A Contrastive Study on Conceptual Metaphor “WOMEN ARE SUPERNATURAL FORCES” in 20th-Century Vietnamese and American Literature: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach
Abstract
Conceptual metaphors are a pervasive means through which literature conveys abstract ideas via concrete imagery. In literature, women are often portrayed through supernatural symbolism, reflecting their complex social, cultural, and moral roles. This study adopts a cognitive linguistic approach to examine the metaphor “WOMEN ARE SUPERNATURAL FORCES” in 20th-century Vietnamese and American literature. Drawing on 4,000 metaphorical statements, the analysis focuses on 213 statements within the “supernatural forces” domain, identified using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) across four sub-domains: types, features, activities, and realms. The findings reveal that women are perceived as supernatural entities evoking both positive and negative emotions. They are described in dualistic terms, embodying both extremes of good and evil in appearance, morality, and action. These portrayals depict women as divine or angelic figures symbolising beauty and virtue, and as witches or demonic beings representing ugliness, danger, and malevolence. This duality encapsulates cultural ambivalence—revering women while marginalising them. In both corpora, women appear as sources of enchantment and anxiety, but with distinct cultural orientations. Vietnamese literature, shaped by polytheistic and Buddhist traditions, frames women as spiritualised beings whose strength lies in harmony and transcendence. American texts, grounded in Christian cosmology, construe female agency through moral struggle, emphasising temptation, sin, and redemption. The comparison shows that while both cultures employ a divine–demonic hierarchy to conceptualise femininity, Vietnamese mappings stress spiritual harmony, whereas American ones dramatise moral dualism and inner conflict. These findings suggest that metaphorical cognition shows universal tendencies, yet its expression remains culture-specific.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor; women; supernatural forces; literature; contrastive study
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Adegbola, O. F. (2021). Conceptualisation of 'the Woman': A critical analysis of selected Yoruba proverbs. Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, 11(13), 44–58. Retrieved July 18, 2023, from https://iiste.org/Journals/index.php/RHSS/article/viewFile/56736/58590
Adenuga, T. J. (2025). Supernaturality of women in Nigerian Films: A Study of Olatunji Balogun's Yemoja. A journal of Theatre and media arts, 5(1), 1–10. Retrieved September 28, 2025, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392615514_Alarinjo_Journal_of_Theatre_and_Media_Arts
Ahmed, U. (2019). Gender in media discourse. The discursive construction of gender in Nigerian newspapers. LIT.
Ahrens, K., Zeng, W. H., Burgers, C., & Huang, C.-R. (2024). Metaphor and gender: Are words associated with source domains perceived in a gendered way? Linguistics Vanguard, 10(1), 711–720. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0021
Akuno, L., Oloo, P. A., & Achieng' Lilian, M. (2018). THE OBJECT OF LOVE IS FOOD Conceptual metaphor in selected Dholuo Benga music of 1970s and 2000s. Linguistics and Literature Studies, 6(1), 40–46. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324519571_THE_OBJECT_OF_LOVE_IS_FOOD_Conceptual_Metaphor_in_Selected_Dholuo_Benga_Music_of_1970s_and_2000s
Aragbuwa, A., & Omotunde, S. A. (2022). Metaphorisation of women in Yoruba proverbs: A feminist critical analysis. European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics Studies, 5(4), 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejlll.v5i4.315
Aziz, A., Wen, X., Naeem, M. K. H., & Naeem, S. (2025). Framing of femininity: A cognitive study of gendered metaphors in brand advertisements. Acta Psychologica, 258, 105201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.105201
Barasa, M. N., & Opande, I. N. (2017). The use of animal metaphors in the representation of women in Bukusu and Gusii proverbs in Kenya. Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, 10(2). Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol10no2/10.2-7-
Barasa%20(1).pdf
Bletsas, A. (2020). Gendered metaphors in proverbs: A study on Italian and French. metaphorik.de, 30, 11–37. Retrieved April 20, 2022, from https://www.wehrhahn-verlag.de/public/uploads/excerps/Metaphorik%2030%20Text%20Leseprobe.pdf
Bratić, V., & Vuković, M. (2017). Commodification of women through conceptual metaphors: The metaphor Woman as a car in the Western Balkans. Gender and Language, 11(1), 51–76. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.22009
Carli, L. L., & Eagly, A. H. (2016). Women face a labyrinth: An examination of metaphors for women leaders. Gender in Management: An International Journal, 31(8), 514–527. https://doi.org/10.1108/gm-02-2015-0007
Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Palgrave Macmillan.
Chen, Y. (2023). ‘Women are warriors” or “Women are flowers”: A corpus-based study on the metaphorical framings of Women in Women of China. Queen Mary University of London. Retrieved March 14, 2024, from https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/media/sllf-new/department-of-
linguistics/documents/51-QMOPAL-Chen.pdf
Chin, J. S.-K. (2009). Are women nothing more than their body parts? Obscene and indecent metaphors used to describe women in a Hong Kong magazine. LCOM Papers 2, 17–30. Retrieved June 21, 2019, from https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/53620192/obscene-and-indecent-
metaphors-used-to-describe-women-in-a-
Dancygier, B., & Sweetser, E. (2014). Figurative language. Cambridge University Press.
Fisiak, J. (1981). Contrastive linguistics and the language teacher. Pergamon Press.
Fludernik, M. (2019). Metaphors of confinement: The prison in fact, fiction, and fantasy. Oxford University Press.
Gibbs, R. W., & Siman, J. (2021). How we resist metaphors. Language and Cognition, 13(4), 670–692. DOI: 10.1017/langcog.2021.18
Hryzhak, L. (2024). Metaphorical depictions of women: Exploring animal metaphors in Victorian prose fiction. Brno Studies in English, 50(1). https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2024-1-3
Hulse, S. B., Balogun, Z., Rosenzweig, M. Q., Marsland, A. L., & Palmer, V. M. (2024). I’m still me, I’m still a person: War metaphor use and meaning making in women with metastatic breast cancer. Supportive Care in Cancer, 32, 108. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-024-08309-5
Jabłońska, M. R. (2024). Gender-oriented analysis of witchcraft discourse in social media. Open Theology, 10(1), 20240006. https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2024-0006
Jackson, L. B. (2021). Framing British ‘Jihadi Brides’: Metaphor and the social construction of I.S. women. Terrorism and Political Violence, 33(8), 1733–1751. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2019.1656613
James, C. (1980). Contrastive analysis. Longman.
Kochman-Haładyj, B., & Kiełtyka, R. (2023). Paradigm shift in the representation of women in Anglo-American paremiology – a cognitive semantics perspective. Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, 68(1), 41–77. https://doi.org/10.2478/slgr-2023-0003
Kövecses, Z. (2002). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford University Press.
Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge University Press.
Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics across cultures: Applied linguistics for language teachers. University of Michigan Press.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Basic Books.
López Maestre, M. D. (2020). Gender, ideology and conceptual metaphors: Women and the source domain of the hunt. Complutense Journal of English Studies, 28, 203–218. https://doi.org/10.5209/cjes.68355
López-Rodríguez, I. (2009). Of women, bitches, chickens and vixens: Animal metaphors for women in English and Spanish. Culture, Language and Representation, 7(7), 77–100. Retrieved May 24, 2019, from https://www.e-revistes.uji.es/index.php/clr/article/view/12
Meng, H., Li, X., & Sun, J. (2025). Large language models prompt engineering as a method for embodied cognitive linguistic representation: a case study of political metaphors in Trump’s discourse. Frontiers in Psychology, 16. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1591408
Musolff, A. (2021). Researching political metaphor cross-culturally: English, Hungarian, Greek and Turkish L1-based interpretations of the Nation as Body metaphor. Journal of Pragmatics, 183, 121–131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.07.011
Novosadska, O. (2020). Metaphorical verbalization of the concept 'woman' in the Victorian novels of Mary Braddon. Linguaculture, 11(1), 113–122. https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2020-1-0165
Pan, Y. (2023). A comparative study of metaphors about women between Thai and Chinese languages on the Internet. Interdisciplinary Academic and Research Journal, 3(4), 539–554. https://doi.org/10.14456/iarj.2023.206
Pham, T. G. (2023). Đối chiếu ẩn dụ ý niệm về người phụ nữ trong tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt (trên cứ liệu các tác phẩm văn học thế kỉ 20) (A contrastive study on conceptual metaphors of women in English and Vietnamese (in 20th-century literary works) [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Graduate Academy of Social Sciences.
Pragglejaz Group. (2007). The Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP): A method for identifying metaphorical language. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1), 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926480709336752
Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge University Press.
Steen, G. (2008). The paradox of metaphor: Why we need a three-dimensional model of metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol, 23(4), 213–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926480802426753
Susilowati, N. E., Wijana, I. D. P., & Cholsy, H. (2025). The use of verbal violence metaphors toward Indonesian female politicians on X social media. Jordan Journal of modern languages & literatures, 17(2), 485–507. https://doi.org/10.47012/jjmll.17.2.5
Sweetser, E. (1990). From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge University Press.
Takada, M., Shinohara, K., Morizumi, F., & Sato, M. (2000). A study of metaphorical mapping involving sociocultural values: How woman is conceptualized in Japanese?. In Proceedings of the 14th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (pp. 301–312), Waseda
University International Conference Center, Tokyo, Japan, PACLIC 14 Organizing Committee. DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/2065/12164
Tamil Selvam, S., & Yong, M. F. (2025). Disease as sociopolitical metaphor in Marina Mahathir’s columns. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature, 31(2), 43–60. https://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2025-3102-04
Tarkela, M. (2016). “Being All BITCH BITCH BITCH Pms Pms BITCH BITCH BITCH” - Conceptual metaphors describing women on Seventeen.com and Cosmopolitan.com [Pro Gradu Thesis]. University of Helsinki. Retrieved September 19, 2020, from
https://helda.helsinki.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/50f104aa-6a53-4686-b952-d9c446207ca6/content
Tran, N. T. (1999). Cơ sở văn hoá Việt Nam (The fundamentals of Vietnamese culture). Education Publisher, Hanoi.
Turpín, E. (2014). A critical study of the Women are animals conceptual metaphor [Conference paper]. Trabajo fin de grado, University of Murcia. DOI:10.13140/2.1.1637.6329
Valipour, N., & Rahbar, B. (2025). Women metaphors in Persian colloquial terms. Culture and Folk Literature, 13(64), 182–217. DOI: 10.48311/cfl.2025.23969
Verbeek, J. (2024). Hex the patriarchy: About the history of feminist witchcraft and how witches on social media correspond to it and shape it. Sacra, 22(2), 27–42. Retrieved June 22, 2025, from https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/sites/default/files/pdf/Sacra_22_2024_2_05.pdf
Wallace, D. (2009). ‘The Haunting idea’: Female Gothic metaphors and Feminist Theory. In Wallace, D., & Smith, A. (Eds), The Female Gothic (pp. 26–41). Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245457_3
Wanning, E. (1995). Sốc văn hoá Mỹ (American cultural shock). Translated by Nguyen, H. D., & Bui, Đ. T. (1995). National Political Publishing House, Hanoi.
Yu, H., Zhang, H., & Liu, W. (2025). Visual metaphors in current Chinese ideological promotion: a multimodal analysis of public service advertisements. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2025.2480883
Yu, N. (2008). The relationship between metaphor, body, and culture. In R. W. Gibbs (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought (pp. 247–261). Cambridge University Press.
Zhou, Y. (2017). Cultural gender metaphors in modern Chinese fiction. Language and Cognitive Science, 3(1), 1–40. Retrieved June 25, 2023, from https://www.sciscanpub.com/uploads/2021/08/19/lcs20211013v3.pdf
Zhumasheva, K. B., & Shokym, G. T. (2022). Gender metaphor is a tool for evaluating value indicators in the linguistic picture of the world. Philology Vestnik, 106(2), 67–73. https://doi.org/10.31489/2022ph2/67-73
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
eISSN : 2550-2247
ISSN : 0128-5157