Metaphorical Blends Research Articles

Conceptual Blending in Indian Political Cartoon Discourse

Conceptual blending theory has been used by scholars to study various genres of texts. Scholars studying cartoons in particular have used it to study how metaphors and metaphorical blending are used in cartoons to construct meaningful texts. This paper studies selected Indian political cartoons using the Conceptual Blending Theory of Fauconnier and Turner. The themes of the cartoons chosen for the study focused on various social issuesthat were part of the media discourse in contemporary times. The study was conducted to understand how cartoons depicting social issues used metaphoric blending to visualise an issue. The paper found that the graphic form of the political cartoon mediates the understanding of a communicative event through the use of cognitive devices like metaphoric blends. It was found that novel metaphoric blends were created in a cartoon text depending on the nature of the issue and that these metaphorical blends are regulated by context and background knowledge regarding the event being represented. It was also observed that the novelty of metaphoric blends in Indian editorial cartoons depended on the social, political and cultural context. Meanwhile, the metaphoric blends also draw into it everyday objects and scenarios that structure the meaning potential of the political cartoon. Another relevant finding is regarding how certain cartoon texts had more than one conceptual blend, forming a network of blends that worked in conjunction with each other. Furthermore, it was observed how conceptual blends in cartoons aided in anchoring the meaning of the cartoon and prevented polysemic confusion. The findings of the research prove that cognitive devices are prevalent in cartoon texts and could significantly direct their interpretation and use.

The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition

The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition

Parasites, Herbivores and Dried Fish: Dehumanising Metaphorical Blends in Japanese

In the context of a vast body of research on the role and function of conceptual metaphor in linguistic representation of non-dominant or non-normative social groups, the present paper deals with metaphorical blending found in a number of expressions used to describe deliberately single people forming part of the Japanese society. Expressions such as parasaito shinguru (“parasite singles”), sōshoku-kei danshi (“herbivorous men”), and himono onna (“dried-fish women”) are used as labels designating particular groups of people who do not conform to conventional societal roles because of, for example, failing to marry and establish a family in, what is considered, due time. The Japanese language often reflects very conservative, conformist, and ritual-abiding attitudes and mindsets of its speakers and hence, is rife with derogatory expressions which serve to denigrate non-conforming elements of a society. The expressions analysed here are culturally-determined and mirror, at least partially, the mindsets and opinions of some of the Japanese speakers. The present paper is maintained within the methodological framework of cognitive semantics. We conduct a conceptual blending analysis of selected metaphorical expressions found in the Japanese discourse. We find a strong trend towards employing conceptual blends based on dehumanising, often animalising, metaphors in order to linguistically denigrate groups non-conforming to expected societal norms.

Mental model theory as a model for analysing visual and multimodal discourse

Mental model theory is taken by scholars like Teun van Dijk as the fundamental idea of epistemic representations about the situations, events, and actions of the natural and social world. Modified by dynamic as well as situationally variable cognitive context (communication) models, the structures of such models, and therefore of the world knowledge, are claimed to multiply affect the production and interpretation of text and talk— e.g., in storytelling, argumentation, expository discourse, the level and specificity of characterisation, (non-)metaphoric blends, etc. Hence, the theory of context models also forms the basis of pragmatics. In this article, it is argued that visual and multimodal discourse will benefit from adopting van Dijk's mental model theory as the basic model for analysis. This will demand adaptation of the model, which has hitherto been primarily employed to examine verbal mass-communication or interaction, to multimodal mass-communication. The article offers tentative suggestions on how this can be done, using a corpus of political cartoons and Internet memes.

A marriage of convenience or an amicable divorce: Metaphorical blends in the debates on Brexit

Abstract The paper investigates the interaction of conceptual blending and conceptual metaphor in producing figurative creativity in discourse. The phenomenon of figurative creativity is defined by Kövecses (2005) as creativity arising through the cognitive mechanisms of metonymy, metaphor, and blending. Specifically, the paper examines the use of creative figurative language in the British public discourse on the topic on Brexit. The aim of this paper is to show that conventional metaphors can be creatively stretched through conceptual blending, producing instances of creative figurative language. Specifically, applying blending theory, we will analyse innovative conceptual blends, motivated by the conventional marriage/divorce metaphor. In addition, the paper also examines the way in which creative figurative language produced in metaphorical blends provides discourse coherence at intertextual and intratextual levels.

Mostafa Houssien’s Satan’s Family

After the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt, the Egyptian media launched strenuous campaigns against the Muslim Brotherhood and the West. In this paper, I present a cognitive analysis of a multimodal text of a cartoon with labels, with the goal of gauging its social/political impact. Crucially, the cartoon ‘frames’ its message so strongly that even if the viewer is not a speaker of Arabic and all verbal elements in the cartoon are to be erased, he or she (with certain ‘general’ background knowledge) will probably be able to read its moral message. For the analysis, I employ Fauconnier and Turner’s (1998) conceptual blending theory. The analysis shows that metaphoric blends do not just surface in public discourse. Rather, they can have a strong influence on how people perceive political issues.

Metaphorical blends and their function in discourse on society

This article examines two corpora composed of four discourse genres — oral interviews, written interviews, newspaper articles, and non-fiction books — to explore the ways in which ‘society’ is discussed metaphorically in current German and Brazilian discourse. It discusses culture-specific ‘mixed metaphors’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) which can be seen as ‘metaphorical scenarios’ (Musolff 2004) or ‘integration networks’ (Fauconnier & Turner 2002, 2008). The results reveal that the Brazilian metaphors tend to incorporate the idea that SOCIETY AS A PERSON has didactic and poetic functions to a high degree. By contrast, the German metaphors have a stronger relation to motion dynamics, frequently argumentatively analyzed from an observer’s point of view. Finally, this article demonstrates that Blending Theory must be extended by a semiotic-contextual view to integrate elements like ‘relevance space’ (Brandt & Brandt 2005), and to account for culture-dependent variation and the involved speech functions displayed by real speakers/writers and hearers/readers in specific communication situations.

Making sense of a blend

In this paper we propose an analysis of the metaphor “This surgeon is a butcher!” discussed in Grady, Oakley & Coulson (1999), introducing it into a mental space framework derived from conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), blending theory (BT) and cognitive semiotics. The method of analysis is to work backwards; we attempt to reconstruct the meaning of the butcher-surgeon metaphor by giving a step-by-step description of the cognition involved in understanding an occurrence of the metaphoric expression, and hypothesize a general framework for analyzing metaphoric blends and other kinds of rhetorically potent integrations of semiotically distinguishable conceptual contents (mental spaces) in expressive blends. It is argued that examples of expressive blends, such as metaphor, need to be accounted for in semiotic terms, since they occur in — intersubjective as well as private — communication, which is essentially semiotic in nature; expressive blends occur as signs and are therefore a natural subject of cognitive semiotics, the study of cognition in semiosis.

Metaphors, domains and embodiment

Investigations of metaphorical meaning constitution and meaning (in-) variance have revealed the significance of semantic and semiotic domains and the contexts within which they function as basis for the grounding of metaphorical meaning. In this article some of the current views concerning the grounding of metaphorical meaning in experience and embodiment are explored. My provisional agreement with Lakoff, Johnson and others about the “conceptual” nature of metaphor rests on an important caveat, viz. that this bodily based conceptual structure which lies at the basis of linguistic articulations of metaphor, is grounded in a deeper ontic structure of the world and of human experience. It is the “metaphorical” (actually “analogical”) ontological structure of this grounding that is of interest for the line of argumentation followed in this article. Because Johnson, Lakoff and other’s proposal to ground metaphorical meaning in embodiment and neural processes is open to being construed as subjectivist and materialist, I shall attempt to articulate the contours of an alternative theory of conceptual metaphor, meaning and embodiment which counteracts these possibilities. This theory grounds metaphorical meaning and meaning change in an ontological and anthropological framework which recognises the presence and conditioning functioning of radially ordered structures for reality. These categorisations in which humankind, human knowledge and reality participate, condition and constrain (ground) analogical and metaphorical meaning transfer, cross-domain mappings, and blends in cognition and in language, provide the basis for the analogical concepts found in these disciplines.

Primary metaphors as inputs to conceptual integration

One of the most striking aspects of conceptual integration (or ‘blending’) is that it seeks to unify an extremely broad variety of conceptual phenomena – from the most startling feats of imagination and invention to the most mundane instances of conceptual composition – and treats them all as the products of a single cognitive process (or closely related suite of processes). This article focuses on metaphoric blends, and assesses properties that distinguish them from other blends, and lend them their particular quality. In particular, the paper examines the nature of metaphoric counterpart connections, and especially the “ready-made” connections, i.e., entrenched metaphoric correspondences between concepts, that provide the basis for the real-time construction of metaphoric blends. The paper argues that primary metaphors constitute a distinctive class of counterpart connections and they require an explanation not found among blending theory's other technical apparatus. These patterns of metaphoric association cannot be explained by mechanisms such as analogy, nor by relations such as cause-effect or identity, which underlie other sorts of blends. Instead they derive from recurring correlations between particular types of mental experiences.

Body Partitioning in ASL Metaphorical Blends

This article addresses body partitioning in American Sign Language (ASL). Specifically, it demonstrates how partitioning allows for greater contributions of conceptual metaphor to the structuring of complex grounded blends.