View Of Metaphor Research Articles

Michael Polanyi and Bessel A. van der Kolk on the Healing Power of Metaphor

In this essay, I contend that Polanyi’s view of metaphor as outlined in Meaning (1975), has important heuristic implications for understanding the way metaphor functions in trauma therapy. I also contend that in his seminal book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score (2014), Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., although he rarely uses the term, relies on metaphor as a vital element in his treatment of trauma victims. Analysis of Van der Kolk’s practice further confirms and extends Polanyi’s view of the bodily roots of all knowledge. Juxtaposing Polanyi’s theory and Van der Kolk’s practice demonstrates how unspeakable trauma can be overcome through the embodied metaphoric/linguistic matrix of human speech.

THE ROLE OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN CONCEPT PROFILING

The article systematizes the main methodological aspects of the study of conceptual metaphor. Attention is focused on solving the following tasks: to reveal the essence of ‘conceptual metaphor’, to determine the types of conceptual metaphor, to systematize the methodological aspects of the study of conceptual metaphor. It is argued that metaphor is a cognitive tool that allows to present an abstract concept difficult for comprehensionthrough another more empirically studied concept. The cognitive-linguistic view of metaphor is considered, according to which metaphor works atthree levels: supra-individual, individual and sub-individual. The supra-individual level corresponds to how a given language and culture reflect decontextualized metaphorical patterns,itcorrelates with the level of domains and frames. The individual level corresponds to the metaphorical cognitive system used by individual speakers, correlates with the use of mental processes in mental space, when universal aspects of the meaning of metaphorical expression in a particular communicative situation contains the most specific information acquiredwith experience. The sub-individual level corresponds to the universal aspects of various kinds of embodiment, corresponds to the level of image-schemes, generalizing models of which help to explain the meaning of abstract concepts. Conceptual metaphors connect abstract concepts with physical ones (based on perception), as a result of which the conceptual system becomes embodied, thoroughly based on perception. It is concluded that concepts consist of metaphorical structures that we have in our long-term memory and that provide a conceptual substrate of meaning in general and meaning ofa particular language in particular. Image-schemes, domains and frames, taken together, constitute the content of concepts, which gets an emotional color in the mental space of each individual speaker

Book Review. A New Insight into Theory of Conceptual Metaphor

Book Review. A New Insight into Theory of Conceptual Metaphor

The discourse-based approach towards the translation of metaphors: ‘Journey’, ‘movement’, and ‘body metaphors’ in translation of the Sesotho novel “Chaka”

In a departure from other studies on metaphor translation, this paper employs the discourse-based approach to examine the procedures employed in translation of metaphors used in the Sesotho novel, Chaka, into English. The findings show that there is an alignment with Newmark’s (1988) framework even though the framework is prescriptive and is based on the traditional view of metaphor as purely linguistic. The substitution of a metaphor with a metaphor is the most frequent procedure. There is also the translation of metaphor into simile, the translation of metaphor into sense and the deletion of metaphor. The factors that determine the procedures are: the existence of metaphors with very close similar semantic and pragmatic functions; the existence of TL metaphors that are based on the same cognitive mappings as the SL metaphors, and closely resemble them; the existence of culture-specific metaphors that can be only be decoded if converted to simile; existence of culture-specific metaphors that may not be decoded even if simile is used and the employment of a metaphor for a rhetorical style that is foreign to TT readers. The use of the procedures creates a text that is idiomatic and generally resembles the ST in message, style and language.

Chris Freeman's concept of evolution–A critique of the misuse of biological analogies in macroeconomics

On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Chris Freeman, this paper presents an overview and analyzes his concept of economic evolution and his other contributions to the field of economics. Chris Freeman was one of the leading economists in the field of evolutionary economics during the second half of the twentieth century. Together with Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, as well as a number of other scholars, he contributed to establishing and developing a research program which extends from opening the black box of innovation through to the macroeconomic implications of long-term changes in the economy, technology and social organization. Additionally, Freeman suggested a new macroeconomic foundation for microeconomics – the unfinished legacy of our science. The chapter investigates how these foundations were developed as a critical view of inadequate metaphors from biology.

“The Force and Energy that Lie in the Several Words”: Joseph Addison's Defense of Metaphor

This essay reads Joseph Addison’ views on imagination and on a set of interrelated tropes—wit, metaphor, personification—from the perspective afforded by the interaction view of metaphor. By adopting this analytical standpoint, the essay documents how Addison relies, often unwittingly, on a propositional model of signification in order to put forward his strongest claims on literary language, imagination, and aesthetic judgment. Such a model constitutes a significant departure from Addison's starting point, the referential model of signification that premises and circumscribes John Locke's account of rhetorical language. This reading offers not only a synthesizing account of Addison's views across a range of texts, but it also enables a new and more nuanced placement of Addison in eighteenth-century aesthetics.

“The Force and Energy that Lie in the Several Words”: Joseph Addison’s Defense of Metaphor

This essay reads Joseph Addison’ views on imagination and on a set of interrelated tropes—wit, metaphor, personification— from the perspective afforded by the interaction view of metaphor. By adopting this analytical standpoint, the essay documents how Addison relies, often unwittingly, on a propositional model of signification in order to put forward his strongest claims on literary language, imagination, and aesthetic judgment. Such a model constitutes a significant departure from Addison’s starting point, the referential model of signification that premises and circumscribes John Locke’s account of rhetorical language. This reading offers not only a synthesizing account of Addison’s views across a range of texts, but it also enables a new and more nuanced placement of Addison in eighteenth-century aesthetics.

How metaphoremes emerge

Abstract According to the dynamic view of metaphor, the complexities of metaphorical expressions are emergent products of language use. However, this view lacks an explicit mechanism to account for the process. This paper puts forward a model named single-scope integration network with entrenchment (SINE), and uses if-then rules in the model to explain the temporal order and regularities that the metaphoremes of a metaphor should follow in their emergence. The validity of the model is tested in the case studies of Chinese verb metaphors, which reveal four if-then rules that govern the metaphoreme emergence of Chinese verb metaphors. These if-then rules are obtained via the analysis of the occurrence order of metaphoremes by performing DepCluster, a machine learning tool for collostruction generation, over a large-scale diachronic corpus. The case studies demonstrate that the proposed model is applicable to Chinese verb metaphors.

An Ornamentalist View of Metaphor in Arabic Literary Theory

The aim of the present paper is to examine the kind of thinking and the chain of assumptions that lie behind the reduction of metaphor to a mere ornament in Arabic literary theory. For this purpose, Arabic ornamentalist thinking is traced from the third century A.H. (the ninth century A.D.) to the seventh century A.H. (the thirteenth century A.D.). This is not to say, however, that the seventh century marks the end of such thinking in Arabic literary theory, but that at that time the Arabic literary theory, and the theory of metaphor, was developed into fixtures with an increasing emphasis given to form over content and the art of verbal expression in general. Inordinate attention was given to ornate style, and rhetoric became an arena for displaying verbal acrobatics. The axioms, "closeness of resemblance" and "congruity of metaphorical elements," represent metaphor's highest degree of formalization and stereotyping. That is why some of the images in classical theory are mainly based on complete parallelism between the objects compared, particularly with regard to form, size and color. From that time onwards, the fixtures of the classical theory have been kept intact. Metaphor, and rhetoric in general, is nowadays reduced to textbooks to be studied in abstract and rigid terms developed by the classical theory. Arabic rhetoric is a dead discipline: it is merely an ornamental repertoire of figures that could only be used as a sweet adorner for the language.

The Interior World of Books, Browsing, and Collecting Inside the City

A most desirable and collectable material object is the ubiquitous book. A bound composite of printed pages with words and images, it contains a microcosm of myriad narrative viewpoints, experiences, and imaginations. Metaphorically, a book compactly conceals a kind of interior space that protects the provocative lives of people, their character, ideas, and explorations, thus communicating different scales of interiority. Book collectors, called bibliophiles, revere and covet books as their object of desire. The bibliophile as seeker-collector-seller partakes of simple and complex transactions that essentially protect the lives of the books. This essay concentrates on two main book browsing locations within the urban context of Istanbul, Turkey, and the everyday interior spaces of the sahaf, the secondhand bookseller, who continues a tradition of selling new, pre-owned or secondhand ordinary or rare books. Its text moves between historic information and first-person narrative based on fieldwork to express and expand views of interiority theory, through reality and metaphor. The many scales of individual and collective impulses found inside the city streets and their inserted passage structures are exemplified by the significant simultaneity of the desire for the hand-held object and its hand-to-hand exchange.

Surveying views of metaphor vs. literal language in psychotherapy

Abstract Five key therapeutic functions of metaphors are often discussed by psychotherapists. They (i) help clients express emotions and experiences, (ii) help therapists and clients explain difficult concepts, (iii) introduce new frames of reference, (iv) help work through client resistance, and (v) build a collaborative relationship between therapists and clients. Research on how these functions are enacted in psychotherapy talk tends to assume that they are indeed perceived as such by clients, and that metaphorical language is preferred to comparable literal language in performing them. This paper reports a survey study (N = 84) to critically interrogate these assumptions. Participants read two constructed therapy dialogues, controlled and counterbalanced for presentation sequence, where therapist and client discuss an issue using metaphorical and literal language respectively. Each dialogue is followed by a 15-item questionnaire to rate how well the presumed functions were performed (e.g. the therapist and client can work effectively together, the therapist is able to explain difficult concepts). A combined Confirmatory (CFA) and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) suggests that, instead of the five distinct functions proposed in the literature, participants discerned three functions which reflect a more holistic view of what metaphors can do. A second EFA conducted on literal responses yielded only two factors. This contrast in factor structure further suggests that (i) literal language is less functionally nuanced, and (ii) metaphors are not simply perceived as an ‘add-on’ to literal language, but are evaluated across an extended narrative in fundamentally different ways. Within-subjects metaphor vs. literal ratings of the items under the emergent three-factor structure were then compared. Metaphor ratings were significantly higher in all factors (p < 0.01), suggesting that metaphorical language is indeed perceived as more effective than literal language when discussing clients’ issues. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.

Developing conceptual metaphor–based tasks in the teaching and learning of idiomatic expressions

AbstractGiven the positive effect of teaching idiomatic expressions using the conceptual metaphor (CM) view, and the many benefits of using language tasks in English as a second or foreign language context, this article aims to help teachers design and develop tasks on the basis of CM and task‐based language teaching (TBLT). In this study, a series of tasks was designed around idiomatic expressions derived from the CM ANGER IS A HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER using the three‐phase TBLT framework: pretask, main task, and posttask. The pretask phase is meant to introduce the target anger expressions to learners, the main task phase to give learners the opportunity to use these expressions, and the posttask phase to raise learners’ consciousness about these expressions. The objective of these tasks is to promote interaction among learners and as such facilitate negotiation of meaning and form, leading to the learning of the anger expressions in a natural manner. The tasks were designed in such a way that teachers can easily create and implement them in actual classroom settings, especially in those Asian countries where teacher‐centric teaching style is still prevalent.

Your Father's a Fighter; Your Daughter's a Vegetable: A Critical Analysis of the Use of Metaphor in Clinical Practice.

There are two widespread beliefs about the use of metaphors in clinical medicine. The first is that military metaphors are harmful to patients and should be discouraged in medical practice. The second is that the metaphors of clinical practice can be judged by and standardized in reference to neutral criteria. In this article, I evaluate both these beliefs, exposing their shared flawed logic. This logic underwrites the false empiricist assumptions that metaphorical language and literal language are fundamentally distinct, play separate roles in communication, and therefore can be independently analyzed, systematized, and prescribed. Next, using the resources of ordinary language philosophy, I lay out a theoretical view of medical metaphors that is grounded in metaphor use within clinician-patient relationships. Finally, drawing on the work of philosopher Max Black, I diagram a practical conceptual framework for clinicians to use when they consider whether a metaphor is appropriate for a specific patient encounter.

Maniheist Uygurca Metinlerde Bir Kavramsal Metafor Örneği

Felsefi ve derin bir kavram olan metafor, araştırmalarda genellikle benzetmeyle ilgili edebî bir mesele olarak incelenmiştir. Kavramsal metafor görüşü, geleneksel metafor araştırmalarının seyrini değiştirmiştir. Çağdaş metafor kuramında, kavramsal metaforlar ve dilsel metaforlar birbirinden ayrılmıştır. Soyut düşünce ürünü olan kavramsal metaforlar, dilde çeşitli örneklerle dilsel bir metafor olarak görünürler. Bu çalışmada, kavramsal metaforların Maniheist çevreye ait Eski Uygur Türkçesi metinlerdeki dilsel örnekleri tanıklanmaya çalışılmıştır. Bu metinlerde bulunan bazı çok anlamlı sözcüklere metaforik kullanım açısından yaklaşılmıştır. Ayrıca, sözcükler değerlendirilirken, sözcüklerin tarihî Türk dillerindeki anlamları göz önünde tutulmuştur.

Translation of Metaphor from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

Metaphor not only contains the characteristic connotation of the language itself, but also the words that cannot be expressed in a straightforward manner. The traditional metaphor view holds that metaphor is only used to beautify and modify language, but cognitive linguistics regards metaphor as a mapping of thinking, mainly through people’s existing experience and knowledge to understand new things, that is to say, from a known concept domain to understand another unknown concept domain. Therefore, metaphor can be regarded as a medium for establishing connection between the source domain and the target domain, and it also plays an important role in our study and daily life. This paper analyzes the translation of metaphor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Through the translation of various metaphors, we find that in the process of metaphor translation, we need to distinguish the source schema from the image schema metaphor; also it is necessary to distinguish the type of text; as well as the cultural meaning behind the text and the value to be conveyed. The translation strategy of direct translation or free translation, naturalization or alienation is used to translate the target domain.

Metaphor as a dynamic complex emergence an analysis of the discourse of violence victims

Metaphor is here approached as a complex emergence which results from many internal and external factors such as those of a bio-psychological nature among others. Based on an embodied view which assumes that cognition results from "structural couplings that bring forth a world" (VARELA; THOMPSON; ROSCH,1993); it is assumed that socio-culturally shared beliefs, values and attitudes, individuals' life history, their affective and psychological states, besides embodied factors interact dynamically to cause metaphor emergencies to occur. Such metaphors might incorporate verbal language, gestures, body language etc. Having this view of metaphor as a basis, data gathered from three focal groups composed by volunteer violence victims are analysed. Findings from participants’ talks about ways they cope with the threat posed by urban violence, point to the emergence of several systematic metaphors. VIOLENCE IN FOOTBALL IS A REPELLING FORCE and UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENT SOCIAL GROUPS IS SEEING THEM are the two systematic metaphors analysed here.

The Gastronomical “She”: Narrating (Dis)Embodiment in M.F.K. Fisher's Memoir

This article addresses the deviations between the authorial figure of M.F.K. Fisher and the woman who crafted her, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. It considers M.F.K. Fisher's reputation as a figure in food studies and explores the potentially problematic implications of the overwhelmingly celebratory response to Fisher's metaphorical approach to food writing in her memoir, The Gastronomical Me. By considering Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher's complicated, often negative relationship with food, as highlighted in her journal entries and interviews, the author argues that The Gastronomical Me presents a disembodied protagonist who sidesteps corporeal and gender-specific implications of the sensory-driven, unapologetic eating she promotes. Considering the genre of life writing, the historical context in which the text was published, and Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher's background, this article calls for The Gastronomical Me's treatment as an imaginative recreation of lived experiences (one that could more accurately be named The Gastronomical She), rather than a fact-based example of life writing. Viewing the memoir in this manner allows readers to distinguish M.F.K. Fisher more clearly as a fictionalized version of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, an outlet for which metaphorical views of hunger and consumption afforded Mary Frances space to escape from cultural pressures and personal struggles with her body.

The role of metaphor in communication and thought

AbstractMetaphor is pervasive in everyday communication. It is known to help people understand complex topics, communicate efficiently, and influence others. In this paper, we provide a review of the literature on the utility of metaphor, describing key findings and controversies while underscoring recent experimental and theoretical advances. We begin with a brief introduction to metaphor and offer a critical assessment of the claim that conventional metaphors in language reflect underlying conceptual representations and processing, a view associated with Lakoff and Johnson's groundbreaking conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). We then discuss recent research that examines whether and how metaphor shapes attitudes and reasoning, outlining some of the cognitive, affective, and social forces that moderate the efficacy of metaphors on decision making. Throughout the paper, we highlight theoretical implications of the research and identify challenges that warrant further investigation in the study of metaphor. In the end, this work paints a complex and dynamic view of metaphor in communication and cognition.

Bases are Not Letters: On the Analogy between the Genetic Code and Natural Language by Sequence Analysis

The article deals with the notion of the genetic code and its metaphorical understanding as a “language”. In the traditional view of the language metaphor of the genetic code, combinations of nucleotides are signs of amino acids (see the table of the genetic code). Similarly, words combined from letters (speech sounds) represent certain meanings. The language metaphor of the genetic code (Markos and Faltýnek, Biosemiotics 4(2), 171–200, 2011) assumes that the nucleotides stay in the analogy to letters, triples to words and genes to sentences (Jakobson 1971). We propose an application of mathematical linguistic methods on the notion of the genetic code. We provide quantitative analysis (n-gram structure, Zipf’s law) of mRNA strings and natural language texts. This analysis is sensitive to the detection of the code (language) units hierarchy. We also take into consideration a representative quantitative analysis of DNA, RNA and proteins. Our analysis of mRNA confirms an assumption that the design of the genetic code cannot analogize DNA bases and letters. The notion of the letter is much more appropriate if analogized with triplets or amino acids (see Lackova et al, Theory in Biosciences 136(3–4), 187–191, 2017).

Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates by Carrie Figdor

Reviewed by: Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates by Carrie Figdor Stephen K. Reed FIGDOR, Carrie. Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. x + 220 pp. Cloth, $55.00 The objective of Pieces of Mind is to defend the literalist claim that the best interpretation of the extension of psychological predicates to other domains is a literal one. The literal interpretation justifies the use of terminology such as plants “decide,” bacteria communicate “linguistically,” and neurons “prefer.” A literal extension of psychological predicates would provide a unified account across a wide range of new discoveries in the biological sciences. In chapter 2 on qualitative analogy the author discusses several cases in which psychological predicates are extended to nonhuman domains. One case is the signaling capacity of plants, which have many components found in the animal neural system including voltage-gated channels and hormones that play a qualitatively similar role to neural chemicals found in animals. The result, according to the author, is that analogies between [End Page 598] plants and animals can now be conceptualized within an information-processing framework that launched cognitive science. Another case is communication among bacteria. Communication allows colonies to develop collective memory, generate common knowledge, organize themselves, and learn from experience. In chapter 3 on quantitative analogy Figdor identifies similarity relations based on mathematical models and equations. She extends the Lotka-Volterra model of population dynamics to the decision-making of fruit flies. She next extends a drift-diffusion model of human decision making to the anticipating of neurons. The extent to which such quantitative analogies reveal semantic similarities is a complex issue that is advanced by the author’s arguments. For a different perspective see my “Constraints on the Abstraction of Solutions” (1989). Three chapters are devoted to defending the literal view against semantic alternatives that the author labels the nonsense view, the metaphor view, and the technical view. The metaphor view is the most applicable to cognitive science because of the many studies that have investigated it. Studies in cognitive science typically involve relationships among terms, which Figdor argues is consistent with literalism. Consider the statement “resonator neurons prefer inputs having frequencies that resonate with the frequency of other oscillations.” Use of the term “prefer” is not a similarity mapping between neurons and humans but a mapping between what neurons do and what humans do. I found myself in agreement with the many examples that Figdor uses to support the literal interpretation of psychological terms. But she has selected the low-hanging fruit—the clear cases—to support her position. In my collaboration with ontologists to build cognitive ontologies we have had to make many decisions regarding which cognitive terms generalize across different domains and which terms do not. Our efforts begin with definitions, and here is where I have a problem with Figdor’s analysis. In her concluding summary she states, “Literalism agrees that psychological concepts are anchored in human experience and allows that we can still gain insight from phenomenology but these concepts were never defined within a closed formal system.” The extension of psychological terms should begin with their definitions, but it is difficult to find definitions in Pieces of Mind. Definitions are where the rubber hits the road. One challenge is that words often have multiple definitions. In our article “A Framework for Constructing Cognition Ontologies Using WordNet, FrameNet, and SUMO” (2015), Adam Pease and I began by deciding which definitions of a word are relevant for cognitive theories. For instance, WordNet has six definitions of “attention,” but we selected only two as theoretically important: (1) attention is the faculty or power of mental concentration, and (2) attention is the process whereby a person concentrates on some features of the environment to the (relative) exclusion of others. A second challenge is that tools in the information sciences may have different definitions of the same word. Fortunately, some tools have [End Page 599] coordinated definitions, such as for “seeing” and “looking” in WordNet, FrameNet, and the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). Each defines seeing as perceiving by sight and looking as seeing with attention. They all make a corresponding distinction between...