In this paper, we propose an account of metaphor identification on the basis of contextual coherence. In doing so, we build on previous work by Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides that appeals to rhetorical relations in order to explain discourse structure and the constraints on the interpretation of metaphor that follow from it. Applying this general idea to our problem, we will show that rhetorical relations are sometimes insufficient and sometimes inadequate for deciding whether a given utterance (...) is a case of metaphor. They are insufficient, since rhetorical relations fall short at times of providing a basis for disambiguating between literal and metaphorical interpretations. In such cases, contextual information other than previous discourse needs to enter the picture. To this effect, we bring the idea of external consistency into play. Beyond that, though, we will argue that rhetorical relations are sometimes inadequate to account for coherence, if conceived as relations among sentences only. The reason is that extra-linguistic elements of the situation in which the sentence is uttered may be crucial for getting at the preferred interpretation. To account for these cases, we allow rhetorical relations to connect both with previous discourse and with extra-linguistic situations. In our final refinement of the notion of contextual coherence, we forfeit any appeal to rhetorical relations in favour of Questions Under Discussion (QUD). We defend the view that this account does not only explain the same sort of cases. What is more, it solves the issue of metaphor identification in impoverished contexts. (shrink)

This article discusses the extension of ViewGen, an algorithm derived for belief ascription, to the areas of intensional object identification and metaphor. ViewGen represents the beliefs of agents as explicit, partitioned proposition sets known as environments. Environments are convenient, even essential, for addressing important pragmatic issues of reasoning. The article concentrates on showing that the transformation of information in metaphors, intensional object identification, and ordinary, nonmetaphorical belief ascription can all be seen as different manifestations of a single (...) environment-amalgamation process. The article also briefly discusses the extension of ViewGen to speech-act processing and the addition of a heuristic-based relevance-determination procedure, and justifies the partitioning approach to belief ascription. (shrink)

A number of philosophers, linguists and psychologists have made the dual claim that metaphor is cognitively significant and that metaphorical utterances have a meaning not reducible to literal paraphrase. Such a position requires support from an account of metaphorical meaning that can render metaphors cognitively meaningful without the reduction to literal statement. It therefore requires a theory of meaning that can integrate metaphor within its sematics, yet specify why it is not reducible to literal paraphrase. I introduce the (...) idea of a "second-order meaning", of which metaphor is but one instance, that is a function on literal-conventional, i.e., first-order meaning, and outline a linguistic framework designed to provide a representation of linguistic meaning for both. This framework is designed to represent linguistic units ranging from a single word to an entire text since I argue that the by-now familiar position that the sentence is the appropriate unit for metaphor has mislead us into asking the wrong questions about metaphorical meaning. With this apparatus, we can specify the conditions under which an utterance may transcend the constraints on first-order meaning (transgressions not always apparent on the sentential level), without thereby being "meaningless". Conversely, we can specify the conditions that may render apparently odd utterances first-order meaningful rather than metaphorical. In this way we see how metaphorical language differs both from deviant language and from specialized language such as technical language, fanciful and fantastical language (in fairy tales, science fiction, etc.). (shrink)

This paper examines patterns of metaphor in usage. Four samples of text excerpts of on average 47,000 words each were taken from the British National Corpus and annotated for metaphor. The linguistic metaphor data were collected by five analysts on the basis of a highly explicit identification procedure that is a variant of the approach developed by the Pragglejaz Group (Metaphor and Symbol 22: 1–39, 2007). Part of this paper is a report of the protocol (...) and the reliability of the procedure. Data analysis shows that, on average, one in every seven and a half lexical units in the corpus is related to metaphor defined as a potential cross-domain mapping in conceptual structure. It also appears that the bulk of the expression of metaphor in discourse consists of non-signalled metaphorically used words, not similes. The distribution of metaphor-related words, finally, turns out to be quite variable between the four registers examined in this study: academic texts have 18.5%, news 16.4%, fiction 11.7%, and conversation 7.7%. The systematic comparative investigation of these registers raises new questions about the relation between cognitive linguistic and other approaches to metaphor. (shrink)

This paper continues the debate about how to distinguish metaphor from metonymy, and whether this can be done. It examines some of the differences that have been alleged to exist, and augments the already existing doubt about them. The main differences addressed are the similarity/contiguity distinction and the issue of whether source-target links are part of the message in metonymy or metaphor. In particular, the paper argues that metaphorical links can always be used metonymically and regarded as contiguities, (...) and conversely that two particular, central types of metonymic contiguity essentially involve similarity. The paper also touches briefly on how metaphor and metonymy interact with domains, frames, etc. and on the role of imaginary identification/categorization of target as/under source items. With the possible exception of this last issue, the paper suggests that no combination of the alleged differences addressed can serve cleanly to categorize source/target associations into metaphorical ones and metonymic ones. It also suggests that it can be more profitable to analyse utterances at the level of the dimensions involved in the differences than at the higher level of metaphor and metonymy as such. (shrink)

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)

This article undertakes a deconstructive reading of astrobiology’s search for extraterrestrial life. Taking its lead from Derrida’s ‘White Mythology’, it explores ‘metaphor in the text of astrobiology’—and includes within the astrobiological ‘text’ not only scientific publications and work on astrobiology in the philosophy of science, but also ‘life detection technologies’. I situate astrobiology in the tradition of a metaphysical analogy that goes back through the enlightenment and early modern astronomy to the ancient Atomists’ notion of the ‘plurality of worlds’. (...) This analogy, which constitutes an identification of life with being and therefore serves as the conceptual basis for the notion that life must exist on other worlds, experiences a mutation in the middle of the twentieth century when molecular biology refigures life in terms of a scriptural metaphor as text. The result is an aporia whose logic Derrida formalised in ‘White Mythology’. (shrink)

Many sentences can be interpreted both as a metaphor and as a literal claim, depending on the context. The aim of this paper is to show that there are discourse-based systematic constraints on the identification of an utterance as metaphorical, literal, or both (as in the case of twice-apt metaphors), from a normative point of view. We claim that the key is contextual coherence. In order to substantiate this claim, we introduce a novel notion of context as a (...) rich and heterogeneous body of information, including previous discourse, elements coming from the surroundings of the utterance, background information, and Questions Under Discussion (QUD) issued from these three sources. We then define contextual coherence as a relation between what we call the minimal paraphrase of the metaphor and the context, and argue that for an interpretation to be coherent two conditions must be met. First, the minimal paraphrase must address some question in the QUD stack. Second, it must be externally consistent, i.e. consistent with the available contextual information. Finally, we argue that an approach based on contextual coherence is better suited to deal with twice-true and twice-apt metaphors than traditional approaches based on semantic deviance or pragmatic lack of fit. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the Hyperbole Identification Procedure, a first systematic method for identifying linguistic hyperbole in discourse. We start by comparing existing definitions of linguistic hyperbole. Based on the commonalities shared by these definitions, we provide our operational definition of hyperbole as “an expression that is more extreme than justified given its ontological referent.” The next section argues why it is useful to identify hyperbole, as with metaphor in Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit, at the level (...) of lexical units, and subsequently introduces the steps of HIP. We follow up with two sample analyses of HIP in practice. First, we show how to unitize and analyze one complete sample sentence. Second, we present sample analyses of a number of selected cases. Then we present data showing that HIP can be reliably applied to a sample corpus of Dutch news texts. We end with discussing applications and implications of using HIP in corpus research. (shrink)

A new concept of cognition also implies a novel approach to the study of metaphor. This insight is the starting point of this article presenting two innovations to comprehending and analyzing metaphor, one theoretical and one in terms of methodology. On a theoretical level we argue for a new orientation to metaphor and metaphoricity based on enactive cognition and distributed language and cognition. In recent years enactive and distributed cognition have been developing a new concept of cognition (...) as an inter-bodily and ecologically afforded achievement, and in light of this theoretical development we propose an approach to metaphor as a multi-body, multi-party, and multi-timescale phenomenon. On a methodological level we demonstrate a new way of analyzing metaphoricity in multimodal social interaction based on in-depth video analyses of two real life examples in which we introduce metaphorical identification criteria focusing on doubleness in meaning, affordances for co-action, co-ordination, and co-exper.. (shrink)

This study aims to establish ideological effects of the pre-pandemic metaphor use in the mainstream media on users’ perceptions of their relationship with technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve that, 120 media articles from global mainstream media sources during the pre-pandemic period were collected and analysed at three levels: (1) metaphor identification; (2) deconstruction of conceptual source domains; (3) the coding of metaphorical expressions into psychological types of interpersonal relationships that are projected on technologies. The established (...) metaphorical patterns were tested in an online survey with 100 young adults and adults from Lithuania during the COVID-19 pandemic period of 2019-2020. The research findings resulted in the ideological perceptions of Reversed Agentivity and Mechanised Action characterising our relationship with technology and pointing out to the loss of individual autonomy, a lack of personal growth and more fragmented personal identity during the pandemic. (shrink)

Despite the widely disseminated assumption that metaphors are the key persuasive devices in promoting tourist destinations, specifically those located in tropical regions, there has been to date no systematic research investigating the use of figurative language in tourism promotional discourse. Using a corpus-assisted approach to the identification and analysis of metaphors supported by Wmatrix, this study attempts to establish empirically whether promotion of destinations culturally and geographically faraway does deploy more metaphors than marketing of tourist places “closer” to home (...) and what kind of conceptual mappings and metaphorical expressions are utilized. The results point to a significant increase of metaphor use in the descriptions of tropical destinations. Five domains—“BODY,” “NATURAL PRECIOUS ELEMENT,” “COLOR,” “TASTE,” and “RELIGION”—prove especially productive. The combinations of metaphorical expressions from these domains generate sensory fusions that appeal to multiple senses at once including vision, taste and imagination, and in doing so, potentially increase the “appetite” for “consuming” a destination. They also perform ideological work as devices in discourse that clandestinely perpetuates colonial legacies. (shrink)

When language is expressed metaphorically, metaphors seem to "say" something that has never seen said before. Some of them seem to express insights. What then are the constraints on their interpretations? Charles Peirce's semeiotic suggests a way to answer the question. Crucial to the answer is Peirce's account of semeiotic objects as two-fold, one side, the dynamic or "real" object to be interpreted, the other side, the immediate object, which is the dynamic object that has been interpreted. The interaction account (...) of metaphor is reviewed and related to Peirce's conception of semeiotic objects. The result is my suggestion that the dynamic objects to which metaphorical objects are directed are transformed into interpreted, immediate objects through the mediation of incipient immediate objects. Incipient immediate objects initially appear as dyadic objects recognized through identity expressions—e.g., "Juliet is the sun," which is not a classification but an identification of the referents of the subject and the predicate. The incipient mediating immediate object parallels the percipium referred to in Peirce's account of the formation of perceptual judgments, which are interpretations of percepts. (shrink)

: When language is expressed metaphorically, metaphors seem to "say" something that has never seen said before. Some of them seem to express insights. What then are the constraints on their interpretations? Charles Peirce's semeiotic suggests a way to answer the question. Crucial to the answer is Peirce's account of semeiotic objects as two-fold, one side, the dynamic or "real" object to be interpreted, the other side, the immediate object, which is the dynamic object that has been interpreted. The interaction (...) account of metaphor is reviewed and related to Peirce's conception of semeiotic objects. The result is my suggestion that the dynamic objects to which metaphorical objects are directed are transformed into interpreted, immediate objects through the mediation of incipient immediate objects. Incipient immediate objects initially appear as dyadic objects recognized through identity expressions—e.g., "Juliet is the sun," which is not a classification but an identification of the referents of the subject and the predicate. The incipient mediating immediate object parallels the percipium referred to in Peirce's account of the formation of perceptual judgments, which are interpretations of percepts. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Lepore and Stone’s account of metaphor which is based on three of Davidson’s proposals: (i) the rejection of metaphorical meanings; (ii) the rejection of metaphors as conveying metaphorical propositional contents; and (iii) the defence of analogy as the key mechanism for understanding metaphors. Lepore and Stone defend these proposals because the non-sceptic strategy on metaphorical meanings, characterized in general by the negation of (i) and (ii), fails to come to grips with neither the power (...) of metaphor nor the explanatory resources of traditional pragmatic theories. In this paper we show not only how our non-sceptic account of metaphorical meaning as a variety of ad hoc concept eliminates these diffi culties but also how it can solve two related difficulties that appear in Lepore and Stone’s account. One of them is that Lepore and Stone’s account involves the possibility of interpreting all metaphorical utterances literally (metaphors only have one meaning, the ordinary meaning) as a criterion of metaphorical identification; the other is that their proposal is not suited for explaining how speakers can agree or disagree when they use metaphorical utterances. (shrink)

BackgroundAssessing and understanding the language that women use to express physical, emotional, and social concerns of breast cancer experiences can often be overlooked, even though there is evidence that effective communication between cancer patients and health care providers improves quality of life. This study aims to assess the use of metaphors in conceptualizing breast cancer experience lived by Saudi Arabian women.Materials and MethodsThis is an interpretative phenomenological qualitative study, a purposeful sample of 18 breast cancer patients at an oncology outpatient’s (...) clinic in Saudi Arabia were invited to engage in face-to-face interviews. Data was analyzed using Metaphor Identification Procedure.ResultsFour themes were constructed: dark hidden force, battling imminent death, dreaming and awakening calls, and inner and outer transformation.ConclusionIdentifying metaphors may be beneficial toward improving communication between health care providers and breast cancer patients, who often experience difficulties expressing their needs. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the historical-philosophical analysis of the problem of ambivalence as a fundamental principle of Derrida’s philosophical thinking. It shows how such primordial philosophical questions as ones of limits of philosophies and of limits of philosophy define the basic problem dimensions of Derridean conception. It consideres the correlation of the theme of marginality with both the problem of Derrida’s cultural self-identification and the idea of the metaphoricity of language as the initial premise of différance logic. Also (...) the article examines the role of transcendentalistic implications in Derridean thought that determine a his-torical and philosophical context of Derrida’s philosophy. The analogy between quasi-transcendental and metaphorical aspects of deconstructive thinking is drawn. The identifica-tion of Jewish and metaphorical in Derrida’s conception is demonstrated. The author introduces the concept of "literal metaphor" as the quintessence of Derrida’s philosophical thought which structures its basic forms, namely: aporia, hyperbole, question, commentary. (shrink)

The present paper is focused on the way Vayākaraṇas and Ālaṃkārikas analysed a specific kind of karmadhāraya compounds, taught in Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.1.56 and 72 and later associated with the upamā- and the rūpaka-figures respectively. On the basis of a fresh interpretation of the relevant grammatical sources, the authors try both to understand how the theorists involved them in their analysis and to reconstruct the several steps of the inquiries realized by the modern scholarship on this topic. Nonetheless their research is (...) targeted on the interpretation of these two Pāṇini rules and they conclude that these rules do not actually target similes and metaphorical identifications, but, on the one hand, A 2.1.55-56 deal with a functional pair of figurative compounds involving an upamāna and an upamita, i.e. a reference standard and something which is benchmarked, and, on the other, A 2.1.72 closes a series of karmadhāraya-rules, aimed at illustrating A 2.1.57. Furthermore, they exclude that Pāṇini in A 2.1.55-56 used the term sāmānya as a tertium comparationis, even though Patañjali had already advanced—but eventually rejected—this interpretation. (shrink)

This study investigates metaphor in its role to mediate concepts in academic textbooks and promote content understanding in the English-medium instruction (EMI) context. Of particular interest is how the language of the discourse affected and possibly hindered metaphor comprehension. Drawing on the theoretical insights found in sociocultural theory and cognitive linguistics, a stance was assumed in which language is treated as embodied and contextual, and verbalizing thoughts (languaging) assists understanding. Three pairs of Japanese students with varying English proficiency (...) levels were invited to participate in online group-based think-aloud protocols where they read and discussed selected paragraphs taken from two social and two natural science textbooks written in English. After accessing the participants’ general knowledge about the main topic of each paragraph, content understanding was accounted for in form of prompts during the think-aloud sessions and a 3-week delayed posttest. In total, over 8 hours of video data were collected, transcribed, and treated with the metaphor identification procedure MIPVU. Qualitative inspections of charged moments in discourse pinpoint metaphor as an important tool for compressing abstract entities or processes into meaningful, dense bundles of information. Participants also created their own analogies and expanded on found metaphoric expressions in textbooks when attempting to make sense of abstract phenomena in science. Further, this study confirms that the lack of English proficiency or schematic knowledge can result in non-understanding, misunderstanding, or partial understanding of metaphoric expressions which has implications for the EMI context. (shrink)

This article examines the metaphors that are used to represent dementia in British tabloid newspapers over a ten-year period (2010–2019). The analysis takes a corpus-based approach to metaphor identification and analysis, utilizing in particular the corpus linguistic technique of collocation analysis. Metaphors are considered in terms of the ‘targets’ they frame, which include the following aspects of dementia: (i.) prevalence; (ii.) causes; (iii.) symptoms and prognosis; (iv.) lived experience; and (v.) responses. A range of metaphors are identified, with (...) the tabloids exhibiting a particular preference for metaphors which construct dementia as an agentive and violent entity and people with dementia as passive victims, and which foreground preventative responses to dementia such as pharmacological intervention and individual behavior change. It is argued that such metaphors have the potential to contribute to dementia stigma and place focus on preventing or eliminating dementia while backgrounding responses which may help people to “live well” with the syndrome in the here-and-now. Metaphors which frame dementia as a companion or which the experience of dementia as a journey are put forward as potentially less stigmatizing alternatives which might better reflect the particularities of this complex public health issue. (shrink)

This article proposes a method for the semi-automatic extraction of resemblance metaphor terms from a manually annotated corpus of marine biology texts in English and Spanish. The corpus was first searched for target domain terms as well as for lexical markers indicative of metaphors. The combination of these search strategies for metaphor extraction resulted in a set of English-Spanish term pairs. After analysing and comparing these metaphor candidates, a quantitative analysis provided comparative statistical data regarding marine biology (...) metaphor. Finally, the metaphorical nature of marine biology terms was verified in three ways. The first verification strategy entailed an adapted version of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (CitationPragglejaz Group, 2007). The second involved the analysis of contextual data extracted from the corpus, and the third involved the analysis of visual images from an online marine biology database and from the Google search engine. (shrink)

This article describes the Metaphorical Source Domain Identification Procedure (MSDIP), which can be used to code source domains in metaphor identification. In the first part of the article, we describe the complexity of source-domain coding in corpus analysis. We argue that, in many cases, discourse is underspecified and multiple source-domain candidates may be relevant for a specific metaphorical expression. For instance, if a word like “fight” or “target” is used metaphorically, it could refer to either the source (...) domain of war or sports. To make these issues explicit for analysts, we developed MSDIP, which builds on and extends the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU). In the second part of the article, we explain the coding steps of MSDIP and subsequently report on a reliability analysis, demonstrating the reproducibility of the procedure. We end with a number of detailed sample analyses, demonstrating the role of co-text and context in selecting the likeliest source-domain candidate through MSDIP. These analyses show that MSDIP is both reliable and flexible in dealing with the complexities of real-life discourse during source-domain coding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Miracle of MetaphorRethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and SchmittBonnie Honig (bio)For the word is mere inception until it finds reception in an ear and response in a mouth.—Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of RedemptionThe legal anthropologist Carol Greenhouse opens her book on time, A Moment’s Notice, with a story recorded by Goethe, who, when traveling through Italy, observed a trial and took note of its peculiar timekeeping (...) practices. A man seated at a desk held in his hand a glass sand bottle, a timepiece. It was not immediately clear what his purpose was. But Goethe soon noticed that as the prosecutor spoke the man kept the bottle lying on its side, its sands inert, and whenever the defense began to speak the man would turn the bottle upright and restart its sand flow. When the state spoke, time stopped. The defense, however, was subject to time.The story accords well with the views of state sovereignty propounded by Carl Schmitt, who identifies sovereignty as such with the power to legally suspend law for a time by declaring a state of exception. For Schmitt, as for Giorgio Agamben, who works in his wake, the state of exception is that paradoxical situation in which the law is legally suspended by sovereign power. The ensuing condition is one in which we—or, rather, sovereign powers—are neither subject to law nor free of it but rather both, since the state of exception is itself a legal condition of alegality. Grounded in paradox—the legal suspension of law—and seeming well positioned to explain elements of the current political landscape that liberal and deliberative democratic theorists only criticize, Schmitt’s “state of exception,” I think it is fair to say, has captured the imagination of contemporary political theory.I seek to loosen its hold on our imagination by pluralizing the particular political theology on which Schmitt’s account is based and from which it draws sustenance. And I do so with the intent of highlighting the dependence of the so-called state of exception upon democratic energies and its vulnerability, therefore, to democratic action and resistance.I begin by devoting sustained attention to Schmitt’s metaphor for the state of exception—the miracle, noting that we may accept his metaphorization and yet be drawn by it to very different conclusions. Alternative conceptions of miracle, as we shall see, point not to singular sovereign ruptural power but rather to receptivity, popular power, and the importance of orientation in everyday life to divinity or sovereignty. For this alternative, I turn to Franz Rosenzweig’s theology. Another implication of the work begun here is to lay the groundwork for questioning contemporary identifications of action with event and politics with singularity. I ask whether the metaphor of miracle, normally taken to mark extraordinary, ruptural, or inaugurative politics (as, for example, by Hannah Arendt), might not license instead a turn to the ordinary, away from rupture to the everyday, from transcendence to immanence (though, as William Connolly points out, the immanent can also be ruptural [Pluralism] and, as Eric Santner points out, the rupture sought by Rosenzweig’s new thinking is one that would return us to a different ordinary [On the [End Page 78] Psychotheology of Everyday Life and “Miracles Happen”]). Motivating this exploration is an intuition: that contemporary political theory’s debates about whether political action is best seen as ordinary or extraordinary, ruptural or rule-governed, may be a reiteration of earlier debates in political theology about the status of the extraordinary—god and miracle or divine agency—in the ordinary human world. Mindful of that reiteration, and with the help of Rosenzweig’s “new theology,” we may rechart our course and see opportunities to rethink emergency politics in the state of exception in more democratic terms.A Secret Conversation?In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt, the soon-to-be-lapsed Catholic legal thinker who would later become jurist to the Nazi party in 1930s Germany, claimed that all significant political concepts are reinhabitations of theological concepts and should be treated as such. In The Enemy, an intellectual biography of Schmitt, Gopal Balakrishnan points out this is an overstatement... (shrink)

The neo-liberal upsurge of the last twenty years and the neo-liberal case against the welfare state has gained much of its emotional force from a sub-text which is highly gendered. Whereas social liberalism had contained the promise of more autonomy within the private sphere and more caring values in the public sphere, neo-liberalism depicts the results of social liberalism as a loss of self reliance – through ‘over-protection’ by the state in the public sphere and usurpation of male roles in (...) the private sphere. The identification of the welfare state as female (the ‘nanny state’) helps fuel resentment on the part of those already confused by rapidly changing gender roles. This paper tracks the sex change which took place in the image of the liberal state as it evolved out of the night watchman state – the link between the women's suffrage movement and social regulation, maternal principles of distribution and demands for the public organization of caring. It examines the neo-liberal rejection of the breast and neo-liberal claims that the maternal state is incompatible with ‘self-reliance’ and a barrier to competitiveness in the world market. (shrink)

The powerful images of the events of 9/11 have made an indelible impression on the world psyche. It has given rise to a pervasive rhetoric in practically all fields attempting to explain, interpret and understand the underlying causes and world changing consequences of the events. In a post-modern and secular world it has led to a refocusing on the religious fervour and ideals at work in established religions and in movements that are ostensibly devoid of all religious motivation, such as (...) expansive globalization and American free enterprise capitalism. I argue that similar ideological and "religious" notions are at work in the conflict of worldviews represented by this historical event. In order to substantiate this claim and an identification of the ideological sources of the malaise at work in the world requires a clear distinction between religion, myth and ideology and the legitimate role played by constitutive root metaphors in culture, science and society. Root metaphor analysis reveals the underlying 'war of worlds' at work in the foundational symbolizations of the world (Gibson Winter, 1981) which function as fundamental building blocks of the "cultural cosmologies" of society (Harrington, 1995, 360). It is not only religious convictions that shape the world but the choices of metaphors by scientists, educators and politicians are not random and innocent but fraught with root metaphorical notions as religious as those of their ostensibly secular counterparts and thus laden with frameworks that dramatically alter the perception of phenomena and the behaviour and actions of groups. Harrington's (1995) analysis of the role of holism in the shadow of the Third Reich shows this very clearly. Recognition of the presence and influence of root metaphors of an ideological nature will contribute to the dies-enchantment with their allure. This paper attempts to develop a methodology on the basis of which it is possible to distinguish between the legitimate function of root metaphors in science and society and their hypostatization. (shrink)

Purpose. This article clarifies the significance of the person’s social self-identification as a basis for civilization and institutional explanation of national self-identification in Ukraine. Theoretical basis. The authors found that the analysis of the cultural and anthropological principles of national self-identity reveals two main opposed concepts: the concept of "eastern" cultural and social self-identity of Ukraine, which correlates with the metaphor of the split between "East" and "West", and the concept of "western" projection of the European future (...) of Ukraine, which correlates with the metaphor of the bridge between "East" and "West". These concepts reflect the options for the citizens of Ukraine to make a personal choice of the way in achieving social self-identity. Douglas North’s concept of "open-access order" states and "limited access order" states can be used as a basis for an alternative, pragmatic approach to choice the criteria of national self-identity. Originality. National self-identification is a result of the choice of the person’s self-identification: still the person takes into account the history of the nation, the ethnic diversity of the nation, its cultural and civilizational characteristics. The philosophical-anthropological approach contributes to the demystification of the grounds of social self-identification, revealing the decisive role of the personal choice in shaping the new institutional foundations of national self-identity. Harmonization of the social institutions of Ukraine with the institutions of the European Union and the international community institutions opens wide opportunities for Ukraine’s successful integration into the "open-access order" societies. The clarification of the value and symbolic aspects of national self-identity in Ukraine contributes to the successful functioning of these institutions. Multilingualism is an adequate response to the global challenge of the reconstruction of Ukraine’s national self-identity. The education system is a key area for introducing multilingualism. Conclusions. The development, justification and systematization of cultural and institutional criteria for choosing the best ways to strengthen of national self-identity in Ukraine are a prerequisite for the successful self-identification of Ukrainian citizens in a complex and ever-changing global world. (shrink)

The Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script contains data that shed light on 3 major issues central to current metaphor studies: (a) Where is metaphor, that is, is metaphor linguistic or conceptual? (b) If metaphor is indeed conceptual, does metaphor understanding entail creation of an ad hoc category in which the vehicle is a particularly good exemplar? (c) Is metaphor processing primarily dependent on the identification and activation of the underlying "deep structure" conceptual metaphor? (...) The script includes an elaborate system of classifiers that constitute an intensely motivated, highly constrained categorization system strictly referring to conceptual, nonlinguistic configurations. The Egyptian system is a prototype-centered classification system, from which metaphor clearly emerges as a form of alternative classification. (shrink)

The powerful images of the events^ of 9/11 have made an indelible impression on the world psyche. It has given rise to a pervasive rhetoric in practically all fields attempting to explain, interpret and understand the underlying causes and world changing consequences of the events. In a post-modern and secular world it has led to a refocusing on the religious fervour and ideals at work in established religions and in movements that are ostensibly devoid of all religious motivation, such as (...) expansive globalization and American free enterprise capitalism. I argue that similar ideological and "religious" notions are at work in the conflict of worldviews represented by this historical event. In order to substantiate this claim and an identification of the ideological sources of the malaise at work in the world requires a clear distinction between religion, myth and ideology and the legitimate role played by constitutive root metaphors in culture, science and society. Root metaphor analysis reveals the underlying 'war of worlds' at work in the foundational symbolizations of the world (Gibson Winter, 1981) which function as fundamental building blocks of the "cultural cosmologies" of society (Harrington, 1995, 360). It is not only religious convictions that shape the world but the choices of metaphors by scientists, educators and politicians are not random and innocent but fraught with root metaphorical notions as religious as those of their ostensibly secular counterparts and thus laden with frameworks that dramatically alter the perception of phenomena and the behaviour and actions of groups. Harrington's (1995) analysis of the role of holism in the shadow of the Third Reich shows this very clearly. Recognition of the presence and influence of root metaphors of an ideological nature will contribute to the dies-enchantment with their allure. This paper attempts to develop a methodology on the basis of which it is possible to distinguish between the legitimate function of root metaphors in science and society and their hypostatization. (shrink)

Research on metaphor has over the past decades increasingly been extended to its visual and multimodal varieties. While analysts of verbal metaphors are helped by the fact that languages have grammars and vocabularies, researchers of visual and multimodal metaphors need to rely on other methods for identification and interpretation. One approach that claims to have developed a robust method for analyzing metaphor in moving images is FILMIP, which has hitherto focused on the specific genre of commercials. In (...) this paper it is argued that there are serious problems with FILMIP. First, the theoretical basis of FILMIP and two empirical studies drawing on it are discussed. Subsequently, its limited use for analyzing metaphors in the genre of feature films is demonstrated on the basis of four case studies. The paper ends with sketching some general advice pertaining to researching metaphor in film, and provides a cautious alternative to FILMIP. (shrink)

In Thinking of Others, Ted Cohen argues that the ability to imagine oneself as another person is an indispensable human capacity--as essential to moral awareness as it is to literary appreciation--and that this talent for identification is the same as the talent for metaphor. To be able to see oneself as someone else, whether the someone else is a real person or a fictional character, is to exercise the ability to deal with metaphor and other figurative language. (...) The underlying faculty, Cohen argues, is the same--simply the ability to think of one thing as another when it plainly is not. In an engaging style, Cohen explores this idea by examining various occasions for identifying with others, including reading fiction, enjoying sports, making moral arguments, estimating one's future self, and imagining how one appears to others. Using many literary examples, Cohen argues that we can engage with fictional characters just as intensely as we do with real people, and he looks at some of the ways literature itself takes up the question of interpersonal identification and understanding. An original meditation on the necessity of imagination to moral and aesthetic life, Thinking of Others is an important contribution to philosophy and literary theory. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Kantian Symbol The Schopenhauerian Metaphor? The Schopenhauerian Metonymy Gracián's Poetics and Schopenhauer as Poetic Metaphysician Conclusion References.

The paper argues that metaphorical expressions do more than just instantiate conceptual metaphors. The main aim is to emphasize the role source and target words’ meanings play in construing generic-level metaphors. The latter are taken to act as superordinate categories for other metaphors, occurring at various levels of schematicity. Identification of lower-level metaphors takes into account source words’ metaphorical senses, not the central meanings of the categories they represent. This method brings the issue of source words’ polysemy into play, (...) and hence helps explain why metaphorical expressions relating to the same generic-level metaphor may activate different lower-level metaphors, which carry different metaphorical meanings. (shrink)

In Thinking of Others, Ted Cohen argues that the ability to imagine oneself as another person is an indispensable human capacity--as essential to moral awareness as it is to literary appreciation--and that this talent for identification is the same as the talent for metaphor. To be able to see oneself as someone else, whether the someone else is a real person or a fictional character, is to exercise the ability to deal with metaphor and other figurative language. (...) The underlying faculty, Cohen argues, is the same--simply the ability to think of one thing as another when it plainly is not. In an engaging style, Cohen explores this idea by examining various occasions for identifying with others, including reading fiction, enjoying sports, making moral arguments, estimating one's future self, and imagining how one appears to others. Using many literary examples, Cohen argues that we can engage with fictional characters just as intensely as we do with real people, and he looks at some of the ways literature itself takes up the question of interpersonal identification and understanding. An original meditation on the necessity of imagination to moral and aesthetic life, Thinking of Others is an important contribution to philosophy and literary theory. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Possible Selves and Webs of Belief The Textually Cultivated “I”: Making up One's Mind Metaphorical Identification and Self‐Individuation.

The article focuses on the complex positioning of people from disempowered backgrounds with respect to liberalism and liberal dividends. The author offers the term liberal bargain, paraphrasing Deniz Kandiyoti’s “patriarchal bargain” and Cynthia Cockburn’s “ethnic bargain,” and dwells on the interconnections between the three. The liberal bargain indicates the particular consciousness and symbolic whitening that “colorized” people tend to adopt when they attempt to cash in on the liberal promise. Within the discourse of postcolonial feminism, the concept is intended to (...) promote the discussion of power differentials among women, through refining the analytically dissatisfactory color metaphors habitually used to address issues of hegemony and ethnocentrism. (shrink)

The backward induction controversy in game theory flared up and then practically ended within a decade – the 1990s. The protagonists, however, did not converge on an agreement about the source of the controversy. Why was this the case, if opposing sides had access to the same modelling techniques and empirical facts? In this paper I offer an explanation for this controversy and its unsettled end. The answer is not to be found in the modelling claims made by the opposing (...) protagonists, but in the tacit metaphors they operate under. Aristotle defined metaphor as giving a 'thing a name that belongs to something else' (Poetica, 1457b). The meaning of metaphors has not changed much since then – in contrast to models which are comparatively new, and still not well-understood, scientific tools. The controversy of backward induction in game theory provides a test bed for the explanatory power of metaphors. This paper frames the controversy in terms of metaphor choice to provide a common framework for the protagonists. This results in the identification of three different domains – mathematical logic, game theory and the world – each connected to the other via different metaphors. The controversy around backward induction is placed in, and tentatively explained by, this framework. (shrink)

There is a striking difference, however, between the ways female and male modernists define and describe literal or figurative costumes. Balancing self against mask, true garment against false costume, Yeats articulates a perception of himself and his place in society that most other male modernists share, even those who experiment more radically with costume as metaphor. But female modernists like Woolf, together with their post-modernist heirs, imagine costumes of the mind with much greater irony and ambiguity, in part because (...) women's clothing is more closely connected with the pressures and oppressions of gender and in part because women have far more to gain from the identification of costume with self or gender. Because clothing powerfully defines sex roles, both overt and covert fantasies of transvestism are often associated with the intensified clothes consciousness expressed by these writers. But although such imagery is crucially important in works by Joyce, Lawrence, and Eliot on the one hand, and in works by Barnes, Woolf, and H. D. on the other, it functions very differently for male modernists from the way it operates for female modernists.Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of California at Davis, is the author of Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence and In the Fourth World; the coauthor, with Susan Gubar, of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and its sequel, No Man's Land: The Woman Writer and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination. (shrink)

Early ecofeminists often emphasized the similarities of the oppression of women and earth and delineated both as rape. Is it helpful for ecofeminists today to connect women and nature in such a way? Is this metaphor an adequate expression for third wave feminists or does it cast female bodies and the cosmos into passive victimization? This article uses Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath as a platform to tease out three important aspects of the metaphor of rape, by (...) examining the green apolcalypse present in Steinbeck‘s book, by pointing out Steinbeck’s identification of the exploitatoin of nature as a rape, and by thinking about the ways in which women are portrayed as earth mothers. Through an examination of the metaphors of rape as exploitation and grapes as apocalyptic wrath, the article seeks to counter the hidden apocalyptic and dualistic structures of maternal images and ecorapes and to identify them, question them and channel that powerful linguistic energy. (shrink)

Source domain verification has not received as much attention as criteria for metaphor identification in the study of conceptual metaphor. In this paper, we provide a replicable approach to source...

The article is based on theories of meaning creation and the concepts of archaic mind of Juri Lotman and Giambattista Vico. It compares the notions fantasia, ingegno, memoria and poetic logic by Vico with Lotman’s concepts of text, memory and modelling systems. Donald Phillip Verene’s and Marcel Danesi’s interpretations of Giambattista Vico’s work are also taken into consideration in the analysis. The article aims to bring out the characteristic features of archaic meaning creation. The archaic mind is considered to be (...) fundamentally poetic. Its main mechanism of generating new meaning is metaphorical identification of two otherwise separate elements. The creativity of this act lies in the presumption that imagination is needed to bring these two elements together — they cannot be identified with each other by the means of syllogistic logic. The archaic mind does not operate mainly with generic concepts, as rational mind does. It forms imaginative universals instead, which are based on the sense of identity between objects or their parts, not on the sense of similarity/ dissimilarity of distinct features of objects. This process forms the basis of poetic modelling, which is primary in relation to verbal modelling. (shrink)

The article is based on theories of meaning creation and the concepts of archaic mind of Juri Lotman and Giambattista Vico. It compares the notions fantasia, ingegno, memoria and poetic logic by Vico with Lotman’s concepts of text, memory and modelling systems. Donald Phillip Verene’s and Marcel Danesi’s interpretations of Giambattista Vico’s work are also taken into consideration in the analysis. The article aims to bring out the characteristic features of archaic meaning creation. The archaic mind is considered to be (...) fundamentally poetic. Its main mechanism of generating new meaning is metaphorical identification of two otherwise separate elements. The creativity of this act lies in the presumption that imagination is needed to bring these two elements together — they cannot be identified with each other by the means of syllogistic logic. The archaic mind does not operate mainly with generic concepts, as rational mind does. It forms imaginative universals instead, which are based on the sense of identity between objects or their parts, not on the sense of similarity/ dissimilarity of distinct features of objects. This process forms the basis of poetic modelling, which is primary in relation to verbal modelling. (shrink)

The article is based on theories of meaning creation and the concepts of archaic mind of Juri Lotman and Giambattista Vico. It compares the notions fantasia, ingegno, memoria and poetic logic by Vico with Lotman’s concepts of text, memory and modelling systems. Donald Phillip Verene’s and Marcel Danesi’s interpretations of Giambattista Vico’s work are also taken into consideration in the analysis. The article aims to bring out the characteristic features of archaic meaning creation. The archaic mind is considered to be (...) fundamentally poetic. Its main mechanism of generating new meaning is metaphorical identification of two otherwise separate elements. The creativity of this act lies in the presumption that imagination is needed to bring these two elements together — they cannot be identified with each other by the means of syllogistic logic. The archaic mind does not operate mainly with generic concepts, as rational mind does. It forms imaginative universals instead, which are based on the sense of identity between objects or their parts, not on the sense of similarity/ dissimilarity of distinct features of objects. This process forms the basis of poetic modelling, which is primary in relation to verbal modelling. (shrink)

The verbo-visual metaphor is widely used in messages of a persuasive nature. It is also used in educational materials, where it serves to better explain and fix the presented material in the memory of the recipient. Metaphor is based on an incongruity that the recipient must notice and then read the mapping - read what the presence of the incongruity is supposed to convey. Researchers involved in identifying verbo-visual metaphors describe two types of incongruity that can occur in (...) this type of message: topic incongruity and property incongruity. Mastering the methods of identifying and analyzing metaphors is particularly useful for learning how to make the best use of this tool, i.e., how to produce memorable metaphors that explain the problem under consideration well. (shrink)

This work presents two theoretical challenges to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). The first argument shows CMT’s foundational _Conceptual Claim—_that abstract concepts are necessarily structured by concrete concepts—entails the blurring of the literal–figurative distinction, which calls into question the legitimacy of standard methods of metaphor identification used in CMT. The second argument aims at the _Linguistic Claim—_that conceptual metaphors are necessary for metaphorical language—by showing that conceptual metaphors are neither necessary nor sufficient for linguistic metaphors and that, therefore, (...) the existence of conceptual metaphors cannot be validly inferred from the presence of their linguistic counterparts. In light of the arguments put forward, the CMT theorist is forced to accept one of four options: (A) hold on to both the Conceptual Claim and Linguistic Claim, by adequately addressing problems presented here, (B) discard the Conceptual Claim and give up the theory, (C) discard both claims and give up the theory, or (D) accept the Conceptual Claim but reject the Linguistic Claim and abandon the methods of discovering conceptual metaphors through analysis of figurative language. I argue that the only tenable option is D. (shrink)

This paper aims to uncover the underlying metaphorical expressions regarding the importance of love to human life in English and Vietnamese poetry based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which suggests that metaphor is based on human thought as well as on language. For metaphor identification, the authors use a five-step procedure based on Pragglejaz Group’s method for metaphorical expressions and a self-proposed three-step procedure for conceptual metaphors. The findings reveal that love is metaphorically expressed to have a (...) considerable influence on both the physical and mental aspects of human life. This paper is also a comparative investigation showing both similarities and differences in the love-life metaphorical expressions between the two languages. The similarities are explained by the same grounding of metaphor-embodiment and the universality of conceptual metaphors. The differences are attributed to cultural distinction. (shrink)

Although Aristotle attributes to metaphor - as an instrument that makes poetic imitation possible to the highest degree - an important function, he does not arrive at the conclusion that the essence of poetics is the metaphor. This is due, on the one hand, to the almost total identification of the poem with the tragedy, showing little interest in what we consider lyric poetry; on the other hand, for the little attention given to religious poetry. If the (...) Stagirite had analyzed these genres, he would have discovered that both have in common the attempt to express the ineffable. Metaphor is the privileged tool to talk about something that we can not conceptualize, because it is partially unknown to us - subjectivity - or because this reality (the divine) transcends all kinds of sensible experience. Hence, the metaphor becomes not only an analogical knowledge of sensible reality, but also communication of ineffable realities. (shrink)

The metaphor of “the ghastly kitchen” of life science research, the places that, said the nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard, stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life,” is well known. In the seventeenth century, the kitchen, and particularly the scullery, was the site of the slaughter, butchery, and dismemberment by carving of a variety of animals. The tools and techniques employed in these activities overlapped considerably with those of animal and human dissection. Dissection often took place in residences and (...) the kitchen was the most likely place for this activity. This challenges historians’ identification of the kitchen as an exclusively female realm. The preparation of food and medicines occurred in tandem with experimental natural philosophy, sharing tools as well as the sensory apparatus of cooking, including tasting and smelling. (shrink)

It has been noticed by several authors that the colloquial understanding of anonymity as mere unknown-ness is insufficient. This common-sense notion of anonymity does not recognize the role of the goal for which the anonymity is sought. Starting with the distinction between the intentional and unintentional anonymity (which are usually taken to be the same) and the general concept of the non-coordinatability of traits, we offer a logical analysis of anonymity and identification (understood as de-anonymization). In our enquiry, we (...) focus on the intentional aspect of anonymity and develop a metaphor of “anonymity game” between “perpetrator” and “detective”. Beginning from common-sense intuitions, we provide a formalized, critical notion of anonymity. (shrink)