This study investigates how COVID-19 advice is creatively delivered in a one-minute video produced by the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control in February 2022. It examines metaphors in verbal, visual, and multimodal modes, and illustrates how such metaphors interact with multimodal narrativity. Drawing on the insights of studies on multimodal metaphors, this paper seeks to identify which are the most pervasive metaphors or what dominant metaphor, if any, is used in the video. It finds that the metaphorical mappings between coping (...) with the covid pandemic and handling olympic weightlifting are represented across modes and that the creative delivery of COVID-19 advice is woven from a warp of metaphors in various modes and a weft of narrativity across modes. Such metaphorical creativity is underpinned by the semiotic flow that features four interconnected configurations: moving between metaphorization, literalization, and re-metaphorization; somehow blurring the source-target boundary; expanding the range of functions that the multimodal representation can serve; and initiating a metaphorical thought from one or more contextual factors. (shrink)

Starting from the overwhelming view that time is metaphorically conceptualized in terms of space, this study will, on the one hand, take the time interval words into minute analysis to confirm our view of event conceptualization of time at a more basic level along with space–time metaphoric conceptualization of time at a relational level. In alignment with the epistemology of the time–space conflation of the Chinese ancestors, our view is supported by the systematic examination of evidence related to the cultural (...) origins of the conceptualization of time, through a scrutiny of the original meanings and construction of words related to intervals of time in Mandarin Chinese. This study offers a new explanation of how: the conceptualization of time in Chinese is realized through metonymic cognition and words related to specific intervals of time are coined based on the metonymic conceptualization of related events or a corresponding event schema. Five major types of event-based metonymies are identified, and their interactive functions are illustrated. Based on this evidence, we argue that the double nature of both metaphoric and metonymic time conceptualization in Mandarin Chinese lies in the fact that time interval words can be used in its time categorial sense or as a time entity which suggests the etymological origins of Chinese as ideograph. It is concluded therefore that the event-based metonymy conceptualization of time can provide better insights into the characteristics of Chinese modes of thinking and its influences on the perception of and interaction with the world. This study can also serve as good evidence for the shaping effect of language on cognition. (shrink)

Political cartoons make meaning by drawing on scenarios that must be immediately recognizable by their intended audience. Crucial meaning-making mechanisms in these scenarios are verbo-visual ensembles of metaphors and metonymies. In this paper we investigate 69 Chinese and 60 American political cartoons published in 2018 and 2019 that pertain to the two nations’ trade conflict. By examining the cross-cultural similarities and differences between metaphors and metonymies, we chart how Chinese and American cartoonists portray this trade conflict. We end by showing (...) how a complete interpretation of the cartoons requires enrichment with insights provided by yet other analytical instruments. (shrink)

This article studies 2 Chinese body-part terms zhi 'finger' and zhang 'palm' as they are used in compounds and idioms to express abstract concepts. Primarily, zhi 'finger' is used to express intention, aim, guidance, and direction, whereas zhang 'palm' is used to refer to power and control. The metaphoric and metonymic expressions involved are based on 2 common acts with hands: pointing with the index finger and holding in the palm of the hand. A comparison between Chinese and English data (...) reveals 2 differences. First, the conceptual metaphor "CONTROL IS HOLDING IN THE PALM OF THE HAND" is not richly manifested in English, although it is in Chinese. Second, the conceptual metaphor "THE FINGER IS THE DOER" is well manifested in English, but it is not realized in Chinese. These differences consist in the choice of a subpart (palm or finger) over the part (hand) as a result of cultural preferences. They reside, however, in a larger context of common grounding of meaning in bodily experiences. (shrink)

This paper is a cognitive semantic analysis of a CCTV educational commercial, which is one of a series designed and produced in preparation for, and in celebration of, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Called the “Beijing Opera Episode”, this TV commercial converges on the theme: “To mount the stage of the world, and to put on a show of China”. That is, China sees her hosting of the 2008 Olympics by Beijing as a great opportunity for her to step onto (...) the international stage to perform a show of China. This theme, which alludes to China's globalization and retention of cultural identity, is conceptualized and expressed in terms of a central metaphor of theatrical performance: hosting the beijing olympics is performing beijing opera on an international stage. This study first analyzes in detail how this central metaphor is manifested multimodally through visual and aural as well as verbal discourse, thus examining it as a multimodal metaphor. The study then applies a decompositional approach, based on the distinction between primary and complex metaphors, to analyzing the central metaphor as a metaphorical compound with its internal structures and components, which is nevertheless built on a more general cognitive foundation. The study also offers a linguistic perspective on a cultural model underlying the central metaphor, which is arguably a Chinese cultural model for understanding various aspects and events of life in general. At the core of this cultural model is the widespread life is a stage metaphor, which however has a specific manifestation within the Chinese cultural context. (shrink)

Unlike previous studies which generally seem to focus more on Hausa metaphorical expressions, this study investigates a wide range of uses ofίdὸ‘eye’ in its constructional metonymy patterns in the language by exploring corpus data that contain over 300 eye-related expressions. We observe that some constructional metonymies maintain a set of fixed words and syntax in activating conceptual shifts and producing eye metonymies while others have semi-fixed patterns and produce the same metonymies. Lexical items liketsόkάlế,kὰn,ὰ,dὰ, andbὰsίrὰamong others are constant constituents in (...) the constructional metonymies in which they appear. In the metonymic chaining, the basic mapping of eye metonymies occurs via thepart for partrelation under E-metonymies and thesub- for supercategoryrelation under C-metonymies. We also observe that E→E→C coding has the highest chained metonymic structure in the creation of the eye metonymies. Both attributive and predicative colligates motivate metonymic senses in the language. Finally, our analysis reveals that the eye is metonymically conceptualized and semantically extended to various target domains and produces metonymic conceptualizations that make the eye stand for vision, desire, envy, control, attention, perception, person, meeting, brain, intelligence, and so on. (shrink)

This article presents the first systematic typological study of emotional expressions involving body parts at the scale of a continent, namely the Australian continent. The role of body parts in figurative descriptions of emotions, a well-established phenomenon across the world, is known to be widespread in Australian languages. This article presents a typology of body-based emotional expressions across a balanced sample of 67 languages, where we found that at least 30 distinct body parts occur in emotional expressions. The belly is (...) by far the most frequent, and a dozen others also have significant representation. The study shows how the properties of these body parts – e.g., whether they are internal organs or visible facial parts – partly determine which historical scenarios led to their linguistic associations with emotions, and in turn, their semantic and figurative properties. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

The language of emotions is culturally conditioned and a conceptualization of emotions is determined by the value systems adopted in given cultures, as well as by personal experiences in recognizing, valuing, and communicating those emotions. It is believed that sometimes certain emotions have no lexical equivalents in particular languages. Even within one culture and one language, we can observe a gray area in the meaning of terms from this field. This is not surprising, given the subjective perception of the world (...) by each member of a specific community, as well as the multitude of emotions themselves. Although most information about other people’s emotions comes to the recipients through language, talking or writing about them is not simple. Emotions are among the concepts that are not very clearly delineated in our experience and therefore other, more comprehensible concepts, such as spatial orientations or objects, should be used when referring to them. In the novel The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, emotions are conceptualized and represented for instance by liquids, small animals, natural forces, and substances with some specific taste (sour, bitter, etc.). Our goal was to figure out which emotions and their linguistic instantiations are only typical for the Russian language and which ones would fall in the universal category. The paper will focus on the description and the way emotions are conceptualized from a cognitive linguistic perspective, drawing on CMT (Conceptual Metaphor Theory), conceptual metonymies, and cognitive models. (shrink)

There has been a longstanding interest in discovering or uncovering resemblances among what are ostensibly diverse religious schemas by employing a range of methodological approaches and tools. However, it is generally considered a problematic undertaking. Jonathan Z. Smith has produced a large body of work aimed at explicating this and has tacitly based his model of comparison on metaphor, which is traditionally understood to connote similarity between two or more things, as based on a linguistic or pragmatic assessment. However, another (...) possible approach is cognitive. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have championed the view of “conceptual metaphor,” which regards metaphor as being pervasive not only in language, but also in thought and action. Indeed, according to them, it basically structures our conceptual operations and hence views of the world through partially mapping knowledge across ontological domains, generally from the concrete to the abstract. I shall argue that a similar mechanism can fruitfully be applied to comparing religious schemas, as based on the postulated relationship between the domains of human and divine, physical and abstract, and as realized through expressions of journeying and reflection. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the possibility (...) that some apparently substantive definitional disputes may turn out to be verbal or conceptual, since this pluralist strategy, in our view, requires a commitment to more, rather than fewer, essences. What is more, a deflationary, metaphysically ‘light-weight’ construal of the essence-ascriptions in question leads to a peculiar conception of the pursuit of metaphysicians as behaving like deceptive (or self-deceived) grammarians pretending to be scientists. Moreover, this deflationary attitude, we argue, spreads beyond metaphysics and philosophy more broadly to apparently substantive definitional disputes in the sciences as well as other in other disciplines, such as art criticism. (shrink)

This paper explores metonymical and metaphorical expressions of verbal behaviour in Chinese. While metonymy features prominently in some of these expressions and metaphor in others, the entire dataset can be best viewed as spanning the metonymy-metaphor-continuum. That is, we observe a gradation of conceptual distance between the source and target which corresponds to the gradation of figurativity. Specifically, roughly half of the expressions we encounter are based on the ORGAN OF SPEECH ARTICULATION FOR SPEECH metonymy and can be considered as (...) clustering around the metonymic pole. The other half can be seen as tending towards the metaphoric pole, as they are largely motivated by conceptual metaphors: (a) VERBAL BEHAVIOUR IS PHYSICAL ACTION, (b) SPEECH IS CONTAINER, (c) ARGUMENT IS WAR (or WORDS ARE WEAPONS) and (d) WORDS ARE FOOD. The interaction between metonymy and metaphor is an important cognitive strategy in the conceptualisation of verbal behaviour. The findings (i) evidence the gradient predictability of idiom meanings based on semantic compositionality, (ii) confirm the hypothesis of a bodily and experiential basis of cognition, (iii) suggest the existence of culture-specific models in the utilization of basic experiences, and (iv) point to the role of emotion in the metaphorisation of verbal behaviour as a socio-emotional domain. (shrink)

A foundational goal of cognitive linguistics is to explain linguistic phenomena in terms of general cognitive strategies rather than postulating an autonomous language module (Langacker 1987: 12–13). Metonymy is identified among the imaginative capacities of cognition (Langacker 1993: 30, 2009: 46–47). Whereas the majority of scholarship on metonymy has focused on lexical metonymy, this study explores the systematic presence of metonymy in word-formation. I argue that in many cases, the semantic relationships between stems, affixes, and the words they form can (...) be analyzed in terms of metonymy, and that this analysis yields a better, more insightful classification than traditional descriptions of word-formation. I present a metonymic classification of suffixal word-formation in three languages: Russian, Czech, and Norwegian. The system of classification is designed to maximize comparison between lexical and word-formational metonymy. This comparison supports another central claim of cognitive linguistics, namely that grammar (in this case word-formation) and lexicon form a continuum (Langacker 1987: 18–19), since I show that metonymic relationships in the two domains can be described in nearly identical terms. While many metonymic relationships are shared across the lexical and grammatical domains, some are specific to only one domain, and the two domains show different preferences for source and target concepts. Furthermore, I find that the range of metonymic relationships expressed in word-formation is more diverse than what has been found in lexical metonymy. There is remarkable similarity in word-formational metonymy across the three languages, despite their typological differences, though they all show some degree of language-specific behavior as well. Although this study is limited to three Indo-European languages, the goal is to create a classification system that could be implemented (perhaps with modifications) across a wider spectrum of languages. (shrink)

This article discusses some of the claims of the earlier and later versions of the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (CTM) and addresses some of the criticism that has been leveled against it. It is argued that much of this criticism arises from common misconceptions as to the real claims made by the theory. However, CTM is still in need of further exploration and empirical support. In this connection, we identify some areas where research is still needed and supply our own (...) developments. We argue for a more complex classification of metaphor types, which takes into account various complementary taxonomic perspectives, including the nature of source and target and the genericity and complexity of the metaphoric operation. We also explore metaphor in relation to cognitive prominence and conceptual interaction issues. Finally, we deal with the problem of constraints on metaphor and make a proposal for three complementary kinds of constraint. (shrink)

In the literature, event metonymies have been used to explain how language users produce and interpret utterances in which certain events are understood in terms of their sub-events or the overall/...

Metaphor and metonymy, on the mental level temporally rather than syntactically or semantically defined, show a close association to healthy and neurotic defense, respectively. When the mind functions optimally, reverberating issues of past and present domains inform each other bidirectionally like source and target of a metaphor. Neurotic defense, metonymically conflating past and present, is mental access barring (negative metonymy). Metaphor and positive metonymy, fundamental to how the mind works, are autopoietic devices organizing creative change. Trauma (lost metaphoricity) results in (...) negative metonymy. During psychoanalysis metonymic defenses and transferences get remetaphorized. Nested mentational configurations emerge sequentially as markers of increased awareness (clinical vignette): negative metonymy (target enigmatic); positive metonymy (accessing target); metaphor (domains seen in terms of each other). (shrink)

This article explores the expression and conceptualisation of emotions in Anindilyakwa (Gunwinyguan, north-east Arnhem Land). Fundamental to the emotional lexicon of this language is the widespread use of body parts, which frequently occur in figurative expressions. In this article I examine the primary body parts that occur in emotion descriptions in both literal (physical) and figurative expressions. Particular attention is given toyukudhukudha /-werrik- ‘chest’, the body part conceptualised as the primary site of emotion in Anindilyakwa and the most productive body-related (...) morpheme used in emotion compounds. I consider the role of the chest and other productive body parts that occur in emotion compounds, and examine the metonymic and metaphorical devices that contribute to the expression of these emotional states. In doing so, I propose a number of overarching and widespread tropes that hold across different body-part compounds, and briefly contextualise these in relation to the emotion description systems of other closely-related (Gunwinyguan) languages. (shrink)

This study analyzes the metaphoric and metonymic nature ofbaş/kafa‘head’ in Turkish idiomatic expressions from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The database for the study is composed of idioms containing the two head-denoting wordsbaşandkafa. Idioms and their definitions are analyzed in terms of their figurative uses of abstract concepts, and the conceptual metaphors and metonymies are identified. Findings are examined under five categories: head as the representative of the person, the seat of mental faculties, the locus of emotions, the sign of superiority/power, (...) and the sign of value. The study proposes a cultural model in which the image schemaswhole-part,containmentandverticalityplay a key role, and reveals cross-cultural similarities and differences in the conceptualization ofhead. The study also provides further support for the embodiment thesis, and underscores the impact of cultural processes in shaping the way the body is conceptualized. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of metonymy in determining a syntactic argument alternation (“conductor-vehiclealternation”) which occurs in English and Portuguese:o piloto acelerou a Ferrari“the driver speeded up the Ferrari”/a Ferrari acelerou“the Ferrari speeded up/sped away”. Since the verbs in theconductor-vehiclealternation haveconductorandvehiclearguments (controller and controlled entities), a metonymic process can occur, allowing thevehicleexpression to provide access to theconductorparticipant. To explain how metonymy allows a verb with two participants to be integrated into a construction with a single argument, we assume that metonymy (...) gathers information about both entities involved; thevehicleexpression provides mental access to bothvehicleandconductor(“fusion”). We also discuss cognitive and pragmatic factors involving the choice of a construction over another. Constructions withvehicleexpressions as subject are used when thevehicleis salient or theconductoris unknown. This also explains whydirigir“drive” does not alternate in Portuguese, contrarily to prediction and differently from Englishdrive. We provide a comparative account of the behavior of this verb in both languages.Dirigir, differently fromdrive, conceptualizes semantic components incompatible with a situation in which the agent/conductoris not salient or is unknown. This research adds to the ongoing body of literature on the role of metonymy in grammar and is a contribution to the understanding of the metonymic process, as a fusion, and also to argument alternation processes and lexical-constructional integration. (shrink)