The Effect of Experiential Gestalt on Cognitive Metaphor in Amharic Nile Songs as an Example

Linguistic studies have gone through several stages and have been influenced by multiple trends, and this study is about to discuss one of those trends in linguistic studies, which is cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics began its emergence in the 1970s, and this was a reflection of the emergence of the cognitive trend in the study of science, that inter-scientific trend that investigates the mind and intelligence.The study deals specifically with cognitive metaphor. Metaphors are not classified from a cognitive perspective as a linguistic rhetorical tool, but rather rely on a method of perception that enables them to define a concept in one field through another concept in another field. The cognitive metaphor focuses on two concepts, one of which performs the function of the source and the other performs the function of the target, and the pairing occurs between the source and the target due to the intersection between them in the field plan based on the human concept system,which contains a number of multi-dimensional elements shared between the source field and the target field, and these elements are direct directions, meaning they go from the source to the target and not the other way around. This study took three Nile songs written in the Amharic language as an applied model for reflecting the overall experience of Ethiopian society on the cognitive metaphors contained in the songs.