Metaphor in applied linguistics: four cognitive approaches

DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 2010

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.

DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 2006

for the Conference on Metaphor in Language and Thought, promoted by the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Lingüística Aplicada e Estudos da Linguagem (Post-Graduate Programme in Applied Linguistics and Language Studies) and by GEIM Grupo de Estudos da Indeterminação e da Metáfora (Group of Studies on Indeterminacy and Metaphor). 1 The essays in this book are revised versions of papers presented in the conference which resulted in two other publications under preparation. The first, entitled Confronting Metaphor in Use: An Applied Linguistic Approach, is being organized by Mara Sophia Zanotto (PUC-SP), Lynne Cameron (Univ. of Leeds) and Marilda Cavalcanti (UNICAMP), and the second, entitled Metaphor in Applied Linguistics(provisional title), is being organized by Mara Sophia Zanotto (PUC-SP), Solange Coelho Vereza (UFF) and Maria Isabel Asperti Nardi (UNESP-Marília), the same editors of the present volume. The five-day conference 2 consisted of non-simultaneous activities: plenary talks, round tables, workshops and individual papers. This resulted in an intense and productive interaction among the participants.

The paper reviews the main approaches to the problem of metaphor that contribute to understanding the nature of this linguistic phenomenon emphasizing its significant and multifaceted functions.

This paper suggests that metaphor research can benefit from a clearer description of the field of research. Three dimensions of doing metaphor research are distinguished: metaphor can be studied as part of grammar or usage, it can be studied as part of language or thought, and it can be studied as part of sign systems or behaviour. When these three dimensions are crossed, eight distinct areas of research emerge that have their own assumptions about metaphorical meaning which have their own implications and consequences for the aims and evaluation of research. It is suggested that these distinctions will help in clarifying the validity of claims about the role of conceptual metaphor in language.

DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 2006

An important reason for the tremendous interest in metaphor over the past 20 years stems from cognitive linguistic research. Cognitive linguists embrace the idea that metaphor is not merely a part of language, but reflects a fundamental part of the way people think, reason, and imagine. A large number of empirical studies in cognitive linguistics have, in different ways, supported this claim. My aim in this paper is to describe the empirical foundations for cognitive linguistic work on metaphor, acknowledge various skeptical reactions to this work, and respond to some of these questions/criticisms. I also outline several challenges that cognitive linguists should try to address in future work on metaphor in language, thought, and culture.

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: …, 2000

G. LAKOFF and M. JOHNSON's theory of cognitive linguistics and their definition of metaphor and metaphorical concepts have led to a variety of qualitative approaches whose common aim is to reconstruct metaphorical concepts and metaphorical reasoning in everyday language. Targets of these approaches were cross-cultural, cultural, subcultural, individual matters and metaphoric interaction. To illustrate this, two different strategies for a systematic procedure are briefly outlined.

In the current climate, it is taken for granted that metaphor is important and ubiquitous in language. Metaphor is no longer discussed as a 'violation'of normal verbal meaning (eg, Levin, 1977), but rather as one form of normal verbal meaning. But of course if metaphor were all that 'normal', it would not stimulate the interest that it does.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2004

The articles presented in this special issue are a selection of papers from the Third International Conference on Researching And Applying Metaphor (RAAM III), held in June 1999 at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. The fourth RAAM conference has since been held in Tunis, in 2001, and the fifth, in September 2003, in Paris. The continued interest in the applied study of metaphor bears testimony to the fruitful nature of contemporary metaphor research, and to the timely identification of its potential for application by the initiators of the conference series, Lynne Cameron and Graham Low. Their edited book of the same title is the most conspicuous published result of these developments (Cameron and Low, 1999), and the present special issue is a further addition to this stock. The particular focus of this special issue is on researching and applying metaphor across languages, the conference theme of RAAM III. The plenary papers of the two invited speakers, Raymond Gibbs and Cliff Goddard, are included as two seminal examples of doing this type of cross-linguistic research with radically different methodologies. Two additional papers, by Alice Deignan and Liz Potter and by Christina Schäffner, add further to the variety of approaches employed in cross-linguistic metaphor research. The undercurrent of methodological discussion that can be observed in all four of these papers, and that is characteristic of metaphor as well as of cross-linguistic research, is brought out in its full complexity in the last two papers, by Elena Semino and her co-authors and by my own paper. Together, these six papers provide a concrete and rich illustration of the diverging concerns of contemporary research on, and application of, metaphor. Gibbs and his associates focus on the similarities and differences between the experience of desire in American English and Brazilian Portuguese. They examine the thesis that metaphor is grounded in embodied experience, an idea that has informed cognitivelinguistic metaphor research from the beginning (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999). What is special about Gibbs et al.'s contribution is its systematic and controlled comparison between two distinct cultures, as well as the way these cultures metaphorically conceptualize and express desire as hunger. In particular, a cognitive-linguistic analysis of expressions relating to desire in both languages first leads to an inventory of hunger metaphors for desire. Then an independent conceptual analysis of the experience of hunger by itself produces a classification of aspects of hunger in both cultures. These conceptual analyses are finally used as predictive categories in a rating study examining how people in both cultures think of and talk about desire as hunger. The overall similarities, as well as some of the differences, are remarkable, and can be seen as support for the view of culture and cognition as embodied experience.

This paper outlines a multi-dimensional/multi-disciplinary framework for the study of metaphor. It expands on the cognitive linguistic approach to metaphor in language and thought by adding the dimension of communication, and it expands on the predominantly linguistic and psychological approaches by adding the discipline of social science. This creates a map of the field in which nine main areas of research can be distinguished and connected to each other in precise ways. It allows for renewed attention to the deliberate use of metaphor in communication, in contrast with non-deliberate use, and asks the question whether the interaction between deliberate and non-deliberate use of metaphor in specific social domains can contribute to an explanation of the discourse career of metaphor. The suggestion is made that metaphorical models in language, thought, and communication can be classified as official, contested, implicit, and emerging, which may offer new perspectives on the interaction between social, psychological, and linguistic properties and functions of metaphor in discourse. Keywords: metaphor, language, thought, communication, linguistics, psychology, social science

Metaphor and Symbol

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