فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

This study aimed to investigate and compare the degree of conventionality of synonymous metaphorical patterns in written Persian. In the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and using the corpus-based method of Metaphorical Pattern Analysis by Stefanowitsch (2006), seven synonymous Persian words – /por/, /ākande/, /saršār/, /labālab/, /labriz/, /mālāmāl/, and /mamlov/ – all conveying the meaning of “fullness”, were analyzed. Data were extracted from Hamshahri 2 Written Corpus. The conventionality degree of each pattern was calculated based on the relative frequency of its metaphorical versus non-metaphorical uses. Findings revealed that despite sharing a basic meaning, the synonymous words are not identical in their degree of conventionality and exhibit varying levels of entrenchment and productivity within the conceptual system. Accordingly, the order of conventionality from highest to lowest is: /saršār/, /mālāmāl/, /ākande/, /labriz/, /por/, /mamlov/, and /labālab/. These results confirm that a word's overall frequency does not necessarily equate to its degree of metaphorical entrenchment, and that the “relative frequency” of metaphorical use is a better measure for assessing conventionality. This finding supports the notion that even seemingly synonymous patterns display distinct metaphorical behavior, and that conventionality is an independent phenomenon from lexical synonymy.