Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication
The aim of the series is to publish theoretical and empirical interdisciplinary research on the effective use of metaphor in language and other modalities (including, for instance, visuals) for general or specific cognitive and communicative purposes. The aim of the series is to offer both fundamental and applied contributions to the state of the art. The series also invites proposals for inter-cultural and cross-cultural studies of metaphor in language, cognition, and communication. Room will be given as well to publications on related phenomena, such as analogy, metonymy, irony, and humor, as long as they are approached from a comparable perspective.The scope of the series comprises approaches from the humanities and the social and cognitive sciences, including philosophy, cultural studies, linguistics, cognitive science, communication science, media studies, and discourse analysis. More focused attention may be paid to the role of metaphor in the domains of religion, literature and the arts, the media, politics, organization and management, law, economics, health, education, and science.
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Attention to Metaphor
More LessThe last decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a fundamental scientific discovery: the identification of mirror neurons and, consequently, the development of the Embodied Simulation theory. Neuroscientific data on the mechanism of Embodied Simulation and its role in conceptual and linguistic processing, figurative language included, have stimulated a great deal of research on the embodied nature of conceptual metaphors. However, the very definition of the notions of body and embodiment are today still controversial in the Embodied Cognition debate. This book addresses the issue of the specific contribution of the body to conceptual and linguistic processing and provides a new definition for the mechanism of Embodied Simulation. In this light, and in consideration of a revision of the contemporary theory of metaphor recently introduced by Gerard Steen, who distinguished between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor processing, the book also proposes a new model of metaphor processing that brings together the mechanism of Embodied Simulation, on the one hand, and the notion of deliberateness on the other. Modulation of attention during linguistic processing is a key component in explaining how they interact.
Potential readers of the book include linguists, psychologists, philosophers and any other cognitive scientists and communication scientists piqued by the topic of metaphor and embodiment.
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Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond
More LessThe last half century witnessed an upheaval in scientific investigation of human meaning-making and meaning-sharing. Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond, is offered as a snapshot of the status of this multidisciplinary endeavor—a peak under the umbrella of what Cognitive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Figurative Language Studies and related fields have morphed into. This volume honors Raymond W. Gibbs, who played no small role in this upheaval.
The themes and insights emerging from the chapters (i.e., among others, a need for account integration, a new appreciation of the dynamic nature of figurative [and all] meaning-making, a need for continued broadening of the communicative techniques in our studied topics, greater attention to emotion, a deepened appreciation of social motivations and psychological processes involved, etc.) may guide us in our continued grappling with meaning-making and meaning-sharing, via metaphor, through figurative language, and via other communicative phenomena associated with them.
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Elicited Metaphor Analysis in Educational Discourse
More LessThe ability to recognise, discuss and evaluate one’s educational beliefs and working practices in metaphoric terms has for several years been seen as a highly valuable tool for increasing self-awareness, facilitating learning (or teaching), and/or predicting behaviour. This is the first edited book solely devoted to the topic of researching elicited metaphor in education, and brings together key researchers from China, Poland, Puerto Rico, South America, UK and USA. The 12 chapters involve overviews and state-of-the-art articles, articles focussing on methodology and validation, as well as reflections on the effectiveness of techniques and research reports of recent empirical studies. The bulk of the articles relate to literacy (L1 and L2) and teacher education, but science education is also addressed. The book offers useful models for academics, professionals and PhD students in these areas, and provides solutions for improving the validity of elicited metaphor techniques in educational research.
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Metaphor and Communication
More LessThis collection of papers presents different views on metaphor in communication. The overall aim is to show that the communicative dimension of metaphor cannot be reduced to its conceptual and/or linguistic dimension. The volume addresses two main questions: does the communicative dimension of metaphor have specific features that differentiate it from its linguistic and cognitive dimensions? And how could these specific properties of communication change our understanding of the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of metaphor? The authors of the papers collected in this volume offer answers to these questions that raise new interests in metaphor and communication.
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Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age
More LessThis book describes methods, risks, and challenges involved in the construction of metaphor and metonymy digital repositories. The first part of this volume showcases established and new projects around the world in which metaphors and metonymies are harvested and classified. The second part provides a series of cognitive linguistic studies focused on highlighting and discussing theoretical and methodological risks and challenges involved in building these digital resources. The volume is a result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between cognitive linguists, psychologists, and computational scientists supporting an overarching idea that metaphor and metonymy play a central role in human cognition, and that they are deeply entrenched in recurring patterns of bodily experience. Throughout the volume, a variety of methods are proposed to collect and analyze both conceptual metaphors and metonymies and their linguistic and visual expressions.
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Metaphor in Psychotherapy
More LessThis book represents a bold attempt to address contemporary issues in both metaphor and psychotherapy research. On one hand, metaphor research is increasingly concerned not just with describing metaphors in discourse, but how they could be used more adroitly in purposive ‘real world’ contexts such as psychotherapy. On the other hand, while a growing number of mental health professionals believe that metaphors contribute in some way to the psychotherapy process, their ability and willingness to use metaphors might be compromised by a relative unfamiliarity with the various nuanced aspects of metaphor theory. The present analysis of metaphors in authentic psychotherapeutic talk brings these theoretical aspects to the forefront, and suggests how they can be applied to enhance the use of communication of metaphors in psychotherapy. It should be of interest to metaphor researchers, mental health professionals, and discourse analysts in general.
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Metaphor in Specialist Discourse
More LessMetaphor in Specialist Discourse presents multiple perspectives on metaphor use in specialist and popularized discourse contexts. Using genre and register as starting parameters for deeper exploration, and pushing the boundaries further to open up new areas and possibilities, ten independent articles investigate metaphor use across a range of specialist domains of discourse, such as biology research articles, psychological counseling, soccer commentaries, workfloor communication, and penal policy documents. Framed by two theoretical chapters, the book is a contribution to the study of metaphor use in distinct discourse settings that will be of value to linguists and metaphor scholars of different persuasions, graduate students of linguistics and related disciplines, and practitioners of specialized areas with an interest in (verbal or gestural) language use in their areas of expertise. It shows that aspects of discourse variation are the beginning of, not an afterthought to, accurate empirical metaphor studies.
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Metaphors in Learner English
More LessThis volume presents results from a corpus-based investigation into the metaphorical production of foreign language learners, comparing texts written by Norwegian (L2) learners of English with those written by British (L1) students. Three types of questions are addressed. The first has empirically measured answers: For example, do L2 English writers produce more metaphors than L1 novice writers? How frequent are novel metaphors in an L2, as compared with an L1? The second type has more subjective answers: How creatively do L2 English learners employ metaphor? Are they even expected to be able to produce metaphor at all? The third type combines theoretical and methodological perspectives: How is metaphorical creativity identified? What is the potential role of metaphoric competence? Most importantly, how are metaphors identified? To this end, the newly-developed ‘Metaphor Identification Procedure’ is tested and critiqued. This book is intended for metaphor researchers, corpus linguists, applied linguists and language educators.
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Mixing Metaphor
More LessMixing metaphors in speech, writing, and even gesture, is traditionally viewed as a sign of inconsistency in thought and language. Despite the prominence of mixed metaphors, there have been surprisingly few attempts to comprehensively explain why people mix their metaphors so frequently and in the particular ways they do. This volume brings together a distinguished group of linguists, psychologists and computer scientists, who tackle the issue of how and why mixed metaphors arise and what communicative purposes they may serve. These scholars, almost unanimously, argue that mixing metaphors is a natural consequence of common metaphorical thought processes, highlighting important complexities of the metaphorical mind. Mixing Metaphor, for the first time, offers new, critical empirical and theoretical insights on a topic that has long been ignored within interdisciplinary metaphor studies.
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Motion Metaphors in Music Criticism
More LessThe book explores (1) the motivation of motion expressions in Western classical music criticism in terms of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999) in two corpus studies, and (2) their perceived degree of metaphoricity among musicians and non-musicians in a rating study. The results show that while fundamental embodied conceptual metaphors likeTIME IS MOTION certainly play a part in explaining why we speak of Western classical music as motion, it is the specific communicative setting of music criticism that determines the particular use of motion metaphors.
Furthermore, the perceived metaphoricity of musical motion metaphors varies with participants’ musical background: musicians perceive musical motion expressions as more literal compared to non-musicians, showing that there are individual differences in the perception of metaphoricity.
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