COGNITIVE STUDY OF GENDER REPRESENTATIONS IN ENGLISH METAPHORS

The knowledge of a community or a people is often perceived through their daily linguistic consumption and production. Language is therefore a powerful code that reveals culture, ideologies and even social representations. Metaphors are substantial features of daily linguistic habits used to encode or decode deep rooted social stereotypes and representations. This pragmatic study conducted in a cognitive framework (Georges Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980) reveals that English metaphors can function as both overt and subtle means of sexism and patriarchy, despite the more and more growing collective awareness of gender justice in anglophone countries.