The Conceptual Metaphor ‘People are Animals’ in Zulu

Abstract

Zulu metaphor can be analysed succesfully according to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory propounded and developed by Lakoff, Johnson and Turner. Examples drawn from various literary genres show the metaphor People are Animals to be a particularly good example of a basic conceptual metaphor from which there is an extensive and systematic hierarchy of entailments ranging throughout the different phyla of the animal kingdom from the general to the specific.