Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Modern Approaches in Humanities and Social sciences
Year: 2023
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/6th.icmhs.2023.03.002
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Cognitive-Linguistic Analysis of the Tambura as the Target Domain of a Conceptual Metaphor Tambura Is a Human Being
Ana Tereza Želinski
ABSTRACT:
Even though the tambura is not a native Croatian musical instrument, today it is considered as one of the traditional national treasures of Slavonia. Seeing how songs for the tambura represent a very dominant form of folk entertainment, and today they largely belong to popular culture, it seemed only appropriate to analyse these very songs because the tambura has always been an inescapable part of all social life domains of Slavonia. Therefore, this analysis will examine what the tambura means to both song authors and recipients, is it just a folk string instrument or much more? Seeing how through lyrics it often becomes a real personified narrator for the everyman, telling of many facets of his life in his name (and it does this as an excellent narrator would) it seemed appropriate to relate the tambura to a human being. To achieve this, the purpose of this paper is the realization of conceptual metaphor TAMBURA IS A HUMAN BEING. In the context of contemporary research of metaphor within cognitive linguistics as per the two-domain approach, cognitive-linguistic analysis will be employed to scrutinize the entities of target domain of tambura against the entities of the source domain of human being, colourful linguistic expressions will be highlighted, their prevalence will be explored and described, and it will be attempted to explore whether they dominate the corpus of conventional or innovative metaphor. The corpus researched in this paper is comprised of several Slavonian songs for the tambura from Slavonia, the Eastern part of Croatia.
keywords: songs for the tambura, personified narrator, domains, analysis, metaphor