The theory of metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980a, 1980b) and Lakoff (1993) involves a mapping of conceptual structure from one semantic domain to another. We investigate properties of these conceptual domain mappings by comparing them to morphological derivational relations. Schematicity and productivity are properties that Bybee (1985) and Langacker (1987) propose for characterizing morphological derivational relations, which we apply to our analysis of metaphor. Metaphors are argued to vary in their degree of semantic schematicity: Domain relations function as (...) generalizations over specific metaphorical expressions. We also demonstrate three points on a continuum of productivity: Conventional metaphors are highly productive, metaphorically motivated transparent idioms are semiproductive, and opaque idioms are unproductive. Each point is compared with an example of morphological productivity having a corresponding conceptual organization. The results demonstrate that semantic productivity can be characterized in the same way as morphological productivity, suggesting that form and meaning are organized by the same principles. (shrink)

Metaphor and metonymy, on the mental level temporally rather than syntactically or semantically defined, show a close association to healthy and neurotic defense, respectively. When the mind functions optimally, reverberating issues of past and present domains inform each other bidirectionally like source and target of a metaphor. Neurotic defense, metonymically conflating past and present, is mental access barring (negative metonymy). Metaphor and positive metonymy, fundamental to how the mind works, are autopoietic devices organizing creative change. Trauma (lost metaphoricity) results in (...) negative metonymy. During psychoanalysis metonymic defenses and transferences get remetaphorized. Nested mentational configurations emerge sequentially as markers of increased awareness (clinical vignette): negative metonymy (target enigmatic); positive metonymy (accessing target); metaphor (domains seen in terms of each other). (shrink)

This article explores the expression and conceptualisation of emotions in Anindilyakwa (Gunwinyguan, north-east Arnhem Land). Fundamental to the emotional lexicon of this language is the widespread use of body parts, which frequently occur in figurative expressions. In this article I examine the primary body parts that occur in emotion descriptions in both literal (physical) and figurative expressions. Particular attention is given toyukudhukudha /-werrik- ‘chest’, the body part conceptualised as the primary site of emotion in Anindilyakwa and the most productive body-related (...) morpheme used in emotion compounds. I consider the role of the chest and other productive body parts that occur in emotion compounds, and examine the metonymic and metaphorical devices that contribute to the expression of these emotional states. In doing so, I propose a number of overarching and widespread tropes that hold across different body-part compounds, and briefly contextualise these in relation to the emotion description systems of other closely-related (Gunwinyguan) languages. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of metonymy in determining a syntactic argument alternation (“conductor-vehiclealternation”) which occurs in English and Portuguese:o piloto acelerou a Ferrari“the driver speeded up the Ferrari”/a Ferrari acelerou“the Ferrari speeded up/sped away”. Since the verbs in theconductor-vehiclealternation haveconductorandvehiclearguments (controller and controlled entities), a metonymic process can occur, allowing thevehicleexpression to provide access to theconductorparticipant. To explain how metonymy allows a verb with two participants to be integrated into a construction with a single argument, we assume that metonymy (...) gathers information about both entities involved; thevehicleexpression provides mental access to bothvehicleandconductor(“fusion”). We also discuss cognitive and pragmatic factors involving the choice of a construction over another. Constructions withvehicleexpressions as subject are used when thevehicleis salient or theconductoris unknown. This also explains whydirigir“drive” does not alternate in Portuguese, contrarily to prediction and differently from Englishdrive. We provide a comparative account of the behavior of this verb in both languages.Dirigir, differently fromdrive, conceptualizes semantic components incompatible with a situation in which the agent/conductoris not salient or is unknown. This research adds to the ongoing body of literature on the role of metonymy in grammar and is a contribution to the understanding of the metonymic process, as a fusion, and also to argument alternation processes and lexical-constructional integration. (shrink)

This study offers an embodied, action-oriented perspective on metaphor. It weaves together 3 theoretical ideas: (a) Lakoff & Johnson's (1980a, 1980b, 1980c; Lakoff, 1993) idea that metaphors are cross-domain conceptual mappings, (b) Lakoff & Johnson's (1999) idea that individuals are coupled to the world through embodied interactions with the environment, on which their sense of what is real is based, and (c) Gibbs's (1999) nascent idea that metaphors can be off-loaded into the cultural world. I argue that metaphors, as cross-domain (...) mappings, can be directly realized in the coupling of the external settings that frame and sustain one's activities and what people, individually and collectively, do to and in the world. A comparison of conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory is made from this perspective. I argue that the blending theory is overly stretched when it is applied to an analysis of metaphorical activity that can be jointly explained by cross-domain mappings and the external structures that constrain and modulate the activity. As for the conceptual metaphor theory, I argue that the theory is overly restrictive if domains are construed exclusively in neural terms. (shrink)

Conceptual metaphor is characterized by two important features—systematicity and complexity. This article is primarily concerned with IDEA metaphors in Chinese and attempts to explore how systematicity and complexity have structured the IDEA metaphorical hierarchical system. Four principal IDEA metaphors are investigated, namely, “IDEAS ARE PEOPLE”, “IDEAS ARE PLANTS”, “IDEAS ARE OBJECTS”, and “IDEAS ARE FOOD”. It is found that the relationship between metaphors and human thought is systematic as well as complex and that systematicity and complexity of IDEA metaphors intertwine (...) with each other. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 206 Seiten: 89-108.

Frame Semantics includes context as a central aspect of the theory. Frames themselves can be regarded as a representation of the immediate context against which meaning is to be construed. Moreover, the notion of frame invocation includes context as one possible source of information comprehenders use to construe meaning. As the original implementation of Frame Semantics, Berkeley FrameNet is capable of providing computational representations of some aspects of context, but not all of them. In this article, we present FrameNet Brasil: (...) a framenet enriched with qualia relations and capable of taking other semiotic modes as input data, namely pictures and videos. We claim that such an enriched model is capable of addressing other types of contextual information in a framenet, namely sentence-level cotext and commonsense knowledge. We demonstrate how the FrameNet Brasil software infrastructure addresses contextual information in both database construction and corpora annotation. We present the guidelines for the construction of two multimodal datasets whose annotations represent contextual information and also report on two experiments: the identification of frame-evoking lexical units in sentences and a methodology for domain adaptation in Neural Machine Translation that leverages frames and qualia for representing sentence-level context. Experimental results emphasize the importance of computationally representing contextual information in a principled structured fashion as opposed to trying to derive it from the manipulation of linguistic form alone. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

While many news media organizations offer guidelines about specific journalism practices such as fact checking, attribution, mandatory referrals, etc., to promote quality and integrity of their news products in congruence with the publicly defended principles of journalism ethics such as truthfulness, objectivity, and balance, that news companies of all editorial positions defend, it appears that news media organizations have not benefitted from the more than 30 years of research in Cognitive Linguistics demonstrating how metaphor influences how readers perceive events in (...) the news and how it impacts their attitudes and behavior. Focusing on stock market reporting, this article identifies and explores levels of ethical quality in metaphor production by financial news media providers because improving the ethical quality of specific news reporting mechanisms is one step toward improving the ethical quality of news media organizations as a whole. In this model, high levels of ethical quality, or trustworthiness in metaphor, is the result of achieving high levels of communicative accuracy. Communicative accuracy is the product of metaphorical efficiency, or the lowest ratio of cognitive force—input-output—needed by financial news consumers to process metaphor in order to stimulate predictable entailments, or limited creative and exploratory thought, resulting in high cognitive efficiency. Low ratios of cognitive force is achieved by using metaphors that reduce domain disparity in semantic fields employing domain concepts that are as familiar to the public or as similar in salient semantic features as possible. In the Appendix, this article provides a step-by-step rubric for implementing this model for journalists and editors in the production and editing phases. (shrink)

This paper studies how the concept WATER is metonymically and metaphorically extended to six super-domains: NATURE, LIFE SUSTAINER, MOVEMENT, POWER, PURITY, and WOMAN. We demonstrate that these six target domains are related to each other in intricate ways and within each are a number of sub-domains. This complicated semantic network of WATER is formed via speakers’ embodied experience with their physical as well as cultural environment. We believe that our detailed discussion of the WATER network will contribute to the current (...) research on the relationship between metaphor and metonymy. (shrink)

This article investigates structural aspects of source domains in metaphorical mappings with regard to their manifestation in public discourse data. Specifically, it analyses the organization of source concepts into mininarratives or "scenarios" that dominate the discourse manifestations of source domains. The material consists of examples from a bilingual corpus of British and German public debates about the &European Union.& The data show that while the two national samples share some basic mappings between the source and target domains, they each are (...) characterised further by specific scenarios that provide focal points for conceptualizing the target topic. The scenarios can also be shown to carry evaluative and attitudinal biases that are related to particular political dispositions and preferences of the respective national discourse communities. In conclusion, it will be argued that the analysis of scenarios is a necessary complement to the study of source domains and of domain-mappings in metaphorical language use. (shrink)

TThis paper aims to evidence the inherently metonymic nature of co-speech gestures. Arguing that motivation in gesture involves iconicity (similarity), indexicality (contiguity), and habit (conventionality) to varying degrees, it demonstrates how a set of metonymic principles may lend a certain systematicity to experientially grounded processes of gestural abstraction and enaction. Introducing visuo-kinetic signs as an umbrella term for co-speech gestures and signed languages, the paper shows how a frame-based approach to gesture may integrate different cognitive/functional linguistic and semiotic accounts of (...) metonymy (e.g., experiential domains, frame metonymy, contiguity, and pragmatic inferencing). The guiding assumption is that gestures metonymically profile deeply embodied, routinized aspects of familiar scenes, that is, the motivating context of frames. The discussion shows how gestures may evoke frame structures exhibiting varying degrees of groundedness, complexity, and schematicity: basic physical action and object frames; more complex frames; and highly abstract, complex frame structures. It thereby provides gestural evidence for the idea that metonymy is more basic and more directly experientially grounded than metaphor and thus often feeds into correlated metaphoric processes. Furthermore, the paper offers some initial insights into how metonymy also seems to induce the emergence of schematic patterns in gesture which may result from action-based and discourse-driven processes of habituation and conventionalization. It exemplifies how these forces may engender grammaticalization of a basic physical action into a gestural marker that shows strong metonymic form reduction, decreased transitivity, and interacting pragmatic functions. Finally, addressing basic metonymic operations in signed lexemes elucidates certain similarities regarding sign constitution in gesture and sign. English and German multimodal discourse data as well as German Sign Language (DGS) are drawn upon to illustrate the theoretical points of the paper. Overall, this paper presents a unified account of metonymy’s role in underpinning forms, functions, and patterns in visuo-kinetic signs. (shrink)

The paper argues that metaphorical expressions do more than just instantiate conceptual metaphors. The main aim is to emphasize the role source and target words’ meanings play in construing generic-level metaphors. The latter are taken to act as superordinate categories for other metaphors, occurring at various levels of schematicity. Identification of lower-level metaphors takes into account source words’ metaphorical senses, not the central meanings of the categories they represent. This method brings the issue of source words’ polysemy into play, and (...) hence helps explain why metaphorical expressions relating to the same generic-level metaphor may activate different lower-level metaphors, which carry different metaphorical meanings. (shrink)

This study concerns the distribution of metaphorical lexis in discrete syntactic constructions. Source and target seed language from established conceptual metaphors in economic discourse is used to catalogue the specific patterns of how metaphorical pairs align in five syntactic constructions: A-NP, N-N, NP-of-NP, V-NP, and X is Y. Utilizing the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the examination includes 12 frequent metaphorical target triggers combined with 84 source triggers to produce 2,016 ordered collocations, i.e. investment freeze and turbulent market. Through detailed (...) type and token counts, results confirm that source domains function as conceptual material used to structure the target domain and disproportionally fill syntactic positions associated with predication, Studies in cognitive corpus linguistics. Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publishers; Sullivan, Karen. 2013. Frames and constructions in metaphoric language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing). Given a lexeme’s origin – source or target – when used in source-target metaphors, syntactic alignment can be predicted, market climate is metaphorical, climate market is not. Exceptions to these strong tendencies are explained through genre-specific lexicalization processes in which predicate denoting terms like bubble establish themselves as domain modifiers in economic jargon. Through quantitative techniques to gage metaphorical conventionality and lexical versatility, corpus methodology is used to define and inform the value of frequency effects in cataloguing and understanding metaphorical lexicalization. (shrink)

This study describes metonymic argument alternations, in which a constructional slot can be filled by any of a set of semantic roles that index one another, and provides a diachronic corpus analysis of two such alternations in French. In the Reveal secret frame and other communication frames, the Medium can indexically replace the Speaker and the Topic can indexically replace the Information. A regression analysis shows that while topic for information metonymy is more syntactically and pragmatically restricted, medium for speaker (...) metonymy has seen an increase in usage over time across the frame. This change is related to sociocultural developments and has implications for the study of figurative language and lexical semantic change. While it is well understood that figurative mechanisms such as metonymy affect language change, here it is demonstrated that cultural shifts drive changes in metonymies themselves, with corresponding impacts for linguistic structure. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

A foundational goal of cognitive linguistics is to explain linguistic phenomena in terms of general cognitive strategies rather than postulating an autonomous language module (Langacker 1987: 12–13). Metonymy is identified among the imaginative capacities of cognition (Langacker 1993: 30, 2009: 46–47). Whereas the majority of scholarship on metonymy has focused on lexical metonymy, this study explores the systematic presence of metonymy in word-formation. I argue that in many cases, the semantic relationships between stems, affixes, and the words they form can (...) be analyzed in terms of metonymy, and that this analysis yields a better, more insightful classification than traditional descriptions of word-formation. I present a metonymic classification of suffixal word-formation in three languages: Russian, Czech, and Norwegian. The system of classification is designed to maximize comparison between lexical and word-formational metonymy. This comparison supports another central claim of cognitive linguistics, namely that grammar (in this case word-formation) and lexicon form a continuum (Langacker 1987: 18–19), since I show that metonymic relationships in the two domains can be described in nearly identical terms. While many metonymic relationships are shared across the lexical and grammatical domains, some are specific to only one domain, and the two domains show different preferences for source and target concepts. Furthermore, I find that the range of metonymic relationships expressed in word-formation is more diverse than what has been found in lexical metonymy. There is remarkable similarity in word-formational metonymy across the three languages, despite their typological differences, though they all show some degree of language-specific behavior as well. Although this study is limited to three Indo-European languages, the goal is to create a classification system that could be implemented (perhaps with modifications) across a wider spectrum of languages. (shrink)

This article discusses some of the claims of the earlier and later versions of the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (CTM) and addresses some of the criticism that has been leveled against it. It is argued that much of this criticism arises from common misconceptions as to the real claims made by the theory. However, CTM is still in need of further exploration and empirical support. In this connection, we identify some areas where research is still needed and supply our own (...) developments. We argue for a more complex classification of metaphor types, which takes into account various complementary taxonomic perspectives, including the nature of source and target and the genericity and complexity of the metaphoric operation. We also explore metaphor in relation to cognitive prominence and conceptual interaction issues. Finally, we deal with the problem of constraints on metaphor and make a proposal for three complementary kinds of constraint. (shrink)

This paper explores the trade-off between cognitive effort and cognitive effects during immediate metaphor comprehension. We specifically evaluate the fundamental claim of relevance theory that metaphor understanding, like all utterance interpretation, is constrained by the presumption of optimal relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, p. 270): the ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee's effort to process it, and the ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences. One important implication (...) of optimal relevance is that listeners follow a path of least effort and stop processing at the first interpretation that satisfies their expectation of relevance. They do this by trying to minimize cognitive effort while maximizing cognitive effects. Some relevance theory scholars suggest that metaphors should require additional cognitive effort to be understood, and that in return they yield more cognitive effects than does literal speech. Others claim that metaphors may be understood quickly, as soon as people infer enough effects for the speaker's utterance to meet their expectation of optimal relevance. Our analysis of the experimental evidence suggests that there is no systematic relationship between cognitive effort and cognitive effects in metaphor comprehension. We conclude that relevance theory need not make any general predictions about the effort needed to comprehend metaphors. Nevertheless, relevance theory is consistent with many of the findings in psycholinguistics on metaphor understanding, and can account for aspects of metaphor understanding that no other theory can explain. (shrink)

This paper explores the trade-off between cognitive effort and cognitive effects during immediate metaphor comprehension. We specifically evaluate the fundamental claim of relevance theory that metaphor understanding, like all utterance interpretation, is constrained by the presumption of optimal relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, p. 270): the ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it, and the ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences. One important implication (...) of optimal relevance is that listeners follow a path of least effort and stop processing at the first interpretation that satisfies their expectation of relevance. They do this by trying to minimize cognitive effort while maximizing cognitive effects. Some relevance theory scholars suggest that metaphors should require additional cognitive effort to be understood, and that in return they yield more cognitive effects than does literal speech. Others claim that metaphors may be understood quickly, as soon as people infer enough effects for the speaker’s utterance to meet their expectation of optimal relevance. Our analysis of the experimental evidence suggests that there is no systematic relationship between cognitive effort and cognitive effects in metaphor comprehension. We conclude that relevance theory need not make any general predictions about the effort needed to comprehend metaphors. Nevertheless, relevance theory is consistent with many of the findings in psycholinguistics on metaphor understanding, and can account for aspects of metaphor understanding that no other theory can explain. (shrink)

A philological and comparative analysis of the lexical items concerning personhood in Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Modern English reveals semantic shifts concerning the relative lexical concepts. Ancient Hebrew presents an essentially holistic idea of personhood, whereas, via Biblical translations and Greek philosophical influences, the Western World has conceptualized humans as being dualistic in nature. I analyze the polysemy and semantic shifts in the lexicon used for "body" and "soul" in Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek, which are the two linguistic (...) systems known by St. Paul of Tarsus, and then confront them with Paul's usage context, and finally with Modern English, hypothesizing a possible case of linguistic relativity. (shrink)

Historically Christianity owes much to Judaism. St. Paul’s Christianity, however, changed the way of thinking of many of the first Jews because of a new way of reasoning about selfhood, the human body, and human cognition. Without wanting to treat certain theological concepts, I want to underline how modern science’s view of the person is closer to traditional Judaism than it is to Christianity, and how Paul’s “error” was diffused throughout the Western world, by analyzing the semantics of linguistic references (...) to the body, the soul, and emotions. What was St. Paul’s error? The question means to be both allusive and provocative. He was born by the name Saul in the city of Tarsus, in modern Turkey, during the height of its splendour as a Roman-Greek city. Paul grew up as a “free man”, that is, as a Roman citizen in a cosmopolitan environment. He is considered to be the most influential and productive of the testimonies of the Christian thought throughout Asia Minor and Western Europe. His epistles circulated throughout his time and continue to influence millions of followers, who often interpret his thoughts in contrasting manner, but nonetheless attest to his authority. An erudite Greek-Roman, persecutor of the first Christians, Paul battled to spread the story of Jesus of Nazareth. His ideology, indeed, is a blend of Greek-Roman thought and of what he learned from the first Christians. The Hellenic characteristics of his faith created a divergence from traditional Judaic thought within what was to become the Christian creed though his influence. As a matter of fact, Christianity came to have a more coherent structure because of Paul, and Christian belief in a way is more Paul’s thought than it is Jesus’. Jewish teaching circa selfhood was quite holistic. The Hebrew word nephesh is often translated as “soul” but also means “body”, whereas Paul clearly distinguishes the two, talking about a co-existence, “concupiscence” and the necessity of dominating the body to exalt the spirit. I will examine the semantic changes in words dealing with body and soul, and how Paul’s authority eventually influenced the Western world’s way of reasoning about such concepts. (shrink)