Mapping English Metaphor Through Time

This volume offers an empirical and diachronic investigation of the foundations and nature of metaphor in English, based on evidence from 'The Historical Thesaurus of English'. It offers case studies of a number of semantic domains and provides a significant step forward in the data-driven understanding of metaphor.

This volume offers an empirical and diachronic investigation of the foundations and nature of metaphor in English. Metaphor is one of the hot topics in present-day linguistics, with a huge range of research focusing on the systematic connections between different concepts such as heat and anger (fuming, inflamed), sight and understanding (clear, see), or bodies and landscape (hill-foot, river-mouth). Until recently, the lack of a comprehensive data source made it difficult to obtain an overview of this phenomenon in any language, but this changed with the completion in 2009 of The Historical Thesaurus of English, the only historical thesaurus ever produced for any language. Chapters in this volume use this unique resource as a basis for case studies of semantic domains including Animals, Colour, Death, Fear, Food, Reading, and Theft, providing a significant step forward in the data-driven understanding of metaphor.

Metaphor allows us to think and talk about one thing in terms of another, ratcheting up our cognitive and expressive capacity. It gives us concrete terms for abstract phenomena, for example, ideas become things we can grasp or let go of. Perceptual experience—characterised as physical and relatively concrete—should be an ideal source domain in metaphor, and a less likely target. But is this the case across diverse languages? And are some sensory modalities perhaps more concrete than others? This volume presents critical new data on perception metaphors from over 40 languages, including many which are under-studied. Aside from the wealth of data from diverse languages—modern and historical; spoken and signed—a variety of methods (e.g., natural language corpora, experimental) and theoretical approaches are brought together. This collection highlights how perception metaphor can offer both a bedrock of common experience and a source of continuing innovation in human communication.

The Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities serves as a reference point for key developments related to the ways in which the digital turn has shaped the study of the English language and of how the resulting methodological approaches have permeated other disciplines. It draws on modern linguistics and discourse analysis for its analytical methods and applies these approaches to the exploration and theorisation of issues within the humanities. Divided into three sections, this handbook covers: sources and corpora; analytical approaches; English language at the interface with other areas of research in the digital humanities. In covering these areas, more traditional approaches and methodologies in the humanities are recast and research challenges are re-framed through the lens of the digital. The essays in this volume highlight the opportunities for new questions to be asked and long-standing questions to be reconsidered when drawing on the digital in humanities research. This is a ground-breaking collection of essays offering incisive and essential reading for anyone with an interest in the English language and digital humanities.

An investigation of the historical evolution of figurative language within the framework of cognitive linguistics. It examines how and why metaphors evolve through the ages; discusses the role of culture; patterns of metaphor evolution; how many people use particular expressions.

The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research on metaphor and language. Featuring 35 chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume takes a broad view of the field of metaphor and language, and brings together diverse and distinct theoretical and applied perspectives to cover six key areas: Theoretical approaches to metaphor and language, covering Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Relevance Theory, Blending Theory and Dynamical Systems Theory; Methodological approaches to metaphor and language, discussing ways of identifying metaphors in verbal texts, images and gestures, as well as the use of corpus linguistics; Formal variation in patterns of metaphor use across text types, historical periods and languages; Functional variation of metaphor, in contexts including educational, commercial, scientific and political discourse, as well as online trolling; The applications of metaphor for problem solving, in business, education, healthcare and conflict situations; Language, metaphor, and cognitive development, examining the processing and comprehension of metaphors. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Metaphor is a must-have survey of this key field, and is essential reading for those interested in language and metaphor.

This handbook reviews efforts to increase the use of empirical methods in studies of the aesthetic and social effects of literary reading. The reviewed research is expansive, including extension of familiar theoretical models to novel domains (e.g., educational settings); enlarging empirical efforts within under-represented research areas (e.g., child development); and broadening the range of applicable quantitative and qualitative methods (e.g., computational stylistics; phenomenological methods). Especially challenging is articulation of the subtle aesthetic and social effects of literary artefacts (e.g., poetry, film). Increasingly, the complexity of these effects is addressed in multi-variate studies, including confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. While each chapter touches upon the historical background of a specific research topic, two chapters address the area’s historical background and guiding philosophical assumptions. Taken together, the material in this volume provides a systematic introduction to the area for early career professionals, while challenging active researchers to develop theoretical frameworks and empirical procedures that match the complexity of their research objectives.

Contemporary linguistic forms are partially the product of their historical antecedents, and the same is true for cognitive conceptualization. The book presents the results of several diachronic corpus studies of conceptual metaphor in a longitudinal and empirical “mixed methods” design, employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis measures; the study design was informed by usage-based theory. The goal was to investigate the interaction over time between conceptualization and cultural models in historical English-speaking society. The main study of two linguistic metaphors of anger spans five centuries (A.D. 1500 to 1990). The results show that conceptualization and cultural models—understood as non-autonomous, encyclopedic knowledge—work together to determine both the meaning and use of a linguistic metaphor. In addition, historically a wide variety of emotion concepts formed a complex cognitive array called the Domain Matrix of emotion. The implications for conceptual metaphor theory, research methodology, and future study are discussed in detail.