THE INTELLECTUAL DOMAIN: CONCEPTUALIZING SOME ASPECTS OF MENTAL ACTIVITY IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

Abstract

The present paper reports on the results obtained in a study that aimed to explore the metaphors of the mind. Since the complexity of the domain in question exceeds the scope of one paper, this paper’s focus is limited to cognition, or more specifically, to the aspects of mental activity such as learning, understanding, and knowing. The main aim is to determine the source domains that structure each aspect in English and Serbian, to formulate the metaphorical mappings, and explain their metaphorical nature. By comparing the results of our cross-cultural research, we also seek to identify the similarities and differences regarding the metaphorical conceptualizations in the two languages, hoping to contribute to the exploration of universality of the identified metaphors. The results indicate that the conceptual metaphors that get utilized in the representation of the given aspects are largely structured by the container, territory, vision, valuable commodity, and physical control domains, which are understood in terms of the container, motion, and manipulation image-schemas.