282 Chapter Thirteen
(1) Rahbar e enghelab: in meil e be kam budan e farzand âreze ast va ella
ensan be tor e tabi’I farzand ra dust darad (www.khamenei.ir 31/10/2013).
‘The supreme leader: the desire to have fewer children is a disease, otherwise,
humans naturally love [having] children’.The BELIEF IN HAVING FEWER CHILDREN IS DISEASE metaphor
conspicuously questions and defocuses couples’ considerations or reasons
for having a small family. The metaphor categorizes human beings on the
basis of their desire to have a small or large family and implies that those
who refrain from expanding their families deviate from normal humans by
fighting against their instinctual love for having children around. The word
‘human’ is used in a generic sense to generalize the interest in having a
large family to all human beings through GENERIC FOR SPECIFIC
metonymy.
In his speeches, DISEASE, as a source domain, is also used to
conceptualize AGING OF SOCIETY in the AN AGED SOCIETY IS A DISEASED
BODY:
(2) Agar chenanche ba in shivei k emruz darim harekat mikonim pish beravim,
dar ayandei na chandan dur yek keshvar e piri khahim bud k alaj e in bimari e
piri ham dar haghighat dar dastres nist (www.khamenei.ir 10/12/2013).
‘If we move forward like this, we will have an aged country in a not too distant
future and curing this disease will not really be possible.’Bimari e piri ‘the disease of aging’ and alâj ‘cure’ represent the
application of the DISEASE metaphor in the statement. Moreover, the
application of the ACTION IS MOTION metaphor recalls family planning
policy as a method through an entailment of the metaphor, i.e., way of
moving along the path, which corresponds to way of applying the method.
Ayatollah Khamenei pictures the amount of danger threatening the society
through JOURNEY metaphor:
(3) Mahdud kardan e nasl baraye keshvar khatar e bozorgist. Ma dar
mantagheye khatar mabaleghe ziadi pish raftim. Bayad bargardim
(www.khamenei.ir 10/12/2013).
‘Restricting the generation is a big danger. We went so far in the danger zone.
We must go back (retreat).’Here, the ACTING IN PARTICULAR WAY IS MOVING ALONG A PATH
metaphor is at play. The distance covered in the danger zone corresponds
to the period of time the family planning policy was executed in Iran in the
1990s and the danger zone as a bounded region corresponds to the state of
being an aging society. Furthermore, retreating or going back on the