'The Way to a Man's Heart.' Journey and War Metaphors. Metaphorical Conceptualisations of the Western Romance Model in English and Spanish.

This paper examines two examples of the Western model of romance in English and Spanish discourse: the English metaphor, "the (best) way to a man's heart is through his stomach" (journey metaphor) and its Spanish counterpart, "Al hombre se le conquista por el estomago" (war metaphor). Both central metaphors entail a number of perceptual, behavioral, and cognitive tasks that constitute the Western romance model. The paper discusses why English uses a journey metaphor, in contrast to the Spanish war metaphor, to experience the same (normal) causal order, where events lead to perception, thoughts, feelings, wishes, intentions, and acts. It proposes that both English and Spanish encode the conceptualization of a given shared reality, i.e. male/female prototypical behavior, by emphasizing the establishment of projections into metonymic principles that originate central metaphors, which vary from one language to another. To support this, the paper suggests the analysis of both metaphors in three stages, conceptual structure, application of the cognitive model, and the prototype scenario. (Contains 13 references.) (Author/SM)