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The literature provides diverging perspectives on the universality and stability of economic metaphors over time. This article contains a diachronic analysis of economic metaphors describing trade in a corpus of 225 years of US State of the Union addresses (1790-2014). We focused on two types of change: (i) replacement of a source domain by another domain and (ii) change in mapping within a source domain. In our corpus, five source domains of trade were predominant: (i) Physical Object, (ii) Building, (iii) Container, (iv) Journey, and (v) Living Being. Only the relative frequency of the Container source domain was related to time. Additionally, mappings between source and target domains were mostly stable. Nevertheless, our analyses suggest that the Trade metaphors in our corpus are related to concreteness in a more nuanced way as typically assumed in conceptual metaphor theory: metaphors high in the concreteness dimension of physicality and low in the concreteness dimension of specificity are likeliest to be used over longer time periods, by providing communicators with freedom to adjust the metaphor to changing societal circumstances.

This article broadens Schneider's (2018) proposal relating to finding culture in corpora by examining keyness, conceptual frames, and metaphorical signals in newspaper editorials in two varieties of world Englishes: Chinese and American English. These editorials focus on opinion articles and commentaries about territorial issues in the South China Sea during 2013–2015. The results demonstrate that keywords and metaphorical signals are used differently in the newspaper editorials published in these two countries, while the conceptual frames vary by degree but not by type. I discuss these findings in terms of how lexical‐conceptual patterns allow for a greater understanding of the culture of argumentation. I argue that these types of focused, small corpora analyses are also useful for examining culture in corpora and suggest that Schneider's (2018) second layer of cultural dimensions should be expanded from indicator terms to include lexical‐conceptual patterns found in keyword analysis, conceptual framing, and metaphorical signaling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli, and the choice of non-words) and report on a lexical decision experiment with Chinese nouns in which ambiguous nouns with homonymic and/or metaphorical meanings were contrasted with unambiguous nouns. An ambiguity advantage effect was obtained--Chinese nouns with multiple meanings were recognized faster than those with only one meaning. The results suggested that both homonymic and metaphorical meanings are psychologically salient semantic levels actively represented in the mental lexicon. The results supported a probability-based model of random lexical access with multiple meanings represented by separate semantic nodes. We further discuss these results in terms of lexical semantic representation and how different experimental paradigms result in different ambiguity effects in lexical access.

This study looks at whether conventional and anomalous metaphors are processed in different locations in the brain while being read when compared with a literal condition in Mandarin Chinese. We find that conventional metaphors differ from the literal condition with a slight amount of increased activation in the right inferior temporal gyrus. In addition, when the anomalous metaphor condition is compared with the literal condition, increased activation occurs bilaterally in the frontal and temporal gyri. Lastly, the comparison between the anomalous and conventional metaphor conditions shows bilateral activation in the middle frontal gyrus and the precentral gyrus, and right-hemisphere activation in the superior frontal gyrus. Left hemisphere activation is found in the inferior frontal gyrus and fusiform gyrus. The left hemisphere activation in the frontal and temporal gyri point to the recruitment of traditional language-based areas for anomalous metaphor sentences, while the right-hemisphere activation found suggests that remote associations are being formed. In short, our study supports the idea that metaphors are not a homogenous type of figurative language and that distinguishing between different types of metaphors will advance theories of language comprehension.

Linguistic synesthesia links two concepts from two distinct sensory domains and creates conceptual conflicts at the level of embodied cognition. Previous studies focused on constraints on the directionality of synesthetic mapping as a way to establish the conceptual hierarchy among the five senses (i.e., vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch). This study goes beyond examining the directionality of conventionalized synesthetic terms by adopting a Conceptual Metaphor Theory approach (i.e., the Conceptual Mapping Model) to test if conventional synesthetic directionality still holds when it comes to novel metaphorical expressions. The subjects, 308 native English speakers, are asked to judge the degree of commonness, appropriateness, understandability, and figurativeness in order to measure the degree of comprehensibility of novel synesthetic metaphors. Our findings demonstrate that novel synesthetic metaphors that follow conventional directionality are considered more common, more appropriate, and easier to comprehend than those that violate conventional mapping principles; they are also judged as more literal than those that do not follow conventional directionality. This study explores linguistic synesthesia from the perspective of comprehension of novel synesthetic metaphors, posits a pivotal position for mapping principles in synesthetic directionality, and supports an embodied account of linguistic synesthesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demonstrates that both meanings of an ambiguity are accessed at the onset of the ambiguity when the context is biased towards the secondary meaning. This evidence does not support the context-dependent model, which says that contextual bias should aid the processor in selecting a meaning. (Author/VWL)