المستخلص
After a very long investigation of linguistic cognitive literature, it is noted that emotional poetry has not been investigated from a cognitive stylistic perspective. This gap limits the understanding of the emotional poetry and the readers’ interpretation of this kind of poetry. Therefore, this study concentrates on this area. The study is a cognitive stylistic investigation of selected emotional poems in English and Arabic to find out how the cognitive stylistic devices (ISs and LOVE CMs) are manipulated in expressing the love themes in these poems. This requires adopting an eclectic cognitive stylistic model consisting of two cognitive stylistic theories. The study attempts to determine whether it can be efficiently examined how emotional poems in both English and Arabic are processed and understood in terms of the cognitive stylistic items under study.
This study intends to answer the following questions:
- Are the Image Schema Theory (IST) and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) applicable for analyzing emotional poems?
- What are the ISs and LOVE CMs that occur in the selected data?
- How do the types of ISs and LOVE CMs affect the occurrence of these cognitive stylistic items in both English and Arabic emotional poems?
- What are the similarities and differences between the English and Arabic data concerning the cognitive stylistic items under investigation, (ISs and LOVE CMs)?
1.2 Aims of the Study
This study aims at:
- investigating the cognitive stylistic features of the language of emotional poetry in English and Arabic particularly ISs and LOVE CMs and finding out the applicability of the IST and CMT to the data,
- identifying respectively ISs and the LOVE CMs that occur in the selected data,
- analyzing and discussing the findings quantitatively and qualitatively and,
- stating the similarities and differences of the occurrence of ISs and LOVE CMs in one language and between two languages on the basis of statistics analysis.
1.3 Hypotheses of the Study
For achieving the aims of the present study, the following hypotheses are set up:
- The IST and CMT are applicable for analyzing English and Arabic emotional poetry.
- Certain ISs and LOVE CMs occur in the selected data with various prevalence.
- Certain types of ISs occur more than the others in the selected data such as CONTAINMENT and PATH ISs.
- The LOVE CM: LOVE IS A JOURNEY occurs more than the others CMs in the selected data.
- There is a noticeable similarity and difference in the occurrence of items under investigation (ISs and LOVE CMs) in selected emotional poems. For example, some of ISs and LOVE CMs are used in both languages and others only occur in one language.
1.4 The Adopted Model In this study, the researcher has adopted an eclectic model that contains two layers representing the application of two theories. The first theory is Mark Johnson’s (1987) Image Schema Theory (IST), which is developed by Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green’s (2006) and Maria M.Hedblom’s (2020). The second theory is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson‘s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which is developed by Zoltan Kövecses (2010). The IST is applied in the first layer, while CMT is used in the second one. Accordingly, all the ISs and LOVE CMs are identified
