Abstract
Previous literature has focused on the literary and socio-cultural
aspects and attributes of Pashto landay, a two line poetic couplet.
The available literature shows that linguistic approaches to the
study of Pashto language and literature in general and the study of
Pashto landay in particular, are minimal. This paper has used
conceptual metaphor theory to discover the conceptual metaphors
within Pashto landay. Nine hundred and thirty landay taken from
Noorzi’s book, “Pukhto landay Misre, tappe” have been analyzed.
The analysis revealed eleven conceptual metaphors on the basis of
their respective experiential source domains besides the
resemblance based metaphors. Four examples of each conceptual
metaphor were selected for linguistic analysis. The analysis revealed
that experiential gestalts of, for example, a journey, war, fire,
disease, containers and objects in space have all been used to
conceptualize abstract concepts of love, emotions, time and events
in Pashto landay. However, as this paper has analyzed only a small
portion of landay, further studies of Pashto landay are needed to
discover more conceptual metaphors, which may be helpful in
understanding the cognitive schemas used by Pashto speakers for
processing abstract concepts.
