METAPHOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

Abstract

The article emphasizes the fact that within the past decades there has been a significant interest to studying of metaphors, the main reason awakening it is associated with studies conducted in the field of cognitive linguistics. Many scientists who are engaged in cognitive linguistics consider the metaphor not only as a part of the language, but as well as a fundamental part of the way of human thinking, reasoning and imagination. To some extent this statement has been confirmed by a huge number of empirical studies carried out in this area of ​​linguistics recently. The main purpose of this article is to describe the empirical foundations of cognitive linguistic research related to metaphors, to acknowledge various critical remarks regarding works on essential issues in this area, as well as weaknesses in the concept of metaphor represented by cognitive linguists, Plus, some urgent challenges that are to be resolved to define the subsequent research concerning the part of metaphors in language, thinking and culture have been enlightened. It has been pointed out that cognitive linguists, like scientists from any other academic field, are limited in their work owing to the empirical methods they use, for example, when discussing specific theories of language and thinking.