Book of Abstracts

II International Workshop

Metaphor and Discourse

Where Cognition and Communication Meet

February 2-3, 2006

Universitat Jaume I

Castelló de la Plana

Textlinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics: A Blind Date?

Enrique Bernárdez ebernard@filol.ucm.es

Universidad Complutense de Madrid The cognitive study of language, in the frame of “2nd generation Cognitive Science” as defined by Lakoff & Johnson (1999), has as one of its most direct predecessors and practitioners the discipline of textlinguistics (TL), as practised mainly in continental Europe since, at least, the late 1970’s (cf. Bernárdez 1999). A significant difference, however, lies in the essential social component of TL study, which is still absent from “mainstream” cognitive linguistics. As for cognitive linguistics (CL), its analyses are usually restricted to words, sentences and small group of sentences, with reference to the general knowledge needed for its cognitive processing but not, in most cases, to any particular context or communicative scene. In recent times, some proposals of application of well-known CL methods to the study of texts have been realised, particularly the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (CTM) and Blending Theory (BT). The present paper provides first a very brief analysis of the similarities and differences between TL and CL and then proceeds to the applicability of the results of CL research to the text and, especially, its possible advantages for TL. Brief textual analyses in terms of CTM and BT will be presented and the following questions will then be raised and –if possible- answered: (a) Do such analyses tell us anything about the text -as language in use- that was not previously known to textlinguists (and others)? (b) Are there any significant drawbacks in the CL, as opposed to the traditional TL types of analysis (or vice-versa)? (c) What has to be changed in TL as a consequence of CL analysis (and perhaps vice-versa)? (d) What advantages for our view of language and cognition can be gained by focusing on texts?

Embodiment, Synaesthesia and Metaphor in Discourse

Carmen Mª Bretones Callejas cbreton@ual.es

cbretones@hotmail.com Universidad de Almería

Synaesthesia is a natural association of our mind that takes place when ordinary stimuli elicit extraordinary experiences (Bretones 2005). Through synaesthesia we can not only conceptualise and express an idea, but also let others guess a further impression that a concept provokes on us. For some individuals certain stimuli cause physical conscious synaesthetic responses or synaesthetic perception (Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001, Robertson & Sagiv 2005, inter alia) and, for centuries, synaethesia has been consigned to metaphor in the language. It has been considered a rhetorical figure, consisting on giving a thing a quality that in fact it cannot have because the thing and the quality are perceived by different senses (e.g. white voices, sweat melody). However, synaesthesia is used to organize bodily experiences cognitively, specially affects, because it is rooted in the body. A key factor to state this is that according to metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1999) the ‘projections’ from source to target domain are not arbitrary, and that they can be studied empirically and stated precisely. They are not arbitrary because they are normally motivated by our bodily grounded experience, which is biologically constrained (Gibbs 2005). For instance, in expressions such as ‘She greeted me warmly” or “Send her warm hellos”, there is an underlying conceptual metaphor that allows us to conceptualize affection in terms of bodily grounded thermic experiences, -in this case, Warmth. This is not a mere arbitrary social convention. It is based on a human invariant which is the shared experience of the correlation between the bodily sensation of warmth and affection from the most early days of our life (Núñez 1999: 49). The basic metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1999) for the example would be the following: Emotions are Heat in a Container. But many of the very basic conceptual correlations are sensory-based, that is, they are based in either sensorial or cross-modal projections, and they are synaesthetically motivated. Take, for instance, the following: Basic metaphor: Anger is Heat in a Container Domains: Emotion Temperature Shape Senses: Touch Vision Projection takes place originally from touch and vision to the domain of emotions. Traditionally such projections had not been classified as synaesthetic but named under the general label of metaphor. But this paper intends to find the border line between both, and to highlight the importance of synaesthesia in the study of discourse, body and emotions.

Metaphors of Passion in Wine Advertising Discourse

Rosario Caballero and Raquel Segovia MRosario.Caballero@uclm.es

Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha and Universitat Jaume I The discourse around wine is intrinsically metaphorical. In fact, wine experts (winemakers, retailers, oenologists, etc.) make abundant use of diverse metaphors to conceptualize and verbalize both the processes and products of winemaking. Consider, for instance, terms such as “buttressed”, “tightly-knit”, or broad-shouldered” used in the description of wines, and suggesting the presence of architectural, textile or anthropomorphic metaphorical schemas in the description of the various sensory experiences of wine during and after its elaboration. However, although figurative language appears to be indispensable for disseminating knowledge about wines –as this is mostly articulated in the genre of the tasting note– the quantity and quality of the metaphors used to discuss wine in written texts differ from their use in the genre of wine advertising –also aimed at promoting this product. Conceiving wine as a cultural artefact, this paper is one of a series of team exploratory investigations into the metaphors of wine (the research project “Traduciendo los sentidos: metáfora en la retórica del vino” financed by the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha). Indeed, metaphors are also culture bound: they provide insight into how different cultures view the world. Since metaphors can be used to understand cultural differences, we present an analysis of Spanish wine advertisements as they appear in printed media in an attempt to explore how the Spanish culture symbolically represents itself. For this endeavour we will use a selected corpus of samples taken from both specialized and non-specialized publications. Nonetheless, other cultural wine traditions will also be taken into consideration –i.e., Spanish wine metaphors will be also compared to those used by other European traditions. The theoretical foundations that form the basis of this analysis come from cognitive approaches to metaphor as well as research made in critical discourse analysis and in intercultural communication studies. Our discussion will particularly focus on a salient feature in Spanish adverts, namely the concept of ‘passion’ as this can be variously found in the adverts analyzed. For although wines are often described as “assertive”, “rational”, “serious” and the like, it is the passion component that appears to be granted the lion’s share in Spanish advertising. Indeed, ‘passion versus reason’ is a dominant dichotomy which pivots on a complex imaginary built upon anthropomorphic, religious, and gender issues. This dichotomy is realized both in images and words to the extent that verbal and visual language reinforce each other. The paper is organized as follows: first, we provide a survey of the metaphors used in wine advertising; second, we describe how the topic of ‘passion’ is exploited to sell Spanish wines; third, we discuss the cultural and ideological implications of passion metaphors in wine promotion.

The Appropriation of Metaphor in the Dynamics of Discourse

Lynne Cameron

l.j.cameron@leeds.ac.uk University of Leeds

This paper describes the phenomenon of ‘metaphor appropriation’ in talk between perpetrator and victim in a context of post-conflict conciliation. Metaphor appropriation occurs when a Vehicle term introduced by one speaker is taken up and used by the other. In this process, the Topic of the metaphor is shifted to fit the other speaker’s goals and attitudes. The data for the study is a series of conversations between a man who planted a bomb on behalf of the Irish Republican Army and the daughter of a victim of the bomb. The recordings have been transcribed and analysed using techniques from conversation analysis and discourse analysis, in a theoretical framework that combines complex dynamics systems theory with a socio-cognitive theory of social interaction (Cameron, 2003). This discourse dynamics approach to metaphor connects what happens minute-by-minute in talk with longer term changes in the understandings of speakers. Metaphor in discourse is seen as dialogic, as well as dynamic (Bakhtin, 1981); metaphor is constructed for the Other, taking account of the Other, and is responded to by the Other. In order to understand how change on the ‘local’ timescale of utterances and turns can contribute to change on the more ‘global’ timescales of hours and months, we need to examine what happens to metaphors as they enter the flow of talk, how they are challenged, negotiated or adapted. The micro-level analysis is connected to a more macro-level, using the speakers’ descriptions of how their views of the Other have changed over a period of two and a half years. Appropriation of metaphor is one of the dialogic outcomes of the local dynamics of metaphor identified in the study. Appropriation allows both parties to use the same words – as metaphor Vehicle – and it is argued that, in the conciliation context, it makes an important contribution to the reduction of alterity, or Otherness, and to an increase in shared understanding. Moreover, by examining how metaphor is shifted in the dynamics of discourse, we come to understand more about the nature of metaphor as both, and at the same time, linguistic and cognitive.

Metonymic Nets in Discourse

Georgeta Cislaru

cislaru@clipper.ens.fr Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle

The aim of this paper is to show that metonymy may support text coherence and cohesion by virtue of its cognitive support flexibility. The demonstration is based on news discourse analysis. In the frame of cognitive linguistics metonymy is defined as a conceptual phenomenon operating within an idealized cognitive model and assuming referential and comprehension functions. Thus, for instance, the use of proper names in Washington negotiates with Paris or Russia is protesting is expected to reflect a general principle by which place may stand for an institution located in this place. The qualitative and quantitative study of such metonymies in discourse context provides some supplementary data. Firstly, it confirms that the metonymic use of place/institution/person names, very frequent, is a natural cognitive-linguistic mechanism. Moreover, so as pronominalisation of these names in discourse preserves part, or even whole, of the metonymic value, one may assume that no a priori distinction or negotiation concerning literal and metaphorical meaning is necessary to interpretation. This enables a single-level treatment of metonymy. Secondly, this study shows that the general principle ‘place for institution’ narrows interpretation; it thus points out the genuine cognitive complexity of these metonymies, which map place, institution, leaders-controllers, etc. In this respect, a broader coordinative model, ‘place-and-agent’, is best adapted for news discourse analysis. On the one side, I noted that, since referring to event agents, names of countries, capital-cities, institutions and political leaders play an important role in discourse event construction. On the other side, due to cognitive complexity, metonymic names and their anaphors are referentially ambiguous, as in Iraq closing borders (title) or Iraq's government announced it will close its borders. Cognitive complexity seems to generate cognitive flexibility. Consequently, metonymy is highly “convertible”: country-names, names of capital-cities, institutions, headquarters, and political leaders may designate the same referents: the Soviet Union/Moscow/the Kremlin withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. However, each name preserves part of its individual referential value in news discourse and, corollary, its place in discourse coherence. Referential chains like France-Paris-l’Elysée-Jacques Chirac, Italy-Squadra Azzura-the Italians lay out metonymic nets that outline discourse sites. Thus, metonymies set both a relevant support for text interpretation and a flexible ground for text progression.

A Corpus-Based French-English Contrastive Study of Live Metaphors in Oral

Discourse Using Latent Semantic Analysis and Prosodic Data

Gilles Cloiseau gilles.cloiseau@cegetel.net

University of Orleans The research followed a preliminary internet-based study of metaphorical uses in journalistic discourse on contemporary popular music, whose results established coherence in the cognitive models used in the metaphors produced, e.g: Music is a pointed object, projectile, pierces the body barrier Listening to /playing music is a journey. Encouraged by the results, an oral corpus-based contrastive study was then launched. The corpus consists of scripted interviews carried out with both French and English speakers. Interviewees are aged 18-35 and are either professional or amateur pop and jazz musicians. Nine are American, nine French, and two British. The corpus was then XML formatted and tagged with lsa (latent semantic analysis) coefficients representing the semantic distance of each term with the overall topic (general topic) of the interviews: music. Other labels such as lemma, morpho-syntax (pos tagging), were also added thus enabling a variety of searches by xslt stylesheets. Searches included trawling for potential metaphors at every morphosyntactic level by using lsa tags. This paper concentrates on the use of prosodic characteristics of metaphorical heads, which go hand in hand with the informational structure they appear in. Whereas the morpho-syntactic and semantic distributions of metaphors in both French and English corpora are very similar in the oral discourse on music, there are differences as to what is dead and alive in both languages. It gradually became clear that those differences may be assessed by the close scrutiny of intonation contours and prosodic patterns in both languages. There seems to lie in its pattern the opinion of the speaker as to whether he considers his metaphorical use original, innovative or not. The segment for the last syllable in French features characteristics for F0max—its bell shape and location with relation to the intensity peak. In English, typical patterns are similar but are to be observed on the primarily stressed syllable. Reference pitch pattern obtained for metaphors within spontaneous oral discourse extracted from radio recordings in both languages are used as a gauge. The typical pitch patterns (pitch pattern templates) drawn out and defined thanks to the Praat software seem to be an essential tool for purifying live metaphors from an oral text and helps the establishment of metaphorical mappings for both languages. Since the metaphorical mappings involved in the area of music are manifold, this paper will concentrate on a particular tenor/vehicle vector: Music is a topos (or a landmark), and the musician is a trajectory (or a vehicle). The aim here is both to contribute to the contrastive mapping-out of metaphorical uses and to lay the grounds for a contrastive prosodic grammar of metaphors in oral discourse, in an effort to use optimally a corpus of interviews collected to that effect.

The Metaphorical Contagion: the Spread of Conceptual Mappings in One and

Two-Person Discourse

Daniel P. Corts pscorts@augustana.edu

Augustana College, Illinois Several recent works have shown that novel, explanatory figures of speech and metaphoric gestures are likely to be produced in clusters during monologues such as lectures or other public speeches; in fact, some measures indicate that as much as 1/3 of the figurative language may occur in as little as 10% of the discourse (Corts & Pollio, 1999; Corts & Myers, 2002; Corts, in press). These clusters of figurative language seem to arise when an apt conceptual metaphor is introduced and then explained and/or presented in contrast to alternative conceptual metaphors. Figurative clusters do not seem to follow the introduction of an idiomatic phrase, or phrases that do little to explain the topic. These results have been observed across a number of speakers in various settings, but what happens when two speakers are contributing to the discourse? Initial research has shown that figurative language may facilitate transitions between topics (e.g. Drew & Holt, 1998, 2005). Additional research suggests that when idioms are introduced, they may be difficult for others to ignore (Kitzinger, 2000). Our research interests are focused on what we call contagious metaphor; that is, a conceptual metaphor that is introduced by one speaker and quickly incorporated into another’s language and/or gesture. To extend our research on one to two-person discourse, we drew from our earlier research model applied to monologues. Current investigations involve discourse transcribed from psychological interviews, exchanges between teachers and students, and a number of other settings. We will present descriptive data indicating that situations in which metaphors spread from one person to another usually involve a particularly apt figurative expression. The most typical instances of a spreading metaphor include attempts to clarify and/or extend conceptual mappings, and are quite often used for humor (i.e. discovering incongruent mappings). Finally, we will present results of several brief experiments illustrate that figurative expressions can spread from one person’s speech to another’s gesture.

La manipulación eufemística a través del lenguaje figurado

Eliecer Crespo Fernández eliecer.crespo@ua.es

Universidad de Alicante El objetivo del presente trabajo es mostrar, a través de ejemplos tomados del ámbito sexual, el funcionamiento del lenguaje figurado en la manipulación eufemística del referente tabú. Esta manipulación consiste en una traslación semántica por la cual un término con valores emocionales distintos al vocablo interdicto se aleja de su significado literal con el objeto de lograr la neutralización léxica del tabú. En este maquillaje conceptual del referente interdicto, la metáfora se erige en una herramienta clave del proceso de ingeniería semántica que supone el eufemismo como manifestación lingüística del fenómeno de la interdicción. En la atenuación a través del lenguaje figurado, la capacidad mitigadora de la metáfora eufemística depende de tres factores: de la existencia de un contraste entre el significado de primer orden y el figurado de la proferencia metafórica, de la ambigüedad en la designación del tabú de ese significado adquirido y de la impropiedad del signo con respecto a su referente. Sin embargo, los sustitutos metafóricos de conceptos interdictos no siempre cumplen estas tres características. De hecho, la capacidad mitigadora del lenguaje figurado depende de la naturaleza de la metáfora que origina la alternativa eufemística y, con ello, del grado de vinculación del sustituto con respecto al referente tabú. Así, basándonos en la distinción entre metáforas lexicalizadas, semilexicalizadas y creativas propuesta por Chamizo Domínguez (1998) distinguimos distintas modalidades de atenuación verbal metafórica que dan lugar a cuatro tipos de eufemismos: explícitos, convencionales, novedosos y estéticos. Se trata de sustituciones mitigadoras producto de posiciones distintas ante la metáfora eufemística, con distintos vínculos asociativos entre el signo y el tabú y diferente grado de ambigüedad y de capacidad de mitigación del concepto interdicto. Asimismo, y adoptando el clásico enfoque cognoscitivo defendido por Lakoff y Johnson (1980), demostramos que la capacidad de la metáfora para crear redes conceptuales y, con ello, estructurar nuestro sistema conceptual no es ajena al eufemismo, ya que la conceptualización de una metáfora eufemística incide decisivamente en la percepción de los ámbitos interdictivos y en la actualización de la función ilocutiva del eufemismo y, con ello, determina su comportamiento como fenómeno discursivo.

Both Sides of the Coin

Mª Teresa de Cuadra mtdecuadra@hotmail.com

Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha Being a multidisciplinar subject, wine tasting, is a rather complex topic from a lexical point of view since it is built up with specialized terms from other scientific subjects such as botany, chemistry, edaphology, oenology, wine making process, etc. Indeed, the way we think and talk about wine differs across communities given their different perspectives of the wine world which show up in the different terms used to talk about it. In this paper I will contrast two of these approaches: the one of wine chemists and the one of wine experts, which implies analysing two kinds of language use although these are, in fact, the two sides of the same coin. Thus, what most wine tasting notes normally do is to describe a wine according to the organoleptic sensations they produce. These sensations are mainly described using comparisons and frameworks of reference closely related to our experience of the world and cultural roots. This is the reason why the experience of tasting wine is communicated very frequently by images and metaphors. On the contrary, the chemical analysis of wine requires spectroscopic analysis or gas chromatography. For instance, a young, dry white wine would have the following chemical description: PARAMETERS Residual Sugar ≤ 4 g/l Total Acidity (Tartaric Ac.) Mín. 4,50 g/l Volatile Acidity ( Acetic Ac) Máx. 0,50 g/l (8,33 meq/l) Colouring Intensity (∑ A a 420, 520, 620) Mín. 7 u.a. Total SO2 < 130 mg/l Whereas its corresponding wine tasting note would be: “An unbelievable marriage of coiled power and refinement, the 2002 Riesling Auslese Graacher Domprobst A.P. #1403 is a slate and mineral-scented wine of massive breadth, concentration, purity, and harmony. It’s all here, the detail, richness, elegance, muscle, depth, and stunning length. The lucky few who will encounter this jewel will be wowed by its intense minerality, shocking complexity, and graceful dance across the palate. Projected maturity: 2009-2038.â€� Wine Advocate #151 (Feb 2004) (Robert Parker). What really matters here is that both descriptions are meant to characterize the same wine and both would be easily understood by wine tasters as corresponding one to the other. However, a wine tasting session is not just a physical “organoleptical” experience the wine taster shares with the audience. The taster needs to go beyond that and share the emotions and perceptions the wine arouses with his/her audience. That’s why the chemical description is reformulated and the wine becomes a “jewel”. In this paper I will show how metaphors are used to communicate those experiences that go from physical to non-physical and emotional sensations.

La metáfora en la novela de Patrick Süskind El Perfume

Mª Victoria Gaspar Verdú gaspar@fil.uji.es

Universitat Jaume I El artículo trata las relaciones entre literatura y metáfora dentro del género Bildungsroman o novela de educación, género clásico de la literatura alemana e iniciado por C.M. Wieland en 1766. Nos centramos en la obra Das Parfüm de Patrick Süskind, que recupera dicho género en los años 80 del s.XX y establece en su argumento múltiples metáforas para transmitir al lector el desarrollo interno del personaje. El autor comparte con Aristóteles la concepción de literatura desde el deleite y con este fin aplica la metáfora en esta obra. Mediante el empleo de la metáfora comprende y muestra al lector el desarrollo y la introspección psicológica del protagonista Grenouille es decir, el ámbito de lo humano. Respecto al momento histórico, parece que Süskind escogió al azar esta época para ubicar a su personaje pero no es así. La selección del momento histórico ha sido escogida deliberadamente por el autor ya que la novela de educación o Bildungsroman se inicia como género literario justo en los años en que se desarrolla el argumento de esta novela.

Is this a metaphor?

On the Difficult Task of Identifying Metaphors in Discourse

Juliana Goschler juliana.goschler@alumni.hu-berlin.de Technical University Darmstadt

Since Lakoff & Johnson (1980) claimed that metaphors are ubiquitous in language AND thought, metaphors are of great interest for Cognitive Linguistics. Lakoff & Johnson’s work, however, relies on linguistic examples that have been made up or more or less coincidentally collected. The importance of empirical work has been pointed out since more than a decade by various scholars. A lot of work has already been done. The methodologies that have been used differ considerably. What has often been left out is the question how to decide exactly what is a metaphor and what is not. The problem is that within Conceptual Metaphor Theory metaphors are located on the conceptual level. Linguistic metaphors in this perspective are a mere secondary phenomenon which supports the claim of the existence of conceptual metaphor. Because a genuine linguistic definition of metaphor is not provided in many cases, problems occur when identifying metaphor in discourse. This has already been pointed out by Steen (2002). He and the “Pragglejaz”-group offer a methodology to deal with these problems. The method has been succesfully used in analyzing a poem. But depending on the discourse, there can still remain two serious problems: Truth and/or meaning. These two criteria have been used, mostly implicitly, to identify metaphors in language. The first approach marks expressions as metaphorical which are not actually true. It is easy to ridicule this approach with minimal philosophical skills. But in many cases this approach works not so bad: A marriage is not really on the rocks, nobody is actually shooting down someone else’s arguments, and Christmas is not in fact moving towards me. For these prominent examples and thousands of other expressions used in everyday language this approach works just fine. And in some cases it is the only possibility to distinguish a metaphor from a literal statement. The practical problems arise especially in two certain discourses: Science and religion, because the concept of “truth” is problematic in these contexts, while it can be rather trivial in everyday life. Thus, it is necessary to use a second possible approach to metaphor identification: This second approach to identify a metaphor on the linguistic level is to take “meaning” into account. But here other problems arise: What is the meaning of a word? This is an old question of linguistics and philosophy of language. Which definition of “meaning” and especially of “core” or “primary” meaning one accepts seriously influences the outcome of the empirical research on metaphor. In my talk, I will argue that there are different kinds of metaphors. Depending on the discourse one is focussing on, different identification strategies are required. Based on this observation I will give some suggestion for future research.

Communication, Cognition and Ideology.

A Critical Analysis of Metaphor in UK Immigration Discourse

Christopher Hart christopher.hart@uea.ac.uk University of East Anglia

Following van Dijk’s characterization of ideology as shared social cognitions, where social cognition is defined as ‘the system of mental representations and processes of group members’ (van Dijk 1995: 18), we may conjecture that conventionalised conceptual metaphors are, in some contexts, precisely ideologies. A crucial notion at the intersection between communication and cognition in the political context is the dialectical relationship between elite discourse and public representation, where, for example, metaphor in elite discourse is both constructed by and constitutive of conventionalised conceptual projections. This paper will investigate anti-immigration ideologies, then, as a function of metaphorical structures in elite discourse. Party political manifestos and keynote speeches during the UK 2005 General Election campaign will provide a corpus of data. With a focus on discourse, analysis will be carried out not with the Lakoffian account standard in Critical Metaphor Analysis, but with conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), a more appropriate model representative of cognitive operations performed on discourse. In conceptual blending theory, since further processing arises from the blended space, metaphors are significant structures in the discourse process. Metaphors in elite discourse are ideologically significant for they prompt for discourse processors to entertain particular representations and the inferences yielded by them where the linguistic embedding of metaphor in discourse ‘can contribute to a situation where they privilege one understanding of reality over others’ (Chilton 1996: 74). The state-as-container metaphor will be identified as the most prominent in immigration discourse. Consider by way of example the following reproduced verbatim from the official website of the UK Independence Party (www.ukip.org): The trouble is the UK is already full up. The average population density of England is twice that of Germany, four times that of the France, and twelve times that of the United States. We are bursting at the seams. [my emphasis] The state-as-container metaphor is realised in a variety of linguistic expressions which will be illustrated in this paper. Common across each case, though, is the container schema in the generic space. At a second stage of enquiry, a cognitive explanation will be offered as to the potency of this metaphor in immigration discourse. As a function of the inherent ‘logic’ of the container schema, the state-as-container metaphor signals group boundaries denoting ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. Here it will be postulated that the state-as-container metaphor in immigration discourse is so affective because it connects with an innate ‘fear of outsiders’ module, reinforcing anti-immigration attitudes. Metaphor in discourse, then, truly intersects between communication, cognition and ideology with consequences in the social and political sphere.

Political Ideology via Contradictory Metaphors

María Hellín-García hell0214@umn.edu

majohellingarcia@yahoo.comUniversity of Minnesota

In this paper I examine the apparent contradiction of using fight metaphors to promote an anti-violent political ideology in the speeches of the current Spanish president-Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Zapatero is widely believed to have come to power because of his anti-war agenda and his priority can be aptly summarized with the conceptual metaphor: terrorism is the enemy. However in presidential speeches against terrorism, Zapatero uses metaphors that draw heavily from the domain of fight and are connotative of violence in contrast with his peace ideology. It has been claimed that fight metaphors have been used before in presidential speeches to justify a pro-war political strategy. Charteris-Black (2004), points out how metaphors in political speeches are used to provide social direction and how contextual factors influence the stylistic choices of particular metaphors. Van Dijk (2004) describes the rhetoric used in political speeches to justify the case for war by the previous Spanish president José María Aznar. I use the approach of critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) to describe and classify these fight metaphors into four broad source domains: cognition, moral values, democracy, and anti-violence. The cognition metaphors evoke visual images of historical circumstances such as the Madrid bombing (March 11th 2004) and apathy against the terrorists responsible for them. Lakoff (2001) demonstrated the power of images evoked through such metaphors. The metaphors for moral values reflect human emotions such as hope, encouragement, boldness etc. and are used also to empathize with the victims of previous terrorist attacks. The metaphors for democracy highlight values such as liberty, unity, human rights, legality etc, and are used to promote a strong democratic society. The anti-violence metaphors are used to reflect an ideology for promoting political dialogue and diplomacy in contrast with unjustified physical action. I show how the fight metaphors in the four source domains are used as part of a political strategy to connect with the public. I analyze their usage in context of historical events, public emotion, and the geo-political scenario in Spain. I interpret how the fight metaphors are used to have a greater psychological impact than peace metaphors would have. The peace metaphors would not appease the public especially with the devastation of the Madrid bombing fresh in the minds of the people. I show how fight metaphors help to bridge the gap between the subconscious emotions of the public and Zapatero’s intended political ideology. I finally show the implicit goal of using fight metaphors to polarize a smooth transition of political ideology from the previous pro-war one (Aznar) to an anti-war one. The analysis is based on a corpus of six political speeches from April to December (2004) by Zapatero focused on terrorism.

Death Metaphors in Fairy Tales. At The Crossroads between Literature,

Culture, Linguistics, and Cognition1

Javier Herrero Ruiz jaherrer5@hotmail.com

Universidad de La Rioja

This paper studies how several death metaphors (e.g. DEATH IS DEPARTURE, DEATH IS COLD, DEATH IS SLEEP, etc.) are able to account for the basic meaning and interpretation of more than thirty popular tales and myths. Besides, we offer the possibility of classifying tales according either to the basic metaphor they contain or to the combination of metaphors that may comprise them (for example, whereas The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood is characterised by the metaphor DEATH IS SLEEP, The Flower Queen’s daughter makes use of various metaphors such as DEATH IS RENEWAL and DEATH IS UNDERGROUND). Additionally, the paper explores in what ways the metaphors under scrutiny allow us to explain some of the uncanny elements of tales. Finally, we suggest that these metaphors, because of their strong experiential grounding, may have contributed to an easier transmission of many fairy tales (as it would be easier to memorise their basic patterns), and also to make tales alike in different socio-cultural settings. In order to substantiate these points, we have worked with a computerized corpus of analysis containing 386 fairy tales written by Andrew Lang (1844-1912). The tales, which are representative of various cultures, have been entirely downloaded from the Project Gutenberg online library. The work of identification of underlying metaphors has been carried out with the help of the (encyclopedic) information provided in the Berkeley Framenet Project. This information has allowed us to make an exhaustive and systematic analysis of the lexical patterns of the metaphors. Then, we have made use of WordSmith and its tool Concord in order to find examples of key words and phrases that we expected to underlie metaphorical usage in the texts. This has allowed us to observe if a given metaphor applies in a given tale or not. Also, we have made use of complementary Google searches in order to further substantiate our analysis of the metaphors in every day usage.

1 Financial support for this research has been provided by the DGI, Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, grant no. HUM2004-05947-C02-01/FILO. The research has been co-financed through FEDER funds.

Biotech as Bio-Threat? – Metaphorical Constructions in Discourse

Lise-Lotte Holmgreen holmgreen@hum.aau.dk

Aalborg University

For many years, the European public debate on biotechnology has been marked by widespread scepticism. This scepticism has led to a wide range of research into the basis and diffusion of knowledge, the role of the media, audience reception, etc. (e.g. Bredahl 2000, Bauer & Gaskell 2002). Although focusing on aspects of communication and mediation, such studies have not focused on the role played by discourse and metaphor in determining public attitudes. Nonetheless, some of the findings provide an interesting background for further studies into metaphor use in (media) discourse. In a study from 2002, Hviid Nielsen et al. demonstrated that European scepticism towards biotechnology can be divided into two camps, promoting a Mephistophelean or a Frankensteinian argument, respectively. In the present paper, this finding provides the background for analysing how the debate on biotechnology is metaphorically constructed in the Danish printed media. The basic assumption is that in media discourse metaphors perform the two important functions of explaining and persuading – functions that are equally influenced by public opinion and knowledge as well as the ideological stance of the media itself. Hence, metaphor use in the Danish media debate on biotechnology is likely to be influenced by the way the public perceive the subject, while at the same time reflecting the particular viewpoints of the media. In other words, being constituent parts of discourse metaphors may become points of consensus or contestation between the social groups that act as participants in the debate. On this background, the expected result of the present analysis is the uncovering of metaphors that will respond to the above division in public opinion, either through uses that will support one or both of the arguments, or through alternative constructions that will reject them. The approach used in the analysis is one that draws on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and van Dijkean, socio-cognitive CDA. The adoption of such a combined strategy has proven valuable for understanding the function of metaphor in discourse and social interaction (Holmgreen 2005). The claims of this approach are supported by data from various Danish newspapers from 2005.

Who Is to Believe when You Bet: On Cognitive Motivations of Metaphoric and

Metonymic Uses of the Pronoun You in English

Katherine Hrisonopulo katherine.hrisonopulo@gmail.com

Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, Vyborg Branch

This paper aims to reveal the cognitive mechanisms enabling the use of the second person pronoun you as an alternative of the first person pronoun I in English. The uses in question are to be found in the following three types of utterances: (1) predictions: You (vs. I) bet they are going to win; (2) judgments: You would think (vs. I think) they are working; (3) generalizations: [I have often been subject to boredom.] You (vs. I) feel you (vs. I) can’t ignore it, can’t take your (vs. my) eyes off it. The possibility of using you in (1) – (3) is considered with reference to the context of communicative interaction in which ‘I’- and ‘you’-participants share the same perceptual and communicative domain. In this context, the pronoun you can supposedly be associated with certain cognitive and communicative experiences of the ‘I’-participant of communication. This supposition leads to the hypothesis about the possibility of using you as a sign which – due to the perceptual salience of its referent in a communicative situation – can stand for, and thus be metonymically linked to, the above mentioned experiences of the referent of I. The paper further argues that the hypothesized ‘You – I’ metonymy in cases like (1) – (3) results from specific mappings across source and target domains. In (1) – (3), target domains are supposed to arise in discourse from the abstract mental processes of (1) predicting, (2) making judgments, and (3) making generalizations. Source domains, in turn, are presumably those which originate from cognitive experiences of the speaker (I) throughout his/her communicative interactions with the addressee (you). Such experiences are largely predetermined by the speaker’s position within a viewing scene, as schematically represented in Langacker (2000). Conceptually relevant features of the viewing scene appear to be (a) the speaker’s “offstage” vantage point, (b) a viewing relationship linking the speaker to the addressee, (c) a spatial distance separating the speaker from the addressee. With reference to examples drawn from English-language fiction it is shown that the mentioned features of the viewing scene are mapped onto the respective abstract mental processes conveyed in discourse. In (1), the mapping is based on metonymy VIEWING IS PREDICTING, which explains the modality of prediction as naturally arising from the commitment (betting) of the one who is viewed (You bet) rather than the one who actually takes this commitment (I bet). On the other hand, the uses of you in (2) and (3) are shown to be dependent on metaphoric mappings, the respective metaphors being JUDGING IS TAKING A STANDPOINT and GENERALIZING IS VIEWING FROM A DISTANCE. The results of the proposed study suggest that metaphoric and/or metonymic reasoning is all pervasive finding its expression both in the sphere of abstract vocabulary, as shown in Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and deictic words, such as personal pronouns.

Metaphor, Discourse and Music Theory:

James Weldon Johnson’s Sence you went away

Rubén Jarazo Álvarez rjarazo@udc.es

Universidade da Coruña

As African American poets have always tried to reflect in their writings the typical concerns of their culture in the context of a larger American civilization, they created part of their poetical compositions by recalling the folkloric values of their ancestors. In fact, they conceptualised poetry as a participatory activity, an active mean of expression by creating an aesthetic tradition shaped with communal values, the primacy of musicality and stylish improvisation. As a matter of fact, critics such as Sterling Brown, who explored the unlimited possibilities of the folk tradition, found out that black songs and tales may well represent the originality and complexity of the black race and its literature whereas, the nineteenth century white culture was still basing their traditional music on feigned stereotypes and bald sentimentalism. Consequently, the progress of the African American poetic tradition paralleled the development of an important musical practice that covered every single part of the black existence. However, the close linkage between literature and musical expression will be more palpable during the early twentieth century, especially throughout the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. Within this literary movement, African American poetry began to bloom because of a greater exploration of the black voice. That is to say, poets tried to embark on new cultural expectations based on their realm of experiences by turning away from the western world. In so doing, they chose culture in preference for expressing their past and present reality as representative of their race as well as their individuals.

The Metaphoric, Metonymic, and Image-Schematic Basis of Fictive Motion

Events

Noelia Jiménez Martínez-Losa noelia.jimenez@dfm.unirioja.es

Universidad de La Rioja

Fictive motion is the subtype of motion which has received greater attention within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics (e.g. Talmy, 2000; Slobin 1996, 2000; Ibarretxe, 2003; or Matlock, 2004a, 2004b). In our account of fictive motion our aim is to depart from the previous assumptions, and to argue that metaphor (more specifically the MOTION metaphor), in combination with metonymy and image-schemas, underlies the semantic configuration of fictive motion events. In our analysis of utterances like This road goes from Capitola to Aptos we argue that a set of metaphorical correspondences is mapped from factive motion (the source domain) onto fictive motion (the target domain). Some of the structural elements of the factive motion event are present in the linguistic utterance that expresses fictive motion (e.g. the source and destination of motion), and some others are conceptually activated in order to derive the semantic representation of the utterance (e.g. the trajector). This process of conceptualization of a fictive motion event in terms of a factive motion event serves a specific purpose: the focalization of the path element of the motion event. The study also shows that metonymy plays a crucial role in the metaphorical operation mentioned above. The metonymies MOTION ALONG A PATH FOR PATH and ACTION FOR RESULT (Kövecses and Radden, 1998; Panther and Thornburg, 2000; Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez, 2001) account for the reduction of one of the correspondences of the target domain. In this metonymic operation, by mentioning one domain (the motion along a path element as a matrix domain) we have access to one of its subdomains (the path of motion). One of the conclusions of our study of fictive motion is the discovery of the role of the ACTION FOR RESULT high-level metonymy in the semantic configuration of the mentioned motion event. This metonymy may thus be regarded as a case of what Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez (2001) have called grammatical metonymy due to its impact on the grammatical organization of the clause. It licenses the grammatical phenomenon by means of which a factive landmark is conceptualized as a trajector and grammatically expressed as a subject in fictive motion sentences. Our analysis also argues that the semantic make-up of fictive motion events is sensitive to interaction patterns between image-schemas. We may thus have case of interaction of image-schemas which are subsidiary to the PATH schema (e.g. VERTICALITY, REMOVAL OF RESTRAINT, ENABLEMENT, or NEAR-FAR schemas). We may also find instances of interaction, for example, between the SURFACE and CONTAINER schemas, which are different from the previous one because these schemas are not subsidiary to the PATH schema, and the image-schematic interaction is licensed by the conceptual operation known as conceptual integration by enrichment (a high-level conceptual operation; Fornés and Ruiz de Mendoza, 1998; Ruiz de Mendoza and Santibáñez, 2003, Peña, 2003).

Advertising Genre across Cultures: Some Reflections on the Use of Metaphors

as a Persuasive Tool

Jolanta Kowalska jkowalska375d@cv.gva.es

Escuela Oficial de Idiomas, Valencia

Our everyday communicative exchanges are filled with figurative speech, in other words, use of language in which the speaker’s proposed meaning does not concur with the literal meaning of the words uttered. Hence, knowledge of reality, whether occasioned by perception, language, or memory, needs going beyond the information given. It occurs through the relations of that information with the context in which it is accessible and with the speaker’s pre-existing knowledge. In this view, language, perception and knowledge are inextricably tangled. This has not remain ignored by advertising creators, who have discovered in figurative meaning a powerful device to communicate more successfully with their target audiences. Following Wierzbicka (2002) who said that “Human communication depends on metaphors”, in this paper we analyse the explanatory and emotional potential of metaphors used as a persuasive tool in the advertising genre. For the purpose of our study, we have chosen some advertisements in three different languages (Polish, Spanish and English) but related to the same product.

Metaphors in Design Critiques

Barbara Lasserre barbara.lasserre@uts.edu.au

University of Technology, Sydney

My paper reports on a project which explores the use of metaphor in the context of university level design education, drawing on both the literature of design and cognitive theories of metaphor. In particular the research focuses on the sorts of metaphors that are used by university lecturers when they give oral feedback in the form of critiques ('crits') to design students. The research reported on here is part of larger ongoing study of metaphors used by design theorists and by teachers of design in relation to considerations of the recontextualisation of theoretical design knowledge into pedagogic practice. The crit is a central place for students to learn the traditions and discourse of their field, and to acquire tacit knowledge of ontological metaphorical concepts (following Lakoff); for example SPACE IS A FLUID informs the feedback in this discourse. Metaphor is often used as a cognitive strategy in responding to design problems (Casakin 2004). Furthermore, within the field of design theory and education, there is a body of literature that frequently employs as part of its metadiscourse ‘DESIGN AS..’ as a way of using analogy to describe the design process: DESIGN AS EVOLUTION, PROBLEM SOLVING, , PLAY, SERVICE, BRICOLAGE, or DESIGN AS DEVICE (see for example Morton and O'Brien 2005; Swales, Barks, Osterman, and Simpson 2001, in Dannels 2005; Buchanan 1996; Dorst 2003; Nelson and Stolterman 2003). The question I am exploring is whether these metaphors in the metadiscourse of the design theorists are reflected in the discourse of the crits. In this paper I will examine the discourse of one crit wherein two lecturers in Architecture are speaking to a student about her project. At the same time I will look at the discourse of Sidney Newton in his article “Designing as Disclosure”.

Using Corpora to Explore the Figurative Potential of the Target Language

Jeannette Littlemore and Fiona MacArthur j.m.littlemore@bham.ac.uk

University of Birmingham and Universidad de Extremadura In all languages, the senses of words can be figuratively extended, but languages vary considerably in terms of the extensions they allow. For example, in English, the word ‘cup’ can be can be figuratively extended to refer to a part of a bra, a part of an acorn, and a hip joint. None of these senses exist for the word ‘taza’ in Spanish. Moreover, when words are used figuratively in this way, they are often accompanied by fairly fixed phraseological patterns that differ from those surrounding the more basic senses of the words (Deignan, 2005). All of this presents a significant challenge to language learners. To date there has been little research into the ways in which language learners acquire these figurative senses and the phraseological patterns that accompany them. A potentially powerful learning tool that could be used for this purpose is the language corpus. Corpora provide useful information on both usage and phraseological patterning. In this paper, we describe an exploratory study looking at the ways in which language learners used corpora to explore the figurative extensions of target language words. The participants were a group of university-level Spanish-speaking learners of English, and a group of university-level, English-speaking learners of Spanish. The students in each group were given a list of nouns in the target language, and asked to make predictions about the possible figurative meanings of the derived adjective and verb forms. For example, the students of Spanish were given words such as ‘cuadra’, which gives figurative ‘cuadrar’, and ‘caldo’, which gives figurative ‘caldear’. The students of English were given a similar list of words (including animal names like “dog” or “worm”), which can be used figuratively as verbs. They were then given access to a target language corpus (CREA and the BNC) and asked to explore and discuss their predictions. The discussions between the students and teachers were recorded and transcribed. They were then tested on their retention of the items, and again their discussions were recorded and transcribed. In the teaching sessions, for most items, the learners tended to make predictions based on evidence of an A=B metaphorical expression in their L1. They also tended to predict that verbal meaning would relate to the behaviour of humans. Interestingly, the students made significant use of gesture in these sessions. In the testing sessions, there was considerable variation between the items in terms of retention. In general, the animal terms were remembered better than the other terms. There was also variation between learners in their ability to recall the words and their phraseological patterns. At times, expressions were retained as lexical chunks, and at times, the students resorted to the basic senses of the words, extrapolating from these senses. We discuss the implications of these findings for language teachers and metaphor theorists.

The Dynamics of Multi-Discursive Processing of Metaphors

Marzenna Mioduszewska marzenna.mioduszewska@urjc.es Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

The rapid spread of ideas and concepts from everyday discourse to all kinds of other discourses (and back) is a common feature of our modern society. These ideas and concepts (metaphors) travel across many different contexts of meaning and assume different functions. Taking into consideration the most common aspects of a metaphor, i.e., its transferability as well as its linkage function, this paper proposes the analysis of metaphor transfers into a variety of discourses. My strategy here is to present a case study (based on selected terms or concepts from new technologies area), following the appearance and use of certain metaphors, analysing at the same time the interactions in which they are likely to engage. The procedure will include the frequency of occurrence of a chosen concept over a certain period of time as well as its presence in analysed “importing” discourses. The final phase will focus on the local and specific interactions with a certain metaphor creating specific shades of meaning. It is to be noted that the above mentioned aspects of a metaphor, namely, its transferability and linkage function, contribute largely to the emergence of its global meaning. Thus, the thorough study of metaphor transfers and its discourse interactions can, eventually, help us to understand how discourses are transformed and scientific paradigms or world views changed (Bono 1990, Fauconnier and Turner 1998). As it has been observed by many authors, the transfer of metaphors among various discourses is a very complex issue because it involves the interaction of more discourses with an ever-more faceted metaphor. The newly created meanings and different usages not only add up new cases but also compete with each other. A “successful” metaphor, which has found its place in a discourse and, gradually, unfolds its meaning, affects that discourse retroactively. Finally, by presenting this tentative suggestion, I would like to study the meanings attributed to certain metaphors (chosen for my case study) as they engage in different discursive interactions. Secondly, I should be able to account for certain functional relationships between metaphors and their discursive environments.

The Effects of the Cognitive Turn on the Study of Literary Metaphor

Mariángeles Navarrete López manavar@ling.ed.ac.uk

University of Edimburgh Following Steen (Steen, 1994: 3), this paper focuses on the cognitive or rhetorical turn. It took place in metaphorology and symbolises the departure from the study of metaphor traditionally carried out by literary critics towards the acknowledgement of metaphor as the deepest process of the human mind. The aim is to show that it provides a practical framework for the study of the literary metaphor. Within the paradigm of the cognitive revolution, experts in the area claim that the view of metaphor as a cognitive tool is not totally new: for Eco (1984: 99-100), Semino (1997: 198-199), Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 190), and Turner (Turner, 1987: 3), among others, it can be traced back to Aristotle. This paper will examine the idea that the cognitive function of metaphor has been present in metaphorology since the ancient rhetorics, for more than 2,500 years, to trigger the cognitive revolution. The aim is to arrive at some of the most relevant changes undergone by metaphor following the emergence of the conceptual status of metaphor in the twentieth century e.g. ‘the undermining of the metaphor-as-lie thesis’, ‘the death of dead metaphor’, and ‘the erasure of dichotomies such as metaphor and metonymy’ as described by Fludernik, Freeman, and Freeman (Fludernik, Freeman, and Freeman, 1999: 383-386). Next, the consequences of these changes are revisited with attention to the effect on the study of the literary metaphor. The erasure of the above mentioned dichotomies shows how the traditional dichotomy between similes and metaphors has been replaced by the idea that both simile and metaphor can be considered members of the same cognitive category. Another example concerns the adjustments in terminology, from Richards’s (1936) influential nomenclature ‘vehicle, tenor and ground’ to ‘schema, source domain, target domain and mapping’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and later on, ‘blending’ (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002). The rhetorical or discursive turn presents a consistent practical framework for the study of the literary metaphor. It constitutes a mode of analysis that is possible because “audiences share many things- conceptual systems, social practices, commonplace knowledge, discourse genres, and every aspect of a common language including syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology” (Turner, 1987: 4).

Metaphor and Persuasion in Political Debates

Anabella-Gloria Niculescu-Gorpin anabella_nic@hotmail.com University of Manchester

Politicians want to persuade, that is they try to change their hearers’ beliefs and knowledge, and then their behaviour. Candidates to presidency attempt to persuade their audience, making them believe that they represent the perfect solution for the problems of the country and its citizens; they use language to achieve their final goal, that is getting elected. Nowadays, persuasion can be achieved through different media, such as TV or radio ads or shows, posters, but political speeches remain a preferred choice especially in presidential campaigns. In an attempt to prove and explain the metaphorical relationships or mappings existing between two conceptual domains, Lakoff and colleagues’ theory of metaphor defines conventionalized metaphors as constructions belonging to everyday language that are no longer felt as metaphorical by either speakers or hearers. In this framework, metaphors are not mainly linguistic phenomena, but a result of the mappings between two semantic domains. Yet, the theory says less about the way in which metaphors appear and why they are used. My analytical framework is mainly represented by Relevance Theory and its approach to metaphor seen as a particular case of broadening that gives rise not to mappings between two domains in the sense described by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), but to ad hoc concepts (Barsalou 1983, 1987). My main hypothesis is that the politicians’ use of metaphors contributes to the relevance of their speeches and thus to persuasion, since persuasion can be geared by relevance: hearers tend to process information that will yield positive cognitive effects without requiring a greater processing effort. If the debates are not relevant to the audience, then they may not process it at all. This paper is an analysis of the metaphors identified in the three American presidential debates of 2004. I have analyzed what has been termed in the literature as “conventional” and “novel” metaphors (“to bring people to the table”, “we’ve upheld the doctrine”, “a colossal error of judgement”, “to build a true alliance”, “the free world would act in concert” etc.) in order to prove that politicians use them to categorize or frame the reality they talk about in such a way as to make hearers perceive their speeches as real arguments and solutions for their current problems, thus increasing the persuasive effect. I have analyzed how G. W. Bush and J. Kerry used metaphors to create different images or scenarios of the same realities in their attempt to achieve persuasion.

Discourse, Semantics and Metonymy

José Luis Otal Campo otal@ang.uji.es

Universitat Jaume I

There are many ways of doing semantics. We have formal semantics, which makes use of principles of logic in looking at concepts in terms of classes of items subject to logical operations and definable in terms of intensional and extensional meaning. We have interpretive semantics, in which lexical items can be arranged according to their capability to combine with one another on the basis of selection restrictions (e.g. such atomic concepts as +/- human, +/-living, etc.). There are also paradigmatic approaches like Coseriu's lexematics whereby lexical items are arranged onomasiologically according to their inherent semasiological structure. Other approaches, like Wierzbicka's analysis and the cognitive semantics approach come closer to providing rich semantic characterizations for each lexical item or for the conceptual constructs associated with them. Wierzbicka believes that the essentials of world knowledge can be captured in definitions by means of a set of universal, atomic concepts that she calls "semantic primitives" (e.g. small, big, kind, good, do, etc.). Cognitive semantics has taken two forms: idealized cognitive models theory (Lakoff, 1987), and frame semantics (Fillmore & Atkins, 1992, 1994). In cognitive semantics concepts are complex structures consisting of a number of elements and their associated roles (e.g. in a buying frame, we have a buyer, a seller, a market, merchandise, and money). It is possible to divide all these different ways of dealing with semantics into two basic approaches: one, we will call the minimalist view, and the other the maximalist view. Only cognitive semantics fits the latter category, since it tries to capture all the complexities of conceptual organization. I will argue that, precisely because of these ambitious goals, only a maximalist approach can be productively used to account for discourse activity.

Independent Complement Constructions in German and the “Ethical Dative”:

A Cognitive-Linguistic and Pragmatic Analysis

Klaus-Uwe Panther KUPanther@t-online.de Hamburg University

In this talk I analyze constructions that exemplify an apparent “mismatch” between syntactic structure and conceptual-pragmatic function. They formally exhibit the structure of subordinate, i.e. dependent clauses, but they are used to convey independent speech acts. However, an important aim of the talk will be to show that these constructions are nevertheless partially motivated by their conceptual content and pragmatic function. These constructions show up in a variety of languages but I restrict myself here to data from German:2 (1) Dass du ja pünktlich bist! (order, request)

comp you prt on time are (2) Dass doch die drei Tag[e] schon um wären! (wish)

comp prt the three days already gone were-subj (3) Dass das ausgerechnet mir passieren muss! (expression of

frustration) comp that of-all-people to-me happen must

(4) Dass ich das noch erleben darf! (expression of happiness, joy) comp I that still experience may

The focus of this talk is on German complement clause constructions of the type exemplified by (1) – (4). These examples are actually distinct as to their conceptual content and pragmatic function. (1) has a directive force, (2) expresses an intentional state or propositional attitude of wishing, whereas (3) and (4) express emotional states such as joy and frustration, respectively. The directive speech act construction exemplified by (1), contrary to the other constructions, allows an additional first person dative personal pronoun traditionally known as the “ethical dative” as in (5): (5) Dass du mir ja pünktlich bist!

comp you me.dat prt on time are The grammatical and conceptual status of the ethical dative mir will be discussed in some detail. It will be argued that mir in such constructions as (5) is neither an argument of the construction nor a participant (argument) of the predicate pünktlich sein ‘be on time’. Still, mir has an important conceptual and communicative function: it metonymically elaborates a beneficiary source meaning to a target meaning that emphatically conveys the sincerity condition for directive speech acts. As to the constructions exemplified in (3) and (4), it will be shown that they exhibit rich cognitive models with frame elements such as ‘emotional involvement’, ‘counter-to-expectation situations’, and even metaphysical background assumptions about ‘what the world is like’. I maintain that these knowledge structures are adequately modeled by a “convergent” or integrated theory of meaning encompassing contemporary cognitive linguistic approaches to metaphor, metonymy, conceptual blending, and pragmatic inferencing (conversational implicature).

2 Abbreviations: COMP: complementizer; PRT: modal particle; DAT: dative.

La batalla perdida frente al tiempo y la elección del camino equivocado: una

aplicación práctica de la lingüística cognitiva al discurso literario

Mª Sandra Peña Cervel spena@flog.uned.es

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia Varios autores han analizado en profundidad la utilidad de las herramientas proporcionadas por la Lingüística Cognitiva para el análisis del discurso literario (por ej. Freeman 2000, Gavins y Steen 2003). Asimismo diversos estudiosos se han centrado en determinadas obras literarias para mostrar que dicho discurso hace uso extensivo de los diferentes modelos cognitivos idealizados propuestos por Lakoff para dar unidad y coherencia al citado discurso (por ej. Deane 1995, Crane 2001). En esta propuesta analizamos Macbeth desde un punto de vista cognitivo. Pretendemos ir más allá del análisis ofrecido por Freeman (1995) arrojando más luz sobre la caracterización de los personajes y desarrollo de la obra e incorporando los últimos avances en cuanto a teoría cognitiva se refiere (por ejemplo, tomaremos como puntos de partida la teoría de la metonimia de Ruiz de Mendoza y Otal (2002) y el estudio realizado por Peña (2003) sobre esquemas de imagen). Con tal fin, aportamos las inferencias derivadas de la aplicación de los esquemas de imagen de BLOQUEO, ELIMINACIÓN DE BARRERAS y VÍNCULO. Además, caracterizaremos el personaje de Macbeth en términos de la metáfora del YO DIVIDIDO. La combinación de varios esquemas de imagen (CONTENEDOR, CAMINO y VERTICALIDAD) nos hará considerar a Macbeth como una víctima atrapada en un espacio confinado del que no puede salir. De este modo, Macbeth inevitablemente tomará un rumbo que le llevará al más rotundo fracaso debido a su elección del camino equivocado. La interacción de estos esquemas subyace a la famosa escena de la caldera donde las brujas predicen el destino de Macbeth. Otro tema recurrente en esta obra es el tiempo. El esquema de imagen de CAMINO junto con la idea del tiempo nos harán ver que Macbeth ha ignorado los pasos intermedios del camino para conseguir su objetivo (ser rey), ya que el tiempo le apremia. Finalmente el tiempo le gana la partida y se conceptualiza metafóricamente como un ganador. Existen otras metáforas cuyo dominio meta es el tiempo que contribuyen al pesimismo desgarrador de la obra. Otro tipo de modelo cognitivo idealizado que aporta significado a esta tragedia es la metonimia. Por ejemplo, la sangre que Macbeth quiere lavar de sus manos representa la culpa que le corroe tras cometer varios horribles crímenes para conseguir ser rey. En resumen, los esquemas de imagen, la metáfora y la metonimia contribuyen a perfilar el significado y coherencia de esta tragedia.

The Embodied and Social Grounds for Figurative Meanings: Colour Terms in

EFL

Ana Mª Piquer Píriz anapiriz@unex.es

Universidad de Extremadura Colour terminology has been used as a testing ground for first defending and later rejecting the principle of arbitrariness of language. Empirical work carried out from the late sixties (Berlin and Kay 1969; Heider 1971; Kay, Berlin, Maffi and Merrifield 1997; Davidoff, Davies and Roberson 1999) has supported the idea that colour terms show the influence of underlying perceptual and cognitive factors on the formation and reference of linguistic categories rather than being a prime evidence for the arbitrariness of linguistic categories, as structuralists held. Taylor (2003) adds a third element to the perceptual and cognitive, namely, the environmental factor. Most of this research has mainly focused on the literal meanings of colours and the differences across languages but as is well known, colour terms are also highly metaphorical (e.g. ‘the Green movement’ or ‘a blue joke’). Furthermore, colours themselves can be metaphorically perceived as ‘warm’ or ‘cold’. Exploring this latter aspect from the perspective of cognitive linguistics may shed new light on the issue of colour terminology and further develop the notion of the influence of underlying perceptual, cognitive and social factors in our understanding of the literal and figurative meanings of colour terms. This paper reports on a study carried out with young EFL learners on their perception of six colours as ‘cold’ or ‘warm’. As is well-known, one of the main tenets of cognitive linguistic is that human abstract reasoning is grounded in our concrete bodily experiences and our interaction with the environment that surrounds us. Research on children’s understanding of some semantic extensions of body part terms has shown that they extensively resort to metonymy and metaphor when attempting to understanding the figurative meanings presented to them and that their bodily and social experiences also play an important role (Piquer Píriz 2005). In the study reported here, it is explored whether the same cognitive and environmental factors are present in their understanding of colours as ‘warm’ or ‘cold’.

Cognitive Metaphor as a Structuring Device in Scientific Discourse:

The Case of “Climatology”

Diane Ponterotto dpontero@yahoo.com

ponterotto@cc.univaq.itUniversity of L’Aquila, Italy

In the wake of the development of cognitive linguistics and the discovery of the role of cognitive metaphor in human conceptualization and its linguistic representation, interest has begun to grow in the relationship between metaphor and discourse. Some research has been dedicated to demonstrating the form and function of the presence of cognitive metaphor in discourse and text. In many studies, cognitive metaphor emerges as a primary, structuring device of text and discourse organization (see, for example, Caballero 2003, Charteris-Black 2005, Ponterotto 2000). This paper will analyze a series of texts belonging to a small corpus constructed from the American magazine Scientific American, which disseminates scientific discourse among non-specialist readers. The study will attempt to uncover the metaphorical underpinnings of a specific geographical topic, that of “climatology”, in this text-type. Although it will quantify the cognitive metaphors in discourse on climatology in this corpus, it will also attempt to describe their semantic quality and determine their cohesive role in textual development.

The Internet is a Place Metaphor. Does the Language Shape the Concept?

Mª Dolores Porto Requejo mdolores.porto@uah.es Universidad de Alcalá

The way in which we usually talk about the Internet (sites, visitors, virtual tours…) seems to evidence that the metaphor the internet is a place is the way in which we commonly conceptualize the Internet. The idea of a large amount of networks of computers interconnected all around the world in order to exchange information in “real time” can make most of us dizzy. It is so technical and, for those of us who are not experts, so impressive that we prefer to put aside that idea, even if we know it is the real thing, and make use of a metaphor so as to manage the concept in more familiar terms. However, this is still a high level metaphor and it needs to be further elaborated in more concrete terms in order to make it possible to understand the different aspects of the Internet, as much as the different purposes it can be used for. Thus, we can conceive the Internet as a working place, a relaxing place or a meeting place, for instance. Also, the source domain of the metaphor can be specified in several more concrete locations: a room, a city, a world… and each of these specifications will provide slightly different metaphorical models for the Internet. Expressions like surfing the net, visiting a site, or hacking into a network… reveal the various ways in which the place metaphor is usually elaborated. Yet, the reverse direction can also be considered, i.e. the expressions that we hear and read and by which we learn about the Internet would affect the way in which speakers construct the concept. This paper will contrast the English and Spanish metaphorical expressions for the Internet in order to examine the diverse specifications of the place metaphor in either language. This will raise the question of how much the language affects the concept and subsequently if English- and Spanish-speaking users experience the Internet differently.

Metonymic Blending and the Construction of Meaning

Günter Radden fs2a501@rrz.uni-hamburg.de

University of Hamburg The paper argues that metonymy, like metaphor, is essentially a phenomenon of conceptual blending. Grady, Oakley and Coulson (1999) have analyzed metaphor in terms of conceptual blending, Coulson and Oakley (2003, 2005) have applied blending theory to selected metonymies. The blending approach to metonymy proposed here is based on the well-known cognitive-linguistic insight that metonymy is not a matter of substitution, which is tantamount to saying that the metonymic source is not erased but is still present and interacts with the metonymic target. This is exactly the kind of situation blending theory is concerned with. In terms of conceptual blending, the metonymic source, or reference point, represents one input space, the metonymic target represents the other input space. As in all cases of conceptual blending, the information derived from both input spaces gives rise to the construction of emergent meanings in the blended space. It will be shown that this applies to metonymic blending as well. As a first step, the paper illustrates the important role the metonymic source plays in contributing to the meaning of metonymy. In a second step, a number of lexical and grammatical metonymies are reanalyzed within the blending approach. Particular emphasis is placed on the construction of meaning in the metonymic blend. Finally, a definition of metonymy based on the results of this study is proposed.

La dona objecte i altres metàfores

Montserrat Ribas and Júlia Todolí montserrat.ribas@upf.edu , julia.todoli@uv.es

Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat de València Una de les metàfores que ha explicat millor com les societats patriarcals construeixen el concepte de “dona” és la reiterada metàfora de la dona objecte. La conceptualització de la “dona” com un “objecte”, com alguna cosa que es pot posseir, ens permet explicar per què comportaments socials tan abjectes, com la violència de gènere, la prostitució, els matrimonis convinguts de nenes, etc.. són acceptats, per una gran part de la població mundial, com a conductes perfectament “normals”. Altres imatges de la feminitat que són també a la base dels imaginaris socials i culturals emergeixen de la “naturalització” de comportaments relacionats amb la morfologia dels cossos. Així, de la maternitat potencial que caracteritza la biologia femenina, se’n desprèn una especial capacitat per tenir cura dels infants i, per extensió, de la gent gran, dels discapacitats i dels malalts. De la qual cosa s’infereix que la “naturalesa” femenina està més preparada que la masculina per a dur a terme activitats relacionades amb la llar, l’educació i l’assistència sanitària. Sortosament, els models de “dona” que aquestes conceptualitzacions han produït s’han anat qüestionant des de posicions feministes i, amb el temps, s’ha aconseguit incidir en les formes de representació i d’acció social que n’emergeixen. Quines són les noves conceptualitzacions de la feminitat que el discurs dominant ha incorporat en aquests darrers anys? En quines metàfores i analogies es basen? Aquestes són dues de les preguntes que ens formulem i que volem analitzar en aquesta comunicació. Per a dur a terme l’anàlisi, ens fixarem en els relats que els telenotícies de les diferents cadenes de les televisions estatals i de la Televisió de Catalunya van fer del 8 de març (Dia Internacional de les Dones) de 2005. Atès que es tracta d’un format audiovisual, i partint de la consideració que els processos de conceptualització són en general complexos, no ens limitarem a treballar les expressions verbals, sinó que orientarem l’estudi envers una dimensió multimodal de les metàfores i analogies a l’entorn de les quals el discurs dominant articula la categorització del gènere. Des del punt de vista teòric i metodològic, adoptarem postulats de la lingüística cognitiva, dels estudis culturals de gènere i de l’anàlisi crítica del discurs.

Colours We Live By?: Everyday Colour Metaphors in English and Spanish

Ana Laura Rodríguez Redondo y Silvia Molina Plaza analaura@filol.ucm.es, silvia.molina@uclm.es

Universidad Complutense de Madrid y Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha The goal of this paper is to study metaphors of colours in English and Spanish. Most studies on colour metaphors are related either to emotions (Kövecses, 1990), to the influence of synaesthesia (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2003) or studied in literary texts (Cazeaux, 2002; Cacciari et al. 2004) . Our study, on the contrary, aims at the analysis of colour metaphors in relation to concepts different from those of emotions, where synaesthesia is not the only motivation, and in contexts which are non-literary texts. The colours to be studied are central colours such as black, white, red, green and brown. Idioms and expressions in everyday language in which these colours appear are analyzed, both when the colour name is the nucleus, and in collocations where the colour names contribute to the essential meaning of the collocation. Moreover, the experiential motivation of the metaphors (Lakoff, 1990 [1987]) developed from colours is clear, so the degree in which these metaphors are within the metonymy to metaphor continuum is observed (Radden, 2000). The English examples of this contrastive study are taken from the British National Corpus and the Spanish corpus is extracted from the CREA.

Universal Metaphors in Sign Languages – Evidence from 15 Sign Languages

Rachel Rosenstock rachel_rosenstock@yahoo.com

Taub's (2001) groundbreaking work investigating metaphors in American Sign Languages has demonstrated the extensive use of such mappings in sign language. Very few empirical studies have applied her work to other researched sign languages (Brennan 1990, Grosso 1993) and none to non-European sign languages. This study draws on data collected from fifteen native signers of a variety of linguistic backgrounds and compares different lexical items that make use of metaphoric mappings in their form-meaning pairs. In particular, signs relating to mental processes, feelings and growth or positivity were compared in terms of their source and target domains. The results show clearly that all included sign languages use the same source domains for these three areas and that the lexical items in these vastly different sign languages are consequently very similar. This research shows the importance of considering iconicity and metaphor in the cross-linguistic study of sign language and cautions researchers to be aware of the universal sources for metaphoric constructions in compiling word lists for testing family relationships between sign languages.

Grounding Constructional Meaning

Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez

francisco.ruiz@dfm.unirioja.esUniversidad de La Rioja

The notion of idealized cognitive model (or ICM), as originally put forward by Lakoff (1987), is one of the distinctive features of Cognitive Semantics. Lakoff distinguished four kinds of ICM: frames, metaphor, metonymy, and image schemas. Over the last twenty-five years, the amount of literature on cognitive models has grown to impressive proportions. Consider in this respect seminal pieces like Lakoff & Johnson (1980, 1999), Lakoff (1987), Lakoff & Turner (1989), and other more specific developments and applications, such as Kövecses (2005), Al-Sharafi (2004), or the contributions to Barcelona (2000), and Dirven & Pörings (2002), plus the vast amount of references therein. In recent years, one of the areas of somewhat productive development of the notion is found in generic or high-level metonymy, as originally discussed in Kövecses & Radden (1998). The implications of the notion for some areas of grammatical enquiry has been explored in some more detail by other scholars, notably Panther & Thornburg (1999), Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez (2001), and Brdar-Szabó & Brdar (2003), who have argued that many grammatical constructions and phenomena such as categorial and subcategorial conversion, valency extension and reduction, enriched composition, and deontic modality shifts are grounded in high-level metonymy. In connection to these developments, Ruiz de Mendoza (2005) has noted that some grammatical phenomena are motivated by high-level metaphorical mappings. A case in point is the caused-motion construction (cf. Goldberg, 1995), as in Peter laughed John out of the room. In this sentence, the predicate ‘laugh’ undergoes necessary subcategorial conversion from the pseudo-transitive structure (i.e. actor-predicate-goal/experiencer) corresponding to laugh at to the transitive structure (i.e. actor-predicate-goal/undergoer) of the V+O (+PP) type required by the caused-motion construction. Michaelis (2003, 2004) has discussed a host of cases of lexical adaptation to constructional requirements in terms of the notion of coercion and the related Override Principle, according to which the meaning of a lexical item conforms to the meaning of the structure in which it is embedded. In the case of ‘laugh’ above, this principle predicts that the arguments of the verb have to be re-construed according to semantic coherence constraints. However, this explanation misses the important fact that the adaptation process is grounded in a high-level metaphor whereby we understand one form of being affected by an action (as an experiencer) in terms another such form (as a undergoer). The importance of postulating this kind of cognitive grounding in high-level metaphor can hardly be overstated. First, high-level metaphor licenses the subcategorial conversion process (i.e. it allows for a conceptually feasible use of ‘laugh’). Second, since we have a metaphorical mapping, the conversion process needs to abide by all constraints associated with metaphor. One of them is the Correlation Principle (Ruiz de Mendoza & Santibáñez, 2003), according to which for a metaphoric source element to qualify as the counterpart of a target domain element, the source element needs to share the relevant implicational structure of the target element. In the case of the incorporation of ‘laugh’ into the caused-motion construction, the Correlation Principle ensures that the role instrument from the source is discarded (cf. *Peter laughed John out of the room with laughter/a big smile), since ‘laughing’ is treated as instrumental to caused motion (cf. Peter caused John to go out of the room by laughing at him). In much the same vein, the presentation explores the cognitive grounding of other constructions in high-level mappings.

Metaphorical Mappings in Discourse: The Case of Homonymic Compounds in

Japanese

Reijirou Shibasaki reijiro@okiu.ac.jp

Okinawa International University This study presents that discourse serves as a crucial factor for a precise understanding of Japanese puns i.e. a word play with homonym, and argues that the double meaning in a pun can be developed in two ways, metaphorically and metonymically associated with other words in discourse. The theoretical contribution of this study is that such a bi-directional mapping in thought is facilitated in immediate discourse and can be accounted for by Blending Theory (Fauconnier 1997). Japanese words consist of syllables which usually include a consonant and a vowel; compound expressions are often found to serve an effective unit for puns, because they are not so influenced by changes in pitch and accent. Due to such a simple phonological structure, homonymic compounds abound in the history of Japanese. In order to precisely understand the double meaning of a pun, the expression should be used in a stretch of discourse, at least in a clause. Otherwise, the double meaning in the expression cannot fully be understood. Consider the following example. (1)

In (1), the word ‘hinsoo’ consists of ‘hin’ and ‘soo’; the former is the same sound as the neighing of horses and the adjective 貧 [hin] ‘poor’; the sound of the latter corresponds to 僧 [soo] ‘a priest’ and 相 [soo] ‘a countenance’; therefore, [hinsoo] implies both ‘a poor-looking priest’ and ‘a horse-looking priest’. Despite their same pronunciations, homonymic compounds can derive two distinct but related meanings in immediate discourse, and Blending Theory can handle with such conceptual mappings in Japanese puns. (A full representation of mapping is to be presented at the conference.) In Japanese, speakers are required to have some knowledge about effective use of puns, especially in poetry. Either poetic or ordinary puns, the mechanism for conceptual mapping is the same, and Blending Theory gives a unified account of it.

Metonymy and Anaphoric Reference in Dude, Where’ My Country, Stupid

White Men, The Da Vinci Code and Deception Point

Antonio José Silvestre López asilvest@ang.uji.es

Universitat Jaume I This paper constitutes an Analysis of the Cases of Anaphoric Reference to a Metonymic Antecedent in Dude, Where’ My Country, Stupid White Men, The Da Vinci Code and Deception Point. It departs from the postulates of Ruiz de Mendoza and his collaborators on metonymic anaphora (Ruiz de Mendoza 1997, 1999; Ruiz de Mendoza & Otal 2002; Ruiz de Mendoza & Díez 2004). Different cases of anaphoric reference to a metonymic antecedent and to elements of frames or scenarios activated by the use of certain terms are analysed, and the functioning of the principles underlying the selection of the anaphoric referents in each case (CMA, DAP, DCP, DPP) are examined and illustrated by means of a series of commented examples. A distinction between simple and double metonymic mappings is drawn and illustrated with examples. Ruiz de Mendoza’s account on metonymic anaphora proves a highly comprehensive approach, capable of accounting for all the examples analysed in this paper.

Finding Metaphor in Discourse:

Pragglejaz and Beyond

Gerard Steen gj.steen@let.vu.nl

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam This is a methodological paper which addresses the ways in which metaphor can be found in discourse. I will begin by presenting a brief overview of the various methodological issues which play a role in metaphor identification. Then I will continue by reporting on the state of development of the Pragglejaz method for finding metaphorically used words. Finally I will talk about a number of metaphorical phenomena which are excluded by the Pragglejaz method, but which also need to be addressed. All of these issues will be broached from the perspective of empirical research done in two five-year research programmes launched in September 2005. The first is “Metaphor in discourse: linguistic forms, conceptual structures, cognitive representations”, a programme supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). It involves the study of the structure, distribution, functions, and processes of metaphor in a ten percent sample of the BNC-Baby, in collaboration with Ewa Biernacka, Lettie Dorst, Anna Kaal, and Irene Lopéz-Rodríguez. The second is a study of metaphor within the programme “Conversationalization in discourse”, with the collaboration of Tryntje Pasma. This is a programme participating in the interdisciplinary VU-Ster research initiative “Text, cognition and communication” and involves a joint project between the faculties of Psychology, Social Science, and the Arts on mechanisms of rhetoric in public discourse.

Do ‘Real’ Pictures Really Facilitate the Mnemonics of Mental Imagery?

Hélène Stengers, Frank Boers, and June Eyckmans

helene.stengers@vub.ac.be frank.boers@docent.ehb.be

june.eyckmans@docent.ehb.be Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Universiteit Antwerpen & Erasmushogeschool Brussel,

Erasmushogeschool Brussel The figurative meaning of a considerable number of idioms can be motivated by resuscitating their original, literal usage. This association of a figurative idiom with a concrete scene is likely to involve mental imagery and such an imagistic approach to idioms has been shown to be highly effective as a mnemonic technique in the context of FLT (Boers, 2000, 2001, Boers, et. al., 2004). These mnemonic effects are in accordance with Dual Coding Theory (Clark and Paivio, 1991; Paivio, 1986) and Levels-of-Processing Theory (Cermak and Craik, 1979; Craik and Lockhart, 1972). Because of cognitive style variables, however, the inclination for mental imagery may not be equally present in all learners. This presentation explores two hypotheses: (i) learners who incline towards the imager end of the imager-verbaliser cognitive style continuum (so-called high imagers) benefit more from the mnemonic effect mental imagery than low imagers and (ii) learners’ imagistic processing of idioms can be enhanced through the addition of ‘real’ images illustrating the origins of the idioms. Both hypotheses were put to the test in controlled (CALL) experiments using Idiom Teacher, a pedagogical tool promoting insightful learning of idioms which was developed by the authors. The participants were students of English at a tertiary education college offering four years of training in modern languages. The results offer corroboration of the first hypothesis. With regard to the second hypothesis, the experiment revealed that the addition of pictures resulted in an equally successful performance by both low and high imagers in comprehending and remembering the idioms. Comparative data analysis with former experiments (in which the idioms were presented without pictures) show that, overall, the presence of the images contributed to an increased facility to identify the meaning of the idiom, but did not promote the retention of the form of the expression. Subsequent item analysis confirmed that the images acted as a distraction from the focus on the form of the expression. Participants however expressed their preference for exercises containing pictures.

Sharing Sensorial Experience, Conceptualizing Wine

Ernesto Suárez Toste

ernestojesus.suarez@uclm.es Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

Because there is no single lexicon with the expressive potential to cover all the range of sensorial impressions, the intellectualization of sensorial experience is inextricably linked to the figurative uses of language. The inherent subjectivity of sensorial experience represents innumerable difficulties when technical discourse is under scrutiny. The many discourses around the world of wine offer incredible expressive richness derived, no doubt, from sheer necessity. Much sophisticated wit has been put into this little universe, and indeed naming farfetched aromas may be an ingenious little game, but there are too many other aspects of wine that demand a reliable and standardized jargon. Spotting “apple” and “slate” in a wine is one thing, but a description of its tactile impression on our palate, its “size,” or its “length” are totally different tasks that almost always demand the use of different metaphors. The description and evaluation (i.e., critique or review) of wines is realised in the tasting note. Rather than being a mere private record of a sensorial experience, the genre is an extremely useful consumer tool in today’s ever-expanding fine wine market. For these communicative efforts to be efficient, both ends must accept the possibilities and limitations of winespeak. This specialised discourse points to various figurative phenomena (synaesthesia, metonymy, metaphor), all of which are indispensable tools for articulating what is an intrinsically sensorial experience. A wine, therefore, must become a living creature, a jewel, a building, or a tissue, to name but a few of the metaphorical schemas underlying lexis used to discuss it. In this context anthropomorphic metaphor is possibly the most interesting. (I use a concept and formalization of metaphor taken from Lakoff and Johnson’s 1980 Metaphors We Live By, and Lakoff and Turner’s 1989 More than Cool Reason.) In accordance with this theoretical framework, metaphor is not seen as a linguistic ornament but, rather, as an essential heuristic tool that fulfils our cognitive and communicative needs. In the case of wine discourse, metaphor not only reveals the way wine specialists conceptualise the subject at issue - i.e., wine - but also works as an indispensable tool to communicate the complex sensorial experience of tasting wine to others, making it not only graspable or intelligible, but also, and most importantly, something susceptible to being transmitted and learnt.

Metaphoric Extension and Invited Inferencing in Semantic Change

Karen Sullivan

ksull@berkeley.edu University of California at Berkeley

In recent years, debate has raged over how to describe semantic extensions like the sense of see meaning ‘understand’, as in (1). (1) OK, now I see what you mean. (forums.rpghost.com/showthread.php?p=343390) Some argue that all semantic extensions between conceptual domains (such as from SEEING to KNOWING in [1]) are metaphoric extensions. The change ‘see’ > ‘understand’, for example, is attributed to the well-documented conceptual metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING (cf. Sweetser 1990). Others propose that examples like see ‘understand’ should be explained as generalized invited inferences (GIIN) (Traugott and Dasher 2002). On the GIIN account, see ‘understand’ arose from the reanalysis of see in contexts which are ambiguous between seeing and knowing, such as (2). The speaker’s command in (2) to ‘see where it is’ invites the addressee to also ‘find out/learn where it is’. These contexts abound in OE and ME corpora, and continue to arise in NE. (2) Nou wend and seh wher hit be. (c1310, Marina, anon.) I argue that either GIIN or metaphor can explain see in (1), but neither model can account for all cross-domain semantic extension. Both models are therefore necessary in a thorough model of semantic change. The GIIN explanation breaks down when it comes to examples like brilliant as in (3). My survey of OE and ME corpora revealed no contexts which are ambiguous between literal light sources and ideas: light-emission and inspiration do not literally co-occur as often as seeing and knowing. On the other hand, the metaphor model has no problem with brilliant in (3), attributing it to KNOWING IS SEEING and the mapping IDEAS ARE LIGHT SOURCES. (3) I had a brilliant idea. (bncp=13=642=1) Conversely, the metaphoric extension model fails when it comes to examples such as seeing meaning ‘dating’, as in (4a). No recognized conceptual metaphor maps SEEING onto DATING. Observe, too, that simple-present see in (4b) cannot refer to DATING; which suggests that ‘seeing’ > ‘dating’ does not reflect a prelinguistic cognitive process like metaphor, but rather a discourse-based extension like GIIN. (4) a. I know you’re not married, but are you seeing anyone right now? (elektronicsurveillance.homestead.com/interviews_RazinBlack.html) b. #I know you’re not married, but do you see anyone right now?

The GIIN model attributes seeing ‘dating’ to ambiguous contexts like (5), in which the addressee could interpret seeing as referring either to visual contact or romantic meetings (which typically involve visual contact). (5) She has forbid me seeing her... (1682, The city-heiress, Aphra Behn) While the metaphoric extension and GIIN models overlap in their explanatory utility, as in see ‘understand’, each model can handle examples which the other cannot. I suggest that we should not choose between the metaphor and GIIN models, but should rather consider how the two can be integrated into a unified theory of semantic extension.

Variation in Conceptual Metaphor: A Study of “CAUSES ARE FORCES”

Dennis Tay Zhiming dennis.tay@gmail.com

National University of Singapore This paper explores the idea of variation in conceptual metaphor, focusing on CAUSES ARE FORCES (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), and demonstrates that metaphorical conceptualizations of causal relations are varied to achieve different discourse objectives. In philosophical discussions, causal agency is deemed to lie between the opposite ends of determinism and freewill. Likewise, causal relations may be conceived of as either being more deterministic, implying a greater sense of inevitability, or as more “free-willed”, implying the opposite. This can be achieved in discourse by varying the depiction of causal forces (the source domain). I propose a brief typology of forces, which differentiates forces along the dimensions of agency (whether human agency is involved) and resistibility (how resistible the forces are). This conjures up four main classes of forces (+agency +resistible, –agency –resistible, +agency –resistible, –agency +resistible), with –agency –resistible being the most deterministic. I then use this to classify causal metaphors from various texts discussing political issues, mostly in an Asian context. From this, I suggest that texts that aim to convey a more deterministic outlook tend to employ causal metaphors on the deterministic side of the typology (i.e. towards the –agency –resistible end), with the converse being true. The findings are hoped to not only raise awareness about the idea of variation in conceptual metaphor (see Kovecses 2005), amidst considerable consensus about their universal aspects, but also the fact that such variation can be motivated by specific discourse purposes. This should shed further light on the interrelatedness of cognition, ideology and language.

Cognitive Metaphor as a Means of Building Linguistic Concepts

Raisa Tazetdinova adremr@rambler.ru

Bashkir State University Treated as a means of interrelation between language, thought and culture, the word represents itself a certain structure which reflects different kind of human knowledge. Every meaning constituent shows categorial features which in their turn comprise the contents of the correspondent linguistic concept. In this article we will deal with linguistic concepts of human abode. The meaning structure of lexical elements denoting types of dwelling looks like a particular combination of semes reflecting their various features. Thus one part of a word conceptual structure can be explicated by means of component analysis of its definition. The other part of conceptual structure includes epistemological knowledge about typical human dwelling which is contracted in such meta-words as house, flat etc. Russian linguists E. Vereshagin and V. Kostomarov single out 5 components which a priori exist in the meaning structure of every unit denoting names of dwelling: the roof, the wall, the window, the door, the threshold [Верещагин, Костомаров 2000: 19]. The combination of these 5 epistemological components is called in this article the basic cognitive model of the conceptual sphere ABODE. Conceptual features explicated from the dictionary definition of the corresponding word are treated here as qualifying, specifying the basic cognitive model and are called modifiers. For example the word studio means: an apartment consisting of one main room, a kitchen or kitchenette, and a bedroom 2) a one-room apartment having a high ceiling and large windows (WEUDEL); when property prices were rising, “studio” flats – single rooms with modest facilities – became popular [McKay: 21]. The cognitive model of studio is represented in the following table: The basic cognitive model The roof, the wall, the window, the door, the threshold Modifiers: size small number of rooms 3 interior layout having a high ceiling and large windows degree of comfort modest facilities cultural and historic factor when property prices were rising, “studio” flats became popular The cognitive model structure reflects not only various types of human experience but also a way of concept forming in our mind. The idea of a typical house/flat as a unity arranged by 5 components is the result of a cognitive process managed by the conceptual metaphor CONTAINER. This basic cognitive process works as follows: man mentally treats different phenomena, events, actions, emotions applying to their comprehension the terms of

his physical body such as realizing them as a container whose volume is limited. The authors of a cognitive metaphor theory J. Lakoff and M. Johnson consider the process of analogy plays the main role in the transfer of knowledge from one objective sphere to another [Lakoff, Johnson 1980]. In this case this quality is transferred to the objects that surround him - houses and buildings. Thus the cognitive metaphor being a universal means of classification of perception, thought and action stipulates the lexical coding specificity in different languages: the basic cognitive model + modifying conceptual features.

Metaphor and Borrowing

Alexander Tokar

tokar@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de Heinrich-Heine-University

The problem to be addressed in my paper is a role of metaphor as a factor of choice between borrowings and loan-translations when dealing with foreign word material. In a recent dissertation on French and Spanish terminology of the World Wide Web (Jansen 2005) it has been claimed that those English expressions which have a metaphoric status are in general rendered by loan-translations. Homepage, for example, corresponds to page perso in French and página principal in Spanish (ibid.p.408). Loanwords, on the contrary, are used only when translation is impossible for semantic reasons. The term spam, for instance, was integrated into French and Spanish Internet vocabulary because the basis for its metaphoric extension in English – a popular sketch of the comic group Monty Python set in a restaurant in which SPAM (a name of a canned pork product) is included in every item on the menu – is simply not known to the majority of speakers of French and Spanish (ibid.pp.291-292). In the first part of my paper, I will try to analyse whether Jansen’s claim can be treated as a universal tendency. For this purpose, I will compare how the same metaphorical concepts (page, site, cookie, etc.) are verbalized by speakers of other languages such as German and Russian. My belief is that the metaphorical status of a source language expression is not a sufficient criterion to predict how it will be dealt with in a target language. Both German and Russian borrowed a number of metaphoric expressions which could have been easily translated. The term (web)site, for example, is traditionally associated with (perhaps the most basic) INTERNET IS SPACE conceptual metaphor and, consequently, could have been easily rendered by a German Ort and a Russian mesto. Since speakers of both these languages, however, decided in favour of a loanword, I suggest that a more differentiated approach should be elaborated. In the second part, I will outline the possibility of a cognitive treatment of the phenomenon described. What has been completely left out of consideration in Jansen’s thesis is a question how speakers of a target language understand metaphorical concepts which are verbalized by loanwords. In other words, if speakers of a target language fail to find an adequate translation for site (even though there is a clear understanding why this term is metaphorically used in English), does the expression lose its metaphorical status once it penetrates the lexicon of a target language as a loanword? My position is that in target languages German and Russian as well in English the concept of a website is understood metaphorically in terms of the same SPACE metaphor. Loan-translation, however, is impossible because the meaning of site as constructed by speakers of these languages does not result from the interaction (in the sense of Max Black) of a primary and a secondary subject (geographical and Internet sites) which is typical of English.

Lexical Networks and Metaphorical Conceptualization in Specialized

Languages : The Case of Biomedicine

Sylvie Vandaele

sylvie.vandaele@umontreal.casylvvan@ca.inter.net

Université de Montréal Our work relies on the hypothesis that metaphorical conceptualization (MC), as defined by Lakoff (1980/2003; 1993), is an important driving force behind conceptual creativity in biomedicine, that is reflected at the terminological and phraseological levels. In our previous work (e.g. Vandaele and Lubin, 2005), we have proposed that some predicative lexical units, which we call conceptualization indicators (CIs), are the central elements in linguistic expressions and lexical networks reflecting MC. In order to systematically describe and analyse the lexical networks involved, and to produce a dynamic representation of their structure and interconnections, we implemented a strategy of semantic annotation in multilingual parallel corpuses of structured documents using XML (Extensible Markup Language). For the purpose of the analysis, we have concentrated our efforts on the field of cell and molecular biology. We thus developed an original method for systematically analyzing metaphorical conceptualizations, which allows us to combine (1) conceptual tagging of metaphorical conceptualizations as expressed by conceptualization indicators, and (2) lexical tagging of the surface expressions involved. This latter focuses on linguistic elements expressing the actants of predicative conceptualization indicators as well as on specific collocations. The conceptual tagging is inspired by the theorical frameworks of Lakoff (metaphorical conceptualization), Talmy (2001; principles of factivity/fictivity) and Fauconnier and Turner (1998; blending, or conceptual integration). The lexical analyses is realized with the help of the Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicology component of the Meaning-Text Theory (e.g. Mel’čuk et al., 1995), namely actantial analysis and Lexical Functions. Apart from the main methodological features, we will present a number of metaphorical conceptualizations that are prominent in molecular and cellular biology with the lexical networks involved, namely metaphorical naming of concepts (terms) and associated phraseologisms, with examples in English, French and Spanish. We will also show how conceptual integration occurs within the scientific discourse. Finally, we will discuss the importance of metaphorical conceptualization in the understanding of scientific concepts as well as in technical and popularized scientific writing and translation.

Relevance Theory and the Pragmatics of Metaphor: Some Implications

Deirdre Wilson deirdre@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk

Department of Linguistics, UCL Relevance theory offers a different view of metaphor from the standard Gricean one. For Grice (as for most philosophers of language) metaphor is a departure from a norm of literal truthfulness; for relevance theorists (as for most cognitive linguists), metaphor is entirely normal and pervasive in language use. While cognitive linguists see metaphor as originating primarily in thought, relevance theorists have been developing an account of how metaphors arise in the process of verbal communication. The two approaches are not incompatible, since there may be distinct (though related) metaphorical phenomena at the level of thought, on the one hand, and language, on the other. Recent attempts to explore the common ground between them (e.g. Ruiz de Mendoza, 2005; Gibbs & Tendahl, forthcoming) are likely to be of benefit to both. Apart from the claim that metaphor is wholly normal and violates no pragmatic maxim or principle, the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor makes two main points: (a) metaphor is not a distinct pragmatic category but part of a continuum of cases, from literal use, through approximation, to hyperbole and metaphor, with no clear cut off point between them; (b) the interpretation of metaphor is properly inferential, with the audience’s conclusion about the speaker’s meaning being properly warranted by the fact that the speaker has uttered a sentence with a certain linguistic meaning, together with appropriate contextual assumptions (e.g. Carston, 2002; Sperber & Wilson, 2002; Carston & Wilson, forthcoming; Sperber & Wilson, forthcoming). After illustrating the relevance-theoretic approach with emphasis on these two points, I will consider its implications for attempts to combine relevance theory and cognitive linguistics, and for accounts of linguistic or conceptual metaphor as a ‘mapping’ between distinct domains.