Search

In the last century, cognitive linguistics has drawn attention to the relevance of metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon when it comes to understanding reality, as well as its ability to project a certain image on the concepts we are talking about. Hence the importance of its role in the construction of political discourses, since, with it, an interested vision of what is transmitted can be showed. Aware of this, in this study we have analyzed the cognitive metaphors used by the different Spanish political leaders in their interventions in the Congress of Deputies during the first wave of the pandemic at 2020. We have studied the different cognitive metaphors used in their speeches by the representatives of each political group, and we have related them to their position regarding the action carried out by the Government in response to the spread of the coronavirus in our country, especially in relation to the declaration of the State of Alarm. In this way, we have verified how the different uses of the metaphor were used to legitimize the decisions made by the Government, and by the opposition to structure the criticisms made against the government proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the constant debates within conceptual metaphors studies and metaphor in discourse concerns metaphor identification and annotation. In recent years, most metaphor studies have applied Steen et al.'s MIPVU or Pragglejazz's MIP as the identification method, but this does not mean that they are exclusive. In fact, there are certain factors of a given study that influence the choice of one method over another, such as its design, size or language. It was precisely the particularities of our corpus (made of economic reports published in English and Spanish) that suggested the combination of other existing methods in order to obtain, in the most practical way, the most reliable outcomes for this target-based case study. Stefanowitsch's MPA was applied and complemented with MIPVU, used to filter and confirm potentially metaphorical patterns. Apart from reviewing some of the existing methods, this paper provides a case study that supports the validity of combining identification methods or adapting them to the needs of each case, as the results obtained after analysis show concordance and agreement post-combination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this study is to describe the color term negro as a polysemic unit and to show it as a radial category containing different meanings related among them, as well as to highlight the prominence of metonymy in the motivation and the relation among senses. The article is structured as follows: (i) exposition of the main characteristics of cognitive semantics and conceptual polysemy, (ii) description of the motivation of different meanings related to negro and (iii) organization of the radial network of negro as a polysemic category and description of the role of metonymy and metaphor in the relationship among meanings. In order to carry out the study a corpus-based methodology is applied. This allows us to obtain usage-based events of the color term negro as well as to access the cotextual and contextual information that intervene in the activation and distinction of senses. In terms of the motivation and the relationship among them, the study is carried out according to the TCMM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study attempts to make a comparative analysis of two Spanish and American political speeches, which belong to two different debate traditions, in terms of the metaphors used. For that purpose, we analyze the Economy sections of the 2015 State of the Union Address in the US and in the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain. The present study aims at answering the following research questions: 1. What metaphors do President Obama and Prime Minister Rajoy use in the American and Spanish political speeches to convince their audiences of America's and Spain's economic victory? 2. What are the similarities and differences between the representations depicted by metaphor use in the speeches as the politicians attempt to shape the economic recovery of America and Spain after recession? To answer these questions, we use an analytical framework for the identification of conceptual metaphors and a theoretical framework for the use of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The results indicate that both politicians use metaphors in an attempt to reify the new economy in such a way that the economic policies used to fight crisis are justified, while the negative effects on citizens are not mentioned and, thus, are dismissed as unimportant. However, the politicians take different approaches to reification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agent-deprofiling constructions have the function of drawing the language user's attention to the non-agentive elements of a predication, while endowing one of these elements with agent-like qualities. Members of this family are the inchoative, middle, instrument-subject, location-subject, and cause-subject constructions. These constructions have been discussed in the literature, especially in projectionist accounts of language, without adequately accounting for their relatedness, which in our view can best be done by investigating their grounding in cognition. The present article addresses this issue by considering agent-deprofiling constructions as belonging to the class of what we term pretense constructions. Pretense constructions provide non-descriptive, or re-construed, representations of states, situations, or events. Because of their re-construed nature, which involves metaphor and/or metonymy, in these configurations there is no one-to-one match between the semantic and syntactic functions of their elements. We discuss how this reorganization of the semantic and syntactic function of constructional elements produces specific meaning implications that can be motivated by underlying metaphoric and metonymic shifts, sometimes working in cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few years there has been a rapprochement between Cognitive Linguistics and semantic theories of humour based on the notion of script or frame. By drawing on Ritchie's version of the theory of frame-shifting (2005) and reviewing the cognitive linguistic account of humour, we shall demonstrate how the interpretation of jokes containing a metaphor or a metonymy involves two cognitive-pragmatic tasks: the completion of the metaphorical/metonymic mapping that results in a new frame, and the resolution of the joke's incongruity via a contrast with the surrounding frames of the joke. We also develop a classification of frame shifts according to their ontological structure (non-metaphorical/metonymic shifts and shifts based on metaphorical and/or metonymic reasoning) and the degree of the interpreter's inferential activity (conceptual filling out and metaphor/metonymy replacement). In doing so, we attempt to identify some of the defining features of humorous metaphors and metonymies, as well as other phenomena that may also characterise jokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article is concerned with the analysis of so-called metaphoric resemblance operations. Our corpus of animal metaphors, as representative of resemblance metaphors, reveals that there are complex cognitive operations other than simple one-correspondence mappings that are necessary to understand the interpretation process of the selected expressions (which include metaphor and simile). We have identified a strong underlying situational component in many of the examples under scrutiny, which requires the metonymic expansion of the metaphoric source. Additionally, metaphoric amalgams (understood as the combination of the conceptual material from two or more metaphors) and high-level metonymy in interaction with low-level metaphor are also essential for the analysis of animal metaphors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an attempt to come to a better understanding of the concept of prototypicality, this article compares two different tools for explaining prototypes, viz. the theoretical constructs found in the literature on cognitive linguistics and claiming to describe cognitively salient models, and frequency of linguistic usage as evidenced in the UVaSTECorpus. In particular, this article focuses on the periphrastic causative constructions of the verbs allow, cause, and enable, and investigates two research questions: (i) are prototypes the most frequently corpus-attested items? (ii) Are there significant differences among these verbs, considering that cause is an implicative causative, whereas allow and enable are non-implicative causatives? Results are commented on making our case for indicating that the notion of prototypicality is fuzzy and must be interpreted in terms of language varieties. This paper follows Gilquin's work (2006) but explains the results obtained in terms of medium (written) and genre (scientific and technical English). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a detailed analysis of some of the most frequent proverbs and sayings in English and Spanish from a cognitive point of view. In our study we show the necessity to further develop conventional metaphoric and metonymic analysis into more complex patterns of interaction between the two. Furthermore, this paper stresses the relevance of subjectivity in cognitive conceptualizations; cross-linguistic differences arise in most of the expressions analysed, which show that cultural differences mark the choices of language. A more refined view of image metaphors is also provided in this paper, which claims the existence of a continuum ranging from one-shot purely imagistic to those that resemble image-schematic metaphors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. 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 may have contributed to an easier transmission of many fury tales and also to make tales alike in different socio-cultural settings. The tales, which are representative of various cultures, have been extracted from the Project Gutenberg online library and belong to the British author and compiler Andrew Lang (1844-1912). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]