A Study of Cognitive Strategies of Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy of Human Body Parts in Persian Idioms.

This paper attempts to investigate the conceptual metaphors and metonymies which motivate the figurative meaning of Persian idioms containing human body parts. The main goal is to show that the cognitive strategies of conceptual metaphor and metonymy help the language users to convey the literal meaning of idioms to the metaphorical and figurative meaning. The conceptual Theory of Lakoff has been used here to show whether it is possible to. Predict the metaphorical meaning of idioms through the meaning of their individual consisting words. This paper shows that when Persian language user comprehends the figurative meaning of idioms and proverbs, the cognitive mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy act in this process. During the process of comprehension of figurative meaning of idioms and proverbs, language users activate the exiting keyword and general figurative meaning of most idioms is predictable in this way.