METAPHORICAL EXPRESSIONS IN INDIAN ENGLISH

This exploratory study on the use of metaphors in an indigenized variety of English- - Indian English - -sought to discover the degree to which the language varied or stayed closed to the norm-giving parent language-British English, in terms of the use of metaphorical expressions (MEs). Using the main tenet of the Conceptual Theory of Metaphor (CMT) that metaphor is a cognitive mechanism and not a literary device as the main theoretical framework of the study, and adopting the discourse approach, MEs were identified and analyzed in terms of their density, frequency, and distribution in naturally occurring discourse. The findings indicated that the use of MEs in terms of both types and tokens was much higher in Indian news stories than its counterpart.The domain analysis indicated that although the source domains overlapped in the two varieties, Indian English exhibited unique characteristics, especially in the distinctive extension of the mapping of the source domain “fire”. Findings of this study adds yet another dimension to the existing research in the cognitive linguistics field of metaphors in the Indigenized varieties of English and their use of metaphorical expressions.