A STUDY OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN SUZANNE COLLINS’ THE HUNGER GAMES

Abstract

Intentionally, in literary work, language is used to examine what happen around us by using one of language styles such as metaphor. Metaphor, as the part of communicative strategy in implicature contains what the speaker has said whose the meaning is far beyond what literally said. Metaphor works on our daily routine expressions for instance in the concept of emotion in the novel The Hunger Games written by Suzanne Collins (2009). Metaphor is uttered in three types. There are nominal metaphor, predicative metaphor and sentential metaphor. Since the conception of metaphor preciously constructed by what we think and act therefore this research is arranged to give a proof on how metaphors are constructed in our brain and to understand the way we perceive mapping process through conceptual metaphor in linguistics field. Meanwhile, the data are extracted from the source which is a novel. Collected data are processed by stratifying and sorting based on conceptual metaphor and 9 domains of emotion (Kӧvecses, 2000: 20). Then, through applying theory of Conceptual Metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) metaphors are identified by the mapping process between target domain and source domain. Lastly, the Comparison theory proposed by Miller (cited in Levinson 1983) is used to categorize the types of metaphors through comparing the features of metaphor. By applying mixed-method through exploratory-qualitative-statistical research (Mackey and Gass, 2005: 4) data are executed in statistic, explorations, and descriptions. These methods determine the dominant types of metaphor, target domain and source domain and map us into the whole story of the novel. The result of this research shows that there are only nominal and predicative metaphors that dominantly used. SADNESS, FEAR, and ANGER are the dominant target domains. There are NATURAL FORCE, FIRE, TORMENTOR, DOWN, and CAPTIVE ANIMAL appearing as the dominant source domains. The dominant categories appear and indicate particular tendency that is related with the story, character and what the Katniss Everdeen does and feels in the story.