The metaphorical conceptualization of phraseological units with water
a contrastive English–Bulgarian analysis
Keywords:
phraseological units (PUs), conceptual metaphors (CMs), Source domain (SD), Target domain (TD), conceptualizationAbstract
The article aims to report the results of an analysis of the phraseological units (PUs) with water in English and Bulgarian. The differences and similarities in the metaphorical conceptualization of such PUs are outlined. The analysis of the data set yields three groups of PUs: 1. (Pseudo-)Identical PUs (the lexical unit water appears in both languages, but the PUs are subdivided into ones where the inherent conceptualization coincides and ones in which there are differences in conceptualization; 2. English PUs which contain the water component, but their Bulgarian equivalents are based on different source domains (SD) and the conceptualization is different; and 3. Bulgarian PUs which contain the water component, while their English equivalents do not contain it and therefore a difference in conceptualization is observed. Such analyses contribute to mastering the difficult sphere of translation, since PUs are traditionally one of the most difficult units to translate.
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