Building Metaphors Research Articles

Exploring Self-Construction of the American International Image: A Conceptual Metaphor Perspective

While press releases and cultural transmission materials are common materials for understanding a country's self-construction of international images, to what extent the speeches at international conferences are effective in shaping national images is yet to explore from a perspective of cognitive linguistics? The present study compiles the minutes of 26 meetings of the United Nations Security Council on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian issue, from which the speeches by U.S. representatives were selected to establish a corpus, and explores the self-construction of the American international image with conceptual metaphor theory. It is found that JOURNEY metaphor, BUILDING metaphor and so on are instrumental in shaping its image of advocating peace, but SEED metaphor and NEIGHBOR metaphor, etc. reveal its intention to perpetuate the conflict and double standards in dealing with the two conflicting parties.

Exploring Self-Construction of the American International Image: A Conceptual Metaphor Perspective

While press releases and cultural transmission materials are common materials for understanding a country's self-construction of international images, to what extent the speeches at international conferences are effective in shaping national images is yet to explore from a perspective of cognitive linguistics? The present study compiles the minutes of 26 meetings of the United Nations Security Council on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian issue, from which the speeches by U.S. representatives were selected to establish a corpus, and explores the self-construction of the American international image with conceptual metaphor theory. It is found that JOURNEY metaphor, BUILDING metaphor and so on are instrumental in shaping its image of advocating peace, but SEED metaphor and NEIGHBOR metaphor, etc. reveal its intention to perpetuate the conflict and double standards in dealing with the two conflicting parties.

Digital Rhetoric in Media: Conceptual Metaphors in Chinese Editorial Stories

This study examines the use and impact of conceptual metaphors in Chinese digital editorial narratives. It aims to identify predominant metaphor types and their role in enhancing the persuasive power of editorials. The study analyzes 50 stories from China Daily using content analysis to explore metaphorical language in context. Findings indicate a prevalent use of orientational, ontological, and structural metaphors. Orientational metaphors simplify complex ideas, while ontological metaphors, like object and personification, make abstract concepts tangible, boosting emotional appeal. Structural metaphors, particularly war and building metaphors, dramatize political narratives, intensifying the impact of the editorials. The study concludes that these metaphors significantly improve comprehension and emotional engagement, influencing reader perceptions and opinions. It highlights the importance of metaphor analysis in media discourse, suggesting its inclusion in journalism education and advocating for comparative metaphor studies in different cultural contexts.

War, Tool, Race or Building? A comparison of vaccine metaphors between (translated) media and scientific reports in the age of COVID-19

News reportage is one of the major means of scientific communication to the public, but science information can be misrepresented in news. In this study, we used a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach to examine the use of COVID-19 vaccine metaphors across news, translated news and scientific articles and how metaphorical frames may have differed based on genre and translation. Results reveal that there are shared (HUMAN, RACE and WAR) and unique (BUILDING, PASSPORT and TOOL) source domains between news articles (original and translated) and scientific reports. Interestingly, the study reveals that translation plays a role in the discursive construction of news values, such as Proximity and Negativity, which engenders frame shifts in news production for different target readers. The study concludes by advocating the use of a BUILDING metaphor to map COVID-19 vaccine/vaccination for the benefits of health communication. It has further revealed the complicated nature of scientific communication through (translated) news and calls attention to the political intention of news translation.

Analysis of Political Metaphors in Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union Address in 2020

On the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, this paper conducts a cognitive analysis of conceptual metaphors in Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union Address in 2020, aiming to explain the metaphors in the State of the Union Address, reveal the political intentions hidden behind the metaphors, and construe the relationship between politics and metaphor. It is found that the metaphors in this State of the Union Address are: CONFLICT metaphors, BUILDING metaphor, JOURNEY metaphors, ORIENTATIONAL metaphors, and PLANT metaphors. Through the analysis, this paper concludes that conceptual metaphor has the function of persuading the masses and shaping the image of politicians. At the same time, this paper also finds that politics restricts the choice and application of metaphor.

Концептуально-метафорическая репрезентация в метадискурсе англоязычного художественного нарратива: диахронический аспект

The paper deals with a very important aspect of communication – the fictional communication between the author of emotive prose and the reader. The research is based on the widely accepted thesis of a communicative nature of narrative. The author of the paper uses a popular nowadays term metadiscourse. The paper studies the diachronic aspect of conceptual-metaphoric representation in English fiction. The research shows that the conceptual metaphor is presented differently in the explicit and in the implicit dialogue of the author with the reader. The conceptual metaphors JOURNEY, BUILDING and GASTRONOMIC METAPHOR are characteristic of the explicit dialogue, whereas CONTAUNER mainly appears in the implicit dialogue.

Metaphor, Religion, and Gender: A Case Study of Metaphor Analysis in Islamic Motivational Speech Corpus

Metaphor plays a vital role in human communication and its presence is evident in various discourses across genres. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity in the study of metaphors used among different genders especially in religious discourse. Thus, the current study aims to examine metaphor use in religious motivational speeches between two (male and female) speakers. A corpus-based approach, that involved analysis of keywords, collocation, and concordance, was selected in identifying linguistic metaphors while conceptual mapping (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) was chosen to identify conceptual metaphors in both corpora. The main data consist of four speeches of Yasmin Mogahed (YM Corpus) and four speeches of Nouman Ali Khan’s speeches (NAK Corpus) retrieved from their YouTube Channels. #LancsBox 5.0 was chosen as the tool in analysing the language patterns. From the findings, it can be concluded Yasmin used a higher frequency of metaphors compared to Nouman. This is evident from the results in the collocation analysis in YM corpus that showed seven collocates (‘SWT’, ‘heart’, ‘foundation’, ‘healthy’, ‘fear’, ‘solid’, and ‘fill’) were predetermined to have signals of metaphorical expressions as compared to NAK corpus that only has four collocates (‘evil’, ‘syirik’, ‘religion’, and ‘faith’) with signals of metaphorical expressions. It is also apparent that the variety of metaphors used by Yasmin is more diverse (BUILDING, HUMAN/LIVING ORGANISM, TREE, and CONTAINER metaphors) as compared to Nouman that only uses COMPUTER FILE and CONTAINER metaphors. Yasmin’s choice of metaphors seems to be heavily influenced with the common metaphors used in the Qur’an, while Nouman’s lack choice of metaphors indicate his preference in explaining religious concepts through literal explanation instead of metaphorical one. Future studies are recommended to have a bigger sample to better differentiate the metaphor usage between genders. It is also imperative for future research to further examine the implications of different choice of metaphors on the construction of meaning in the Islamic motivational religious corpus between different genders.

Reframing Architecture through Design

Reframing Architecture through Design

An Overview of Metaphor Computation

Metaphor is very common in natural language, which conveys deep meaning beyond the literal meaning. Metaphor computation is still a challenge in NLP tasks. In this paper, we introduce the conventional metaphor theories, and the computational models and approaches, as well as resource constructions. Meanwhile, we find that metaphor theories fail to explain metaphor from the perspectives of language generation and understanding. Besides, linguistic features are not fully utilized in metaphor computation and metaphor corpus lacks deeper meaning annotation. Then we put forward a novel approach of building metaphor corpus based on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), which will supply deep representation for Chinese metaphor computation.

Framing metaphor use over time: ‘Free Economy’ metaphors in Hong Kong political discourse (1997–2017)

Diachronic studies on metaphor use in public discourse have primarily focused on Inner Circle English and European languages. However, the usage patterns of specific metaphorical frames over time is universal or cultural-specific remains underexplored. This article investigates the diachronic changes of economic metaphors focusing on the concept of free economy in a corpus of Hong Kong political discourse spanning two decades (1997–2017). We analyzed fundamental changes (transformations of source domains) and incremental changes (transformations of source-target mapping principles) in free economy metaphors. We found that free economy metaphors have slightly decreased over time. No fundamental changes were found in the use of the four frequently occurring source domains: journey, living organism, sport, and building. The meanings of free economy metaphors either remained mostly constant (living organism and sport metaphors) or underwent incremental changes (journey and building metaphors). We argue that the constancy and the incremental change were two rhetorical strategies political leaders used to frame their political agenda for achieving full economic liberalization in Hong Kong. Given the complex socio-historical background of Hong Kong, this study provides a distinct East–West perspective on diachronic economic metaphor use in an Outer Circle English context.

Land and nature as sources of health and resilience among Indigenous youth in an urban Canadian context: a photovoice exploration

BackgroundPopulation and environmental health research illustrate a positive relationship between access to greenspace or natural environments and peoples’ perceived health, mental health, resilience, and overall well-being. This relationship is also particularly strong among Canadian Indigenous populations and social determinants of health research where notions of land, health, and nature can involve broader spiritual and cultural meanings. Among Indigenous youth health and resilience scholarship, however, research tends to conceptualize land and nature as rural phenomena without any serious consideration on their impacts within urban cityscapes. This study contributes to current literature by exploring Indigenous youths’ meaning-making processes and engagements with land and nature in an urban Canadian context.MethodsThrough photovoice and modified Grounded Theory methodology, this study explored urban Indigenous youth perspectives about health and resilience within an inner-city Canadian context. Over the course of one year, thirty-eight in-depth interviews were conducted with Indigenous (Plains Cree First Nations and Métis) youth along with photovoice arts-based and talking circle methodologies that occurred once per season. The research approach was also informed by Etuaptmumk or a “two-eyed seeing” framework where Indigenous and Western “ways of knowing” (worldviews) can work alongside one another.ResultsOur strength-based analyses illustrated that engagement with and a connection to nature, either by way of being present in nature and viewing nature in their local urban context, was a central aspect of the young peoples’ photos and their stories about those photos. This article focuses on three of the main themes that emerged from the youth photos and follow-up interviews: (1) nature as a calming place; (2) building metaphors of resilience; and (3) providing a sense of hope. These local processes were shown to help youth cope with stress, anger, fear, and other general difficult situations they may encounter and navigate on a day-to-day basis.ConclusionsThis study contributes to the literature exploring Indigenous youths’ meaning-making process and engagements with land and nature in an urban context, and highlights the need for public health and municipal agencies to consider developing more culturally safe and meaningful natural environments that can support the health, resilience, and well-being of Indigenous youth within inner-city contexts.

A critical consideration of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology for tourism studies

Increasingly, tourism researchers have turned their attention to the use of creative methodologies to gain deeper understandings of tourist phenomena. There is a need to challenge and creatively disrupt conventional methodological approaches as they are criticised for their inability to be participant driven, capture the co-construction of research context or to address the impact of wider social dynamics to knowledge creation in tourism studies. Based on our research focused on host–guests experiences participating in the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) programme in New Zealand we provide a critical consideration of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® for tourism studies. LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a communication tool aimed at developing creative thinking through building metaphors around identities and experiences using LEGO® bricks. To demonstrate how the method can be used in tourism studies, we draw on examples from three LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshops to illustrate the benefits and challenges of this methodological approach. LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® offered a metaphorical way for participants to construct creative artefacts and explain their ideal WWOOFing experience, representing sometimes complex, entrenched and emotional issues, and relationships that may have been difficult to express via traditional methods. The method enables participant driven, co-production of knowledge in a playful, free-flowing way to foster creative thinking, meanings and possible solutions. The method helps participants creatively communicate complex and sensitive issues, especially around their relationships – to objects, landscapes, people and identities – aspects that may otherwise be silenced by traditional research methods. As a novel method LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® provides opportunities for researchers who want to gain a deeper understanding of the social dimensions of tourism, to co-create spaces for knowledge exchange and develop an in-depth understanding of socially constructed relationships and realities.

What Does Methodology Mean for Learning Analytics?

The diversity of substantive expertise and analytical techniques encompassed by learning analytics can be a challenge for understanding and interrogating methodological choices. But active pursuit of methodological clarity is essential to productive multi-vocality. This was the focus of the LAK ’17 Methodology in Learning Analytics workshop from which the idea for this special section arose. Discussions were framed using a building metaphor of developing structurally sound bridges between disciplinary methods. Strong arguments are buttressed by supporting evidence and warrants but also engage with potential alternative explanations. Papers in this special section further the discussion and span a range of relevant approaches including sensitivity analysis, model evaluation and model fit, causal inference, and visualisation as a methodology. All advance the case of structural integrity in this bridge discipline and highlight the importance of adequate descriptions of methodological considerations to aid our interrogation of methodology and epistemology.

Boat Building: A Metaphor for Teaching as a Creative Enterprise

A boat building metaphor is presented as a way of exploring teachers' development of pedagogy and teaching methods. People in these two professions create their own knowledge of what makes a good product. Construction and use influence design on the part of both teachers and boat builders as they incorporate changes in their future designs, depending on how successful they determine their current product to be. This is also accomplished by interpreting rules, that act as guides, from their own community of practice. By using a new context, that of boat building, educators may construct uncommon meanings and view teaching in a way that is new to them.

Designing the welfare state: Selected building metaphors of the welfare state across the British press

Designing the welfare state: Selected building metaphors of the welfare state across the British press

Exploring EFL Teachers’ Cognitive Models Through Metaphor Analysis

This study aims to investigate how a group of Chinese university teachers developed their cognitive models by using “English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers” metaphors. The research method includes an open-ended questionnaire, a checklist questionnaire, and verbal reports. The goal for this research is twofold. First, we will present those metaphors we believe to be the most frequently used or most central in shaping the thoughts or ideas they have had for EFL teaching and learning. Second, we will provide a description of their internal process of developing cognitive models, as well as factors that could account for such models. The findings showed that (a) most of us had three ways of understanding EFL teachers in terms of the educational journey metaphor, the educational building metaphor, and the educational conduit metaphor; (b) we used such a cluster of converging cognitive models as the instructor model, the transmitter model, and the builder model to construct definitions for EFL teachers, with the instructor model as a central model; and (c) metaphor can actually serve as a useful, effective, and analytic tool for making us aware of the cognitive model underlying our conceptual framework.

A case study of building and animal metaphors in specialized discourse: Are scholars’ metaphorical conceptualizations represented in discourse?

espanolEste estudio aporta pruebas basadas en los datos de corpus sobre como las conceptualizaciones metaforicas postuladas por los academicos en una disciplina encuentran su expresion en el discurso especializado. Los academicos a menudo proponen aproximaciones teoricas alternativas para afrontar problematicas concretas. Estas aproximaciones pueden llegar a ser mas o menos productivas a nivel linguistico en el discurso especializado. En este trabajo se analiza el discurso sobre la gestion de proyectos para buscar evidencias del uso de las metaforas conceptuales que en su momento fueron propuestas por los academicos para mejorar el entendimiento y la gestion de los proyectos reales. La metafora de la muralla china (Angling, 1988) fue postulada para describir las situaciones en las que se gestionan simultaneamente varios proyectos de una manera similar a la construccion de un muro. La alternativa metafora del dragon chino (Eskerod, 1996) fue lanzada para realzar la complejidad de la gestion de proyectos multiples. El estudio siguio el metodo de Philip (2010) para identificar las metaforas conceptuales o temas metaforicos en el discurso especializado. Un corpus de aproximadamente 400.000 palabras que incluye articulos de investigacion, asi como los articulos de revistas profesionales fue creado para este estudio. Los resultados obtenidos muestran los usos mas frecuentes y expresiones metaforicas mas variadas correspondientes al tema metaforico de animales, incluyendo la metafora del dragon chino. El estudio comenta como las reivindicaciones basadas en metaforas se reflejan en el discurso especializado y sus consecuencias para la practica empresarial EnglishThis study provides corpus-based evidence for the claim that metaphorical conceptualizations postulated by scholars in a particular discipline are expressed in specialized discourse. Scholars often propose alternative metaphors to address particular issues, and these metaphors may become more or less linguistically productive in specialized discourse. This corpus-based study looks into project management discourse to find evidence of two conceptual metaphors, proposed by scholars to enhance the understanding and management of real-life projects. The Chinese wall metaphor (Angling, 1988) was first postulated to depict situations in which several projects are managed simultaneously in a stone wall building-like manner. The alternative Chinese dragon metaphor (Eskerod, 1996) was later proposed to highlight the complexity and unpredictability of multi-project management. This study follows Philip’s (2010) method to identify conceptual metaphors or metaphor themes in specialized discourse. The corpus of nearly 400,000 words used in this study included research papers as well as periodical journal articles. The results show a higher frequency and a broader range of metaphorical expressions for the animal theme, including the Chinese dragon metaphor. The study discusses how metaphorbased theoretical claims are reflected in specialized discourse and the consequences for management practices

Legitimization and delegitimization strategies on terrorism

This article examines the role of Building Metaphors in the political discourse of the former Spanish president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. More specific, it analyzes how Building Metaphors serve as legitimization and delegitimization strategies used by the Government and its anti-terrorist plight. The corpus of investigation comprises all political speeches on terrorism during Zapatero’s two terms in office (from April 2004 to December 2011). I argue that the use of Building Metaphors is a strategy of Zapatero’s whereby the solid ground of the Government’s anti-terrorist initiative is juxtaposed with terrorism’s lack of foundation. Findings suggest that the following conceptual metaphors are used as framing devices: POLITICS IS BUILDING, POLITICAL ENTITIES ARE BUILDINGS, THE GOVERNMENT IS THE BUILDER, TERRORISM IS THE DESTROYER, DEMOCRACY IS A STANDING BUILDING WITH SOLID FOUNDATIONS, TERRORISM IS A BUILDING WITH NO FOUNDATIONS, DEMOCRATIC VALUES ARE CONNECTORS, and TERRORIST VALUES ARE OBSTRUCTORS.

The Path and Building Metaphors in the Speeches of Vladimir Putin: Back to the Future?

A critical exploration is provided of the path and building metaphors used in the speeches of the former Russian president Vladimir Putin. We use the concepts of 'discourse metaphor' and 'frame' in our analysis of a corpus of Putin's speeches written and delivered between 2000 and 2007 in order to reveal the rhetorical strategies employed in them, and establish the ideological patterns of metaphor use. The metaphors are identified, analysed according to source domains, and then explored for their contribution to the overall project of the Russian president. Our findings suggest that, although the metaphorical expressions used by Putin are conventional and have a strong experiential grounding, in pragmatic terms, the choice of them appears to be in line with the legitimization and delegitimization strategies adopted by the former Russian president during his two terms in office.

Ideological influence on BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches

This article studies the conceptual metaphor A COUNTRY IS A BUILDING in Taiwanese presidential speeches. Two culture-specific metaphor patterns are identified as being unusually productive in the corpora: retrospective BUILDING metaphors and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors. These clusters of BUILDING metaphors deviate from the BUILDING metaphors reported in previous literature at two levels. At the conceptual level, retrospective BUILDING metaphors include FORERUNNERS ARE BUILDERS and PAST HISTORY IS FOUNDATION, and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors involve COMMUNISTS ARE DESTROYERS and THE COMMUNIST TAKEOVER IS DESTRUCTION. At the ideological level, history puts such metaphor uses into perspective as rhetorical strategies employed by Kuomintang presidents to instill a Chinese ideology. The Democratic Progressive Party president, by contrast, tries to replace such metaphors with alternatives, which results in his overall low number of BUILDING metaphors. These different framing strategies reflect the manipulation of metaphors to appropriate ideological issues to each presidents' respective political advantage.