Within Relevance Theory, it has been suggested that extended metaphors might be processed differently relative to single metaphoric uses. While single metaphors are hypothesized to be understood
the ...creation of an
concept, extended metaphors have been claimed to require a switch to a secondary processing mode, which gives greater prominence to the literal meaning. Initial experimental evidence has supported a distinction by showing differences in reading times between single and extended metaphors. However, beyond potential differences in comprehension speed, Robyn Carston's 'lingering of the literal' account seems to predict qualitative differences in the interpretative mechanisms involved. In the present work, we test the hypothesis that during processing of extended metaphors, the mechanisms of enhancement and suppression of activation levels of literal-related features operate differently relative to single metaphors. We base our work on a study by Paula Rubio-Fernández, which showed that processing single metaphors involves suppressing features related exclusively to the literal meaning of the metaphoric vehicle after 1000 milliseconds of encountering the metaphor. Our goal was to investigate whether suppression is also involved in the comprehension of extended metaphors, or whether the 'lingering of the literal' leads to continued activation of literal-related features, as we take Carston's account to predict. We replicate existing results, in as much as we find that activation levels of literal-related features are reduced after 1000 milliseconds. Critically, we also show that the pattern of suppression does not hold for extended metaphors, for which literal-related features remain activated after 1000 milliseconds. We see our results as providing support for Carston's view that extended metaphor processing involves a prominent role of literal meaning, contributing towards explicating the links between theoretical predictions within Relevance Theory and online sentence processing.
Metaphors in policies can have a significant effect on how ideas are conceptualised and concepts are framed. By investigating the metaphors in a specific recent language policy framework, insights ...into the conceptualisation of language and related concepts can be provided. After identifying all the relevant metaphors, they were categorised into themes and the themes were described with some illustrative examples. The most prominent metaphor theme in the policy is HUMAN, where languages are portrayed as humans. Languages are also depicted as having bodies (EMBODIMENT), and as being physical entities (PHYSICAL) and plants (NATURE). Terminology as money (FINANCIAL) also features. The implications of these metaphors are discussed in the conclusion.
The subjective experience of neurological symptoms provides useful information for assessment, intervention and care. However, research in the subjective experience of aphasia is limited. Word ...production difficulties are universal to aphasia, and interdisciplinary research has produced sophisticated models of the multiple stages and processes involved. Critically, this word-production research does not incorporate the subjective experience of symptoms. We carried out a metaphor-led discourse analysis on autobiographical accounts written by people with aphasia, to determine whether subjective descriptions of word finding difficulties are consistent with the stages and processes of psycholinguistic models.
Metaphor-led discourse analysis was used to identify, code and interpret metaphorical expressions describing word production difficulties in 12 English-language autobiographical accounts written by people with aphasia. These expressions were then analysed to determine the systematic metaphors (i.e., the related concepts which are used consistently to describe a particular topic). Two distinct types of systematic metaphor emerged in the analysis: conventional systematic metaphors frequently recurring throughout all or most of the accounts; novel systematic metaphors used in one or two extended passages in an overlapping subset of the accounts.
4020 metaphorical expressions described word production, predominantly using conventional metaphors about communication and cognition. The conventional metaphor WORD-PRODUCTION AS MOVING OBJECTS OUT OF A CONTAINER was the most prevalent, with elaborations and variations allowing mapping of different symptoms. Other conventional metaphors included: WORD PRODUCTION AS A JOURNEY/HUNTING/HERDING THROUGH A LANDSCAPE, allowing description of effortful or partial retrieval, neuroplastic recovery, and internal strategies; APHASIA AS BODILY IMPAIRMENT, which described various symptoms in terms of different body parts, including self-monitoring difficulties; and APHASIA AS FRAGMENTATION AND PERSONIFICATION OF SELF and SELF AS MACHINE/COMPUTER to describe a disrupted sense of agency and attention. Novel systematic metaphors were used to describe certain symptoms: APHASIA AS SILENCE and APHASIA AS SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE were used to describe a lack of 'inner speech', and APHASIA AS A DISMEMBERED TREE to describe problems making semantic associations.
This research demonstrates the many consistencies of subjective descriptions of word production difficulties in aphasia with theoretical models, but also shows that some subjectively salient symptoms, in particular attentional and self-monitoring difficulties, and a lack of inner speech, are not captured by all theoretical models. Careful attention to the way that people with aphasia describe their symptoms can provide a valuable source of information to be integrated with objective measures.
The conceptual metaphor is a major persuasive tool in political discourse. Therefore, the aim of the research is to analyze the realization of van Dijk’s Ideological Square strategies with the help ...of machine conceptual metaphors used by the presidential candidates during the 2020 electioneering campaign. The data of the research comprise 99 political speeches delivered by Donald Trump and Joe Biden at rallies. Consequently, the following methods of linguistic analysis were used: a Critical Discourse Analysis, a Conceptual Metaphor Analysis in the form of the method of the reconstruction of conceptual mappings, a comparative method, a contextual analysis, and statistical methods. As a result, the analysis demonstrated that conceptual metaphors, which were identified in the corpus, play an important role in realizing the Ideological Square strategies with persuasive goals. Apart from that, it was established that the conceptual metaphor ECONOMY IS A MACHINE is predominant in Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden's discourses. In addition, the data analysis showed that the majority of metaphors were used to highlight the candidate’s own positive sides while exaggerating his opponent’s disadvantages.
Nowadays, in the context of the global ecological crisis, the task of raising ecological awareness becomes more urgent than ever. One of the effective instruments of achieving this end is documentary ...films, which in their turn, make use of conceptual metaphors, which are one of the main instruments of thinking and conceptualization. This article presents an analysis of conceptual metaphors in ecological filmic discourse, in particular English documentaries addressing ecological issues. In my research, I focus on multimodal instantiations of conceptual metaphors. Theoretically, the article departs from the conceptual metaphor theory and moves on to the emergentist metaphor theory. It also extends the latter by taking into account multimodal manifestations of the metaphors under analysis. I consider verbal (written and spoken) and visual (static and dynamic images) semiotic modes. Taking English documentaries on ecological problems as empirical data, I aim to reveal how conceptual metaphors emerge in ecological filmic discourse. According to the emergentist metaphor theory, an individual conceptual metaphor emerges over language in use. The results obtained here show that individual conceptual metaphors in the discourse under study emerge over the elements of several semiotic modes (verbal, visual), as well as their interaction. The visual mode can contribute to conceptualization by vividly illustrating the information presented verbally, by appealing to the embodied experience, or by emphasizing certain features. It was also proved that the pairings of the source and target domains can happen on the basis of the correlation with the embodied or bodily experience; a certain similarity between the source and the target domains; the construal operation of schematization. These three kinds of metaphor motivation help to conceptualize complex ecological concepts or reconceptualize wrongly-perceived ones by appealing to their similarity to easier or better defined concepts, addressing the embodied experience, or schematizing one key feature into the target domain
The role of vividness of imagery in metaphor generation Stephan, Elena; Shidlovski, Daniella; Shanetzki, Maya ...
European journal of social psychology,
February 2023, 2023-02-00, 20230201, Volume:
53, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Pointing to novel links between mental representation and social communication, we examine the association between vividness of imagery and use of metaphors. In a study on individual differences and ...three experiments, we demonstrate that vivid imagery is linked to greater use of metaphors and that this relationship is bi‐directional. We also show that this relationship is stronger in the context of negative valence. We demonstrate that vivid imagery results in greater generation of metaphors (in particular, for negative concepts). In examining the reverse direction of influence, we show that in the negative (rather than positive) context, use of metaphors results in greater perceptions of vividness. We suggest that vividness can be signified and produced by using metaphors that play an important role in meaning making and communication.
This article focuses on some conceptual metaphors and their linguistic manifestations used to refer to perhaps the most famous dichotomy in Translation Studies: that between source-oriented and ...target-oriented translation. The metaphors are cited from Translation Studies books and articles, from a collection of quotes on translation as well as from non-academic online material. I analyze them in order to highlight in what way they reflect the relationship between the source text and the target text, the role of the translator in establishing this relationship, and the translator’s status associated with this role. The conclusion of this analysis suggests that, though the contribution of metaphors to the understanding of these three matters is unquestionable, further investigation on the topic would be welcome in order to reveal both the multitude of angles the metaphors may still be approached from and their more recent developments in Translation Studies.
Group isomorphism and homomorphism are core concepts in abstract algebra, and student understanding of isomorphism has received extensive attention in line with the centrality of this topic. However, ...limited work has directly examined student conceptions of homomorphism or what metaphors students use to express their thought processes while problem solving. Based on interviews with four students, we contrast two students who used predominantly formal definition and mapping-centered metaphors for homomorphism with two who additionally used sameness-centered metaphors and note that the usage or non-usage of sameness-centered metaphors was not indicative of successful problem solving. Implications include the alignment between students’ metaphors and those used in instruction, indicating the importance of attending to metaphors when teaching, and the importance of discussing what is intended by some sameness-based metaphors, such as operation-preservation.
•Students used sameness metaphors for isomorphism tasks and were successful.•All students used mapping and formal definition cluster metaphors for homomorphism.•Two students additionally used sameness-based metaphors for homomorphism.•Most student metaphors had arisen in class previously.•Not all students took up all metaphors that had been used in their class.
Metaphors permeate our daily communication, and they are part of our cognition. The present study investigates metaphors in a corpus-based study during the Coronavirus disease 19 crisis (COVID-19) ...using the Antconc Software. The way written media discourse framed the COVID-19 Crisis, especially in the Middle East received little attention from discourse analysts. The data include news editorials about the Coronavirus disease 19 from April 1, 2020 to July 5, 2020 collected from "the Jordan Times" Newspaper in English. The metaphors will be analysed according to Lakoff and Johnson's (1980; 2003) perspective of Conceptual Metaphors and Charteris-Black (2004) of Critical Metaphor Analysis. The quantitative analysis shows that the conceptual metaphors COVID-19 IS WAR, COVID-19 IS WATER, and COVID-19 IS A PERSON are highly used in the corpus to frame the pandemic. The conceptual metaphor COVID-19 IS WAR is not only used to represent a war against the disease, but also a war between countries. So, the metaphorical use is politicised, and reflects hidden ideology. The quantitative analysis asserts that the context is the decisive factor for the analysis of certain lexical items related to the pandemic and identifying whether they are literally or metaphorically used.
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