Cognitive Linguistic Studies - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2017

This paper contributes to research on metaphor variation in the context of world Englishes from a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Starting with a discussion of the dissonance between universality and cultural specificity in conceptual metaphor research, basic dimensions of variation are outlined that are relevant to conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). These dimensions inform a continuum of variation in CMT that ranges from basic conceptualizations (as primary metaphors) to the surface level of language use (as metaphorical expressions). The empirical part of the paper takes heed of this continuum of variation and outlines the methodological choices relevant to the description of conceptual metaphors in an associative task. The data are based on meaning interpretations given to novel English compounds by Māori and non-Māori speakers of New Zealand English. The results of the task highlight that Māori-English bilinguals apply a greater range of different conceptual metaphors compared to non-Māori bilingual and monolingual speakers of English. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for further research on metaphor variation in Aotearoa New Zealand and world Englishes.

The current paper offers a novel methodological approach to gathering rich spatial data from Irish English speakers, showing variation in the cognition of physical and conceptual space. A mixed method study was conducted to gather conceptual and sociolinguistic data. This includes the first part of the data gathering: a structured interview, focusing on geographic aspects of the town and two wayfinding exercises. I then describe the second part of the study: twenty cloze procedure questions relating to a written example, followed by questions relating to seventeen hand-drawn images. I take as a baseline the instruments used by, inter alia, Levinson and Wilkins (2006a) and apply them to a within-culture study. I conclude this paper by discussing replicability and future studies. While Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) offers researchers a model to connect physical and conceptual elements of space, we have not seen a large-scale study of how CMT affects the language of space in varieties of English.

This paper discusses the culture-specificity of figurative language use in varieties of English. Idioms as a special type of figurative language are understood as being conceptually motivated by underlying metaphorical mappings, also reflecting the nexus of language and culture. On the basis of data from large-scale web corpora of varieties of English, the paper examines the lexico-grammatical and conceptual variability of selected idiomatic expressions related to the source domains food and eating. The results show patterns of lexico-grammatical variation and innovation of idioms in (West) African Englishes and confirm previous research that points towards the high salience and frequency of food and related concepts of eating as source domains in conceptual metaphorical mappings in West African cultures. The paper concludes that food and eating seem fruitful points of departure for further studies on culture- and variety-specific “linguistic markers” across varieties of English.

Research into emotion concepts has become an established part of the cognitive-linguistic research agenda and has often revolved around the competing notions of universality (from the perspective of embodied cognition) and (cross- and within-cultural) variation (see Kövecses 2005 ). At the same time, a relatively recent approach to socio-variational aspects of language in the form of Cognitive Sociolinguistics has created an ideal platform for the study of variation in institutionalized second-language varieties of English, often referred to as new Englishes (see Kristiansen & Dirven 2008 ; Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009 ). This paper aims at bringing together these two research strands in a study devoted to variation on the level of metaphor in new Englishes, specifically involved in the conceptualization of emotion. While metaphor is theoretically understood within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), this study will make use of a corpus-based method of metaphor retrieval and identification informed by Stefanowitsch’s ( 2004 , 2006 ) Metaphorical Pattern Analysis (MPA) and Steen et al.’s (2010) method for linguistic metaphor identification (MIPVU). anger metaphors will be examined for four second-language varieties of English, namely those spoken in Nigeria, Kenya, India, and Singapore, which are represented in the Global Web-based English corpus (GloWbE; Davies 2013 ).With the assumption that metaphor variation emerges in a variety’s preference for certain source domains in emotion-based mappings vis-à-vis other varieties, the main questions at the core of the analysis are: (1) Which source domains are employed in a respective variety to conceptualize anger? and (2) To what extent are the source domain preferences of new Englishes similar to a norm-providing variety, namely British English? Although initial results reveal much similarity, some differences in the data are highlighted at a deeper level of analysis. Thus, a discussion of the results provides a basis for inter-variety comparison of anger metaphors and, thus, contribute to the universality / variation debate.

With the spread of English in many parts of the world, numerous local varieties have emerged, shaped by the sociocultural contexts in which they are embedded. Hence, although English is a unifying element, these varieties express different conceptualizations that are deeply rooted in culture. For the most part, these conceptualizations come in the form of conceptual metaphors, which not only influence our perception of the world ( Lakoff & Johnson 1980 ), but also reveal cultural specifics of a particular society.

One of the latest approaches in the field of conceptual metaphor research suggests that conceptual metaphors are actually multimodal, i.e., that they are expressed not only in language, but also, e.g., in gestures, facial expressions, sounds or images ( Forceville 2009 ). Films are an ideal source of data for such multimodal metaphors.

In the form of a pilot study, this paper applies this novel approach to metaphor to the field of World Englishes. While adding to the range of research that has already used the methodological toolbox of Cognitive Linguistics or its cognate discipline Cultural Linguistics in the investigation of the cultural dimension of varieties of English (e.g., Kövecses 1995 ; Liu 2002 ; Malcolm & Rochecouste 2000 ; Sharifian 2006 ; Wolf 2001 ; Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009 ), we provide a new exploratory angle to that investigation by using cinematic material for the analysis. Specifically, this study focuses on conceptualizations pertaining to the target domains woman and homosexuality. The data we have selected are from Great Britain, India and Nigeria, because these countries have important film industries, and British English, Indian English and Nigerian English constitute culturally distinct varieties.

This study examines the notion of womanhood in the literary works of contemporary Indian authors by analyzing conceptual metaphors of womanhood. More specifically, the data collected in this study are metaphorical expressions (MEs) from nine fictional works set in India’s three main ethnically and linguistically diverse regions occupied by three linguistic groups, namely, the Indo-Aryan, the Dravidian, and the Tibeto-Burmese. The identification of MEs follows the Metaphor Identification Procedure VU University Amsterdam (MIPVU; Steen et al. 2010a ). The analysis focuses on cross-cultural variation in conceptual metaphor, applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT; Lakoff & Johnson 1980 ) and the cognitive dimension of socio-cultural diversity proposed by Kövecses (2008). Through the analysis of conceptual metaphor, the paper provides insights into the current social context regarding the status and roles of women in India.