Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013

The paper is devoted to an analysis of the relation between language and culture in the context of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Section 2 deals in an explicitly critical way with some problems in the concept of “culture” as used in “mainstream” schools of CL. Section 3 offers a brief review of the problems involved in the studies on the concept of “time” and its metaphors. Section 4 reviews some interpretations of the concept of “time” in Amerindian cultures. Section 5 analyses the linguistic expression of time in Quechua, in an attempt to (dis)confirm the “past in front” conceptualisation proposed by some researchers for the (geographically and culturally close, but genetically unrelated) Aymara language. Some final conclusions follow.

This paper relates the functional model of Dialogic Syntax and its key concept of resonance (Du Bois 2001 [2009]) to Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991, 2001, 2008, 2009) with the aim of inquiring into the prospects, potential gains, and limitations of a Cognitive Grammar-inspired discourse analysis. First the two frameworks are compared from a theoretical point of view, focusing on how Du Bois’ account and Langacker’s Current Discourse Space Model (2001, 2008) deal with prior discourse as a resource for new usage events. In the subsequent case study, the theory is confronted with interactional data from Austrian parliamentary debates. Specific attention is paid to construal operations, more specifically viewpoint phenomena and subjectification, which are explored in relation to resonance activation. Drawing on detailed analyses that combine insights and concepts from Dialogic Syntax and Cognitive Grammar, strengths, shortcomings, and future challenges of Cognitive Grammar discourse studies are discussed.

The major goal of this study is to investigate conceptual emotion metaphors of Korean, particularly those of ANGER, HAPPINESS, and SADNESS, by utilizing a corpus-based analysis. The universality of conceptual metaphors continues to be a controversial topic in cognitive linguistics and thus, more cross-linguistic and language-specific studies are needed to support the theoretical framework of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). To this end, the current study identifies and examines Korean metaphorical expressions through a conceptual analysis, supported by both quantitative and qualitative methods, and aims to find out the types of concepts with which ANGER, HAPPINESS, and SADNESS are associated, and thus, to what extent these associations comprise primary (universal) and complex (cultural) metaphors, as suggested by the current view of the CMT. I argue that while it is important to distinguish between universal and cultural metaphors, the hierarchical mapping of variation also describes the characteristics of a language vis-à-vis universality or cultural specificity. Furthermore, I claim that the characteristics of metaphorical expressions should also be determined based on analysis of their occurrences in language use. The data suggest a positive correlation between frequency and productivity. Understanding the frequency and productivity of emotion metaphors through analysis of their occurrence in actual language use will allow better understanding and provide a basis for further investigation of native speakers’ cognitive styles and cognitive tendencies.

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up, a scene of affection, after enlarging the negatives, transforms into a scene of an attempted or an actual murder. It seems a good image to characterize the change of the initial view of conceptual metaphor from a more precise perspective. The conceptual metaphor theory emerged with the claim that primary metaphors, such as Categories Are Containers, More Is Up, Affection Is Warmth, and even Time Is Money, were determined by the fundamental constants of our perceptual experience; hence, they could not change or evolve, and had no history. Later, however, plenty of studies have provided strong evidence that such metaphors, being much more complicated structures, essentially rest on the cultural-historical ground. The article can be considered as a step in this direction. It addresses the machine metaphor as a cultural-historical phenomenon examining its development from Antiquity to Early Modernity. The author reveals that conceptual machine metaphor appears in the Middle Ages, long before Newton and the Industrial Revolution, in the wake of the transformation of basic elements of the cultural model from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

In recent years much progress has been made in developing systematic protocols for finding linguistic metaphors in authentic language data. The description of conceptual structures, however, has not been placed on equally firm footing. One existing proposal, known as the five-step method, introduces systematicity to the process of determining conceptual structures of metaphors in discourse. However, it does not take sufficient steps to minimize intuition and to maximize transparency. This paper seeks to reduce these weaknesses by introducing the systematic use of dictionaries and a lexical database. The result is a more transparent and constrained method.