Weather-Related Metaphors in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

This study aims at identifying the similarities and differences between weather-related metaphors in English and Arabic in terms of structure, function, and range of collocations. A sample of English and Arabic weather-related metaphors was collected from bilingual and monolingual dictionaries in both languages and from relevant corpora such as COCA and BNC. In addition, weather-related metaphors were collected from everyday conversations, dialogues and talk shows in the two languages. The data analysis revealed that weather-related metaphors are reflections of human experiences as they express human emotions, attitudes, behaviors, traits, actions, reactions, and situations. It was also found that weather-related metaphors are much more abundant in English than in Arabic. Moreover, English metaphors showed more diversity in the use of parts of speech than Arabic metaphors did. Temperature metaphors are the most frequent weather-related metaphors in both Arabic and English..