Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Cultural Studies - East European Studies, grade: 1,3, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) (Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften), language: English, abstract: Metaphors are crucial for our understanding of the world. Without metaphors we would not be able to understand abstract concepts such as emotions, time and life as such. They do offer a great insight in how our cognitive processes are structured. In addition, it is interesting to see whether completely different languages share the same of different conceptual metaphors. Not only for metaphor understanding but also for the understanding how culture and metaphor are interrelated, the concept of embodiment plays an important role. This present work will show that there exist metaphorical conceptualizations that are almost universal and that we can also find metaphorical aspects that differ across cultures.