Abstract:
HIV is one of the challenges confronting the human race and Kenyans are not an exception to this fact. HIV is both a medical and social problem hence information communication is significant. Speech communities have invented ways of communicating about the scourge with the use of metaphor standing out. Human beings use metaphor to make sense of reality. Metaphor is the understanding and experiencing of one thing in terms of another or as a tightly structured mapping or a set of correspondences between two conceptual domains, which are referred to as the source and target domains. In this case, a concrete and clearly organized source domain, being more clearly related to physical and bodily experience, is used to understand and talk about a more abstract and less clearly structured target domain. For instance, WAR METAPHOR has been used in a number of places to understand illness. People even talk of BATTLING a cold, FIGHTING an illness, and the WAR against AIDS. Metaphorical conceptualization of concepts is so natural and at times unconscious to human beings that they do not even realize that they are using metaphor. In addition, the choice of metaphors is culturally cultivated and motivated which in turn determines speakers’ interpretation and understanding of metaphor. This article examines how EkeGusii speakers use the accident metaphor to understand the process of HIV and AIDS infection. The ubiquity nature of metaphor makes it possible for the accident metaphor to be abundant in EkeGusii HIV and AIDS discourse. This article reveals how metaphor reflects and structures EkeGusii speakers’ understanding of reality and particularly HIV and AIDS infection. Consequently, EkeGusii speakers perceive HIV infection and contracting HIV and AIDS as an accident.
