PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

The eating experience, being vitally essential for the survival of human beings, can be extended to convey other conceptually abstract experiences. As a cognitive-semantic account of metaphor conceptualisations, this study aims to investigate the relationship between food-related metaphorical concepts and Persian cultural cognition and cultural models, as well as how they influence the targeted speakers' beliefs and ideas. Following the orientation of experientialists' views (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999) and most discussions of metaphorical concepts since then within the cognitive linguistics movement, this study in particular explores the commonalities and variations in ontological metaphor conceptualisations of thought/ideas as food in a cross-cultural comparative study of English and Persian. The metaphoric extensions of food and cognition in Persian, to a great extent, are mediated and motivated by embodied experiences; as well as socio-cultural orientation, Iranian traditional medicine and the spiritual tradition of Sufism as it is shown through the marginal role the Persian language plays a role in the rational-irrational dichotomy.