Structural metaphor of love in contemporary Vietnamese poetry

Abstract

The article applies cognitive metaphor theory to establish the structural metaphor of LOVE in contemporary Vietnamese poetry. By using linguistic description methods and linguistic statistical methods to survey 444 works, we have obtained 172 corpora with structural metaphors of the target domain LOVE, generalized into five structural metaphors, which are as follows  (1) LOVE IS A JOURNEY, (2) LOVE IS A PLANT, (3) LOVE IS A GAME, (4) LOVE IS A PLAY, (5) LOVE IS A FIRE. The article demonstrates that, based on mapping similar attributes from the source domain to the target domain, each source domain in the structural metaphor occupies a different proportion, but they all play an important role in clarifying the perception of contemporary Vietnamese poets about the target domain LOVE.