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Apostrophe in Life and in Romantic Art: Everyday Discourse, Overhearing, and Poetic Address
Gerard J. Steen
Identifying Metaphor in Language: A Cognitive Approach
Craig A. Hamilton
Mapping the Mind and the Body: On W. H. Auden’s
Personifications
Chanita Goodblatt and Joseph Glicksohn
Metaphor Comprehension as Problem Solving:
An Online Study of the Reading Process
Jim Swan
“Life without Parole”: Metaphor and Discursive Commitment
Margaret H. Freeman
Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis
Patrick Colm Hogan
A Minimal, Lexicalist/Constituent Transfer Account
of Metaphor
Michael Sinding
Assembling Spaces: The Conceptual Structure of Allegory
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. and Nicole L. Wilson
Bodily Action and Metaphorical Meaning
Dylan Glynn
Love and Anger: The Grammatical Structure of Conceptual
Metaphors
David Herman
Narrative: A User’s Manual
Recent work in cognitive rhetoric and the “poetics of mind” stresses the continuites rather than disjunctions between everyday linguistic usage—along with the thought processes presumed to underlie it—and figurative language. Apostrophe, the rhetorical figure identified by deconstructionist rhetoric as exemplifying the excessive, aberrant, “literary” character of figurative language, presents itself as an especially rich subject for reconsideration along cognitive lines. Far from typically striking hearers as unusual or “embarrassing,” apostrophes pervade everyday discourse and are readily understood, although verbal artists can manipulate the objects and styles of apostrophic address to create unusual effects. Literary uses of apostrophe present a rough continuum, from familiar addresses to intimates to “bolder” invocations of inanimate objects or abstractions. The perceived unnaturalness of even the latter apostrophes, however, varies according to historical context.
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Gerard J. Steen. “Identifying Metaphor in Language:
A Cognitive Approach”
This paper presents the background, findings, and implications of a
new line of research on the technical identification of linguistic metaphor.
Inspired by the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor launched by Lakoff
and Johnson, a new theoretical framework and operational definition has
been developed for the identification of metaphorical expressions in authentic
discourse. The paper presents a brief report of two reliability studies
of the first stage of the approach, and spells out how it may be applied
in linguistic, stylistic and rhetorical text analysis with reference to
a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
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Craig A. Hamilton. “Mapping the Mind and the
Body: On W. H. Auden’s Personifications
In this essay, I explore Auden’s tendency to use personification metaphors
for the mind and the body. Auden uses these figures throughout his career,
which reveals his preoccupation with dualism. My analysis involves in particular
two of Auden’s poems: “The Mind to Body Spoke” and “Memorial for the City.”
What makes personification particularly intriguing to analyze here is how
the target domain relates to a personified source domain. To discuss this
relationship, I borrow terms from cognitive linguistics in order shed light
on Auden’s peculiar personifications. More specifically, I explain how
conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory can clarify phenemona
first noticed by classical rhetoricians but poorly understood ever since.
In doing so, a better understanding of personification in general and the
metaphor’s function in Auden’s poetry in particular is possible.
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Chanita Goodblatt and Joseph Glicksohn.
“Metaphor Complrehension as Problem Solving: An Online Study of the Reading
Process”
A special issue on “Cognitive Approaches to Metaphor” calls forth in
this paper a collaboration between a literary critic and a cognitive psychologist.
This particular convergence of the two disciplines is to be found in a
Gestalt-Interactionist theory of metaphor, which views the reader as being
faced with a problem-situation presented by the text. We have implemented
a methodological strategy which juxtaposes an analysis of individual protocols,
produced by a reader “thinking aloud,” with a depiction of the reading
process by means of a flowchart. Our objective is to provide empirical
support for viewing the process of metaphor comprehension in terms of the
cognitive process of problem solving, as students of literature begin to
unravel a whole poetic text (an Imagist poem). We have thus shown how real
readers have dealt with a real text in real time.
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Jim Swan. “‘Life without Parole’: Metaphor and
Discursive Commitment”
Figurative thought and language require a capacity for un-making perceptions
as well as making them, and a capacity for irony as well as metaphor, a
real-time awareness that the figures of perception are contingent and approximate,
both true and not true at the same time. This view differs significantly
from theories of metaphor as embodied schema (Lakoff and Johnson) and conceptual
integration (Turner and Fauconnier). Such bottom-up theories fail to account
for the fundamental role played, in metaphor production and comprehension,
by a prior, top-down judgment on the part of a situated, ethically intuitive
subject of discourse.
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Margaret H. Freeman. “Cognitive Mapping in
Literary Analysis”
In this article I discuss the ways in which cognitive linguistics can
contribute to literary study by showing how both writers and readers make
use of implicit cognitive mapping strategies in creating and interpreting
literary texts. My argument is based on the premise that the same cognitive
processes occur to both produce and understand language. I apply contemporary
theories of analogical mapping, conceptual metaphor, and conceptual integration
networks (blending) to several Dickinson poems and show how different interpretations
of a Dickinson text arise from the different mapping strategies readers
use, based on their own idealized cognitive cultural models (knowledge
domains).
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Patrick Colm Hogan. “A Minimal, Lexicalist/Constituent
Transfer Account of Metaphor”
Probably the two most influential approaches to understanding metaphor
are the constituent transfer approach and the cognitive metaphor approach.
The former confines metaphor to specifiable lexical processes. The latter
extends metaphor to a broad and pervasive principle of cognition. In the
following pages, I argue that a fairly circumscribed lexical treatment
of metaphor can explain all the relevant data more elegantly than the conceptual
metaphor account. Specifically, I argue that a version of constituent transferal
provides a good account of both literal and metaphorical interpretation
and that, when combined with standard lexical processes such as priming,
it allows us to give a simpler and more plausible explanation of metaphorical
patterning than that presented by conceptual metaphor theorists. In addition,
it correctly predicts some patterns that are, at least prima facie, anomalous
for the conceptual metaphor account.
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Michael Sinding. “Assembling Spaces: The Conceptual
Sturcture of Allegory”
Blending theory accommodates more complex mappings than the source-target
projections of the Lakoff-Johnson theory of metaphor. It can resolve a
number of traditional puzzles about allegory, while preserving critical
insights and supporting them with a sophisticated linguistics. I examine
Prudentius’s Psychomachia to show how prototypical allegories use organizing
metaphors but exhibit blending operations. I suggest that from a latent
existence in language, allegory arises as an imagined scene, then expands
to narratives. This can illuminate how blends get elaborated. I explore
the nature of variant forms of allegory in blending terms, looking closely
at Kafka’s Trial.
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Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Nicole L. Wilson.
“Bodily Action and Metaphorical Meaning”
Our purpose in this article is to explore the role that bodily action
has in motivating different aspects of metaphorical meaning. We present
findings from different linguistic and psychological studies showing that
people’s intuitive sense of pervasive bodily actions constrains their understanding
of many types of metaphorical language. More specifically, the precise
metaphorical meanings associated with many conventionalized utterances
can be explained by an examination of the ways people move and experience
their bodies. This diverse set of research findings illustrates the linkages
between phenomenological experience, concrete and abstract concepts, and
both conventional and poetic uses of language.
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Dylan Glynn. “Love and Anger. The Grammatical
Structure of Conceptual Metaphors”
The aim of this article is to apply a long held theory of cognitive
linguistics, namely the inter-dependence of meaning and form, to the study
of conceptual metaphors. This has yet to be done in any rigorous manner
and the current study demonstrates that it is a task well overdue. Although
the investigation posits important theoretical arguments for “cognitively
informed” studies of metaphor, the discussion bases its analysis in two
established conceptual domains, love and anger. The discussion begins by
demonstrating weaknesses in the current study of conceptual metaphors based
solely on the lexicon. This is done through a brief investigation of the
figurative language of anger. The investigation then moves to resolve this
issue by applying the study of morpho-syntax to conceptual metaphor analysis.
Through the application of formal enquiry to the analysis of the domain
love, the discussion demonstrates two important points. Firstly, that morpho-syntactic
study helps resolve problems of domain membership and delineation in cross-reference
mapping of conceptual metaphors. Secondly, the study reveals that metaphors
posses a “grammatical topology.” This topology, or character, is part of
the conceptual makeup of the domain that is undetectable in purely lexical
analyses.
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David Herman. “Narrative: A User’s Manual”
The authors characterize stories as a mode of communication, a resource
for cognition, a means of socialization, and an index as well as catalyst
of psychosocial development. Particularly noteworthy is the authors’ “dimensional”
approach to narrative; this approach contrasts with attempts to identify
distinctive features that are found in all and only stories. Construing
narrative as both a process and a product, Ochs and Capps discuss five
dimensions—tellership, tellability, embeddedness, linearity, and moral
stance—that afford continua of storytelling possibilities. All of the dimensions
are relevant for any given narrative; but a particular story will be more
or less linear in its presentation of a sequence of events, more or less
definite in its choice of a moral perspective, and so on.
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