Abstract
This study seeks to develop quantified methods for the description of conceptual metaphors. The study examines the target concept of boredom in contemporary English and Russian. It aims to not only identify which metaphors are used in the two languages, but also how they are used. Using the qualitative-quantitative approach of ‘behavioural profiles’, the study examines comparable informal and personal written language in both cultures, revealing that the most frequent metaphoric conceptualisations of boredom are as death, as an enemy or as an illness. Moreover, the study also shows quantitatively that, despite shared metaphor structures across the languages, there is some difference in how they are used. Through these results, the study highlights that the description of conceptual metaphors needs to pay more attention to their use but also demonstrates the importance of quantitative tools for those usage descriptions.
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©2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial: Cognitive Linguistics as an interdisciplinary endeavour
- How vector space models disambiguate adjectives: A perilous but valid enterprise
- Death, enemies, and illness: How English and Russian metaphorically conceptualise boredom
- The status of nominal sub-categories: Exploring frequency densities of plural -s
- No big deal: Situation-backgrounding uses of the Polish dative reflexive pronoun sobie/se
- Hand gestures with verbs of throwing: Collostructions, style and metaphor
- Exploring the conceptualisation of locative events in French, English, and Dutch: Insights from eye-tracking on two memorisation tasks
- Extending structural priming to test constructional relations: Some comments and suggestions
- Lexical Integrity: A mere construct or more a construction?
- Cognitive Linguistics meets Interactional Linguistics: Language development in the arena of language use
- Cognitive Linguistics meets multilingual language acquisition: What pattern identification can tell us
- Constructionist approaches to creativity
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial: Cognitive Linguistics as an interdisciplinary endeavour
- How vector space models disambiguate adjectives: A perilous but valid enterprise
- Death, enemies, and illness: How English and Russian metaphorically conceptualise boredom
- The status of nominal sub-categories: Exploring frequency densities of plural -s
- No big deal: Situation-backgrounding uses of the Polish dative reflexive pronoun sobie/se
- Hand gestures with verbs of throwing: Collostructions, style and metaphor
- Exploring the conceptualisation of locative events in French, English, and Dutch: Insights from eye-tracking on two memorisation tasks
- Extending structural priming to test constructional relations: Some comments and suggestions
- Lexical Integrity: A mere construct or more a construction?
- Cognitive Linguistics meets Interactional Linguistics: Language development in the arena of language use
- Cognitive Linguistics meets multilingual language acquisition: What pattern identification can tell us
- Constructionist approaches to creativity