Metaphor Analysis

The ability to recognise, discuss and evaluate one’s educational beliefs and working practices in metaphoric terms has for several years been seen as a highly valuable tool for increasing self-awareness, facilitating learning (or teaching), and/or predicting behaviour. This is the first edited book solely devoted to the topic of researching elicited metaphor in education, and brings together key researchers from China, Poland, Puerto Rico, South America, UK and USA. The 12 chapters involve overviews and state-of-the-art articles, articles focussing on methodology and validation, as well as reflections on the effectiveness of techniques and research reports of recent empirical studies. The bulk of the articles relate to literacy (L1 and L2) and teacher education, but science education is also addressed. The book offers useful models for academics, professionals and PhD students in these areas, and provides solutions for improving the validity of elicited metaphor techniques in educational research.

In a stimulating and novel approach, this book explains why metaphors are persuasive, suggesting that they are ideologically effective because they are cognitively plausible and evoke an emotional response. 'Critical Metaphor Analysis' is then developed in a series of corpus-based studies in which analysis of collocations provides insight into the cognitive motivation and expressive connotation of metaphor. By unifying traditional and cognitive semantic with pragmatic approaches, the reader becomes aware of the importance of metaphor in persuasive language.

This book explores the cognitively-oriented approach to metaphor studies, comparing it critically to other contemporary paradigms of metaphor in meaning. It incorporates cutting edge empirical data. In both semantics and cognitive linguistics, metaphor has gained central status over the past decades, chiefly on account of Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, which has become a standard point of reference. Rather than advocating a 'pick and mix' combination of cognitive attitudes with theory and data from other paradigms, the book argues for the methodologically reflective comparison of theory traditions and acknowledgement of their strengths and weaknesses. This critical reflection on metaphor is an essential read for students of metaphor at an advanced undergraduate or postgraduate level. Each chapter outlines areas for further reading and research, and the book is built around data drawn from a multilingual research corpus of metaphors compiled from existing research, other corpora and internet data.

This work describes practice in the analysis of metaphor on real-world discourse. The contributors have all had to find ways to deal with methodological issues in their own research and have developed techniques that are brought together here.

This volume takes up the challenge of surveying the present state of a variety of approaches to the identification, analysis and interpretation of metaphor across communication channels, situational contexts, genres and social spheres. It reflects three foremost trends of present metaphor research, namely the communicative approach, the cognitive modelling approach and the multimodality approach. These trends are considered as areas of research emerging on the ground of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, initiated by Lakoff. The book intends to show their concomitances as well as mark their diversifying paths. The aim is to bring about and make apparent the many connections among assumingly different trends stemming from CMT. Whereas discrepancies between communicative and conceptual perspectives might seem irredeemable, the book emphasizes and claims that the background framework of CMT provides a solid foundation for collaboration and mutual influence. Consequently, the analysis of metaphor usage in context may provide insights for cognitive modelling proposals. The analysis of cognitive configuration of conceptual domains may, in turn, illuminate our understanding of communicative decisions in discourse. The integration of multimodal metaphor analysis puts forward the idea that diverse modal manifestations of metaphor reveal the symbiosis between communicative and cognitive stances. The various subject areas and methodologies illuminate the scene of current research in the field. The poignant contributions open far reaching avenues into the realm of human thought and discourse.

Cognitive linguists have proposed that metaphor is not just a matter of language but of thought, and that metaphorical thought displays a high degree of conventionalization. In order to produce converging evidence for this theory of metaphor, a wide range of data is currently being studied with a large array of methods and techniques. Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage aims to map the field of this development in theory and research from a methodological perspective. It raises the question when exactly evidence for metaphor in language and thought can be said to count as converging. It also goes into the various stages of producing such evidence (conceptualization, operationalization, data collection and analysis, and interpretation). The book offers systematic discussion of eight distinct areas of metaphor research that emerge as a result of approaching metaphor as part of grammar or usage, language or thought, and symbolic structure or cognitive process.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Heidelberg (Anglistisches Seminar ), course: Hauptseminar Cognitive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Language is versatile. Language is complex. Language can be a mystery. For example, why do we say chair leg although legs are usually thought of being a part of the human body or an animal? Why do we refer to the ground where a river runs through as a river bed? Is a bed not usually an object that we use to sleep in? And why is it that we can say I’m surfing the web although surfing typically means to ride one’s board on ocean waves? The news report says, The Iraq democracy is in its infancy. Would we not typically use infancy when we talk about children, or refer to a person’s childhood? If we consider the above examples, we can easily draw the conclusion that these words – besides their original meaning – can be used “outside of their natural environment”. Words and their meaning can be transferred to a different domain. The name for such a transfer is metaphor. [...] This paper will highlight Lakoff’s and Johnson’s major claim that metaphor is not only a poetic device, or simply a (linguistic) matter of spoken words, but that “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 3). I shall explain some of the most important devices of their theory, such as target, source, and mapping and briefly elucidate the systematicity that underlies metaphorical conceptualization. The analysis of the conceptual metaphor, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, will reveal some ambiguities about Lakoff’s and Johnson’s theory. By doing this, I will consider some of the major critiques and analyze whether there is an underlying conceptual metaphoric system in our everyday language.

The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. This book explores the critical role that conceptual metaphors play in language, thought, cultural and expressive actions. It evaluates the arguments and evidence for and against conceptual metaphors across academic disciplines.