The Metaphorical Concept "Life is a Game" in the Qur’an: a Cognitive-semantic Analysis

Abstract

The present paper has tackled the metaphor “life is a game” in the Qur’an within the theoretical framework put forward by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), known as the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor, where it has shown how the Qur’an is structured around the idea of the life process and how every correspondence between the two domains of “life” and “game” can fit there. The metaphor “life is a game” takes as a source domain the concept “game” and as a target domain the concept “life”. The other related metaphors are an extension of that metaphor. It gives us knowledge about something we did not know or only partly knew about our life.