Background of the Study
but also used in thought and action. Lakoff and Johnson 1980:3 further state that “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is
fundamentally metaphorical in nature”. Moreover, metaphor is used effortlessly and unconsciously by ordinary people, not merely by special talented people
Lakoff and Johnson, 1980 in Kövecses, 2002: viii. Finally, Lakoff and Johnson state that Conceptual Metaphor theory is a fundamental property of doing research
in metaphorical expression. Working on the topic of metaphors, theoretically two division areas of
metaphors would be touched. They are living and dead metaphors. Basically, living metaphors and dead metaphors are based on the existence of their
metaphorical values or characters. Additionally, a living metaphor is a figure of speech which is understood with a consciousness of their nature as a substitution
for their literal equivalent. Its original imagery is still felt as a metaphorical expression that has an implicit meaning. On the other hand, a dead metaphor is
a figure of speech which has lost its original imagery of its meaning due to extensive, repetitive, and popular usage. Because dead metaphors have a
conventional meaning that differs from the original, they can be understood without knowing their earlier connotation.
Concerning the knowledge of metaphor, practically there is a huge number of people speak using metaphors consciously or unconsciously. As mentioned
previously, the contributions of metaphors in communication are in order to beautify words and sentences used, as a decorative part, and understand abstract
concepts easier, since metaphor allows speakers understand abstract concepts in terms of entities and substances. Another reason is in order to gain some
variations in communication by utilising lexical choice metaphorically. Furthermore, metaphor takes an important role in daily language nowadays.
In this study, investigating the word ‘God’ is a continuing concern within metaphorical expression in its use. God is related to a belief of human beings in a
group or community which concerns with the culture of the group or community. In addition, among cultures in the world concern the God in some different ways.
As Rajeg and Primahadi Wijaya R. 2015: 6 stated that “God is Human”. This result in metaphorical expression of God could be different in the western culture,
where it could be found in COCA The Corpus of Contemporary American English. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in corpus based-
study. A corpus is a collection of machine-readable, authentic text, samples, and
representative of a particular language or language variety. The word corpus was formed from a Greek word, corpora, meant as body. Corpus linguistics uses
language naturally, whether it is spoken, academic, newspaper, magazine, fiction, etc. There are some advantages by using corpus in doing a research, they are
generate and verify new linguistics hypotheses, provide textual evidence in text- based humanities and social science subject, and testing existing linguistics theory
and hypotheses. Additionally, a corpus can be more comprehensive and balance. A corpus, as well, is showing what is typical and common. Moreover, it can store
and recall all the information that has been stored in a short time, providing a real communication context as examples. Furthermore, it is giving more objective
evidence and frequency of words.
Hence, the desire and relevancy to view metaphor as a part of linguistics semantically and grounded on those new perspectives by Lakoff and Johnson.
Since the enthusiasm to learn and get a good understanding and comparison of metaphor successively were built up. Furthermore, communication is an important
part in a culture which consists of interaction among individuals, individual and group, or among groups that must be there the same conceptual system of human
kind use in thinking and action. Also, language is one of many evidences that showing the existence of a culture itself.
Herein, the data would be picked from COCA, in this respect, the metaphorical expression related to God. Furthermore research, further
investigation of the conceptual metaphor types was strengthened by seeking out and analyzing as well the meaning brought inside the metaphorical expression.
Finally, refers to what would be searched and analyzed in this research, was the types of metaphorical expression based on the conceptual metaphors related to
God found in COCA. The aims of this study are, generally, in order to describe what metaphor is all
about and in order to realize the knowledge. Especially, the aims are in order to find out and analyze as well the metaphorical concepts of metaphorical expression
related to God, based on the conceptual metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson, found in COCA, and to disclose the meaning of the metaphorical expression covered
within the text.