Metaphorical Representation Research Articles

Metaphorical Representations of Migrants in the Italian and British Press During a Time of Crisis

Metaphors have a way of influencing the way we feel and think about political and societal issues. The goal of this paper is to examine the metaphorical portrayal of immigrants who entered Italy and the UK between January and December 2011, a time when both the economic and migration crisis occurred. The study follows a mixed-method approach, combining corpus linguistic and critical metaphor analyses in order to identify the metaphorical expressions employed by the press—and the politicians they quote—in the construction of migration discourse. The underlying conceptual metaphor of each metaphorical expression was identified and the findings have shown that the conceptual representation of migrants is centred around the following source domains: natural disaster, container, invasion and animal, with a strong predominance of the first. The discourse focuses on identity-related concerns as they relate to constructs of the ‘other’ and how immigrants are portrayed as a threat and risk. Future research will investigate the metaphorical representation of intra- versus extra-European migrants and will consider both routine and other ‘migration crisis’ periods.

The metaphorical representation of the concept of “mother” in the epic works by Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Rou Shi and Vsevolod Ivanov

The research paper highlights the metaphorical representation of the concept of "mother" in the works of fiction by Ukrainian, Chinese and Russian writers. The authors of this paper analyzed the novel "Behind the curtain" by Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, the story "A Slave Mother" ("为奴隶的母亲") by Rou Shi and the story "Polaia Arapiia" by Vsevolod Ivanov. In Borys Antonenko-Davydovych’s novel "Behind the curtain" the metaphor of "Motherland" is represented by the concept of "mother". In the novel this metaphor is defined by the research paper’s authors from the subtext of the work of fiction. The concept of "mother" in the story of Chinese writer is realized through the metaphor of "female slave", that is presented in the title of the work. The metaphor of "hope" represents the concept of "mother" in the story of Russian writer, this metaphor is represented in the name of the main character. This paper proves that the concept of "mother" in the epic works of Ukrainian, Chinese and Russian writers is also represented through the metaphor of "berehynia", which indicates the similarity of these three works. The concept of "mother" in the novel "Behind the curtain" by Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, the story "A Slave Mother" ("为奴隶的母亲") by Rou Shi and the story "Polaia Arapiia" by Vsevolod Ivanov is represented through similar semantic markers: motherly love, humility, self-sacrifice, mental strength over a man, unselfishness, protection, humanity, kindness.

GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR REPRESENTATIONS IN NEWS ITEM TEXT OF JAKARTA POST

This article aims to investigate grammatical metaphor representation in news item text of Jakarta Post. This research was conducted by applying a descriptive research design. The data were taken from a news item text from Jakarta Post entitled “BREAKING: 189 people on downed Lion Air flight, ministry says.” This article was published on October 29, 2018 in Jakarta Post sites. This text was then analyzed by coding the lexical representation as congruent and incongruent ones. From a news item text Jakarta Post, the finding is Representation of incongruent coding is only 17% of the text; the rest (83%) is congruent coding. Grammatical Metaphors representation in the text is dominated by the changes of verbs becoming nouns around 71%.

THE VOICE BEHIND THE MASK: PROBLEMATIZING THE THEATRE METAPHOR FOR ECSTATIC PROPHECY IN PLUTARCH'S DE PYTHIAE ORACVLIS

AbstractDifferent translations of Plutarch's De Pythiae oraculis 404B reflect an interpretative difficulty not yet adequately thematized by exegetes. Plutarch's dialogues on the Delphic oracle describe two perspectives on mantic inspiration: possession prophecy, where the god takes over the prophetess as a passive apparatus, and stimulation prophecy, where the god incites the prophecy, but the prophetess delivers the oracle through her own faculties. Plutarch understands the Pythia at Delphi to exhibit stimulation prophecy, not possession. One of his metaphors for inspiration comes from the theatre: the god ‘puts the oracle into the Pythia's mouth, like an actor speaking through the mask’ (De Pyth. or. 404B [Russell]). Some translators take the metaphor as describing possession prophecy (Goodwin), while others take it as stimulation prophecy (Babbitt)—in other words, it may describe the view Plutarch affirms or the view he rejects. This article assesses the two alternatives, concluding that the theatre metaphor describes possession prophecy.

Conceptualizations of gratitude: A comparative analysis of English and Persian dissertation acknowledgements written by Persian authors

ABSTRACT The present study applies a cultural conceptualizations framework within the multidisciplinary field of Cultural Linguistics to the analysis of gratitude in dissertation acknowledgements (DAs), as a culturally-embedded genre written in Persian and English by native speakers of Persian. Benefitting from a corpus analysis approach to Cultural Linguistics, 185 English and 196 Persian DAs from language-related fields were selected randomly from DAs written in national universities in Iran as the corpus for the study. Grounded theory-driven analysis revealed a number of similar and different representations of Persian cultural schema and cultural metaphors between the sampled Persian and English DAs. Additionally, the unclosed cultural conceptualizations revealed a selective transfer of Persian cultural conceptualizations to the DAs written in English. The paper concludes with reference to the emergence of Persian English in the DAs. By complementing genre analysis with a Cultural Linguistics perspective, the study contributes to the literature on comparative genre analysis of DAs, moving it beyond move-step analysis to a more systematic in-depth cultural analysis. In addition, the findings advance the literature on Cultural Linguistics by revealing a relationship between cultural schema and cultural metaphor.

Русская тактильная метафора в аспекте эмотивности (на материале лексико-фразеологического поля «Гладить»)

The article deals with the directions of the concept Gladit' (Stroke) metaphorisation in Russian that is presented in lexical and phraseological units with the initial motivating semantics of tactility. The cognitive model of the tactile metaphor is described in terms of figurative and emotional-and-evaluative interpretation of tactile impact and tactile perception processes. The theoretical basis of the research is grounded in the semasiological theory of language figurativeness, the linguistic theory of emotiveness, the cognitive theory of metaphor, and the propositional-frame analysis of the verb semantics. The methods of field modelling, component and contextual analysis of conceptual and connotative semantics, cognitive-pragmatic analysis of metaphorical representations of conceptual content are used. The analysis of the units, which constituent the lexico-phraseological field Gladit' (Stroke), represented by the tactile verbs as well as adjectives, nouns, and adverbs derived from them contributed to revealing the propositional-frame structure of the concept Gladit' (Stroke). Its elements are metaphorically mapped into the spheres of psychic, mental, speech, social, political, everyday mechanical, and physical processes. The language units that represent the metaphor of tactility are noted to express wide range of emotional assessments. The cognitive foundations of metaphorical projections are found to be based on the tactile impact of the tactile signal sender, and the emotional reaction of the subject who perceives it.

The Structure and Communicative Import of Selected Proverbs in Nzema Language and Culture

Adopting an Ethno-pragmatics framework, the current study aims to describe the sentential structures and communicative imports of selected proverbs in Nzema, a Kwa language of Ghana, West Africa. Using data obtained from primary and secondary sources, this study identifies the structural properties of the proverbs by further highlighting structures which contribute to the pragmatic interpretations of these proverbs. The findings revealed that structural properties such as conditional constructions, causative constructions, focus constructions, and simple, compound, and complex-embedded sentences are prevalent in the syntactic manifestation of Nzema proverbs; which make affirmative and negative propositions. Hence, it was observed that these structural features have a significant contribution to determining the pragmatic import of these proverbs, based on the Nzema social norms, values, beliefs, experiences, and cultural worldview. This research also underscores existing postulations that proverbs are ‘multi-layered’ in terms of their interpretations, and they rely heavily on metaphoric representations and contextual use in any situation. Additionally, it was also noted that the oral construction of proverbs in Nzema is grammatically insightful; and thus, provides a window to the syntactic description of the Nzema language.

Keeping Morality "on the Straight" and Never "on the Bend": Metaphorical Representations of Moral Concepts in Straightness and Curvature.

The study of moral conceptual metaphors has been an important topic in recent years. In Chinese culture, the concepts of curvature and straightness are given certain semantic contents, in which curvature refers to being sly while straightness refers to having integrity. In the present study, we used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) paradigm (Experiment 1) and the Stroop paradigm (Experiment 2) to investigate whether there are metaphorical representations of curvature and straightness in moral concepts. The results revealed that the mean reaction time in compatible trials (i.e., moral words accompanied by a straight pattern and immoral words accompanied by a curved pattern) was significantly shorter than that in incompatible trials (i.e., moral words accompanied by a curved pattern and immoral words accompanied by a straight pattern). The Stroop paradigm showed that reaction times were significantly reduced when moral words were presented in a straight font, but there was no significant difference between the presentation of immoral words in a straight font and that in a curved font. The results suggest that mental representations of moral concepts are associated with straightness and curvature in Chinese culture.

An Eco-feminist Study of Lalithambika Antharjanam's "A Leaf in the Storm' and Jamila Hashmi's "Exile"

Abstract: Women are compared to nature. This is not a new phenomenon rather this tendency has been coming since the dawn of civilization because of their reproductive, nurturing, life giving competence .This paper will try to hold forth an eco-feminist study on two Indian Partition short stories. One is Lalithambika Antharjanam’s “A Leaf in the Storm” (1948, “Kodumkaattipetta Orila” in Malayalam), other one is Jamila Hashmi’s” Exile” (1969, “Banbas” in Urdu). An Indian partition story is generally expounded from some common angles such as horror experiences of abducted women during Indian Partition in 1947, trauma, rape, dislocation, bloodshed, etc. due to communal riots of that time. This paper is a new intuition of reading the above mentioned stories, as it is now going to show an eco-feminist study of the same. It will show how eco-feminism as an ideology and spiritual realization heals unmarried girl Jyoti’s ( protagonist of “A Leaf In The Storm”) wounds which she got being impregnated by rival community males during communal riots of Indian Partition and how after getting mental healing Jyoti accepts her newborn baby as her own correlating her baby with natural elements. And it will also show how Bibi, the protagonist of “Exile”, being abducted by Gurpal, gets emotional support by comparing her own existence with that of a “pear” tree. For Bibi, her girl child is the metaphorical main root of her life tree. A transparent metaphorical representation of women to Nature is seen in both the stories. This impersonation evokes a spiritual eco-feminist study.

Me, myself, I:

Digital technologies have sparked a renewed focus on radio personalities. Radio personalities are, by virtue of their profession, performers, and social media offers a stage on which to enact their professional and personal identities. Drawing on Goffman’s (1959) theatre metaphor, this study explored the way radio presenters display their personal and professional identities online. This research evolved from the difficulty that seems to exist in the interplay between a personal online identity and an online personal brand. The qualitative study was embedded within an interpretative and constructivist paradigm. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews with radio personalities of a commercial radio station in South Africa and were triangulated with content analysis of the presenters’ social networking profiles. The findings extend existing scholarship by suggesting that radio personalities display differently configured online characters. The study makes a theoretical contribution by highlighting that radio personalities’ actions on social media should be informed by a strategic marketing approach in achieving individual and business goals.

Joseph Bristow. Oscar Wilde on Trial: The Criminal Proceedings, from Arrest to Imprisonment

The story of Oscar Wilde’s three trials has been told many times—excitedly, day by day as the trials occurred, in the national and world press from The Times to the Illustrated Police News; then subsequently in Charles Carrington’s The Trial of Oscar Wilde from the Shorthand Reports (1906), Christopher Millard’s Oscar Wilde Three Times Tried (1912), and H. Montgomery Hyde’s compression of the latter for Penguin’s Famous Trials series; and regularly on stage and in two films both released, pre-Wolfenden Report, in 1960 starring Robert Morley and Peter Finch, respectively. The story compels as the tragic double to the exquisite mastery of Wilde’s theatrical comedies, Wilde’s fall from one who stood, as he expressed it in his prison letter De Profundis ‘in symbolic relation to his age’ to the most outcast of men evoking the most irreproachably Aristotelian pity and terror. More than one newspaper reporter reached at the time for theatrical metaphors when reporting on the performance in the court of Wilde and his interlocutors. In spite of Wilde’s averring in the first trial, when pressed by the Marquess of Queensberry’s counsel Edward Carson on the meanings of The Picture of Dorian Gray, that ‘novels and life are different things’ (p. 12), the intertwining of art and life in both the trials and the critical history of Wilde’s work have consistently challenged Wilde’s claim, in Dorian Gray’s Preface, that art’s aim is ‘to reveal the artist and conceal the artist’. Rather, Wilde’s life has then and now been read as an aesthetic artefact: ‘Your books,’ Edward Shelley, the most artistic of Wilde’s partners to be dragged into the legal proceedings, wrote to Wilde ‘are part of yourself’ (p. 342).

Postcard Motifs and Littered Landscapes: How the Inglorious Relationship Between Tourism and Waste (Re)Shapes Phu Quoc Island’s Appearance

Abstract Phu Quoc Island is famous for its sun, sand, and sea, but tourism struggles with visible plastic pollution. The colorful plastic waste disrupts tourists’ imaginaries of a pristine, tropical paradise. To counter the threat of image loss, local authorities and the tourism industry create both materially and symbolically ‘clean’ places that fulfil the scenery tourists seek. Drawing on my human geography background, I frame this making, maintaining, and manipulation of attractive environmental features as place-making practices. Yet, the creation of an appealing environment makes it necessary to find places to store the immense amounts of waste. I understand these places as ‘places behind the scene,’ referring to Goffman’s theatre metaphor of front- and backstage settings. The paper illuminates how waste-tourism entanglements foster the creation of front- and backstage places, which ultimately lead to an increasing socio-spatial fragmentation of the island.

LA ORALIDAD ESCRITA. ESTILOS DE REPRESENTACIÓN FIGURATIVA EN LA POESÍA AFRODESCENDIENTE DE NICOMEDES SANTA CRUZ

The poetry of Nicomedes Santa Cruz is one of the most widely disseminated in the country. However, there are few publications on his work linked to the figurative and aesthetic universe. For this reason, the objective of this work is to investigate, from cultural rhetoric and discourse analysis, the marks of orality represented in the poems: “El café”, “¡Oiga usté, señor dotor!” and “Palmero sube a la palma”. From our perspective, the metaphorical representation that comes from orality has made it possible to configure two types of memory in poems: cultural and communicative. One, it fulfills a social storage function and; the other, performs the function of a memory of every day located in everyday life. Finally, we will observe how the linguistic imagination is configured based on multiple traces of it linked to the representation of language.

A multimodal investigation of EFL upper-intermediate learners’ conceptual metaphors of language learning with some psychological implications

Increased attention has been directed toward utilizing visual modes because linguistic modes cannot accurately depict L2 learners’ metaphorical conceptions of their language-acquisition experiences. The goal of this study was to investigate the mental images that Saudi EFL students may have in mind while learning a foreign language. To this end, both verbal and nonverbal metaphorical conceptions were investigated. An experimental group of 12 students was randomly selected. Both the learners’ written responses and drawn descriptions were evaluated to tap into the learners’ mental representations of foreign language learning. The multimodality-based analysis of the upper-intermediate learners’ metaphors demonstrated that the EFL learners’ metaphorical verbal and non-verbal representations had the same perspectives on learning a foreign language. The learners’ positive attitudes were also revealed by the extracted metaphorical concepts. Most of the metaphorical representations showed language learning as an exciting and uniquely personal experience. Few metaphorical representations showed that learning English was an awful experience.

Interactive Moiré Patterns Reflecting on the Traditional Nanjing Baiju

AbstractThis article presents a human-machine design approach to the artistic and metaphorical representation of the traditional weaving scenes featured on Yunjin brocade as interactive moiré patterns accompanied by Nanjing Baiju performance. After extracting the basic elements of the eye-shaped moiré patterns, the authors systematically recomposed them to mimic the weaving process. They then wrote an algorithm to generate moiré patterns that respond dynamically to the unique sounds weavers make while weaving, symbolizing the gazes and eye contacts among the weavers. This became an interactive sonic installation, Sweating Weaving Room, which represents the rhythmic machine sounds, the Nanjing Baiju, and the hard labor and harmonious work hidden behind the glamorous brocade.

Визуальная метафора в сатирических поликодовых текстах интернет-коммуникации: на примере карикатур и демотиваторов об антироссийских санкциях

The aim of the study is to describe visual metaphors as means of establishing an evaluative and satirical attitude of an addressee to the phenomena of global policy. The article represents the visual metaphor conception, pays special attention to metaphors in political caricatures and demotivators, which allow openly and quite accurately expressing public, often critical opinion. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the functional and pragmatic description of metaphorical models used in political cartoons and demotivators. This article considers a visual metaphor as a means to highlight more vividly the events taking place both in the country and in the world. The results obtained showed that through visual metaphors, a critical attitude to ongoing events is represented, aimed at forming public consciousness in relation to the sanctions policy and its participants. The paper emphasizes some metaphorical representations of anti-Russian sanctions, which are compared with a boomerang, a bomb, etc. The article focuses on the analysis of the most productive metaphorical model “anti-Russian sanctions are a boomerang”.

Metaphorical representation of coronavirus in Spanish and Brazilian cartoons

The worldwide outbreak of Covid-19 epidemic has been profusely covered by the mass media in 2020. This research focuses on the metaphorical content of cartoons from prominent Spanish and Brazilian newspapers published online in March and April 2020. In these satirical drawings the virus is portrayed through two main modes of representation: pictorial and verbal. The conceptual metaphors conveyed in each cartoon were identified, analysed and classified into four source domain scenarios: arts and literature, conflicts, sports and games, and other. Mainly, two theories coming from Cognitive Linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and Multimodal Metaphor Theory, have been used to approach this contrastive study in which the metaphorical representation of Covid-19 serves to offer a humorous and persuasive point of view about the impact of the pandemic in the Spanish and Brazilian society and the way the most important politicians of each country dealt with the sanitary crisis.
 
 Keywords: Spanish and Brazilian newspapers; cartoons; Covid-19; metaphorical representation; pictorial and multimodal metaphors.

Alcoholic herbal sex drinks and the construction of masculinities in Nigeria

Extant works on masculinities have focused on their differential patterns in Nigeria. However, none of these studies has examined how masculinities are constructed through the metaphorical representation of alcoholic herbal sex drinks and their functions. Drawing insights from Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, Forceville’s visual metaphor and van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to ideology to analyze the names together with verbo-visual conceptualization of alcoholic herbal sex drinks, this paper discusses some of the subcultural ideologies that delineate masculinities among the manufacturers, sellers, and consumers of these drinks in southwestern Nigeria. Analysis of the data reveals the construction of masculinities by this group in terms of the territorial and subordinating sexual status of the male. Also, the male sex organ and muscular male body are conceptualized by this group as sexual weapons, controllers of the female sexual satisfaction, and the cleaning agents for vagina. The paper concludes that these drinks and the associated sexual beliefs reflect some of the trending subcultural ideologies that discursively shape the construction of masculinities in Nigeria.

Interactive Moiré Patterns Reflecting on the Traditional Nanjing Baiju

Abstract The paper presents a human-machine design approach to the artistic and metaphoric representation of the traditional weaving scene of Yunjin brocade as interactive Moiré patterns accompanied by Nanjing Baiju. We extract the basic elements of Moiré patterns and systematically recompose them to mimic the weaving process. Then, we wrote an algorithm to generate eye-shaped Moiré patterns responding dynamically to the unique sounds weavers make while weaving, symbolizing the long and tiring gaze of warp and weft, and eye contacts between weavers. Finally, we develop a sonic interactive installation with the rhythmic machine sound and Nanjing Baiju Sweating Weaving Room, visualizing the hard labor and harmonious work hidden behind the glamourous brocade.

Narracje o tworzeniu, czyli „ciemność i magia”

Narratives on Creating, or “Darkness and Magic” The presence of autothematic narratives in the three basic models of culture – literary, audiovisual and digital – is a crucial factor influencing the diversity and dynamic evolution of the story on creating. The notion of autopoiesis introduced by the neurobiologists and sociologists widens the spectrum of research on creative process in literary texts, and more broadly in texts of culture. In the connection with these two functional aspects of autopoiesis: in the traditions of different medias and multiple research directions analysing the creative process, the author presents three models of modernist novel on creating. The interpretation of Testament by Witold Gombrowicz allows us to indicate, firstly, the process of narrative identity of writer constituting itself; secondly, the metaphor of theatre’s backstage providing autopoiesis with a performative dimension; and thirdly, the poetic rules of storytelling about creation, which build up its epiphanic aura.