A Conceptual Analysis of Metaphors in Selected Dholuo Popular Music

Abstract

Conceptual metaphors had for a long time remained unnoticed until the advent of the famous study by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), “Metaphors We Live By”. Love is an emotional experience that elicits a lot of source domains and it is reflected using a variety of image schemas. It is on this premise that this paper investigates the conceptual metaphors used to portray love in Dholuo popular music, an avenue in which this emotion is commonly addressed. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) was adopted because it explains that our conceptual system plays an important role in defining our everyday realities. The data that was deployed in this study was in the form of words and expressions from the selected Dholuo popular songs downloaded from YouTube. Purposive sampling was used to get a sample of eight songs sung by both male and female musicians in order to get a representative sample. The songs were then subjected to analysis based on the principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Findings reveal that love is expressed metaphorically by the use of conceptually accepted image schemas.