Women Studies

Women Studies

The Analysis of Conceptualization of Women’s Beauty in Advertisements in Virtual Space based on Cognitive Mechanism of Metaphor and Conceptual Blending

Document Type : -

Author
Maryam Sadat Fayyazi
Associate Professor of Linguistics at Asian Cultural Documentation Center; Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies
10.30465/ws.2026.53491.4538
Abstract
In the discourse of beauty, metaphors and conceptual blending play a fundamental role in shaping human understanding of the body, beauty and identity. By employing these two cognitive mechanism, advertisements and discourses in virtual spaces elevate concepts related to the body, care and makeup beyond the biological level and reconstruct them within social, emotional and even affective frameworks. Although the analysis of metaphor and conceptual blending pave the way for identifying the hidden mechanism that reproduce embodies experience and cultural expectations, the cognitive processes underlying these two procedures differ. The present study investigates the role of metaphors and conceptual blending in constructing the social reality of beauty in virtual contexts to identifies the type of mappings and blending spaces used for metaphorical conceptualization of beauty and determines the most frequent source or the first input domains in blending spaces. The findings of this fundamental qualitative research exhibit considerable diversity in the mappings and blended spaces used for conceptualizing the experience of beauty and indicate that human, precious commodity, art and radiance are among the most used source domain in metaphorical conceptualization and conceptual blending.
Keywords
conceptual metaphor
conceptual blending
beauty
embodiment
conceptualization
Subjects
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  • Receive Date 18 November 2025
  • Revise Date 05 January 2026
  • Accept Date 15 February 2026