Metaphor has intrigued philosophers, rhetoricians, and poets since Antiquity. The phenomenon of metaphor has been mostly interpreted as a figure of speech, and only in last decades of the 20th ...Century the so-called cognitive turn defined metaphor as a product first of the thought and then of the language. According to this view metaphor is used in everyday life and it is present, therefore, potentially, in every type of texts. Furthermore, metaphor can be identified also in images that convey specific concepts. Both as a figure of speech and as a cognitive phenomenon, the research of metaphor in the ancient Near Eastern written sources has never been thoroughly investigated. Yet the study of metaphor will consent to win a deeper knowledge of the texts and of the system of thinking of the cultures that produced those texts. Therefore, this volume edited by Marta Pallavidini and Ludovico Portuese aims to research metaphor from different perspectives by considering its presence in ancient Near Eastern written documents. The contributions focus on several ancient Near Eastern cultures and encompass more than two millennia as well as examine various topics, from Sumerian literature, to Hittite written sources, to Neo-Assyrian art to the Biblical world.
Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been thousands of articles on the use of metaphor to describe the crisis. A Google search yields more than 7000 hits. Indeed, an avalanche of ...metaphors has already been used to describe the Covid-19 pandemic. From war and oceanic metaphors to the dreaded phrase ‘ramping up’, the language and images used by politicians, journalists, scientific experts, commentators, artists, comedians, and meme-makers to understand the crisis are not neutral constructs. But far more disappointing than the use of inappropriate or politically incorrect metaphors is the fact that there is no single scholarly article that systematically studies the influence of the pandemic on cognition, especially metaphorical conceptualization. That is, how has the coronavirus pandemic changed the meaning of home, love, Halloween, social media platforms, and so on for us? Technically speaking, how has the crisis triggered, prompted, or simply facilitated the selection and employment of particular conceptual metaphors or their linguistic and non-linguistic manifestations? This article, based on a large-scale corpus of political cartoons, aims to answer that question – how the pandemic itself becomes a metaphor. I show that various different metaphor targets (including WAR, ISRAEL, TURKEY, DONALD TRUMP, BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ARAB DICTATORS, THE KUWAITI NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, THE JORDANIAN CABINET, THE IRANIAN REGIME, MILITANT GROUPS, POVERTY, RACISM, CALENDAR, CORRUPTION, INJUSTICE, RUMORS, POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS, THE GLOBE, THE UNION JACK, THE EUROPEAN UNION, THE US FAR RIGHT, THE 50 STARS OF THE AMERCAN FLAG, US-RUSSIAN RELATIONS, HOUSEWIVES, PERSONAL BELONGINGS, LOVE, QURBAN BAYRAM, CHRISTMAS, HALLOWEEN, ARABIC DRAMA, SCHOOL BAG, AWARENESS, and SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES such as Facebook, among many others) are all explained with reference to coronavirus-related terms or the source domain of CORONAVIRUS/VACCINATION. The sheer frequency of occurrences of CORONAVIRUS metaphors (a total of 175 out of 497 relevant multimodal cartoons, that is, more than 35%) demonstrates and makes a case for the necessity to examine the effect of context, in particular topical news and physical circumstances, in the cognitive linguistic study of creative metaphor. In short, the results provide initial evidence that new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19 have a negative and significant effect on cognition (or shape societies’ worldviews).
Realidad; Representación; Ontologismo; Crítica antropológica Abstract Addressing recent debates that have arisen between Mesoamericanist anthropology and those of an ontological nature, the present ...work illustrates the issues implied by the superficial treatment of the notion of reality in the discourse of our subjects of study. Through a critical review of some of the proposals that have had the greatest impact in our region of study, it becomes clear' that the different in which that we conceive reality directly impinge upon the relations that we establish with alterity. ...several historical and ethnographic cases are examined to underscore the importance of the distinction between reality and representation to truly grasp the indigenous perspective. En Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT), Motion tabled at the 2008 meeting of the University of Manchester, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/academic_staff/mJholbraad/selected-papers/GDAT_-_CA_2010.pdf Horcasitas, F. y Ford, S. O. de.
Introduction
Metaphor is more than understanding and expressing an abstract concept in terms of a concrete one. Pre-linguistically, it is the conceptual creativity that resides in the entities yet to ...be expressed. Linguistically, it is the invention that expands the boundaries of words. Contextually, it is the preservation or generation of polysemy that brings about a confrontation of meanings. As such, metaphor is also a universal creative mechanism of semantic innovation and an artful discourse feature. Both Metaphor and Translation Studies, however, have mostly addressed conventional metaphors and professional translators, thereby neglecting students' behaviors when translating creative metaphors, especially at discourse level.
Methods/Aim
The main objective of this task-based descriptive study is therefore to investigate to what extent and how the translation strategies spontaneously adopted by 73 translator students are influenced by local, creative metaphors and by their textual patterning. The analysis of the data showed that while isolated, non-conflictual metaphors did not pose any challenges, the diverse patterns of conflictual ones hampered the translation outcome. At the micro-level, literal and explicitation strategies result in neutral, less connotative renditions. When omission prevails in correlation to metaphor clusters, the target texts appear more condensed, overtly informative, and lack the metaphorical diversity and cohesion of the source ones. As a result, the appealing linguistic jocularity deriving from exploiting metaphors and puns is toned down.
Discussion
Since students tend to avoid creative solutions, these findings will serve as a preliminary discussion on how students' strategic and textual competence can benefit from cognitive-informed, conflict-based inferencing skills by exploiting the metalinguistic nature of creative metaphors and puns.
The immense increase in metaphor theory and research over the past decades is posing a threat of fragmentation to the field, which has been responded to by calls for new and more encompassing ...approaches to virtually all aspects metaphorical. This article argues that the opposite response may be more productive. By focusing on a different way of theorizing metaphor and its comprehension, existing theories and data can be re-ordered in an alternative and coherent way, which moreover breaks new grounds in tying up both with a general theory for all utterance comprehension as well as a general theory for all cognition as involving fast and slow thinking. The core of the new theory highlights the differentiation between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor use, related to how people see the use of a metaphor as a metaphor in communication, that is, as a metaphor that counts as a metaphor between language users. It shows how this distinction can be employed to make sense of many insights about metaphor and its comprehension in innovative ways. The article outlines the foundations of the new theory and discusses how existing data, old and new, can be seen as supporting the new proposals.
People often think, feel, and behave metaphorically according to conceptual metaphor theory. There are normative sources of support for this theory, but individual differences have received scant ...attention. This is surprising because people are likely to differ in the frequency with which they use metaphors and, therefore, the frequency with which they experience the costs and benefits of metaphoric thinking. To investigate these ideas, a 5-study program of research (total N = 532) was conducted. Study 1 developed and validated a Metaphor Usage Measure (MUM), finding that people were fairly consistent in their tendencies toward literal thought and language on the one hand versus metaphoric thought and language on the other. These differences were, in turn, consequential. Although metaphor usage predicted susceptibility to metaphor transfer effects (Studies 2 and 3), it was also linked to higher levels of emotional understanding (Studies 4 and 5). The findings provide support for several key premises of conceptual metaphor theory in the context of a new measure that can be used to track the consequences of metaphoric thinking.
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