The conceptual metaphor “THOUGHT IS FOOD” is exemplified in many verbal expressions. Nevertheless, how food metaphors are realized through the actual dining experience remains unexplored. Based on a food design event called EATAIPEI that took place in the London Design Festival in 2015, one aimed at promoting Taipei as World Design Capital 2016, this article analyzes how the multimodal metaphors of food were creatively represented and elaborated within it. This study proposes an analytical framework that combines insights from cognitive linguistics (...) with an intercultural performative view of food presentation and food metaphor. More specifically, it treats complex metaphors as resulting from the interactions of primary metaphors, proposition schemas and intercultural performance. The multimodal metaphors of food are complex metaphors composed of combined sets of primary metaphors, enriched by schema propositions and embedded within food performance. The experience of eating in the event reactivates the sensorimotor experiences that underpin the complex metaphors. (shrink)

This article presents a developmental ecological approach to the emergence and development of metaphor in children, based on the ecological psychology tradition following the work of J.J. Gibson, and its extension into developmental research and theory, as developed by E.J. Gibson and others. This framework suggests that a basic compatibility and meaningfulness exists between the knower and the known, based on the direct perception of affordances. To build an ecological understanding of metaphor we need to clarify how this metaphysical ground (...) plays out in acts of knowing that involve metaphor. In this endeavor, it is important to understand the ontogenesis of novel insightful metaphors and the role of perception. Developmental ecological psychology has repeatedly shown that infants can perceive meta-modal invariants that specify persistence of qualities. Early metaphors are consequences of the process in which invariants over naturally occurring kinds are perceived. Thus, novel metaphor production is an act of situated and experience-dependent perceiving and acting in the ecological world of socially shared meanings. Examples from previous experimental and qualitative research are reviewed to substantiate theoretical claims. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This article presents an exploratory analysis of the metaphoric structure of five artistic paintings within “Think aloud” protocols, in which a group of 14 English speakers with a low self-rated level of expertise in art and history of art expertise were asked to verbalize all their thoughts, ideas and impressions of the artworks. The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows: (1) multiple interpretations for the same artwork are possible, (2) the interpretations of the metaphorical structures described (...) by the participants often diverge from those advanced by the researchers. These findings challenge the methods by which metaphor identification and analysis in pictorials is currently approached. As a matter of fact, most of the research in pictorial metaphors tends to reduce stimuli such as artistic paintings to unique metaphoric interpretations generally produced by a single researcher by means of introspection. By addressing this methodological problem in metaphor research, this article contributes to the development of a theoretical and operational participant-based framework that takes into account the role of metaphoric conceptualization within the domain of art and art cognition. (shrink)

TThis paper aims to evidence the inherently metonymic nature of co-speech gestures. Arguing that motivation in gesture involves iconicity (similarity), indexicality (contiguity), and habit (conventionality) to varying degrees, it demonstrates how a set of metonymic principles may lend a certain systematicity to experientially grounded processes of gestural abstraction and enaction. Introducing visuo-kinetic signs as an umbrella term for co-speech gestures and signed languages, the paper shows how a frame-based approach to gesture may integrate different cognitive/functional linguistic and semiotic accounts of (...) metonymy (e.g., experiential domains, frame metonymy, contiguity, and pragmatic inferencing). The guiding assumption is that gestures metonymically profile deeply embodied, routinized aspects of familiar scenes, that is, the motivating context of frames. The discussion shows how gestures may evoke frame structures exhibiting varying degrees of groundedness, complexity, and schematicity: basic physical action and object frames; more complex frames; and highly abstract, complex frame structures. It thereby provides gestural evidence for the idea that metonymy is more basic and more directly experientially grounded than metaphor and thus often feeds into correlated metaphoric processes. Furthermore, the paper offers some initial insights into how metonymy also seems to induce the emergence of schematic patterns in gesture which may result from action-based and discourse-driven processes of habituation and conventionalization. It exemplifies how these forces may engender grammaticalization of a basic physical action into a gestural marker that shows strong metonymic form reduction, decreased transitivity, and interacting pragmatic functions. Finally, addressing basic metonymic operations in signed lexemes elucidates certain similarities regarding sign constitution in gesture and sign. English and German multimodal discourse data as well as German Sign Language (DGS) are drawn upon to illustrate the theoretical points of the paper. Overall, this paper presents a unified account of metonymy’s role in underpinning forms, functions, and patterns in visuo-kinetic signs. (shrink)

This study measured hand and head action strengths of eight typical emotional states using an authentic but implicit emotion elicitation task. Participants listened to and then retold five stories in which eight typical emotional states were experienced by the narrators. The number of hand and head gestures that occur naturally while experiencing an emotional state was used as an index to determine the hand and head action strength of that emotional state. Results showed a larger number of head gestures than (...) hand gestures, suggesting that head action strengths of the eight emotional states are stronger than their hand action strengths. These findings are consistent with the data extracted from Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (LSN), although the two sets of data were gathered in two completely different experimental conditions and in two different languages. Furthermore, our data showed a prototypical directionality effect for the typical emotional states, specifically, happiness, anger and pride were primarily accompanied by upward gestures but downward gestures for sadness and shame; surprise was primarily accompanied by forward gestures but backward gestures for fear and disgust. (shrink)

This paper investigates an unexplored indexical dimension inherent in the mapping structure of metaphor. The empirical focus is on the metaphor of stain but the scope of indexicality in relation to...

In the book Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Zoltán Kövecses presents a holistic view of how conceptual and contextual factors influence metaphor production and comprehension, with a comprehens...

This paper presents and evaluates a model of how the abstractness of source and target concepts influences metaphoricity, the property of how metaphoric a linguistic metaphoric expression is. The purpose of this is to investigate the long-standing claim that metaphoric mappings are from less abstract concepts to more abstract concepts. First, abstractness is modeled using Searle’s social ontology and this model of abstractness evaluated using a participant-based measure of abstractness. Second, this model of abstractness is used to determine the direction (...) and distance in abstractness of metaphoric mappings. Direction of abstractness in these mappings is whether the source or target concept is the more abstract. Distance is the difference in abstractness between source and target concepts. Both factors influence metaphoricity, as measured using introspection and a participant-based study of metaphoricity. The results give empirical support for a long-standing claim about abstractness in mappings, but also.. (shrink)