Metaphor and the Social World - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2014

Metaphors are ubiquitous in our daily lives and discourse, and as cognitive linguists and sociolinguists argue, language, culture and cognition are inseparable: embodied experience is not the only basis of meaning construction. Economic discourse, the focus of this paper, is a prime example of metaphors at work. Although there have been studies comparing conceptual metaphors such as the economy is a living organism in different languages, so far very little work has been done on the relationship between socio-cultural factors and the bodily movement metaphors which manifest in this overarching metaphor in economic discourse. This paper therefore examines two corpora consisting of economic news articles in “The Guardian” (UK) and the “Hong Kong Economic Journal” from the year 2006, in order to compare and contrast the way that these bodily movement metaphors constitute and reflect the attitudes and values of the people using the metaphor in these two locations. In so doing, the contrastive study demonstrates that many ‘universal’ conceptual metaphors, such as the metaphor studied in this paper, are indeed different, since the formation of embodied experience needs to be understood in its socio-cultural context. This paper compares collocations and syntactic structures of bodily movement metaphors. Although many primary metaphors, such as down is bad and forward is good, are shared across these two corpora, the findings reveal that the conceptualization of the economy in the two corpora differs mainly in three ways. Firstly, construal of the economy in the UKGC appears to be more dynamic. Secondly, the metaphorical extension of bodily movements is found to be different in the two corpora. Finally, ‘kinship’ metaphors conceptualizing economic relationships in the UKGC are more likely to trigger marriage imagery. In short, these subtle differences reveal that cognition is situated within a wide cultural context, resulting in culture-specific metaphors.

This paper reports on analyses of data gathered from discourse interactions of two focus groups of Brazilian university students (n = 11) as they talk about urban violence in Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil. The analytical procedure follows Cameron et al.’s (2009) metaphor-led discourse analysis which focuses on the role metaphor vehicles play in the emergence of systematic metaphors in discourse. The findings highlight the trivialization of violence in Brazil by the media/TV, evidenced by the emergence in the talk of three related systematic metaphors: violence is a product manufactured by the media, violence is a spreading contagious disease and fear as a response to violence is a form of imprisonment.

Cognitive, communicative, and linguistic forces have been theorized to inhere in all metaphor use in real world contexts, with Steen (2011) describing these forces as constitutive and interacting ‘dimensions’ of metaphor. This paper proposes that cognition, communication, and language should be seen not just as crucial dimensions of individual metaphoric utterances, but also of their circumstances and contexts of use. In other words, purposive real world discourse activities impose various demands of a cognitive, communicative, and linguistic nature on speakers, and these shape the characteristics of metaphors used in definitive ways. I characterize the discourse activity of psychotherapy along the three dimensions, and show how the strategic use and management of metaphors in psychotherapy is, and ought to be, determined by interacting cognitive, communicative, and linguistic considerations. From this, I suggest that the effectiveness of therapeutic metaphors can be evaluated in terms of their “discourse career” (Steen, 2011, p. 54) over a series of therapy sessions. I conclude by highlighting the value of psychotherapy to metaphor study, and of metaphor study to psychotherapeutic practice.

Even though our language is pervaded by metaphor, we do not necessarily think metaphorically. Knowing whether people make conceptual connections between a source and a target domain, and if so under which conditions, is of theoretical as well as practical interest, for example in text design. This paper experimentally investigates under which conditions people build their textual representations of a news article on a metaphorical schema. To disentangle the inconclusive output of recent reaction-time studies, we conduct a memory study. We probe the effect of signaling and conventionality on textual representations — two variables which have been ignored or conflated in previous studies. We find that people are more likely to metaphorically structure their representations of a news article to the extent that it contains novel metaphorical expressions. The inclusion of similes that explicitly signal extended mappings between source and target domains may also act as an aid to integration, although our evidence for this is more equivocal. These findings are discussed in relation to the career of metaphor theory and to the role of deliberateness in metaphor processing.

There has been growing recognition that factors other than fundamental financial information have an impact on investors’ decisions on whether or not to invest in financial products. As the accumulation of information makes it increasingly difficult to process all the data efficiently, it has been shown that the power of imagery tends to compete with that of objective technical indicators. This paper extends existing perspectives on the behavioural effect of agent metaphors and shows that the connected notions of rationality and responsibility implied by some metaphorical themes will induce investors to invest or not in specific stocks.

This article draws on phenomenological and sociological notions of the ‘lived’ body in order to develop a dynamic perspective on embodiment in Conceptual Metaphor Theory. My main argument is that even our most basic sensorimotor experiences are more complex, fluid, and more deeply imbued with socio-cultural meanings than many metaphor scholars assume. While our conscious awareness is ordinarily directed towards the world, making our physical actions and perceptions appear to be natural and straightforward, at times of dysfunction, such as illness and disability, the body suddenly seizes our attention and is perceived as alien. In these moments bodily experience often becomes not just the source, but also the target of metaphorical mappings. I demonstrate the usefulness of the notion of dynamic embodiment by applying it to the example of verbal and visual cancer metaphors.