Metaphorical Representation Research Articles

La Bretagne ou « la magie du lieu » selon J.M.G. Le Clézio

Abstract This essay attempts to demonstrate Brittany as seen by Le Clézio. In presenting the land of the writer’s ancestors, it relies heavily on a text described by himself as an ‶autobiographical tale″ Chanson bretonne (2020). The essay also refers to a polyphonic novel, Revolutions (2003), which deepens the representation of the Breton country by a historical stratum. In line with geopoetic theories, the theme of the land does not stop in Le Clézio’s work at the level of description but attains the status of a more metaphorical representation. I propose to enrich the geopoetic approach with the methods of the geocritical and ecocritical approaches.

Children's emerging concepts of resilience: insights from using body mapping in an East London cohort sample of 7-10-year-old children.

Understanding resilience factors in children is essential for developing early mental health interventions. Middle childhood is an understudied developmental stage, with many quantitative measures lacking validation for this age group and not capturing diverse experiences. This study aimed to use body mapping, an arts-based method, as a novel approach to understand 7-10-year-old children's concepts of resilience (including definitions and factors that contribute to resilience) in East London. An advisory group of six children commented on the findings. Body mapping was included in the Development of Emotional Resilience (DEER) Study. Participants drew a resilience symbol, wrote recent worries and colored on an A4-sized body map to signal where they embody stress. Demographic data were collected via self- and parent-report surveys and school records. Manifest content analysis identified four thematic categories related to worries, somatic stress and resilience. 196 children (48.47% boys, 46.43% girls; 35.20% White, 30.10% Asian, 11.22% Black) across school years 3-5 completed body mapping. Concepts of resilience included perseverance and metaphorical representations of personal strength. We also identified socioecological factors that contributed to resilience, mainly at the individual and interpersonal levels. Boys more often depicted Sports whilst more girls depicted Engagement in the arts and Social networks. 11 worry categories emerged, including education, relationships and physical health. Of the body categories colored (n = 51), the most common were the head, hands and abdomen/stomach. Children expressed dominant and abstract symbols of resilience and identified factors that contributed to resilience. Hobbies and strong relationships may be particularly important in middle childhood, corroborated by the advisory group's experiences. Body mapping revealed diverse worries (e.g., education, change and uncertainty and global and societal concerns) and somatic experiences of stress (e.g., the head, chest and torso). Through prioritising children's perspectives, body mapping holds promise in clinical and educational settings.

Suffering and Greatness: Metaphor, Will and Self-reference in The Flying Dutchman

ABSTRACT Wagner’s early opera The Flying Dutchman has long been recognized as the first of the composer’s works to be written in his own authentic style and idiom, in which the protagonist strongly suggests a metaphorical representation of autobiographical content, complemented by a musical expression of overpowering will that listeners have variously felt to be aggressively domineering or curiously liberating. This paper traces the progressive unfolding of these effects in the course of seeing (and hearing) the work performed, approaching it as a form of drama in which stage action and dialogue are immeasurably enhanced by the Wagnerian musical narrative. As such, it begins with the overture, in which the opera’s central metaphor is already implicit in the figure of the storm, before becoming explicit in the onstage presentation of character contrasts and relationships, a dynamic in which the sympathetic listener is increasingly implicated through a heightened emotional (and even quasi-sexual) involvement in the music. There is, in other words, an implied parallel between the heroine’s redemption of the doomed Dutchman and the aesthetic abandonment to the work itself that is so imperiously demanded of its audience.

Metaphoric Representations of Spirituality in Ebenezer Obey’s Music

This paper investigates the synergy that exists between metaphor and spirituality within the Yoruba cosmology as exemplified in the music of Ebenezer Obey. The study underscores the authenticating role metaphor plays in the concretisation of Yoruba beliefs in the existence of a supernatural world. The existing variations of independent studies on both concepts attest to the rich cognitive influence both ideologies evoke within the academia. However, most of the extant studies carried out on these concepts have mainly honed their distinctive strengths. The corpus of research on metaphor relates its relevance mainly to the academic sphere where it acts as diagnostic tool for the analysis of literary terms and by extension to specified human experiences and restricts its versatile application to the significant influence metaphor has on spirituality, thus, de-emphasising the strengthening potency the connection between both ideologies can have on the social and economic lives of people. This notion of irreconcilable difference has resulted in undermining the veritable possibility of an alignment between metaphor and spirituality. This is against the backdrop of paucity of scholarship on this creative hybridisation. This study, therefore, foregrounds the essence of this metaphorical appropriation on the Yoruba ability to re-interpret their disillusioned post-independence realities. Conceptual metaphor theory is deployed as a tool by which underlying metaphor of spirituality is pointed out in the selected music texts of Ebenezer Obey.

Science teachers’ conceptual perspectives on scientific experiments: a metaphorical representation

ABSTRACT Background Despite the valuable learning opportunities experimentation offers, it poses significant challenges for teachers and learners. The effectiveness of instructional scaffolding in students’ experiments is intricately linked to science teachers’ conceptual foundations and practical abilities to impart science concepts and epistemic practices. Purpose Considering their metaphorical representations, this research unveiled science teachers’ imaginations regarding core epistemic practical work, specifically scientific experiments. Methods The present study engaged 340 Turkish science teachers. The participants used a metaphor imagination task to express their perceptions of scientific experiments. Results The study identified metaphorical conceptualizations organized around structural themes (action, tool, and place). This indicates that the participants perceived the generation of scientific knowledge through experiments as a dynamic process akin to science-as-activity. Furthermore, three predominant conceptual orientations were highlighted: hypothesis testing, knowledge production, and discovery. Teachers viewed scientific experiments as avenues for knowledge generation through discovery, with hypothesis testing playing a significant role. Conclusion The findings suggest that the metaphors conveyed a science-as-logic and science-as-theory perspective rather than a science-as-practice understanding. The study advocates for reconsidering and redesigning teacher training programs to instill the understanding that scientific experiments extend beyond isolated activities. These developmental programs should stress that experimenting is an epistemic activity involving collaborative knowledge generation within social, cultural, contextual, and institutional contexts.

Metaphors Used by Male Batterers in Cases of Gender-Based Violence: A Look at Canadian and Spanish Newspapers

This article explores metaphors used by male batterers in cases of gender-based violence reported in Spanish and Canadian newspapers. It analyzes the most common metaphoric representations of female victims in episodes of gender-based violence documented in newspaper articles in Spain and Canada from 2012 to 2022. The research shows how images of objects, garbage, animals, mental impairment, and prostitution articulate discourses of gender-based violence and how the male perpetrator sees the abused woman through these lenses to dehumanize, exert, and even justify his violent actions.

Metaphorical representation of the VERITE/TRUTH concept in the individual authorial consciousness of G. Flaubert

Metaphorical representation of the VERITE/TRUTH concept in the individual authorial consciousness of G. Flaubert

Biting into the Bitter Reality: A Metaphorical Exploration of Food Disorders

This study investigated the metaphorical representation of eating disorders in a bilingual corpus of blogs. The analysis yielded three common metaphors: ED IS A JOURNEY; ED IS A WAR and ED IS A CONTAINER. Two language-specific metaphors emerged: ED IS A LIVING ENTITY in the Spanish subcorpus and ED IS A BODY in the English subcorpus. The journey and war metaphors demonstrated subtle linguistic nuances, with the Spanish speakers emphasizing the disease’s challenges and the English speakers emphasizing the prospects for recovery. The specific metaphors ED IS A LIVING ENTITY and ED IS A BODY highlighted cultural variations in agency, with the Spanish speakers portraying themselves as passive sufferers and the English speakers viewing themselves as active agents in the recovery process. This cultural divergence aligns with the distinct value orientations of American and Spanish cultures. While the limited text corpus precludes definitive conclusions, the findings align with previous research on conceptual metaphors in ED discourse. Further investigation is warranted to establish the figurative potential of different languages and determine whether either language employs more metaphors in the ED communicative domain.

Nonnormative Communication and Metaphors of Silencing in Two Postcolonial Texts

Brian Friel’s Translations and Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones both use a character with a speech impairment as a metaphorical representation of silencing and its limits under colonialism. When read purely as metaphors, as in the extensive body of criticism on Friel’s play, these characters offer competing visions of what is lost and what is not when precolonial cultures and languages are suppressed. However, a purely metaphorical reading reinforces both the broad tendency to use disability to represent other forms of oppression and the specific tendency to use communication disabilities to represent the supposed silencing of marginalized people, both of which reaffirm ableist conceptions of disability as deficiency and pull our attention away from the individuality of the disabled characters. A closer reading of each text shows the flaws in a strictly metaphorical reading, as both characters complicate the idea that their inability to vocalize is a form of silence, as they demonstrate that people with communication disabilities can have much to tell people and many ways of doing so. This poses a challenge to the overreliance on voice and voicelessness as metaphors in discussions of marginalization.

A Multimodal Metaphorical Representation of Selected Political Cartoons in Nigeria

Complementing studies on the representation of political cartoons which apply metaphorical representation in the portrayal of societal ills, this study explores a multimodal metaphorical representation of selected political cartoons in Nigeria to investigate how cartoonists employed metaphors to represent the current political situation in the country. In the face of the ongoing election petitions and handover of office to the President, among other activities within the political domain in Nigeria, a number of political cartoonists have flooded the online platform with cartoons depicting visual metaphorical representations of happenings within the nation. Such metaphorical representations are semiotically showcased via such cartoons as Go to Court, the Scape Goat, Buhari’s Pet, Corruption, and Original Wahala Received by Me in the portrayal of reality that Nigeria faces today. Given the foregoing, this study combines linguistic and visual modes to form a multimodal representation of the metaphors used in the selected political cartoons. The study adopts a qualitative analysis of 10 political cartoons in Nigeria. It uses Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006, 2020) approach to multimodality and Forceville’s (1996, 2016) view of visual realisations of conceptual metaphor in constructing meaning to investigate how visual images are constructed to cue conceptual metaphors. The results of the study suggest that Nigerian political cartoons rely mainly on visual metaphors as a means of communicating their messages. In addition, the metaphors used often rely on comic, exaggerated and simplistic depictions to convey their meaning effectively and to stir a strong emotional reaction from the readers. Furthermore, the findings of the study emphasise the importance of metaphorical representation in political cartoons and its implications for public discourse. The results reveal ways to improve the power of the metaphorical messages and the impact of the cartoons on public opinion. The study contributes to the multimodal metaphor research field and reveals the Nigerian public’s underlying beliefs and ideologies.

“I Don’t Want War in My House”: Young Children’s Meaning‐Making of War and Peace Through Their Drawings

War and conflict have always been an integral part of humankind, posing significant threats to humanity. This article investigates young children’s conceptualisation of war and peace through their drawings. Taking a qualitative, interpretive research paradigm, eight five‐year‐old children who had never experienced war first‐hand were invited to draw pictures depicting their understandings of war and peace accompanied by their narratives. The drawing and talk processes were video‐recorded. Drawing on the theory of social semiotics, this study considers drawing as a multimodal visual artefact and metaphorical representation to analyse the content as illustrated by children. Employing a phenomenological approach, the analysis centres on the meanings, feelings, and constructs of war and peace that the participant children communicated through 25 drawings. The findings indicate that children used visual elements like lines, colours, symbols, and narratives to convey multilayered meaning‐making, where five overarching themes were identified as the children’s conceptualisations of war: concrete depictions and symbols of war and warfare such as weapons and soldiers; descriptions of identifiable actions of war to include fighting, shooting, and killing; the negative consequences of war including dead people and animals, sadness and homelessness; conceptualising peace as the end of war and as a happy, safe place with beautiful nature; and reflections on war and peace including the dichotomy between the two. The findings show that while children who do not have first‐hand experience of war, struggle to fully comprehend its complexity, they still exhibit a basic understanding of the trauma of war. The findings also emphasise the importance of giving voice to children to communicate their understandings and emotions through drawing.

The Rhetoric of Healthcare and the Moral Debate About Theatre-Funded Hospitals in Early Modern Spain

While early modern Spain may seem a world away, it is an extremely rich and relevant context for gaining a better understanding of the Rhetoric of Health, specifically the power of metaphor, in the related spheres of policy-making and public debate. It was a time and place in which the urban populace’s physical well-being depended upon the fortunes of theatrical performances due to a system of alms for hospitals driven by ticket receipts. Anti-theatricalists argued that the immoral nature of theatrical performances made them spiritually and medically detrimental to society. Pro-theatricalists argued that plays were always a public good on balance because they raised much-needed funds for hospitals. Instead of producing a conflict between morality and public health, each side reinforced their connection until the two topics became nearly inseparable in the sphere of public debate. While pro-theatricalists mainly stayed with their arguments about funding hospitals, anti-theatricalists developed a new strategy of literalising the metaphor of theatre as a “plague of the republic” and arguing that immoral entertainment brought literal disease to the populace as a punishment from God. This exemplifies Stephen Pender’s observation of how, in an early modern medical context, “Rhetoric as a way of perceiving probabilities and adjusting one’s argument to the audience and circumstance offers a model of ethical action and interaction”. This article is organised chronologically to track specific adjustments to a specific public-health debate that rely upon moral metaphors of medicine. Each side wrangled over these metaphors in an effort to break a deadlock in a public-health policy debate with entertainment, finance, and morality at its centre. By the end of the seventeenth century, anti-theatricalists finally found their best rhetorical weapon in the literalisation of the “plague of the republic” metaphor, but it only offered a short-term solution to banning theatre contingent upon the ebb and flow of epidemics. Simultaneously, the finance structure of funding hospitals began to erase the role of hospitals from the longstanding debate about the morality of public theatre. The case of early modern Spain provides valuable lessons about the power of metaphor in the Rhetoric of Healthcare that are still applicable today.

Metaphoric Representations in Saudi GIF-based Cartoons

Metaphoric Representations in Saudi GIF-based Cartoons

Political Expression in Non-mainstream Metaphorical Music:Exploring the Metaphorical Musical Works of Hong Kong, China-based Artist Wong Yiu Ming

The intensification of authoritarian ideology and censorship in China has made it increasingly challenging to communicate politically sensitive messages through cultural products (Ye and Zhao, 2023). To navigate these constraints, it is crucial to examine the strategic use of political metaphors in music. This dissertation explores the political metaphors embedded in the musical oeuvre of Wong Yiu-Ming (Anthony Wong), a prominent artist from Hong Kong, China. Through a comprehensive analysis of imagery and textual content, this study investigates how these metaphors facilitate the expression of political orientations and assesses the impact of Wong's identity and actions on his audience. The findings suggest that non-mainstream music holds a distinct political significance compared to mainstream music. Metaphorical representations in non-mainstream music effectively challenge state power by circumventing censorship, leveraging the global industrial network, enabling political expression, and aligning with the artist's multifaceted identity.

Метафорическая концептуализация экономических отношений в публицистическом дискурсе финансово-экономической нестабильности (на материалах англоязычных публикаций, отражающих кризис потолка госдолга в США в 2023 г.)

The article examines the metaphorical conceptualization of a crisis economic situation in mass media discourse. The article looks at the metaphorical representation of economic relationships in the period of financial uncertainty caused by the inflation and the debt ceiling crisis in the USA in 2023. The aim of the research is to determine and describe the most relevant metaphorical models depicting the economic phenomena in the given historical period. The scientific novelty lies in describing the ways of metaphorical conceptualization of economic relationships in mass media discourse brought to life by new empirical data of the debt ceiling crisis. The research findings include describing the most relevant metaphorical models that depict the economic phenomena in the articles of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist; determining the nominative field of the target concept ECONOMY; extending the corpus of metaphors from crisis discourse and identifying the primary functions of the metaphors used in the texts under the study.

Metaphorical Representation of the Posthuman in Mary E. Pearson’s Novel “The Adoration of Jenna Fox”

Metaphorical Representation of the Posthuman in Mary E. Pearson’s Novel “The Adoration of Jenna Fox”

“Welcome to shege banza”

Abstract This paper examines the forms and functions of Internet memes relating to the fuel subsidy removal policy of Nigeria´s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, with a view to identifying the conceptual metaphors that underlie the creation of the memes. The data, which consist of fifty memes shared in the Nigerian WhatsApp space, are analysed qualitatively using aspects of Kress and van Leeuwen´s (2001) multimodal discourse analysis and Forceville´s (2015) multimodal metaphor theory. The findings reveal that the discourse, design and production of the multimodal resources enhance the conceptualization of the metaphorical representations in the memes. The study also shows the prevalence of the metaphors: fuel subsidy removal is a fraud, fuel subsidy removal is poverty and fuel subsidy removal is inequality among other conceptual metaphors to explain the people´s negative disposition towards the fuel subsidy removal policy. The study concludes that the forms and functions of the subsidy removal-related memes assist in revealing the multimodal conceptual metaphors underlying the memes.

Taking the temperature of time: The influence of temperature on people's metaphorical perspectives on time through emotion

AbstractSpace provides the conceptual scaffolding for the understanding of time. Customarily, the movement of events in time is metaphorically conceptualized from two spatial perspectives: the ego‐moving perspective that envisions an observer moving towards a stationary future and the time‐moving perspective that envisages the future moving towards a stationary observer. Extensive work has shown that emotions of opposite valence can yield contrary temporal perspective preferences. Relatedly, much evidence suggests that physical warmth and coldness prompt antithetical emotional evaluations. Threading together these two strands of insights, the current research explored whether ambient temperatures would influence people's metaphorical perspectives on time through a common link to emotion. Study 1 suggested that when deciphering two temporally ambiguous statements, people in warmer spring preferred the ego‐moving perspective, whilst those in colder winter favoured the time‐moving perspective. To determine a causal effect and test the hypothesized underlying mechanism of emotion, Study 2 examined the priming effect of temperature on temporal perspective preferences and emotional states. The results showed that differential temperatures induced opposite emotional responses, which in turn prompted diametric perspectives on time. These findings were replicated in Study 3 using an alternative measure of perspectives on time. Study 4 further validated the mediating role of emotion in the temperature–time relationship. Taken together, the current findings evince a unidirectional relationship between the incidental environmental factor of temperature and the metaphorical representation of time and accentuate the roles of sensory perception and emotional experience in temporal cognition.

English learners’ beliefs about L2 speaking fluency: Insights from elicited metaphor analysis

AbstractSecond language (L2) learners hold different learning beliefs that influence their interpretation of classroom experiences and their L2 learning process. Developing a thorough understanding of such beliefs is therefore imperative. This article reports the representations of Iranian English‐as‐a‐foreign‐language (EFL) learners’ beliefs about L2 speaking fluency as revealed by elicited metaphors and follow‐up interviews. A group of 24 Iranian EFL learners majoring in teaching English as a foreign language were asked to conceptualize L2 speaking fluency through metaphor. Learners’ metaphorical representations were examined using metaphor analysis and organized into eight metaphor themes through thematic analysis. The findings suggest that metaphor is a suitable tool for gaining insight into learners’ beliefs about L2 speaking fluency and capturing its complex, multifaceted nature. Various aspects were conceptualized, which revealed that learners had a deep understanding of L2 speaking fluency and could represent its multifaceted nature in the learning process. Additionally, this research sheds light on contextual factors that might contribute to learners’ beliefs. The findings fill a gap in research concerning EFL learners’ beliefs about L2 speaking fluency and have useful implications for L2 teachers, learners, and researchers.

REPRESENTATION OF THE GOSPEL CODE IN THE NOVEL “GETTING INTO CHARACTERˮ BY H.L. OLDIE THROUGH THE PRISM OF SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRICAL METAPHOR

In the presented study the novel “Getting into Characterˮ (1991) by Henry Lyon Oldie (the pen name of Dmytro Hromov and Oleh Ladyzhens’ky) is considered as a part of Hamlet`s text of modern Russian-language literature. The peculiarities of the representation of the Gospel code of the novel are analysed. They are conditioned by the author’s concept of the artistic world, which assumes the recreation of reality according to the stage laws. It is established that the transformation of the Gospel code in the novel occurs at the level of the image system (Actor-Hamlet-Christ, mentor/Master-Messiah, pupil/apprentice-follower, stage word as Logos, theatre as religion, abyss as unrealised creative work), motif structure (motifs of mentoring, faith, salvation and resurrection of the soul). The ideological and thematic content of the artistic work is changed (the theme of art and its Creator, the problem of faith and faithlessness, the idea of redemption of human sins – the humanistic mission of the protagonist). It is determined by the theatricality as the most important category of the novel`s poetics, underlying the construction of the artistic reality of “Getting into Characterˮ. Special attention is paid to the representation of Shakespearean theatrical metaphor, as well as to the intertextual connection of H.L. Oldie’s novel with Shakespeare’s “Hamletˮ tragedy.