Metaphor And Metonymy Across Time And Cultures

This volume offers new insights into figurative language and its pervasive role as a factor of linguistic change. The case studies included in this book explore some of the different ways new metaphoric and metonymic expressions emerge and spread among speech communities, and how these changes can be related to the need to encode ongoing social and cultural processes in the language. They cover a wide series of languages and historical stages.

This volume offers new insights into figurative language and its pervasive role as a factor of linguistic change. The case studies included in this book explore some of the different ways new metaphoric and metonymic expressions emerge and spread among speech communities, and how these changes can be related to the need to encode ongoing social and cultural processes in the language. They cover a wide series of languages and historical stages.

This volume offers new insights into figurative language and its pervasive role as a factor of linguistic change. The case studies included in this book explore some of the different ways new metaphoric and metonymic expressions emerge and spread among speech communities, and how these changes can be related to the need to encode ongoing social and cultural processes in the language. They cover a wide series of languages and historical stages.

Metaphor is a fascinating phenomenon, but it is also complex and multi-faceted, varying in how it is manifested in different modes of expression, languages, cultures, or time-scales. How then can we reliably identify metaphors in different contexts? How does the language or culture of speakers and hearers affect the way metaphors are produced or interpreted? Are the methods employed to explore metaphors in one context applicable in others? The sixteen chapters that make up this volume offer not only detailed studies of the situated use of metaphor in language, gesture, and visuals around the world – providing important insights into the different factors that produce variation – but also careful explication and discussion of the methodological issues that arise when researchers approach metaphor in diverse ‘real world’ contexts. The book constitutes an important contribution to applied metaphor studies, and will prove an invaluable resource for the novice and experienced metaphor researcher alike.

The book deals with the important shift that has been heralded in cognitive linguistics from mere universal matters to cultural and situational variation. The discussions examine cognitive and cultural linguistics’ theories in relation to the following areas of research: (i) metaphorical conceptualization; (ii) the influence of culture on metaphor, metonymy and conceptual blends; (iii) the impact of culture and cognition on metaphorical lexis; (iv) the interface of pragmatics and cognition when metaphor is studied in situ, that is, in face-to-face as well as in virtual multimodal interaction; (v) the application of insights from metaphorical conceptualizations to language teaching, and (vi) recent methods for revealing (inter)cultural metaphorical conceptualizations (corpus-based approaches, gesture studies, etc.). The book brings together cognitive, functional, and (inter)cultural approaches.

The communicative act of drawing attention to metaphor is a relatively recent topic in metaphor studies and one that has remained contentious from a cognitive perspective. This book brings philologists of ancient languages together with metaphor experts from several modalities to interrogate whether ancient and modern texts and languages draw attention to figurative tropes in similar ways. In this way, the diachronic, multimodal and pluridisciplinary contributions to this volume critically review the theoretical frameworks underpinning metaphor marking and metaphor analysis from a completely new empirical basis.

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.

The monograph presents new findings and perspectives in the study of variation in metonymy, both theoretical and methodological. Theoretically, it sheds light on metonymy from an onomasiological perspective, which helps to discover the different conceptual or lexical "pathways" through which a concept or a group of concepts has been designated by going back to the source concepts. In addition, it broadens the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics research on metonymy by looking into how metonymic conceptualization and usage may vary along various dimensions. Three case studies explore significant variation in metonymy across different languages, time periods, genres and social lects. Methodologically, the monograph responds to the call in Cognitive Linguistics to adopt usage-based empirical methodologies. The case studies show that quantification and statistical techniques constitute essential parts of an empirical analysis based on corpus data. The empirical findings demonstrate the essential need to extend research on metonymy in a variationist Cognitive Linguistics direction by studying metonymy’s cultural, historical and social-lectal variation.