Creative Metaphors Research Articles

“The Place Where My Body Longed to Go”: Metaphors of Sexual Desire in André Aciman’s Prose

Sexual desire is one of the fundamental components of human personality and is seen as an important research object in contemporary Humanities. Its relevance for Linguistics lies in the increasing interest in the verbal representation of various forms of subjective experience, as well as in a large-scale discursivization of sexuality in contemporary culture and the need for developing a highly promising line of research known as ‘Language and Sexuality’. The present research focuses on metaphor with the aim of proving that it is an efficient mechanism of objectifying, structuring, interpreting, and verbalizing the subjective experience of sexual desire. The research is carried out on the basis of three thematically relevant novels by the contemporary American writer André Aciman (“Call Me by Your Name”, “Enigma Variations”, and “Find Me”). It is based on a sample of 364 contexts. Methodologically the research rests upon the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which facilitates the analysis of the ways fragments of subjective experience are comprehended and provides systematicity in the study of this phenomenon. The specific methodological instruments employed in this research include: the career of metaphor theory, which substantiates the inclusion of similes in metaphor analysis; the metaphoric landscape theory, which enables us to systematize metaphors by identifying central and peripheral elements and defining their conceptual load; the metaphorical creativity theory, which proves the possibility of metaphorical innovations both at the conceptual and verbal levels. The paper identifies and analyzes ten groups of metaphors, nine of which regularly occur in Aciman’s prose and one of which is made up of unique isolated forms. It has been shown that contrary to the popular belief that sexuality discourse is dominated by the fire metaphor, the central element of the metaphoric landscape of sexual desire in Aciman’s texts turned out to besexual desire is movement in space. Among the most creative and regularly occurring ones are the metaphorssexual desire is a financial transactionandsexual desire is music. Within each of the identified groups the paper pinpoints the properties of the source domain that are being profiled, analyzes ways of their verbal representation, and discusses the possibility of conceptual and verbal variation. The research is qualitative and does not presuppose a statistical analysis of the metaphors.

Common brain activation and connectivity patterns supporting the generation of creative uses and creative metaphors

Recent studies and reviews suggest that creative thinking is at least partly a domain-general cognitive ability, dependent on consistent patterns of brain activity including co-activation of the executive control and default mode networks. However, the degree to which the generation of ideas in different creative tasks relies on common brain activity remains unknown. In this fMRI study, participants were asked to generate creative ideas in both a uses generation task and a metaphor production task. Whole-brain analysis showed that generation of creative uses (relative to conventional uses) activated the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), medial prefrontal cortex, left supplementary motor area, left angular gyrus (AG), left thalamus, and bilateral cerebellum posterior lobe. The generation of creative metaphors (relative to conventional metaphors) activated dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and left AG. Importantly, regions active in both creative use and creative metaphor generation included the dmPFC and left AG. Psycho-physiological interactions analysis showed that the left AG was positively connected to the right precentral gyrus, and the dmPFC to the left IFG in both creative tasks. Our findings provide evidence that the generation of creative ideas relies on a core creative network related to remote semantic association-making and conceptual integration, offering new insight into the domain-general mechanisms underlying creative thinking.

Brexit як ключове слово британського політичного дискурсу

This case study examines the neologism Brexit, defined in OED as "the (proposed) withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union and political processes associated with it." Coined in May 2012, this word quickly gained media currency in the United Kingdom and abroad. The political coinage has become an internationalism, i.e., it has achieved global recognition and entered other languages in its original meaning and form. After an unprecedented surge in use (by astronomical 3 400%), Brexit was declared the 2016 word of the year by Collins Dictionary and gained entry to the Oxford English Dictionary. This study explores the word's characteristics and use in the media. The data were collected from British internet magazines and newspapers and the NOW corpus (News on the Web) for the time period from May 2012 to January 2023. The study argues that the word Brexit has the following features of a keyword: social significance, high frequency, wide use in various contexts, occurrence in strong media positions, metaphorical creativity, and neological productivity. Brexit appears on magazine covers, newspaper front pages, and in headlines. Reflecting heated debates on the British exit from the EU, the word has acquired new and controversial meanings and become a rich source of word formation, thus giving rise to numerous neologisms collectively referred to as Brexit glossary or Brexicon. This glossary of Brexit terms includes "old" English words and expressions that have acquired new meanings and political terms used in everyday discussions about Brexit. The most significant contribution of the word Brexit to present-day English is the new productive suffix -exit that, transcending the boundaries of political discourse, has come into use in various other domains.

Plato’s Ion: An Interpretation with a Sociopolitical Perspective

Ion is probably the most underappreciated dialogue of Plato. Its conventional interpretation focuses on his criticism of artistic creation, that is viewed as the result of divine inspiration and occurs outside the artist’s awareness. I propose that Ion possesses an additional important value, as a form of social criticism: By disengaging the poet from the reciter, Plato targets specifically the latter, and his position in the society, but not the former that is spared from the philosopher’s criticism. Poet’s divine inspiration is just a metaphor for exceptional creativity which is used by the reciter for his personal benefits.

«ЛЕДА» Р. М. РИЛЬКЕ: МОДЕРНИСТСКОЕ ПРОЧТЕНИЕ МИФА

The article presents a literary analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Leda" from several positions. The sonnet is considered as a modernist work created under the influence of Auguste Rodin, having the characteristics of a literary work of a synthetic type and representing the so-called "poem-thing". The presence of a hidden meaning in the poem is proved, which makes the whole work a metaphor for poetic creativity. The ideological influence of the mythological source of the poem is substantiated, which is artistically expressed in the interpretation of the image of the Swan as a Dionysian principle, and not completely Apollinarian. The artistic form of the sonnet is considered and its inherent, in this case, ornamentation in the arrangement of lexical material is proved, which emphasizes the modernist nature of Rilke's work. The conclusion is made about the continuity inherent in the poem, both in the use of mythical personification and poetic form.

Olematud trammiteed linnamaastikus: atmosfäärialased kunstiprojektid Turus ja Tallinnas

The article brings together public transport, art, landscape, and atmosphere. The article aims to demonstrate landscape thinking, a way to attend to the multi-faceted nature of landscape, using two artistic interventions in the urban landscape as case studies: Invisible Tramline in Tallinn and Tram Chalk Walk in Turku, created by one of the co-authors of the paper (researcher and artist Aleksandra Ianchenko). Here, we look at atmosphere as a concept that can be used to bring the material and the sensory aspects of landscape together. In both artworks, atmosphere emerged in the metaphorical (re)creation of infrastructure through material interventions: in one case, the tram was made to appear as tracks skied in the snow, in the other as chalk lines. Lasnamäe tram is a case of planned but unfinished tramline whereas Turku had an active tram service for almost a century before it was discontinued in 1972. Yet, as in the case of Lasnamäe, sentiments echoing a desire to have the tram in active function are present. These artworks resonated with these sentiments although they did not have a desire to make a political statement. Instead, they artfully played with the ephemeral nature of landscape by generating atmospheres of tramlines. The article shows how atmosphere can emerge in the interaction between material aspects and being present in this environment, more specifically in the activities that metaphorically animate infrastructures in the landscape. Although the tram itself was not present in either intervention, the holistic landscape experience brought present an idea of the tram created by the interventions.

The creative minds of Arab cartoonists: metaphor, culture and context

Abstract This article addresses the question of whether context plays a role in creating novel multimodal metaphors. Or, to put the question differently, from where do Arab political cartoonists (as members of several, overlapping or hierarchically related knowledge communities) recruit creative conceptual materials for metaphorical purposes? Specifically, it draws a distinction between direct and indirect sources of metaphor, where embodied experience is classified as direct, and communication (watching TV, reading books and newspapers, etc.) as indirect. Discourse, albeit a major source of human knowledge and hence of metaphor, has received much less attention than it deserves. Using a large-scale corpus of 300 Arabic political cartoons, this study is intended to fill this research gap. It would be difficult to talk about multimodal metaphor without other construal operations such as metonymy and conceptual integration. To clarify the meaning of this, metaphor is seen as a byproduct of blending; and the visual representation of an abstract domain requires choosing a metonym, or chain of metonyms, from a specific domain that in the given context stands for the domain as a whole and that is eminently depictable. Thus, it is of interest to discuss why a cartoonist uses one metonym rather than another. This research is considered relevant for intercultural and cognitive studies, because it also addresses the question of how regional variation in knowledge is related to similar variation and diversity of metaphorical creativity.

Translating Macbeth’s Colour Metaphors Into Arabic: A Revised CMT Approach to Shakespeare’s Creative Metaphors

Shakespeare is one of the most translated and retranslated English language authors into Arabic. Ever since the rise of the modern translation movement, translating Shakespeare into Arabic has continued to receive the attention of translators and researchers in the field of translating literature. But most academic and critical research on the translation of Shakespeare into Arabic has focused on the sociocultural implications of the translation process while neglecting aspects related to Shakespeare’s language and thought. One of the multifarious challenges of translating Shakespeare into Arabic is the Bard’s use of creative metaphors which account for the richness, exquisiteness and creativity of Shakespeare’s lexical and conceptual legacy. This paper aims to research one of the restrictions of translating Shakespeare’s creative metaphors in two Arabic translations of Macbeth with specific focus on the colour metaphors of the emotion of fear. The research methods adopt the improved version of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) in identifying, collecting and analysing the tokens in the source and target texts. The study shows that the translation of a creative metaphor into Arabic is influenced by the degree of saliency in the associations between the metaphor’s two conceptual domains. It also concludes that the revised CMT provides a reliable framework for understanding and analysing the communicative function of creative metaphors in discourse. The results also show that the deconstruction of conceptual metaphors back into their basic kernel patterns provides a good but inadequate strategy to translate highly-contextualized uses of creative metaphors in the case of lexical or conceptual restrictions.

‘We have sick souls when God’s physic works not’: Samuel Rutherford’s pastoral letters as a form of literary cure

ABSTRACT Samuel Rutherford’s letters draw on biblical imagery and idiomatic metaphors, including contemporary discourses of illness and medicine, to diagnose and promote the spiritual and physical health of individual believers and the Scottish Kirk. This essay examines how Rutherford used language to care for his correspondents enacting a form of literary cure through the letter as a communication technology. Interrogating Rutherford’s use of language theologically, politically, and practically to negotiate God’s providential care for his people, the traumatic splintering of the church and state in England and Scotland, and caregiving within covenanting communities, reveals how his epistolary practice expands knowledge of the church’s historical provision of care, and the intersection of religious and medical caregiving in early modern Scotland. Rutherford’s lexical and metaphorical creativity, rendering complex theological concepts emotionally intelligible and rhetorically effective, ensured his letters provided comfort to covenanted godly communities and underwrote their posthumous publication as a devotional and literary classic.

From small acorns: Using a creative metaphor in postgraduate course design

The acceleration of online education especially during the COVID-19 pandemic has been well documented, and many educational institutions prepared online materials for their learners with great success. Existing fully online programmes, however, continued to operate and be developed as a matter of course. To expand the online Master’s portfolio at the University of York, a new Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme was proposed. The use of a visual metaphor in teaching is not uncommon; however, the metaphor of a tree allows a path to be traced from the roots/key themes to the fruit/key skills. The metaphor works as a template or map showing how programme learning outcomes are linked to module learning outcomes. The tree metaphor also has transferable applications such as embedding employability or decolonising the curriculum. Using the tree as a template enables future-proofing of the course’s integrity, because revisions can be embedded and linked at an ideas stage rather than in a more ad hoc manner. Examining the underpinning concepts which were derived from the University’s strategy, this paper explores the influences on the MBA’s programme design and how the inspiration and subsequent adoption of a metaphorical tree facilitated the construction of a relevant, creative and coherent programme.

Individual differences in identifying creative metaphors from video Ads

Abstract Reliable identification of metaphors from multimodal discourse has attracted scholarly attention in recent years. However, the role of individual differences in identifying creative metaphors from video ads is underexplored from an empirical perspective. This includes the extent to which individual differences influence metaphor identification in multimodal discourse and how the individual differences result in divergent identification. Our study contributes to addressing these issues by investigating how the background of researching metaphors influences identifying creative metaphors from video ads. We compared results of creative metaphor identification from three metaphor analysts and three external annotators who were novice to metaphor research and probed into the underlying reasons for divergent identification through discussions among six annotators. Both groups of annotators applied Creative Metaphor Identification Procedure for Video Advertisements (C-MIPVA) (Pan & Tay, 2021) into the same 20 Chinese video ads through a systematic process of inter-rater reliability examinations. Results from Fleiss’ Kappa and Percentage Agreement provided substantial support for reliable identification, regardless of the metaphor research background. Discussions among annotators revealed that the interplay between the individual differences in life experience and the influences of temporal and dynamic discourse lead to extra identification, different content, and missing cases of metaphors.

News discourse as a source of metaphorical creativity in political cartooning

It is through news reports in the press or on television, radio or the Internet that people learn most of what they know about their environment or the world beyond their daily experiences. This paper raises the question: to what extent can a trending topic in news discourse become the source of metaphorical creativity, and which factors contribute to this fact? It uses the systematic analysis of multimodal metaphors in a corpus of political cartoons. The genre conventions of the political cartoon generate a particular form of engagement with the news, which in turn shapes the metaphors that political cartoonists use in their work. An editorial or political cartoon is a text, especially one in a newspaper or magazine, concerning a topical event and therefore, by definition, plays a crucial role in the reproduction of knowledge. Finding a fresh angle on a breaking news story and using this to create another piece of media content, such as an editorial or political cartoon, is often referred to as news-jacking. The question is not whether topical news stories are reproduced by journalists — it is whether they offer unique opportunities to journalists, influencing their choice of metaphors. A comparative study of cartoons about a range of topics across different cultures would deliver useful insights into how topical news items may shape the metaphors that political cartoonists use to offer expert comment. In so doing, this paper moves beyond the confines of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), presenting fundamental challenges to a theory that was originally developed based on linguistic and artificial data.

Between science, science-fiction and COVID19 as a way to interpret the ontological realm of COVID19. Humanity in the post-COVID19 and re-application of knowledge.

The current article is an attempt by the authors to present a bioethical case, or rather a search being undertaken to develop tools to interpret the novel ontological realm which has been created, and continues to be transformed in real time, by the COVID19 pandemic and its aftermath. The ontological realm is new, but the physical features of the world and the human in it are partially constants and identical to the previous realm parameters, the pre-COVID19 space-time. The question of existence in the new ontological realm is…how can the continuum of Homo sapiens and its existence be sustained in this new realm? The tools being developed use of previous information and knowledge of the members of Homo sapiens as a starting point and source of metaphors as tools to facilitate existence in the new realm. In this way, existing knowledge, which is held by individual members of Homo sapiens, and which exists and continues being created in the continuum of Homo sapiens, can be the foundation for the creation of new knowledge about the post-COVID19 realm and the individual and collective comprehension of humans of it and in it. Conceptual metaphors, the creation of compound metaphor and the prospective dialectic are suggested by authors as a possible epistemic implementation mechanisms in this context. The adaptation of humanity, its imagination and some professions are used to demonstrate the case for the ‘new science of human existence’ in the post-COVID19 world.

Devising Trainings to Enhance the Capabilities of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder to Cope With Metaphor: A Review of the Literature

This article reviews the literature reporting on the trainings implemented with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) without intellectual disability to enhance their capability to cope with metaphor comprehension. The studies in this review can be classified into two main strands of thought, behavioral-analytic and psycholinguistic, respectively. Beyond some basic similarities all these studies share in their attempt at training children to consider the semantic features of metaphors, the mental pathways activated by those trainings are based on different cognitive and linguistic processes. The trainings based on the behavioral-analytic perspective teach the meaning of metaphors by making an extensive use of prompts: iconic, echoic, and textual. In the trainings based on the psycholinguistic perspective, instead, a wide range of activities are devised to stimulate children's analytical abilities to cope with semantic relations in metaphors. A significant part of these activities are jointly conducted between adult and children, and aimed at promoting the child's autonomy. Among the most interesting theoretical challenges stemming from the abovementioned studies, this review considers the spontaneous creation of original metaphors in children with ASD when solicited to understand metaphorical expressions. This unexpected reaction highlights the complexity of the relationships between metaphor comprehension and production in children with ASD.

METAPHORICAL ELEMENTS USED IN THE CONCEPTS ABOUT LOVE AND BELOVED IN DÎVÂNU LUGÂTİ’T-TÜRK

Metaforların oluşturulmasında ve çözümlenmesinde kültür önemli bir yer tutmaktadır. Geçmiş dönem eserlerinde oluşturulmuş metaforların tespiti ya da oluşturulan bir metaforun günümüzde çözümlenebiliyor olması kültürel devamlılıkta bütünlüğün önemli bir göstergesidir. Çalışmamızda, Dîvânu Lugâti't-Türk (DLT) ’de konumuz olan aşk ve sevgiliye dair yazılmış şiirlerde oluşturulmuş metaforlar ile aşkın ve sevgilinin yüceltilmiş, insanüstü boyutlara taşınmış olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Eserde aşk ve sevgiliye dair zorlukların anlatılması dağlar, aşk acısı, gözyaşı, ciğer yarası ile ilintilendirilmiş ve aşk bir tuzak olarak metaforize edilmiştir. Aşkın acı verici yanı, sevgilinin iyileştirici rolü, aşkın büyü, sevgilinin büyücü olması şeklinde anlatılmıştır. Şiirlerde oluşturulan bu metaforik anlatımlar, günümüz Türk kültür ve düşünce dünyasında kolayca karşılık bulabilecek düzeydedir. Gerek meteforun oluşturulması, gerekse çözümlenmesi konusunda kültürel belleğin etkisi dikkate alındığında; aşk ve sevgili konularında Türklerdeki bilişsel kodların değişmeden bugüne kadar ulaştığı görülmektedir.

On the creative use of metonymy

Abstract Antonio Barcelona’s work has advanced our understanding of the role played by pragmatics in the production and comprehension of metonymy. Much of his work has focused on playful uses of metonymy, which involve creative extensions of attested metonymic relationships, particularly in the pursuit of adversarial humour. Whilst there has been extensive work on the creative use of metaphor, very few studies have explored the range of ways in which metonymy is used creatively. In this article, I analyse creative uses of metonymy from a range of sources including film reviews, text messaging, art, advertising, cinema and literature in order to identify the different forms that creative uses of metonymy can take. In the process of analysing these different creative uses of metonymy, I address the following questions: What is the difference between ‘novelty’ and ‘creativity’ and what is the relationship between them, in the context of metaphor and metonymy? To what extent and in what ways are the principles underpinning the identification of creative metonymy, analogous to those used in the identification of creative metaphor? At what level of abstraction should the creativity be identified in each case? Can and should we distinguish between ‘creative metonymy per se, and creative uses of metonymy? At what point can we say that a new metonymic mapping has been created as opposed to a creative use of an existing mapping? What affordances does metonymy offer for creative use and how do these compare with the affordances that are offered by metaphor?

Acting like a Hedgehog in Times of Pandemic: Metaphorical Creativity in the #reframecovid Collection

ABSTRACT The need to provide novel but meaningful ways to reason and talk about an unprecedented crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a surge of creative metaphoric expressions in a variety of communicative settings. In order to investigate novel ways of conceptualizing the pandemic, we consider the metaphors included in the #ReframeCovid collection, a crowdsourced dataset of metaphors for the pandemic that rely on non-war frames. Its heterogeneous makeup of multilingual and multimodal examples (to date, over 550 examples – monomodal and multimodal in 30 languages) offers a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which metaphors have been used creatively to describe different aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. The patterns of metaphor creativity discussed in this paper include: creative realizations (verbal and visual) of wide-scope mappings, the use of one-off source domains, shifts in the valence of the source domain evoked, and the exploitation of source domains that are specific to particular discourse communities. The analysis of multimodal examples contributes to our understanding of the role of metaphor in sense-making and communication at a time of an extraordinary global crisis and will also provide new insights into metaphor creativity as a multidimensional phenomenon that integrates conceptual, discursive and cultural factors.

Lithuanian Sign Language Poetry: Location as Mean of Expression of Metaphors

In order to solve issues in sign language linguistics, address matters pertaining to maintaining high quality of sign language (SL) translation, contribute to dispelling misconceptions about SL and deaf people, and raise awareness and understand of the deaf community heritage, this article, for the first time in a Lithuanian scientific journal, discusses authentic poetry in Lithuanian Sign Language (LSL) and inherent metaphors that are created by using the phonological parameter – location. The study covered in this article is twofold, involving both the micro-level analysis of metaphors in terms of location as a sub-lexical feature and the macro-level analysis of the poetic context. Cognitive theories underlie research of metaphors in sign language poetry in a range of sign languages. The study follows this practice. In view of the abovementioned reasons, this piece of research is new and relevant to Lithuania. The article covers qualitative analysis of 10 pieces of LSL poetry. The analysis employs ELAN software widely used in sign language research. The target is to examine how specific types of location are used for the creation of metaphors in LSL poetry and what metaphors are created. The results of the study show that LSL poetry employs a range of locations resulting in a host of metaphors created by using classifier signs and by modifying the location of the established signs. The study also reveals that LSL poetry mostly tends to create reference metaphors indicating status and power. As the study shows, LSL poets metaphorically encode status by encoding another meaning in the same sign, which results in creating double metaphors. The metaphor of identity has been determined to consist of chest signing. Notably, the poetic context has revealed that the latter metaphor can also be identified as a metaphor of life. The study goes on to note that deaf poets create metaphors related to the importance of various phenomena, significance of the lyrical subject. Notably, the study has allowed detecting locations never mentioned in previous SL research as used for the creation of metaphors. For instance, previous SL research fails to cover temporal metaphors expressed by signing in central and peripheral areas and attitudinal metaphors represented by signing near the eye. The study has also detected a sign that can be identified as a metaphor of death and that is absent in previous SL research.

Meaning Used By Pranatacara in Javanese Wedding Ceremony “Panggih Manten”

This study used the descriptive qualitative method. The qualitative method was a research procedure which results in descriptive data, including written and oral word from the research objectives. The data used in this study were taken from the speech utterances by Pranatacara in "Panggih Manten" wedding ceremony in the Aeksongsongan. The researcher took the data from two Pranatacara and two Panggih Manten which taken from the speech utterances. The researcher used a source of theories about the semantic field by Knowles and Moon to support the thesis. Some steps were undertaken during the data collection: the process of selecting, focusing on the important things, simplifying, abstracting and transforming the data that appear in transcription. The results showed that the data into 23 metaphorical meanings from total two pranatacara of Javanese Wedding Ceremony or Panggih Manten. The dominant of metaphorical meaning was creative metaphor which had the highest percentage. The other result showed the least of metaphorical meaning was conventional meaning which had the lowest percentage. We took to identify and consider three things : metaphor, meaning, and connection by analysing and discussing metaphors in any depth. The percentage of the sequences Panggih Manten consisted of the opening, balangan gantal, injak telur, sinduran, dulangan, kacar kucur, sungkeman and the closing.

The Bioethical Discourse in the Development of a Musician-Performer

Involvement of a modern performer in the dialogue of concepts of recompense and biocentrism regulates its experimentation with bio and recorded music by awakening a sense of responsibility at the level of the epigenetic rule. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to substantiate a pedagogical model of bioethical education of a musician-performer - creation of a favourable environment to motivate them to comprehend the value of what serves as confirmation of God-like dignity of a person and the general weal for the glory of the Creator. The essence of the proposed pedagogical model is the concept of musical performance as a workroom of soul. Its leading idea is metaphorization of the intonated sense of emotional revelation as an anthropological discourse. Specifically, the basis of the proposed model appears the connectivism theory of metaphorical interpretation. The direction of such performative activity is determined by the strategy of creative clustering, which involves playing out of music scenarios of the value-based choice on the path to “creative innocence” or “the path of the heart”. The regulatory function in implementation of the mentioned strategy performs the methodology of pedagogical and metaphorical creativity. The technology of performative improvisation and the contextual approach to the game are factors in activating the mental resources of the musician-performer. The effectiveness of implementation of the proposed pedagogical model provides creation of a special event platform in the art laboratory.