Commodification of women through conceptual metaphors

Abstract

Commodification of women in a society can be reflected in its language and its conceptual metaphors. Thus, conceptualising women as possessions in the western Balkans has engendered the conceptual metaphor WOMAN IS A CAR, which the present research has shown to be widely-spread and commonly used among the speakers of BCMS (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian). The study has been carried out on excerpts from online discourse, mostly fora and readers’ comments on news portals, whereby the authors have extrapolated the extensions (i.e. the submetaphors of the most general metaphor studied – WOMAN IS A CAR). Bearing in mind that conceptual metaphors form mental frames in the minds of individuals which are difficult to dispel and which operate at subconscious levels, the implication is that the significant presence of the metaphor WOMAN IS A CAR in BCMS suggests that its speakers see women as objects to be disposed of by their owners (men); that is, that women continue to occupy a lower position in the societies of the western Balkans. Metaphors such as this one support and perpetuate such social relationships, which is why it is of great significance to uncover their underlying discourse mechanisms.

The Functioning Of Gender Metaphors In Political Discourse

“…This creativity is genetically embedded in the asymmetric attitude of the sexes: gender always means an asymmetric relationship between a man and a woman, which positions the functions of these gender groups in such a way that they are involved in various activities and are in different social spaces (Barchunova, 2002). Gender-marked metaphors are metaphors which target sphere is represented by a person of a certain gender, male or female (Bratic & Stamatović, 2017). Cognitive linguistics is aware of the role of metaphor as the main tool of cognitive processes.…”

Universality and cultural variation in the conceptualisation of love via metaphors, metonymies and cultural scripts: The case of Montenegrin

“…We applied the filter of repetitiveness to the expressions provided by the respondents and included in the analysis only those with at least three linguistic realisations (Hines 1999: 149;Bratić and Vuković Stamatović 2017), as one of our aims was to find a link between the manners of conceptualisating love, on the one hand, and culture, on the other hand, and thus the more common expressions were believed to be more representative of the latter.…”

The Conceptual Metaphor WOMAN IS AN ANIMAL in Montenegrin wegpages

“…On the other hand, very few studies of conceptual metaphor in general have been conducted in Montenegro. To our best knowledge, only two of these deal with the metaphors depicting women -one conducted by Bratić and Vuković Stamatović (2017), who dealt with the metaphor WOMAN AS A CAR in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, and another, more general one, carried out by Perović (2017), who touched on how women are represented as animals in Montenegro, although not much attention was devoted to this issue, bearing in mind the more general goals of her study. Perović (2017) noticed that people often conceptualise women as small or big animals.…”