Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Online First

Folk art, serving as a condensed manifestation of indigenous folk culture, is potentially embedded with rich multimodal metaphors. This paper contributes to the exploration of interpreting various modalities in folk art, focusing on the Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Through qualitative analysis, this study delves into the metaphorical connotations present in the visuals, material carriers, and genre of Huashan Rock Art. The results highlight that the relationships among different modes in interpreting the target domain are both complementary and mutually exclusive. Each multimodal metaphorical interpretation appears uniquely attached to a specific mode, which cannot be substituted by another. The coordinated interplay of various modes facilitates a comprehensive understanding of the multi-layered target domain. It demonstrates that folk arts are not limited to merely artistic pursuits but also serve to manifest abstract meanings through the combination of different modalities. This study integrates cognitive linguistic and anthropological perspectives into the interpretation of multimodal metaphors, providing a thorough understanding of the motivations behind the creation of Huashan Rock Art.

This study reviews the literature on touch to establish an analytical framework for the study of touch in communication through language. Two questions are at the heart of the study — an ontological and a methodological one: What counts as touch, and how can we investigate the way we talk about touch? Within the broad framework of cognitive semantics, we offer a general approach to touch and identify two main types of Gestalt profiles related to the dynamicity in the Gestalt formation, namely activity and experience, in which case the former is related to external stimulation only, while the latter may be the result of external or internal stimulation.

This study investigates the metaphor comprehension strategies used by elementary school students with Greek as an L2 when they encounter a Greek metaphorical expression. Using open metaphor comprehension tasks, as well as stimulated recall interviews, the present study aims to describe students’ cognitive processes in relation to the bodily, conceptual and sociο-experiential motivation that triggers their emergence (Kimmel, 2006; Zlatev, 2006). The results demonstrate that a variety of strategies are used by the participants with metaphorical extension of the literal meanings dominating on the others. In the same conditions, mental imagery, as well as universality of metaphors interact in a variety of respects and define not only the strategy that is used, but also the extent to which the linguistic metaphors are comprehended in a non-directive context.

The paper explores various aspects of conceptualization based on motion-related image schemas and their combinations. It does so based on a custom-made and self-annotated linguistic corpus belonging to the journalistic register in Serbian, used for obtaining various descriptive and inferential statistical data interpreted qualitatively. It demonstrates that image schemas exhibit a marked clustering tendency and that they appear to interact with one another and with the categorical variables (newspaper, topic) in non-trivial ways. It reinterprets scale as a higher order principle (rather than an image schema per se) specifying the intensity with which other schemas occur. This, in turn, has enabled formalization of intensities of individual image schemas participating in the established image schema complexes, with important consequences for further research, including the exploration of the dynamic nature of schema interaction and meaning construction not only in language but also other semiotic domains.

The article sets out to examine the entertainment source domain and its scenarios as realised in the media discourse surrounding political events in Belarus in 2021. Metaphorical scenarios are investigated considering different viewpoints, such as those presented in Lithuanian, German, and Russian media. The methodological framework is a blend of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies, embracing the viewpoint (Sweetser, 2012), Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2005), metaphorical scenarios (Musolff, 2016), and framing (Hart, 2014). The results demonstrate that the entertainment domain acquires multiple scenarios depending on the viewpoint. The evaluation attached to the scenarios is mostly negative; however, the viewpoint adopted in Lithuanian and German discourses is very different from Russian discourse. The former is based on Western values and targets the authoritarian regime, whereas the latter is Russian-centric, with the Western world posited as a major threat to the Belarusian and Russian societies.

The analysis offered in this article applies the multilevel approach to conceptual metaphor to relief posters, created and distributed widely after the massive Japan 2011 earthquake. The aim of the analysis is to show in what way the multilevel approach to metaphor can be used to illustrate how the figurative meaning of relief posters emerges from the interactions between different levels of schematicity: from basic image schemas and domains, through contextually embedded semantic frames, finishing with metaphorical scenarios at the highest level of specificity and complexity. The present analysis also shows the potential applicability of image schemas as the guiding analytical element, serving as the departure point for the unfolding metaphorical and metonymical interpretation of a multimodal message. Accordingly, it has been shown how the image schemas of part-whole, full-empty, process and force aid the analysis of metaphoricity and how the central metonymic element of the national flag co-constructs the figurative reading of the posters.

The paper explores the creative combination of metaphors, both complex and mixed. The data for the study are drawn from political discourse concerning the target concept of crisis. Building on the argument that constructional parameters facilitate metaphor clustering, the paper also focuses on adjectival constructions. The general claim that constructional parameters and figurative meaning are interdependent is thus supported. It is shown that as complex and mixed metaphors are created, they both reveal and emphasize the speakers’ political ideologies.

In recent years, a number of scholars have expressed doubts about the productivity of the concept of meaning and its associated methodology for modern lexical semantics. This article aims to examine the current situation by comparing it with the process of transition from classical to quantum physics. Empirical data that challenge classical interpretations are briefly analyzed in a special section, whilst the subsequent sections address alternative theories that propose new methodological frameworks. Particular attention is paid to the ad hoc СС & Ms theory developed by Daniel Casasanto and colleagues, though Hans-Jörg Schmid’s Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model and the Motivation & Sedimentation Model formulated by Jordan Zlatev and colleagues are also touched upon. In the final section, frame semantics, as presented by Charles Fillmore, is revisited, with a focus on his dichotomy of U-semantics and T-semantics. A significant result of the analysis of Fillmore’s perspectives is the assertion that the concept of frame in Fillmore’s construal can serve as an alternative to the concept of meaning in its classical interpretation.

How metaphors are comprehended and their pragmatic effects have long been of interest (Colston, 2019; Gibbs, 2017; Gibbs & Colston, 2012). Attending to the varied constructions where metaphors appear has also advanced our understanding (Athanasiadou, 2017). How metaphors in extra-linguistic mediums has been of particular interest of late, as have the import of embodied simulations (Bergen, 2012; Cienki & Muller, 2008; Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009). But these explorations outside of language and inside the body have left some bits relatively unattended. Metaphors and their host constructions can be embedded into an array of language genres. These also bring their own idiosyncratic influences on metaphor cognition. Moreover, the target domain content that metaphors invoke adds to this complex mixture. And metaphors can be layered within metaphors. This paper presents a tour of just some of the immense fractalesque complexity invoked when we look at the full richness of metaphorical meaning.

Speakers regularly use their experiences of spatial relations to construe linguistic meaning in metaphorical and non-metaphorical ways. Still, we have yet to identify the meaning-bearing functions that different spatial relations commonly serve. This paper focuses on into relations. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, we apply an Embodied Scenes approach to identify the categories of concepts that are regularly construed with ‘into relations’ and the actions that are commonly involved. More generally, we aim to show how spatial metaphors can be systematically studied by investigating the collocates of prepositions and prepositional constructions.