Preface: essays on metaphor in language and thoughtPREFACE
Essays on metaphor in language and thought
Paula Lenz Costa LimaI; Ana Cristina Pelosi Silva de MacedoII; Emilia Maria Peixoto FariasIII
I(UECE-CE/Brazil)
II(UFC-CE/Brazil)
III(UFC-CE/Brazil)
The phenomenon of metaphor, in terms of its cognitive role, has drawn the attention of an ever-increasing number of Brazilian scholars since the early 90s, but it was only in 2002 that Mara Sophia Zanotto from PUC (Pontífica Universidade Católica), organized the first conference in São Paulo, in plenary sessions, which attracted an audience of around 80 researchers. Since then many Brazilian scholars have taken part in important discussions on metaphor in language and thought around the world, increasing the interest in the topic in the country. Three years after the First International Conference on Metaphor in Language and Thought (ICMLP), the second conference, organized by Solange Vereza at UFF (Universidade Federal Fluminense), Rio de Janeiro, reached the dimension of a large meeting, offering a number of round tables, individual paper sessions, workshops and plenaries, with much more participants and massive presence of students.
The proposal to hold the III International Conference on Metaphor in Language and Thought in Fortaleza (in 2008) was made during the IICMLP and was finally signed in Leeds, in 2006, during the RaAM6, which brought-together many Brazilian scholars who had taken part in important discussions on metaphor in language and thought around the world. It aimed to provide an opportunity for the growing number of Brazilian researchers, predominantly graduate students, to have contact with a wide variety of current research in the area on several theoretical approaches, as well as to interact with eminent scholars.
As with previous conferences, the focus of that event was to promote a dynamic environment for reflexive discussions on the role that metaphor plays in structuring thought and motivating everyday language. The relaxed and friendly atmosphere of the three-day conference gave rise to lively and productive discussions both at question times after paper presentations as well as in the hotel's communal areas during coffee breaks.
We thank DELTA for the opportunity to publish, in this special issue, articles that resulted of plenary sessions and round table communications presented at the IIICMLP. Although most of these articles focus on the role that metaphor plays in structuring and organizing thought and how this is evidenced in language, there are also articles which placed special emphasis on the role that language and discourse seem to have in molding figurative thought.
A crucial mark in the study of metaphor from a cognitive perspective was established by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 with the publication of their revolutionary book - Metaphors We Live By, as shall be seen in most of the articles in this issue. Although interest in studying metaphor not merely as a figure of language but as a cognitive tool was already present in works which date back to the seventies or earlier (see, for instance, Reddy's paper, published in 1977), Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 work was the first to present a systematic account of metaphorical language from the perspective that what were termed metaphors were, in fact, linguistic expressions licensed by conceptual metaphors also termed conceptual mappings.
According to this view, human thinking is largely structured in metaphorical terms. The theory puts forward the idea that both verbal and non-verbal language used to express perceptions and feelings, as well as ordinary language, are significantly linked to our capacity to conceive one thing in terms of another (events, entities, concepts). The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), launched by these authors has, over the years, given rise to a vast number of studies which focus on understanding the interrelationship between thought and language.
Despite the success achieved by Lakoff and Johnson's ideas, their theory was significantly revisited in the next decade, especially during the years 1997 and 1999, with a series of studies on what was termed primary metaphors. The work of Joseph Grady (1997), who launched the Primary Metaphor Hypothesis, is worthy of note, as he caters for a more basic or primitive kind of metaphor, one which emerges via a neural learning process from strongly correlated experiences of two distinct natures (a perceptual one: the source domain, and a conceptual one, or cognitive response to the perceptual input, termed the target domain). The continuous repetition of certain experiences, such as lifting things and feeling the difficulty or ease of lifting them, would eventually establish a strong correlation between different domains leading human beings to understand more abstract concepts (e.g. difficulties) in terms of more concrete ones (e.g. weights). The co-activation of neural domains of different natures (perceptual/conceptual ones) would give rise to what have been called primary conceptual metaphors.
The papers to be presented in the next pages will, to a greater or lesser extent, discuss both from a theoretical and/or experimental basis research which relates to Conceptual Metaphor Theory both from the 1980 and/or the 1997 perspectives. Others focus on the role that discourse seems to play in figurative language. Nevertheless, although they are sorted by the first name of the first authors, the articles follow a certain thematic sequence. While the first six papers focus on the body's role in cognition, the others explore the relationship between metaphor, meaning and discourse, from different perspectives and with different purposes.
Alfonso Santarpia, R. Venturini, A. Blanchet and M. Cavallo open the collection with their essay entitled Metaphorical Conceptualizations of the Body in Psychopatology and Poetry. They seek to identify and categorize different types of body conceptualizations, based on a corpus comprising professional manuals and classical works of Italian and French Psychopathology as well as classical Italian poems (which showed differences in the use of body conceptual metaphors), in order to help therapists to understand and to construct a specific psychotherapeutic intervention on patients' diseases. The authors claim that their categorization, drawn on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and on Context-Limited Simulation Theory, provides an alternative to anatomical descriptions of the body - the "Literary Construction of the Body" - that can be helpful for the understanding of literary sentences in clinical contexts.
Emilia Maria Peixoto Farias and Paula Lenz Costa Lima in Metaphor and Foreign Language Teaching give special attention to the study of conceptual metaphor as an important tool that can contribute to the process of teaching and learning vocabulary in a foreign language. Focusing on the dimension of variation related to the ANGER concept and to the use of the noun head, in Portuguese and in English, they argue that awareness of the motivation and foundation of meanings can facilitate the acquisition of vocabulary by language learners.
The purpose of Helena Martins 'Wittgenstein, the Body, its Metaphors is to provide elements for rethinking the relationship between the body and metaphor, discussing the issue in the light of Contemporary Theories of Metaphor from a non-foundationalist point of view. Arguing that experientialism is ultimately tied to a foundationalist perspective, the author explores, in particular, Wittgenstein's critique of traditional mental/physical, inner/outer dichotomies.
Heloísa Pedroso de Moraes Feltes, in her article Embodiment in Cognitive Linguistic: from experientialism to computational neuroscience, reflects on the character of embodiment in Cognitive Linguistics. Starting with the experientialist point of view that metaphor is a neural mechanism, the author discusses the Neural Theory of Language, arguing that the proposed paradigm may be problematic and dependent on more detailed and demonstrative discussions. Feltes claims that Cognitive Linguistics does not need to accomplish structured connectionism or neurocomputational simulation and that embodiment should be treated as interface between domains of investigation instead of levels in a reductionist feature paradigm.
On the other hand, Kanavillil Rajagopalan in "Corporeality" in Metaphor Studies: why it is so easy to miss the point claims that there is today an urgent need to revive the term corporeal/corporeality, to restore its original thrust and to stress its revolutionary potential. According to the author, the notion of corporeality that is very commonly used in discussions about mind, language and the way metaphor functions in real life is best thought of as corpo-reality rather than corporeal-ity. The restoration of this revolutionary view requires, as Rajagopalan says, a thorough revision of many of our well-entreched dogmas.
Luciane Corrêa Ferreira, in her article Applying Corpus Linguistics Methodology to Psycholinguistics Research, presents the results of an empirical investigation of the hypothesis that learners of a foreign language use their bodily experience when trying to understand a linguistic metaphor. The author carried out experiments with 221 Brazilian students learning English and compared the results with performance of 16 American students and with data collected in WebCorp.
The discussions about metaphor and discourse begin with Lucienne C. Espíndola's essay entitled Semantic-Discursive Functions of Linguistic Expression that Materialize Conceptual Metaphor in Discurse Genres, in which she analyzes linguistic expressions that materialize conceptual metaphors in different discursive genres, searching for the semantic-discursive function(s) of such expressions. The author's findings show that the semantic-discursive functions of these expressions depend on the social function of the genre.
The aim of Lynne Cameron 's Responding to the Risk of Terrorism: the contribution of Metaphor is to investigate how people conceptualize the background risk of terrorism and explores the potential for knowledge of these conceptualizations to make official communications about the danger more effective and more sensitive to the diverse nature of the population in the United Kingdom. The author analyzed the discourse of 96 people who participated in 12 focus group discussion, organized by gender, religion (Muslim / non-Muslim), and socio-economic status, and found that people use metaphors such as TERRORISM IS A GAME OF CHANCE, TERRORISM IS NATURAL WORLD, and TERRORISM IS THEATER, rather than the common metaphor TERRORISM IS A WAR found in other studies about the media and political discourse.
Mara Sophia Zanotto in her essay The Multiple Readings of 'Metaphor' in the Classroom: co-construction of inferential chains presents part of the results of her project on multiple readings of metaphors in literary texts. Using the interpretative and group-think-aloud techniques in a group of readers, the author analyzes their interpretations of Drummond's The Pulverized Mountain poem, which showed that the apparent chaos was, in fact, inferential chains co-constructed by metonymic and metaphoric processes.
Maria José Bocorny Finatto in Metaphors in Scientific and Technical Languages: challenges and perspective claims that it is time for terminologists to invest in studies of the entire linguistic and cognitive environment of technical-scientific communication. Contrary to classical ideas, the author emphasizes that current studies on metaphors have shown that they do play a role in specialized texts and highlights some results from Huang's (2005) research on metaphors in scientific texts on Medicine/AIDS. These revealed that terminologies involve metaphoric associations in their denominations and definitions.
The purpose of Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr in The Dynamic Complexities of Metaphor Interpretation is to discuss complexities in the interpretation of metaphors, which is dependent on a wide range of factors that interact with one another in complex, dynamic, often non-linear ways, in such a way that it is neither possible to determine the meaning of a specific metaphor nor to have it understood the same way by everyone. The author claims that these complexities should be taken into account in the studies of metaphor meaning and understanding to systematically characterize people's metaphorical experiences.
Consistent with the previous article, but mainly focused on the relationship between body and cognition, Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and Ana Cristina Pelosi Silva de Macedo, in Metaphor and Embodied Cognition, describe experimental findings in recent research within cognitive science that show a close association between humans' perception, concept processing, mental imagery, memory and language processing and their abilities to act in the real world, which are in line with the contemporary work on embodied metaphor in language and thought. The authors also present the results of a series of experiments investigating the embodied understanding that people have of the DIFFICULTIES ARE WEIGHTS primary metaphor.
The issue of metaphor interpretation is also discussed by Solange Coelho Vereza, in her article entitled Articulating the Conceptual and the Discursive Dimensions of Figurative Language in Argumentative Texts, in which she claims that metaphor in discourse requires a broader look into the features of context and co-text of its occurrence, something that has not been featured by contemporary metaphor scholars so extensively. The author proposes a unit of discursive analysis, i.e. the metaphor niche (figurative chains or networks) by which the discursive entailments of argumentative texts are revealed.
In similar line are the last two papers of the issue, by Zoltán Kövecses. In the first article, Metaphor, Creativity, and Discourse, Kövecses argues that metaphorical creativity arises not only from the cognitive processes of extending, elaboration, questioning, and combining conceptual content in the source domain but also derives from contextual factors, such as the immediate linguistic context itself, what people know about the major entities participating in the discourse, the physical setting, the social setting, and the immediate cultural context. Such metaphors have been described by the author as context-induced metaphors.
In his second article, Metaphor, Language, and Culture, Zoltán Kövecses claims that making meaning should be the central issue in the study of culture and language, since there are obvious connections between them in many metaphorical concepts. The author argues that cultures can differ in the use of the meaning-making devices, such as spatial orientation of surrounding objects, similarity- and frame-based categorization, knowledge representation in mind, and that this variety may produce differences in the use of categories and language in general.
Finally, it is our hope that the essays in this special issue of DELTA will keep the flame of interest in metaphor burning through these enchanting facets of language and thought.
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Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
30 Sept 2011 -
Date of issue
2010
