Models Metaphor And Meaning

The purpose of this book is to develop a philosophy of data & information. The book builds on some of the themes of William Kent's, Data and Reality (Kent 2012). The book examines some traditional and contemporary theories of meaning from philosophy and borrows from some contemporary linguistic research regarding the importance of metaphor in human cognition. By examining the philosophy of data and information the reader will come away with a new appreciation of how data models are used to communicate the intent of the designers of information systems.

Although the range is wide (philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of science) in this collection of essays, there is a certain unity of treatment arising from the author's steady interest in using "linguistic analysis" to cast some new light on old problems, such as the nature of logic, causation, and induction.

First published in 2001. Volume 16, Numbers 3&4. This special issue is an attempt to record the state of the art of psycholinguistics research into figurative language. There are quite a number of models addressing distinct issues and aiming to solve different problems—the mark of a maturing field. Indeed, not one theory is tailored to solve all the problems. Rather, each model, while aiming at generality, also recognizes its limitation. Despite specializing in different topics, most of the theories presented here have some things in common. For one, most of them dispense with the literal/ nonliteral divide, proposing, instead, models that are capable of handling literal as well as figurative language. Some models focus on the role primary meanings play in comprehension, others shed light on context effects, and some models seem to encompass both in terms of the accumulating effects of constraints (whether linguistic or contextual).

The volume offers a number of representative papers on cognitive models that are invoked when people deal with questions of social identity, political and economic manipulation, and more general issues such as the genomic discourse. In line with the well-known volume Cultural Models in Language and Thought by Holland and Quinn (1987), the volume shows that Cognitive Linguistics has further explored the idea that we think about social reality in terms of models - 'cognitive/cultural models' or 'folk theories'. As in cultural models, the present volume demonstrates that the technical apparatus of Cognitive Linguistics can be used to analyze the various ways our conception of social reality is shaped by underlying cognitive and/or cultural models or patterns of thought, and also looks into how this is done. The new inroad the volume wants to pursue is the deliberate and explicit orientation towards a cognitive sociolinguistics, or more generally, a cognitive semiotics.

Combining up-to-date scholarship with clear and accessible language and helpful exercises, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction is an invaluable resource for all readers interested in metaphor. This second edition includes two new chapters-on 'metaphors in discourse' and 'metaphor and emotion'-along with new exercises, responses to criticism and recent developments in the field, and revised student exercises, tables, and figures.

This book examines how people understand utterances that are intended figuratively. Traditionally, figurative language such as metaphors and idioms has been considered derivative from more complex than ostensibly straightforward literal language. Glucksberg argues that figurative language involves the same kinds of linguistic and pragmatic operations that are used for ordinary, literal language. Glucksberg's research in this book is concerned with ordinary language: expressions that are used in daily life, including conversations about everyday matters, newspaper and magazine articles, and the media. Metaphor is the major focus of the book. Idioms, however, are also treated comprehensively, as is the theory of conceptual metaphor in the context of how people understand both conventional and novel figurative expressions. A new theory of metaphor comprehension is put forward, and evaluated with respect to competing theories in linguistics and in psychology. The central tenet of the theory is that ordinary conversational metaphors are used to create new concepts and categories. This process is spontaneous and automatic. Metaphor is special only in the sense that these categories get their names from the best examples of the things they represent, and that these categories get their names from the best examples of those categories. Thus, the literal "shark" can be a metaphor for any vicious and predatory being, from unscrupulous salespeople to a murderous character in The Threepenny Opera. Because the same term, e.g.,"shark," is used both for its literal referent and for the metaphorical category, as in "My lawyer is a shark," we call it the dual-reference theory. The theory is then extended to two other domains: idioms and conceptual metaphors. The book presents the first comprehensive account of how people use and understand metaphors in everyday life.