تفاصيل الرسالة العلمية

This study aims at investigating the metaphorical language used in conceptualizing the procedures of diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation among a sample of patients with vision impairment in Jordan. It also aims to reveal the influence of one social factor (gender) and a non-social factor (severity of diagnosis) on the choice between the different categories of metaphors by the respondents. The study adopts the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) as an approach to categorize the conceptual metaphors used by a number of patients with several degrees of vision impairment. The respondents aged between 15 and 45 including both (males and females) from almost similar levels of education. The data consist of audio-recorded interviews that involve questions about the respondents? narratives of their own experiences with visual impairment during the procedures of diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation. The analysis focuses on identifying and categorizing these metaphors and identifying their experiential bases. The study comes with three main findings: first, ontological metaphors are the most frequent category among all types of conceptual metaphors used by the respondents. Second, the social factor (gender) is found to affect the frequency of different categories of metaphors in the sense that male respondents used both structural and ontological metaphors more than female respondents. While, female respondents used orientational metaphors more than male respondents. Third, the study finds that the medical factor (severity of diagnosis) affects the production of the three categories of conceptual metaphor. It has been noticed that as the severity of diagnosis increases, the frequency of both structural and ontological metaphors increases too. In addition, as the severity of diagnosis decreases, the frequency of orientational metaphors increases