Perception Metaphors

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.

Arguing that psychologists and their predecessors have invariably relied on metaphors in articulation, the contributors to this volume offer a new "key" to understanding a critically important area of human knowledge by specifying the major metaphors.

This book offers a new definition of metaphor-as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names “visualist,” challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become a site of philosophical analysis. This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and returns to theories of Arnheim and Gombrich and the current evolution of ideas about the visual or material and embodied cognition. Proposing to see visual metaphors in their basic form, she uses a new externalist terminology of ontology, visuality, composition, affordance, construction, and emergence. Setting out a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors.

In cognitive research, metaphors have been shown to help us imagine complex, abstract, or invisible ideas, concepts, or emotions. Contributors to this book argue that metaphors occur not only in language, but in audio visual media well. This is all the more evident in entertainment media, which strategically "sell" their products by addressing their viewers’ immediate, reflexive understanding through pictures, sounds, and language. This volume applies cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) to film, television, and video games in order to analyze the embodied aesthetics and meanings of those moving images.

The book explores (1) the motivation of motion expressions in Western classical music criticism in terms of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999) in two corpus studies, and (2) their perceived degree of metaphoricity among musicians and non-musicians in a rating study. The results show that while fundamental embodied conceptual metaphors like TIME IS MOTION certainly play a part in explaining why we speak of Western classical music as motion, it is the specific communicative setting of music criticism that determines the particular use of motion metaphors. Furthermore, the perceived metaphoricity of musical motion metaphors varies with participants’ musical background: musicians perceive musical motion expressions as more literal compared to non-musicians, showing that there are individual differences in the perception of metaphoricity.

This book provides an interdisciplinary, unified view of sensual cognition and its cultural manifestations. The contributors favour an ecological perspective and revisit and problematize some of the core assumptions in Cognitive Linguistics. One of the original tenets of CL states that human thinking is grounded in experiential gestalts as well as in interaction between peoples' embodied minds and their various environments or cultures. In addition to looking in detail at this tenet, the volume provides major insights into the methodological and theoretical dimensions of Cognitive Linguistics research and describes applications of the paradigm in diverse contexts and cultures.

Multisensory perception is emerging as an important factor in shaping current lifestyles. Therefore, computer scientists, engineers, and technology experts are acknowledging the comparative power existing beyond visual explanations. Perceptions of Knowledge Visualization: Explaining Concepts through Meaningful Images discusses issues related to visualization of scientific concepts, picturing processes and products, as well as the role of computing in the advancement of visual literacy skills. By connecting theory with practice, this book gives researchers, computer scientists, and academics an active experience which enhances the perception and the role of computer graphics.