Metaphorical Extension Research Articles

Abstract Phonology in a Concrete Model: Cognitive Linguistics and the Morphology-Phonology Interface (review)

Reviewed by: Abstract Phonology in a Concrete Model: Cognitive Linguistics and the Morphology-Phonology Interface Frank Y. Gladney Tore Nesset. Abstract Phonology in a Concrete Model: Cognitive Linguistics and the Morphology-Phonology Interface. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. pp. x, 250. [Cognitive Linguistics Research, 40.] The book is narrowly focused on stem alternations in the Russian verb, as in pisa-l ‘wrote’ ~ piš-et ‘writes’. Nesset’s central claim is that /a/ ~ /Ø/ truncation and /s/ ~ /š/ softening constitute a conspiracy which has the meaning here of [PRESENT]. His broader purpose is to argue that Cognitive Grammar (CG) accounts for Russian verbal morphophonemics better than other frameworks. There are 12 chapters. Chapter 1 states the book’s main argument, that CG accommodates the “morphology-phonology interface” and that morphophonemic alternations are meaningful. Chapter 2 presents the CG linguist’s “toolbox” (represented mainly as boxes and arrows). Chapter 3 is about the CG approach to Russian phonemes and allophones. Chapter 4 presents verbal stem alternations. Chapter 5 claims that CG provides a synthesis of the phonologically based one-stem description and the semantically based two-stem description. Chapter 6 treats infinitives, the straightforward pisa-t’, the morphophonemically more complex gres-ti (~ greb-u), and the hard-to-segment peč’ (~ pek-u). Chapter 7 treats past-tense forms, the problem of soxla (~ soxnut’) losing -nu-, of vel (~ vedu) losing -d-, and of nes (~ nesla) losing -/. Chapter 8 is on the imperative and the problem of opacity, igrajte being opaque because the j doesn’t truncate before a consonant and bros’ because suffixal -i- does truncate even though the conditioning vowel ending does not appear. Chapter 9 is on palatalization and lenition. Kupit’ ~ kuplju is said to show lenition because /pl’/ ends in a continuant and prjatat’ ~ prjaču because [č’] “does not have a complete closure” (174). Chapter 10 is about opacity and non-modularity. Pišet is opaque because the suffix in pisa- which conditions the transitive softening of š is absent from this form. Non-modularity refers to the claim that CG handles forms like pišet effectively because it does not require separate morphology and phonology modules. Chapter 11 is titled “The [End Page 311] meaning of alternations: The truncation-softening conspiracy.” Chapter 12 is concluding remarks. The key principle of CG is the so-called Content Requirement, namely, that language consists solely in sound, meaning, and their symbolic association. Grammar is the network of schemas and their elaborations (or extensions). At the semantic pole, [DOG], for example, is schematic for its elaboration [POODLE] as well as for its metaphorical extension to [INFERIOR PRODUCT], [UNATTRACTIVE PERSON], etc., while itself being an elaboration of [ANIMAL], which in turn is an elaboration of [CREATURE], ultimately of [THING]. Proceeding downward into specificity, poodle can be more narrowly categorized as my poodle, my sister’s poodle, and the poodle that kept me awake last night by barking. In this way words categorize phrases, which categorize clauses, which categorize complex sentences and even discourses. At the phonetic pole, phonemes are schematic for allophones, while allophones are schematic for their various realizations. An important postulate of CG is that everything above the phoneme level is meaningful, including, in the above examples, ‘s, the, that, by, and -ing. This may be what underlies the author’s claim that morphophonemic alternations also have meaning. CG has been most fully worked out for expressions at the word level and higher. In the most recent exposition, Langacker 2008, sublexical matters are dealt with on only a few of its 540 pages. This puts Nesset at a slight disadvantage in applying CG to Russian verbal morphophonemics. An example of how CG handles verbal morphology is provided by the forms seeded and sat. Langacker (1987: 340) presents each as an elaboration of the schema [VERB-PAST]. Seed-ed elaborates it straightforwardly, sat less so. How to handle the [PAST] component of sat is a problem that has been around for a while. Chomsky and Halle (1968: 11) regard [PAST] as an abstract morpheme which is sometimes realized as -ed and sometimes deleted in favor of a readjustment rule that effects ablaut changes like /i/ /æ/. But abstract morphemes and syntactic features are ruled out in CG...

The Pilgrimages of David Lodge

... a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist. --Turner and Turner 20 ... most of the greater pilgrimages have become seedbeds of the literature of high culture:' --Turner and Turner 23 What are they hoping for? I don't think most of them could tell you if you asked them. Some adventure, some encounter, some miraculous transformation of their ordinary lives. --Lodge, Therapy 214 In spite of the decline of organized religion in much of the western world, the concept of pilgrimage is alive and well, if by pilgrimage one means a purposeful journey, undertaken with some sense of homage or veneration, to a place that is set apart as special by the consensus of a specific community. Some traditional religious pilgrimages still flourish, such as that to Compostela in Spain, while people travel to many other sites with some of the attitudes and expectations of pilgrims: places associated with a writer or popular culture icon (Wordsworth's Lake District, the Oxford of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Jim Morrison's grave in Paris) or places that feature in a literary work, or film, or, frequently, in a film made from a literary work. Oxford, a multilayered cultural site, has among its many associations the fact that it is the location of the Inspector Morse series of TV movies, based on detective novels by the Oxford resident Colin Dexter. (l) The phenomenal success of Dan Brown's 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code created at least briefly a new pilgrim's way, retracing the journey of the novel's characters. And of course Castle Howard in Yorkshire owes much of its fame to the fact that it was used to represent the fictitious Brideshead in the celebrated miniseries made from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I will return later in this essay to the question of how far such postmodern tourism can be seen to have anything in common with the religious pilgrimage of early or medieval Christianity. The many versions of pilgrimage in contemporary society have been a recurrent focus in the novels of David Lodge, who is both a Roman Catholic and a keen observer of postmodern culture. (2) In this essay, I will trace his use of the motif of pilgrimage, from his presentation of traditional Catholic religious journeys in several of his novels to much more metaphorical extensions of the concept. I have allowed the term to be used flexibly because a significant theme in Lodge's fiction is the liberating effect of travel, and like many writers--notably Henry James, with whom he has an important intertextual relationship (3)--he often uses a journey to represent a metaphorical journey within the self. One of the places where Lodge signals the significance of this cluster of associations in his imaginative world is at the beginning of Small World, the celebration and satire of academic life, and especially of conference going, that was instrumental in establishing Lodge's North American popularity in the 1980s. He begins the Prologue to Small World with a modern English paraphrase of one of the most famous openings in English literature: When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every heath, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Rare, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences. (1) However, the motif of pilgrimage is not especially important in the text of this novel as a whole, except insofar as the idea of pilgrimage can be assimilated to that of the romance quest; motifs from Arthurian literature are much more significant. …

The Language of Linguistic Research: Is there Room for Meaning Extension?

Meaning extension, including metaphors and metonymies, has traditionally been associated with the language of fiction. Cognitive linguistics has given this area a new impetus by unravelling the metaphoricity of our everyday language and various discourses ranging from spoken to written, from learner language to academic or professional (legal, medical, political). Lakoff (1991 and 1995), Cienki (2005), Schmidt (2003), Cibulskienė (2006), Vaičenonienė (2002) and many other researchers seem to give preference to political and socio-economic discourse which has generated within this branch of linguistics a large amount of research all over the world.Academic discourse (AD) and its multiple layers of meaning, however, has received less attention since it is generally believed that AD aims at discovering the truth, explaining and arguing, it is rigid, critical and unambiguous. According to Hyland (2004, 87), AD depends upon the demonstration of absolute truth, empirical evidence or flawless logic. Its persuasive potency is seen as grounded in rationality and based on exacting methodologies, dispassionate observation, and informed reflection. (…) We see this form of persuasion as a guarantee of reliable knowledge, and we invest it with cultural authority, free of the cynicism with which we view the partisan rhetoric of politics and commerce.So this paper attempts to provide evidence for the claim that AD, like any other discourse, is equally inclined to meaning extension, specifically, metaphors and metonymies. The paper is structured around several key issues: first, it gives background to the study, including a discussion on academic discourse, its relation to other discourse types, the contrastive parameter of investigation and other methodological issues and second, it identifies major types of metonymical and metaphorical extensions as reflected in the data corpus and manifested in linguistic texts in English (EN) and Lithuanian (LT).

Corporations as Citizens: Political not Metaphorical

At the center of our article “Citizenship, Inc.,” is a puzzle about a metaphor. Are corporations really a kind of citizen, or like citizens in some real way, or is talk of “corporate citizenship” all just a misleading metaphorical extension of the age-old concept of individual citizenship? In this reply to four very spirited responses to that article, we will not be defending our particular analysis of that metaphor so much as joining our colleagues in reflecting on the question of what academics are doing, or should be doing, when they take on the vocabulary of politics and business in this way. What can philosophers or social scientists expect to accomplish by telling fellow academics, or fellow citizens, that they should be using concepts like “corporate citizenship” one way rather than another? Is there a respectable methodology for shoring up this kind of advice? Or rather, are we all engaged in some kind of urbane political discourse attempting to push a vocabulary most likely to favor our own preferred ideological positions? We had relatively little to say on these questions in the original article, but we found many of the most interesting critiques or “friendly amendments” in the responses to be essentially about these “meta” and methodological questions (or derived from different answers to them).

L’alternanza argomentale locativa in ceco: un approccio costruzionista

This paper deals with the relationship between verbs and their arguments, investigating the so called locative alternation in Czech in the light of the the Construction Grammar Approach. On this basis the two alterning constructions, i.e. the causative movement construction and the resultative one, are seen to be linked by a metaphorical relation, the resultative construction being a metaphorical extension of the causative movement one. On the basis of their lexical meaning, the author defines four classes of verbs, which allow the locative alternation in Czech. A particular attention is devoted to the role of verbal prefixes in allowing or disallowing the verbs to appear in both constructions, which form the locative alternation: while prefix na- is claimed to allow the verbs to appear in both constructions, the causative movement construction and the resultative one, the prefix po- is claimed to allow the verbs to appear just in the resultative construction.

Fighting Another’s War: Imperialist Projections on the Victorian Novel’s Continent

Set in the late-1840s, Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White uses the Italian War of Independence as more than a background. Instead, it becomes a renegotiation of both Britain’s involvement—diplomatic or cultural as well as on the battlefield—in the wars waging in Europe at the time and, by metaphorical extension, its own “little wars” in the colonies. The “internal colonisation” practised by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire alternately serves as a convenient projection and a mirror-image of self-accusation. The proposed paper traces the representation of European wars in nineteenth-century British fiction. They were seen as a threat, spilling over into Britain, as bringing in competing flows of refugees, and most importantly perhaps, as demanding a rethinking of imperialist legacies of guilt. The focus will be on the representation of the Italian struggle for independence in novels of the 1860s by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon (especially the Austrian villains in The Black Band and Run To Earth), and Meredith’s Emilia in England, later reprinted as Sandra Belloni, and the sequel, Vittoria. Yet it also forms a vital undercurrent in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, a novel that fascinatingly brings in references to colonial guilt produced by the opium trade in China and the second opium war, which was waging when the novel was still being serialised, the Crimean War, and the Risorgimento. In this, it testifies perhaps most insistently to the cultural pervasiveness of Europe’s wars in the Victorian novel.

The Link Schema and Its Metaphoric Extension

이 글은 한국어 사용자의 개념 구조를 밝히기 위해 가장 기초적인 개념화 기제 가운데 하나인 연결 도식을 통한 은유적 개념화 과정을 논의한 것으로, 그 주된 내용은 다음과 같다.BR 첫째, 우리는 [행위의 연속], [관련성], [인간관계]와 같은 개념들을 연결 도식을 통해 이해한다. 우리는 사건이나 행위를 시간선상에서 동작의 시작점으로부터 동작의 끝점을 향해 진행하는 것으로 이해하는데, 이 과정에서 연결 도식의 투사를 통해 사건이나 행위를 선 모양으로 인지한다. 또한 우리는 서로 관련이 되는 다른 개념들 사이의 관계를 연결 도식을 투사하여 이해하며, 사람과 사람 사이의 관계 또한 그러한 방법으로 개념화한다.BR 둘째, 영상 도식은 은유적 개념화에서 구체적인 근원영역 개념을 형성하는 데 기반이 되는 인지 기제이다. 실제로 연결 도식을 투사하여 은유적으로 개념화하는 과정에서 ‘끈, 줄’ 등과 같은 근원영역 개념이 나타나는데, ‘끈’이나 ‘줄’은 더 추상적인 목표영역 개념을 이해하기 위해 사물의 형태로 구체화된 것이라 할 수 있다. 곧 ‘끈’이나 ‘줄’을 근원영역 개념으로 한 은유적 개념화 과정에서는 연결 도식과의 상호작용이 전제된다.

How animal psychology contributes to animal welfare

This article explores the contribution of animal psychology to animal welfare. Since animal welfare includes subjective welfare, it is crucial to know the subjective world of animals. Analysis of the concept of anthropomorphism is particularly important because it is a basic idea of animal ethics. The history of animal psychology, focusing on anthropomorphism and behaviourism, is briefly described, and then measurement of the subjective experience of animals in two ways, namely animal cognition and pleasure or reinforcing effects, is reported. Finally, it is suggested that animal welfare is not a permanently fixed idea, but a socially constructed one that can be changed. To gain widespread agreement about a socially constructed idea, it is important to know in which circumstances ordinary people employ metaphorical extension to an understanding of animal behaviour. In other words, a survey of “folk animal psychology” is important in order to establish a consensus about animal welfare.

The polysemy (?) of phrasal verbs in English

This paper presents the results of a study into the polysemy of four phrasal verbs in English: “get out”, “give out”, “put on” and “put off'. The aim is to look into the degree of polysemy of those phrasal verbs, and more precisely to see if it is possible to reduce the number of different meanings, as was done to a certain extent for some postpositions (Lindner 1983, for “up” and “out”) and verbs (Lindstromberg 1991, for “get”). The meanings of these phrasal verbs are defined from concordances, then studied with the aim of finding similarities among different meanings of a given phrasal verb. On the basis of these similarities, clusters of meanings are made and assigned more general meanings, which are in turn compared and grouped together. A hierarchy is thus defined for each phrasal verb, with a general meaning on top, from which all or almost all others are obtained. The aim of the article is not to deny the polysemous nature of phrasal verbs. That will depend on the level of detail one takes—other factors enter into consideration, such as collocation, metaphorical extensions etc., which can justify assigning more meanings in lower branches. Finally, implications are then briefly discussed, with regards to the teaching of phrasal verbs to speakers of other languages.

Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong incentive

Why are people interested in money? Specifically, what could be the biological basis for the extraordinary incentive and reinforcing power of money, which seems to be unique to the human species? We identify two ways in which a commodity which is of no biological significance in itself can become a strong motivator. The first is if it is used as a tool, and by a metaphorical extension this is often applied to money: it is used instrumentally, in order to obtain biologically relevant incentives. Second, substances can be strong motivators because they imitate the action of natural incentives but do not produce the fitness gains for which those incentives are instinctively sought. The classic examples of this process are psychoactive drugs, but we argue that the drug concept can also be extended metaphorically to provide an account of money motivation. From a review of theoretical and empirical literature about money, we conclude that (i) there are a number of phenomena that cannot be accounted for by a pure Tool Theory of money motivation; (ii) supplementing Tool Theory with a Drug Theory enables the anomalous phenomena to be explained; and (iii) the human instincts that, according to a Drug Theory, money parasitizes include trading (derived from reciprocal altruism) and object play.

On the conceptual, cultural and discursive motivation of Greek pain lexicalizations

This paper provides evidence for the interaction of conceptual structure, cultural models and discursive practices in motivating pain lexicalizations and related constructions in Greek. It is argued that pain is construed as a process or state, a designated property, or an instance of a process or state, prototypically associated with an experiencer and a cause. The elaboration of this core semantics of pain by image-schematic and metaphorical structure and a cultural narrative of selfhood yields metaphorical extensions of pain as an entity and motivates its understanding in the physical and the psychological modalities. Finally, frequency counts of pain lexicalizations in different discourse genres provide evidence for the discursive motivation of the lexical categories at hand. These findings seem to argue for points of contact between cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Sweetser 1990; Langacker 2000), a discursive view of relativity (Clark 1996; Lucy 1996), and a neo-Whorfian perspective on language as a bio-cultural hybrid (Levinson 2003).

Toward a geotypology of EAT-expressions in languages of Asia: Visualizing areal patterns through WALS

Many of the languages of Asia have families of expressions in which a verb meaning EAT exhibits Janus-faced behavior. In some cases the subject of EAT bears the semantic role of an agent while in others it bears the role of a theme, patient, or experienccr. A central concern of this paper is to characterize the geographic distribution in Asia of the semantic extensions of the experientially basic verb EAT in selected languages. We graph the areal distribution of representative EAT expressions as sets of data points on WALS maps and show that while some metaphoric extensions of usage of the verb EAT are probably found in every language, other particular types of extensions are found only in a specific area whose languages share a number of typological characteristics as shown by Masica (1976) in his seminal work on the SOV linguistic area of South, Central, and Northeast Asia. While language contact certainly has played and continues to play a significant role, we propose the independent operation of a radial network of semantic extensions as a possible complementary factor in the proliferation and convergence of EAT-expressions.

The relationship between grammar and the psychological processing of language

The study reported in this article identifies aspects of language usage that illustrate the relationship between grammatical structures and psycholinguistic processing. The psycholinguistic assumption underlying the research for this paper is that structures of speech utterances reflect the manner in which speakers perceive and psycholinguistically process information. The data analysed was elicited from selected first language users of Shona, Ndebele and Setswana. The corresponding English sentences were provided by the researcher. Similarities between the data verified the assumption that grammatical structuring is largely determined by speakers\' psycholinguistic perceptions and how they process the meaning of what they perceive. Keywords : linguistic universals, psycholinguistic processing, universal grammar, psycholinguistic word order, metaphorical extensions, processing constraints, end-focus theory Journal for Language Teaching Vol. 39(1) 2005: 149-161

Prepositional semantics and metaphoric extensions

In this paper we analyze the semantics of the Spanish preposition desde. This analysis is developed within the cognitive linguistics framework. First, we establish the central uses of this category, using a corpus created from examples provided by Spanish speakers. Then, we examine the uses of this preposition that respond to a metaphoric extension. According to my working hypothesis, these metaphoric uses are derived from the topological schema that underlies all the uses of this preposition. The metaphoric extensions of this preposition have been gradually and only partially accepted by the ‘Real Academia de la Lengua’ and other linguistic authorities. However, there exits a use based on a metaphoric transfer which is ignored by traditional treatments. Furthermore, this use is explicitly defined as incorrect by the dictionary of the Spanish language Clave. We will show that this use is consistent with the topological schema that has given rise to the rest of the metaphoric uses of desde and thus should be treated as another valid use of this category.

Wittgenstein's Legacy: Metagrammar, Meaning, and Ordinary Language

Wittgenstein’s Legacy: Metagrammar, Meaning, and Ordinary Language David Herman (bio) Review of: Walter Jost, Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004. Ambitious in scope, richly integrative, and extensively researched, this study demonstrates its author’s familiarity with ideas from multiple fields of inquiry, including classical as well as modern rhetoric, critical theory, philosophy, and literary modernism. The chief aim of the book is to work toward integration and synthesis; drawing on theorists ranging from Martin Heidegger and Kenneth Burke to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, and using the poetry of Robert Frost to work through the author’s focal concerns, the book seeks to develop a framework for interpretation in which “grammar and rhetoric, philosophy and literature, reason and desire, reference and semiotics, truth and antifoundationalism” might be brought into closer dialogue with one another (1). More precisely, Jost characterizes literature and philosophy as the termini of his discussion, suggesting that rhetoric can be used to negotiate between these discourses (7). Hence, although the four chapters in Part II develop extended readings of Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man,” “West-Running Brook,” “Snow,” and “Home Burial,” respectively, the present book is more about exemplifying a specific kind of critical inquiry, interpretation, argument, and community activity than it is about a particular poet, historical trajectory, literary period, or cultural moment. Frost’s poems present me with an occasion to rethink a nexus of questions about the everyday and the ordinary, language, experience, common sense, judgment, and exemplarity; to question assumptions about the grammatical and rhetorical possibilities of literary criticism; and to reexamine what I take to be underappreciated resources for criticism to be found in the traditions of rhetoric, hermeneutic phenomenology, pragmatism, and so-called ordinary language philosophy and criticism. (4) The introduction further specifies what the author means by the “ordinary language criticism” mentioned at the end of the passage just quoted and also in the book’s subtitle. Ordinary language criticism, in Jost’s account, takes inspiration from the ordinary language philosophy pioneered by Wittgenstein, refined by J.L. Austin, and recontextualized by Cavell (Claim, In Quest, Must; see also Baillie and Cohen). For theorists in this tradition, people learn (and later use) concepts thanks to their place within a larger form of life and the modes of language use associated with that form of life. Although abstract logical definitions play a role in specialized discourses (e.g., certain forms of philosophical analysis), in other discourse contexts boundaries between concepts are fixed by “situated criteria, the features and functions of things, the behaviors and actions of people in certain circumstances in which we operate with our words” (8). For example, when I hear someone say plank in a conversation I do not try to match that person’s usage against an abstract mental checklist of necessary and sufficient conditions for “plankness” in order to make sense of the term.1 Rather, I monitor whether the ongoing discourse is about the construction of ships, archaic practices of meting out justice at sea (as in walk the [gang]plank), or political campaigns, and I draw an inference, possibly incorrect, about which concept of “plank” is appropriate given the broader context in which the term plank is being used. “Plank” is irreducibly caught up in these contexts of usage; there is no single, decontextualized meaning of plank (cf. Herman 2002), but rather multiple, partly overlapping meanings, each determined by the use of the term in the situated, rule-governed modes of discourse production and interpretation that Wittgenstein called “language games” and Jean-François Lyotard “phrase regimens.” Further, these language games are not wholly autonomous practices but can impinge on one another, as when through a metaphorical extension plank migrates from the language game(s) of the shipwright to those of the politician and the pundit. The key insight here, though, is that plank does not denote “plank” prior to its being used in some language game or other, even if only the stripped-down “games” in which dictionary definitions or the rules of logic are used to map out semantic relationships among terms.2 But what would be the specific brief of...

New Social Orders: Reconceptualising Family and Community in Utopian Fiction

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: The family is the cradle into which the future is born; it is the nursery in which the new social order is nourished and reared during its early and most plastic period. (Sidney Goldstein, Marriage and Family Living, 1946)1 When Goldstein conceived the metaphor of the American family as the cradle of the future he was writing at a specific historical moment, ‘one to which the stresses of war, the uncertainties of the ensuing peace, and the emerging relationship between ideologies of the family and American national identity together lent an unparalleled ambiguity and anxiety about family life’ (Levey 2001, p.125). Nearly 60 years on, the same conditions seem still to apply not only to the United States, but also to many other countries across the globe. The linking of family to the social well-being of a nation and its individual citizens is a familiar rhetoric employed by politicians, religious leaders, social commentators, and scholars, who rely on the interplay between an actual social unit and its metaphorical extensions to produce an illusion of ‘the truth’. In a similar way, the notion of a ‘new social order’ offers the utopian promise of a better life than that which current or past social orders have provided. Again the force of the metaphor resides in its capacity to appeal to both the intellect and the emotions.

“House-High Favourites?” – A Contrastive Analysis of Adjective-Noun Collocations in German and English

Everybody is talking about collocational analyses these days… Despite recent advances in the monolingual sector, the bilingual environment has not yet come under close scrutiny. It is especially the adjective-noun combinations that have become the focus of attention when it comes to contrastive phraseological studies. Adjectives in particular are subject to semantic tailoring and it is important to bear in mind that (predictable) interlingual lexical one-to-one occurrence, such as the English starless night and the German sternlose Nacht, is a mere exception rather than the rule in the bilingual adjective-noun state of affairs. Factors that have to be considered are (non-) compositionality in contrastive multiword units, like barefaced lie – faustdicke Luge (‘a lie as thick as a man’s fist’), and metaphorical extensions, like haushoher Favorit – hot favourite (*house-high favourite) as well as structural differences in the two languages in question, like (at) short notice – kurzfristig.

On learning to draw the distinction between physical and metaphorical motion: is metaphor an early emerging cognitive and linguistic capacity?

Situated within the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), this study investigated young children's understanding of metaphorical extensions of spatial motion. Metaphor was defined as a conceptual-linguistic mapping between a source and a target domain. The study focused on metaphors that are structured by the source domain of motion in space (e.g. time flies by, ideas pass through one's mind, sickness crawls through one's body). The study investigated whether metaphor comprehension varied by the age of the participant, target domain of the metaphorical mapping, and the conventionality of the linguistic form with which the metaphor was conveyed. Data were gathered using a story comprehension task and a semi-structured interview from 60 monolingual Turkish-speaking children, at the mean ages 3;6, 4;5 and 5;5 (20 participants per age group), and 20 adult native speakers of Turkish. The results showed metaphor understanding to be an early emerging cognitive and linguistic capacity.

When down is not bad, and up not good enough: A usage-based assessment of the plus–minus parameter in image-schema theory

Abstract Preceding research in cognitive linguistics has advanced the claim that evaluative components form an integral part of image schemas (cf. Krzeszowski 1993, 1997; Cienki 1997: 3–6). This so-called “plus–minus” (or “axiological”) parameter has primarily been discussed with regard to opposing dimensions within a range of image-schematic contexts. In the paired particles in–out, up–down, and on–off, for instance, the meaning of which is based on the image-schematic notions of CONTAINMENT, VERTICALITY, and CONTACT, respectively, the second elements are assumed to carry negative default evaluations. Additionally, the Axiological Invariance Principle (Krzeszowski 1997) claims that these evaluative components are generally retained in metaphorical extensions. This study applies the plus–minus hypothesis in image-schema theory to the analysis of semantically highly redundant verb-particle constructions in English. The hypotheses derived from this application are tested against the real usage of such constructions as documented in the British National Corpus and the Collins Online. Though the presentation of a full-blown alternative to the plus–minus assumption is beyond the scope of this empirical investigation, an important implication of this study is that the isolated, “primitive” (noncompound) image schemas traditionally dealt with in cognitive linguistic research should not be considered as the locus of evaluative defaults. It is suggested instead that axiological components are dimensions of richer, contextualized cognitive models, in which image schemas appear as complex superimpositions, i.e., image-schema groupings or compounds.

Metaphor meets typology: Ways of moving metaphorically in English and Turkish

Abstract Earlier work on literal motion has shown that English and Turkish belong to typologically distinct classes of languages, with English speakers paying greater linguistic attention to the manner dimension of motion events (e.g., Özçalişkan and Slobin 1999a, 2003). As a further step, this article investigates whether typological differences hold true for the metaphorical extensions of motion events. Thus, the article compares two types of languages with regard to their lexicalization patterns in encoding metaphorical motion events: (1) verb-framed languages (or V-languages, represented by Turkish), in which the preferred pattern for framing motion events is the use of a path verb with an optional manner adjunct (e.g., enter running), and (2) satellite-framed languages (S-languages, represented by English), in which path is lexicalized in an element associated with the verb, leaving the verb free to encode manner (e.g., run in). The analysis of written texts and elicited responses in the two languages shows clear typological contrast, with English speakers encoding manner of motion in their metaphorical descriptions more frequently and extensively than Turkish speakers, using a variety of linguistic devices (e.g., verbs, adverbials). Overall, the results indicate that the degree of codability of a semantic dimension in a lexical item (i.e., motion verb) has a spillover effect on the choice of other lexical items in a sentence, suggesting the conceptual salience of this dimension for its speakers. This effect is observable in both the literal and the metaphorical uses of the lexicon.