Conventional Conceptual Metaphors Research Articles

TOPIC-TRIGGERED METAPHORS IN NEWSPAPER HEADLINES

The paper deals with metonymy based metaphors in sports newspaper headlines. These are mainly novel, unconventional metaphors, in which the choice of a metaphorical source domain is triggered by some aspects of the target domain. We deal with such metaphors where the NICKNAME of a sports club (animal- or bird-related) metonymically stands for the SPORTS CLUB, when the salient attributes of animals and birds are mapped onto the players. We show how these creative metaphors for VICTORY (eating the opponent, taming the opponent, flying, etc.) and DEFEAT (losing the wings, falling, etc.) are based on some conventional conceptual metaphors.

Conceptual Metaphors in Political Discourse: Evidence from the Speeches of King Abdullah II of Jordan

This paper reports on the findings of a study that aims at exploring conceptual metaphors in the political speeches of King Abdullah II of Jordan which are delivered at the Plenary Sessions of the United Nations General Assembly. Eight political speeches of the King, downloaded from his official website, are analyzed by adopting the cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). The study reveals that there are four dominant themes in these speeches: (1) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, (2) the Syrian crisis, (3) terrorism, and (4) reform in Jordan. To express these themes, twenty three source domains were adopted in the King's speeches. The findings show that the most frequently used source domains are journey, war, hero, building, and human. The study concludes that King Abdullah II relies on the use of conventional conceptual metaphors to present the main themes in his political speeches.

The Conventionality and Novelty of Metaphorical Expressions in British and American Love Poetry: A Cognitive Approach

According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, and most novel poetic metaphors are developed from conventional metaphors. Several examples and explanations have been provided to support these assertions; however, there has yet to be a systematic investigation into the conventionality and novelty of metaphors in literature. To partly fill in these gaps, the present study aims to explore which conceptual metaphors of love are frequently employed in British and American love poems and how the poets adapt them to bring novelty to their works. Love, one of the most highly metaphorised concepts, was chosen as the topic of the metaphors in this study, for there is a considerable resource of love poems available to be explored. The findings of the study reveal that there are nine conventional conceptual metaphors of love employed in British and American love poems. The conventionality and novelty of metaphors in poetry were then analysed in their respective poetic contexts, focusing on how the poets have adopted four techniques (extending, elaboration, questioning, and combining) to create novel expressions from conventional language. This study indicates that the knowledge of conceptual metaphors can help a person, especially a learner of a foreign language, to interpret poetic metaphors in literary contexts.

CONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS OF GERMAN AND HUNGARIAN IDIOMS

The subject of the study is the examination of figurative meaning in Hungarian and German. In the present study, I present the interpretation of figurative meaning within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics by analysing idiomatic expressions in Hungarian and German on the example of the concept of ‘time’. In this contrastive research, I primarily look for the answer to how ordinary people use cognitive tools to grasp intangible abstract concepts such as ‘time’ and what connections can be observed between literal and figurative meaning.
 The examined Hungarian and German idioms are the linguistic manifestations of the conceptual metaphor time is money (valuable resource). The study aims to support the assumption that in any language an abstract meaning can only be expressed with a figurative meaning.
 Time is an abstract concept that is present in the everyday language use of all people. The expressions time passes, the time is here, my time has come, it takes a lot of time – to mention just a few, have become so conventionalized in our language that we take their meaning literally. Nonetheless, they are based on conventional conceptual metaphors that we use to make the concept of time more tangible to ourselves. The linguistic manifestations of these conceptual metaphors are created and understood without any mental strain.
 In the first stage of the research, I searched for possible German equivalents of Hungarian expressions, and then I used Internet search engines and idiom and monolingual dictionaries to select the most frequently used equivalent in German. As a next step, I examined 1) the word form, 2) the literal meaning, 3) the figurative meaning, and 4) the conceptual metaphor of idioms in both languages, which were either been identical or different. Because they are different languages, the word forms are inherently different. At the end of the study, I compared the formed patterns from which I drew conclusions, which support that figurative meaning is figurative in another language as well.

Using personal history to (re)envision a praxis of critical hope in the face of neoliberal fatalism

Who we are and who we become as educators is intimately connected to the historical and socio-political milieus in which we, ourselves, were educated and continue to work as educators. In this article I demonstrate how conventional conceptual metaphors are effective analytical lenses, through which we can explore our personal educational histories, rethink our current pedagogical practices and (re)envision our future educational philosophies. While higher education in South Africa attempts to respond to the post-Apartheid democratic project, it must also address the neoliberal ideology that has taken hold. Through personal history as method, I illustrate how a range of metaphors have enabled me to gain insight into the epistemological and ideological influences on my own educational history, the ways in which neoliberalism has infiltrated my current pedagogical practices, and led to a commitment to a future educational praxis characterised by critical hope, community and care.

The structure of our concepts: A critical assessment of Conceptual Metaphor Theory as a theory of concepts

AbstractGeorge Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory is by and large a theory of what (abstract) concepts are, how they are structured, and how this structure is acquired — i.e., by mapping of structure from one more concrete or sensory-motor specific domain to another more abstract domain. Conceptual metaphors therefore rest on “cross-domain mappings.” The claims to the effect that our abstract concepts are metaphorically structured and that cross-domain mappings constitute one of the fundamental cognitive meaning-making processes are empirical and can therefore be put to the test. In this paper, I will critically assess Conceptual Metaphor Theory as a theory of concepts in light of recent experimental findings. Many such findings provide evidence for the psychological reality of cross-domain mappings, i.e., that structure activated in one domain actually can perform cognitive tasks carried out in another domain. They do not, however, support the claim that the structure of our (abstract) concepts is still metaphorical, as Lakoff and Johnson claim — that is to say, that our mind actually does perform cross-domain mappings when we process conventional conceptual metaphors such as “Death is Rest” or “Love is a Journey.” Two conclusions can be drawn from this: (1) it is necessary to distinguish between cross-domain mappings (which are psychologically real) and the metaphoric structure of our concepts (which is not, in the sense that such concepts do not any longer activate cross-domain mappings when processed); (2) Conceptual Metaphor Theory is not an adequate theory of concepts. I will therefore sketch another more viable theory of concepts where the structure of our concepts is defined as the fullecologyof their situations of use, which includes the kind of situations (objects, agents, interactions) they apply to and the kind of emotional, cognitive, bodily, and behavioral responses they elicit. On this view, the contents of our concepts are to be considered as vague predicates, with vague extensions, which take on a specific form in their situation of use.

Boundaries and hybrid blends: How one multilingual narrator displays symbolic competence in a college writing class

Literacy scholars and second language researchers have identified ELL writers' border crossing experiences as prime sites of critical literacy, observing multilingual speakers' increased ability to manipulate and inflect language with cross-cultural connotations, including metaphorical blending. Most second language researchers who look at ELL's metaphor production focus on language fluency, rather than symbolic competence. This case study compares one Vietnamese-American writer's unconscious application of conceptual metaphor with her consciously chosen metaphorical blend. This analysis finds that Violet displayed symbolic competence when unconsciously modifying source and target domains of conceptual metaphors as well as when consciously crafting her own metaphoric blend. The difference is that, despite Violet's symbolic competence, the conventional conceptual metaphors are more restrictive than her creative metaphoric blend. Violet's creative hybrid space allows her to imagine reconciliation and potential combinations of selected values rather than wholesale subscriptions to cultural norms.

Conceptual Metaphors in Donald Trump’s Political Speeches: Framing his Topics and (Self-)Constructing his Persona

This study investigates the use of conceptual metaphors by Donald Trump in three important political speeches on his way to the US presidency: the acceptance speech of his candidacy, the victory speech on election night, and his inaugural address as president of the US. The consistent analysis of all the metaphors in the speeches shows that Trump relies almost exclusively on conventional conceptual metaphors that are expressed by conventionalised metaphorical expressions. Nevertheless, a range of metaphors appears as constitutive to his framing of political topics, such as immigration and the economy. In addition, Trump metaphorically constructs his political persona as that of a repairman, builder, healer, and warrior, among others.

The role of context in the formation ofhejab‘veiling’ metaphors inhejabbillboards and posters in Iran

AbstractProperhejabobservance has long been an important issue to political-religious conservatives in Iran who, in recent years, have relied on metaphorical language to persuade Iranian women to dress modestly in public. The present paper, based onKövecses’s (2015)account of metaphor in context, explores the role of contextual factors involved in the formation ofhejablinguistic metaphors used in 56 pro-hejabbillboards and posters. Data analysis indicates that the moral and social status of women are depicted as being determined by, or correlated with, their degree of veiling. On that basis, properly covered up women are shown to be the recipients of very positive metaphorical conceptualizations (aspearls,flowers, andangels), whereas immodestly dressed women are negatively pictured as being subject to sexual objectification (asunwrapped edibles). Moreover, thehejab is a protective coveris shown to be the metaphor instantiated in many of the billboards and posters. The protective function ofhejabis highlighted by conceptualizing corrupt men asfliesanddevils.Finally, the metaphorical patterns represent the contextual role of political and religious ideology, key cultural concepts, and show entrenched conventional conceptual metaphors and metonymies in the production of novel metaphors.

Metaphorical Construals of Nature in Thoreau’s Writings

The article investigates how the concept of nature is metaphorically construed in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, one of the earliest and most influential nature writers. The analysis has been inspired by insights from cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics, especially Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending Theory. Several different metaphorical construals of the concept of nature appear in Thoreau’s writings which have been examined in this study, including Walden, The Maine Woods, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a selection from his journal, and two collections of his earlier and later natural history essays and manuscripts. One can encounter there, obviously, conventional personifications of nature, such as Mother Nature, which, however, is questioned by Thoreau, as well as the occasional construal of nature as a companion or a bride. Other conventional conceptual metaphors, which are more frequently employed by him, include the metaphorical construal of nature as a work of art or as a literary work and once, more unconventionally, as a concert. Natural entities are also construed as other kinds of products. An original metaphor, which frequently appears in Thoreau’s late manuscript on the dispersion of seeds, is the personification of nature as a forester.

Cognitive models of anger in Akan

This paper analyses the conventional metaphorical expressions of anger in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, West Africa, in order to identify conventional conceptual metaphors of the concept in the language. Native and relatively monolingual speakers of Akan in semi-rural and rural Ghana participated in focus group discussions to generate a corpus of 23,800 words from which metaphorical expressions of anger were drawn. The analysis reveals that Akan conceptualisations of anger are based on both general metonymic and metaphorical principles that are grounded in fundamental human experiences including physiological and socio-cultural experiences. The major conventional conceptual metaphors identified in Akan are: ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER, ANGER IS A GROWING WEED, ANGER IS A BURDEN, ANGER IS A DANGEROUS THING, ANGER IS A DISEASE and ANGER IS FOOD. While Akan conceptualisation of aspects of anger are similar in some ways to Lakoff’s prototypical anger scenario, i.e., akin to the retribution stage of the prototypical anger scenario in English, it is important to mention that stages 3 and 4 of the prototypical anger scenario in English may be of no consequences at all in what appears to be the prototypical anger scenario in Akan.

Processing Conventional Conceptual Metaphors in Persian: A Corpus-Based Psycholinguistic Study

Research on the psycholinguistic processing of conceptual metaphors has produced contrasting results in recent years. There have also been criticisms that in experimental studies of metaphor processing, linguistic stimuli are mostly intuition-based and not designed objectively based on the original language use data. To address these issues, we studied the processing of conventional metaphoric expressions in Persian language using corpus data. A reading time experiment was designed to test whether conventional metaphoric expressions activated conceptual metaphors. A corpus of 50 million word tokens was used to study the conventional patterns of metaphoric expressions usages and construct experimental items. Fifty five Persian speakers read a set of scenarios containing non-conventional metaphor, conventional metaphor and non-metaphor expressions on computer and the reading times of the following novel target sentence in each condition were recorded by DMDX stimulus presenter program. Comparing mean reading times using one-way ANOVA revealed that reading target sentence after conventional metaphor scenarios had been significantly faster than non-metaphor scenarios, but slower than non-conventional scenarios. The results show that conventionality has a weakening effect on the strength of metaphoric expressions to activate conceptual metaphors.

Metaphor use in Chinese and US corporate mission statements: A cognitive sociolinguistic analysis

Corpus-based approaches to researching metaphor use in business English have become increasingly prevalent, but metaphor use in the genre of mission statements has received little attention. Using a self-built corpus with the help of the corpus tool Wmatrix, we compared metaphor use as a discursive and cognitive strategy in the mission statements of Chinese and US companies from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective, focusing on three conventional conceptual metaphors in business discourse: BRANDS ARE PEOPLE, BUSINESS IS COOPERATION, and BUSINESS IS COMPETITION. The use of the source domains of these conceptual metaphors was found to differ significantly in the mission statements of Chinese and US companies, thus revealing differences in the underlying corporate identities and ideologies. Chinese corporations, which tend to describe themselves as energetic leaders and strong competitors, are more competition-oriented, whereas US corporations, which tend to project themselves as ethical and responsible community members, are more cooperation-oriented. The findings of this comparative study can shed light on how Chinese companies build their brand images and thus lead to a better understanding of changing national image of China.

Evaluation of Plant Metaphors in A Dream of Red Mansions

This work attempts to evaluate the plant metaphors used in A Dream of Red Mansions , aiming at: 1) Identifying the metaphorical expressions associated with plant used in the book; 2) finding out the correlation between plant metaphors and their evaluation; 3) exploring the experiential bases of the operational model of abstract reason in Chinese embodied in A Dream of Red Mansions , achieved via metaphor mapping the concrete concept – PLANT onto the abstract concept? How is it achieved? The results indicate that the cognitive approach to metaphor postulates that all conventional conceptual metaphors are grounded in our bodily and physical experience. Once a metaphorical mapping is set up, it will impose its structure on real life through the creation of new correspondences in experience. If the metaphor is the message, the conceptual metaphor provides a method of representation through which we may identify its salient features. As a result, the evaluation of the plant metaphors can contribute significantly to our understanding of the plant metaphors within Chinese culture. Key words : Plant metaphors; Cognitive analysis; Experiential grounding

If 'Journeys' and 'Things' Frame Our Thinking, Can We Adequately Reason About the Nature of Conflict?

Like virtually all discourse, the professional literature on conflict resolution depends heavily on metaphor to explain its central concern: What is conflict and how may it be resolved? Readers are conscious of explicit distinctions, evaluations, and logic, but unconscious metaphors frame thinking, structure assumptions and inferences, and guide reasoning. Are these metaphors adequate, robust, and creative enough to describe and explain our highly specialized knowledge of the complexities of conflict and how to resolve it? This study uses cognitive linguistics methodology to identify metaphors and unpack their mappings in a sizable corpus of mainstream expert literature on mediation and in a small corpus of dynamical systems literature on conflict. In both, two highly conventional conceptual metaphors are found to dominate: conflict metaphorically understood as a journey, including paths, movement, and force dynamics, and conflict metaphorically understood as a material substance or physical object. Building construction, war/struggle and personificationanimation metaphors are frequently used and several others are occasionally used; novel or unusual metaphors are rare. Overwhelmingly the same conceptual metaphors are used in the literature studied here as are commonly found elsewhere in a wide variety of discourse types. Yet certain innovative elaborations and extensions that explicate the complexities that conflict scholars have labored over for decades were found in the dynamical systems corpus. Their value in helping us comprehend and teach the nature of conflict and suggestions for their conscious elaboration are discussed.

The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor Revisited

It is argued that Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) contemporary theory of metaphor conflates the structure of the target-concept before the metaphoric process has taken place with the structure of the target-concept after the process. A revision of the theory is suggested. A consequence of this revision is that conventional conceptual metaphors are propositional in nature-namely, as propositions expressing identity. The revision hereby reinforces the connection between conceptual metaphor and linguistic metaphor.

Metaphor Interpretations by Second Language Learners: Children and Adults

Metaphor plays an essential role in communication (e.g., Danesi, 1986; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Ortony, 1975), yet second language (12) pedagogy largely ignores the issue of metaphorical competence, focusing instead on the acquisition of literal meaning (Danesi & D' Alfonso, 1989; Discenza, 1987-88). Likewise, the comprehension and use of metaphor in 12 has received little attention in the research literature. The work of Lakoff (1987, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) has made clear that the use of metaphor is not restricted to novel or poetic expression, but in fact is common in everyday language. For Lakoff, the metaphoric process is the means by which we map meaning across conceptual domains. Lakoff emphasizes the existence of conventional conceptual metaphors, which are part of the conceptual system underlying language. An example is the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, which is conventional in English, and allows us to talk about love using the language of travel. Here JOURNEY is the source or vehicle domain, LOVE is the target or topic domain, and the metaphor involves a mapping from the source to the target. Examples of use of this metaphor include 'we've come a long way,' 'we can't keep going the way we're going,' 'our relationship has gone off track,' 'we've hit a dead end,' and so forth (Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). According to Lakoff, novel metaphors are understood via the same process as conventional metaphors - either by extension of the conventional system or by a mapping between mental images.