The concept of “illness” used as metaphor in Thai

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate which concepts Thai speakers understand in terms of the notion of "illness", which is a basic bodily experience. The researcher collected data from the Thai Corpus of the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University and searched for 45 linguistic expressions in the semantic domain of illness. Conceptual Metaphor Theory is applied to analyze the data. The findings show that Thai speakers use the concept of “illness” to understand 10 basic concepts: politics, society, economy, business, computers, mind, love, feelings, experience and frequent behaviours. The metaphorical linguistic expressions found in the data reflect the following conceptual metaphors: political problems are illness, social problems are illness, economic downfall is illness, business problems are illness, malfunctions of computers are illness, lack of dharma of the mind is illness, disappointment in love is illness, bad feelings are illness, bad experiences in the past are illness, and frequent behaviours are illness. The findings show that Thai speakers use the notion of “illness” to understand the negative aspects of these target concepts.