Metaphor and the Social World - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2016

In 2008 a financial crisis threatened to make economies collapse worldwide. The world entered an era of bank and businesses failures, private defaults and massive layoffs. The crisis became a major topic in the media. The present article sets out to analyse the conceptualization of the crisis in the English, Spanish and French press. I found that journalists relied heavily on metaphorical imagery to describe it. The crisis was conceived in terms of a structured set of conceptual metaphors which depict it as a living organism, a disease, natural disaster, a weather phenomenon and a harmful object. These metaphors not only shape the readers’ view of the crisis, but also construct a negative evaluation of this economic phenomenon by highlighting its harmful effects. The study also shows the commonalities and divergences in the conceptualization of the crisis across languages.

The distinction between ‘deliberate’ and ‘non deliberate’ metaphors has been developed within a five-step framework (Steen) of metaphor production. Deliberate metaphors invite the addressee to pay special attention to their cross-domain structure mapping rather than focusing primarily on the topical proposition. This paper presents results of a pilot survey eliciting interpretations for the metaphors a nation is a body/a nation is a person from an international sample of respondents in 10 different countries. ESL/EFL users from diverse cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds were asked to apply the metaphorical idiom body politic to their home nations. The responses show systematic variation in preferred metaphor interpretations, some of which can be linked to dominant cultural traditions, as well as evidence of polemical and/or ironic elaboration. Neither of these findings is predicted by classic conceptualist models that describe metaphor understanding as an automatic and unconscious process. Instead, when paying special attention to metaphoricity, informants seem to have chosen between diverse interpretation versions and in some cases to have elaborated them further to achieve social pragmatic effects. These findings provide new supporting evidence for Deliberate Metaphor Theory by highlighting deliberateness in metaphor interpretation and outlining perspectives for further empirical testing of metaphor understanding in specific registers and usage contexts (e.g., political discourse, EFL/ESL acquisition).

Is income inequality more of a blemish or a failing organ in our economy? Both metaphors capture something about wealth disparities, but only failing organ seems to emphasize the fact that our economy is a complex system, where activity in one region may lead to a cascade of problems in other parts of the system. In the present study, we introduce a novel method for classifying such ‘systemic’ metaphors, which reveals that people can reliably identify the extent to which a metaphor highlights the complex causal structure of a target domain. In a second experiment, we asked whether exposing people to more systemic metaphors would induce a systems-thinking mindset and influence reasoning on a seemingly unrelated task that measured the degree to which people reasoned about a domain in terms of complex causal relations. We found that participants who were primed with systemic metaphors scored higher on subsequent tasks that measured relational and holistic thinking, supporting the view that these metaphors can promote systems thinking. Our discussion highlights the potential role of systemic metaphors in facilitating reasoning and decision-making in complex domains.

This study focuses on the emotional aesthetic appreciation of figurative language, a dimension which has often been neglected in experimental psycholinguistics. Our goal was to demonstrate that non-conventional figurative utterances are evaluated as more aesthetically pleasing although they are cognitively more demanding than conventional rhetorical figures. This hypothesis was tested for three main types of figurative language (metaphors, irony and idioms) in three separate surveys. Participants assessed utterances by means of a questionnaire which comprised several semantic differential items. The postulated covariation of non-conventionality and cognitive effort as well as of non-conventionality and aesthetics could be clearly established for metaphors and for irony. For idioms we could only partially provide this evidence. However, in a combined sample for all figurative language forms (compiled from the three studies) the main hypothesis was again confirmed. Thus, the results demonstrate that non-conventional variants of figurative language must be considered as the core of figurative aesthetics. Furthermore, our exploratory data gave evidence of an aesthetic paradox: the cognitive costs of understanding conventional figurative language reduce aesthetic pleasure, while in the case of non-conventional rhetoric figures the enhanced cognitive effort is accompanied by an increase in aesthetic pleasure.

The peace Treaty of Trianon, which was signed by the representatives of Hungary and the Allies in 1920, caused substantial economic, political and social changes in the life of the Hungarian nation. The paper explores how far these changes have been conceptualized by conceptual metaphors in Hungarian public discourse from 1920 to the present day. Specifically, it looks at whether there is a conventionalized metaphoric conceptual system concerning the treaty, which began (or was current) in 1920 and has been developing for almost a hundred years.

The paper applies a qualitative approach to a small corpus of written texts. The corpus contains twenty texts, which are taken from four different categories of public discourse (political, academic, informative and media) and four time periods (1920–1945, 1945–1990, 1990–2010, and 2010–2015).

The paper concludes that, within the public discourse on the consequences of the Trianon peace treaty, the same metaphors have fundamentally survived over nine decades. This conceptual history of metaphors suggests heavy conventionalization, which can play a crucial role in the survival of a certain mental image of the nation and in maintaining negative emotions about the treaty. It also suggests that the Trianon frame is still an essential part of Hungarian national identity.

After the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt, the Egyptian media launched strenuous campaigns against the Muslim Brotherhood and the West. In this paper, I present a cognitive analysis of a multimodal text of a cartoon with labels, with the goal of gauging its social/political impact. Crucially, the cartoon ‘frames’ its message so strongly that even if the viewer is not a speaker of Arabic and all verbal elements in the cartoon are to be erased, he or she (with certain ‘general’ background knowledge) will probably be able to read its moral message. For the analysis, I employ Fauconnier and Turner’s (1998) conceptual blending theory. The analysis shows that metaphoric blends do not just surface in public discourse. Rather, they can have a strong influence on how people perceive political issues.

This paper addresses metaphorical extensions of ho, which means ‘body’ in Akan, a Ghanaian language. In Akan, as in many other languages, body part expressions and bodily functions have extended meanings that still relate to the basic sense of the words. Expressions derived from ho are used to talk about emotions and character traits, perhaps more extensively and pervasively than equivalent lexis in English. The data for this study are taken from interviews, questionnaires, an Akan dictionary, Akan literature, the Akan Bible and recorded materials from radio discussions. The paper supports claims in the literature that there is a strong relationship between people’s conceptual, environmental, and cultural experiences and their linguistic systems.