Metaphor Cognition And Culture

To what extent and in what ways is metaphorical thought relevant to an understanding of culture and society? More specifically: can the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor simultaneously explain both universality and diversity in metaphorical thought? Cognitive linguists have done important work on universal aspects of metaphor, but they have paid much less attention to why metaphors vary both interculturally and intraculturally as extensively as they do. In this book, Zoltán Kövecses proposes a new theory of metaphor variation. First, he identifies the major dimension of metaphor variation, that is, those social and cultural boundaries that signal discontinuities in human experience. Second, he describes which components, or aspects of conceptual metaphor are involved in metaphor variation, and how they are involved. Third, he isolates the main causes of metaphor variation. Fourth Professor Kövecses addresses the issue to the degree of cultural coherence in the interplay among conceptual metaphors, embodiment, and causes of metaphor variation.

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.

This book contains a selection of refereed and revised papers originally presented at the 5th ICLC. After an introduction by the editors, the book opens with a long-needed chapter on historical precedents for the Cognitive Linguistic theory of metaphor. Two chapters demonstrate the method of lexical analysis of linguistic metaphors and how it can be fruitfully applied to a characterization of the conceptual domains of smell and economics. Three chapters deal with theoretical aspects of conceptual metaphor, one of which is a commissioned chapter on the relation between conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending. Finally there are five chapters presenting novel theoretical issues and empirical findings about the relation between conceptual metaphor and culture. This book is hence a wide-ranging sample of current approaches to metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, with some chapters breaking new grounds for future research.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Vienna, language: English, abstract: The first question that arises is in the context of "Metaphor and Culture" is what metaphor actually has to do with culture. This question can be answered in the way that metaphor and culture are related in many ways. Metaphor can be viewed as the ornamental use of language, and a lot about metaphor and culture arises from what we have heard or learned in school about it, such as for instance creative writers or poets who use metaphors. Since literature is a significant part of our culture, metaphor can be regarded as intimately linked to our socio-cultural field. So a possible way of relation between metaphor and culture would be literature, an exemplary manifestation of culture. However, there are in fact much more fundamental relations between metaphor and culture, which become clear when we look at some currrent thinking in anthropology, which leads us to the fact that we can view culture as a set of shared understandings that characterize smaller or larger groups of people (cf. Shore 1996, Strauss & Quinn 1997). It has to be noted that this is obviously not an exhaustive view or definition of culture, considering the fact that it leaves out real artifacts, real objects, practices, institutions, actions and so on, which people participate in and use in various cultures. However, it integrates a large part of it, namely the shared understanding that human beings have in connection with all of these "things."

Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). This book challenges this simplistic division between the body and culture by showing how human emotions are to a large extent "constructed" from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. The view proposed here demonstrates how cultural aspects of emotions, metaphorical language about the emotions, and human physiology in emotion are all part of an intergrated system and shows how this system points to the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory views of biological reductionism and social constructionism in contemporary debates about human emotion.

This volume aims to contribute to the theory of metaphor from the viewpoint of Chinese, in order to help place the theory into a wider cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. It focuses on metaphors of emotion, the "time as space" metaphor and the Event Structure Metaphor.

This book analyses the emotional message of Hungarian folksongs from a Cultural Linguistic perspective, employing a wide range of empirical devices. It combines theoretical notions with analytical devices and has a multidisciplinary essence: it relies on the latest Cultural Linguistic findings, employing spatial semantics, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and ethnography. The book addresses key questions including: How is nature conceptualized by a folk cultural group? How are emotions and other mental states expressed via nature imagery with respect to metaphors and construal schemas? The author argues that folksongs reflect the Hungarian peasant communities’ specific treatment of emotions, captured in an underlying cultural schema ‘reservedness.’ This schema is grounded in principals of morality and tradition, and governs the various levels of representation. The main topics discussed are related to two core issues: cultural metaphors and cultural schemas of construal in folksongs. It provides a detailed example, based on over 1000 folksongs, of how a cultural group’s cognition can be analyzed and better understood through a representative corpus-based linguistic approach. The research is also pioneering in constructing a comprehensive analysis framework adapted to folk poetry, and offers an example of how cultural conceptualizations can be investigated in various discourse types. Last but not least, the book offers insights into the work of Hungarian linguists and folklorists concerning cultural conceptualizations, which have largely been unavailable in English.