Volume 21, Issue 4

While cognitive linguists have been successful at providing accounts of the stable knowledge structures (conceptual metaphors) that give rise to figurative language, and the conceptual mechanisms that manipulate these knowledge structures (conceptual blending), relatively less effort has been thus far devoted to the nature of the linguistic mechanisms involved in figurative language understanding. This paper presents a theoretical account of figurative language understanding, examining metaphor and metonymy in particular. This account is situated within the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (LCCM Theory). LCCM Theory (Evans, Cognitive Linguistics 17: 491–534, 2006, How words mean: Lexical concepts, cognitive models and meaning construction, Oxford University Press, 2009b) is a cognitively realistic model of lexical representation and semantic compositionality, providing, it is argued, an account of figurative language which complements the ‘backstage’ cognition perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory. It also integrates the notion of conceptual metaphor within the account provided of figurative language understanding. The paper introduces the key mechanisms involved in figurative language understanding arising from language use. The paper also provides a programmatic account of how conceptual metaphors are integrated with linguistic knowledge in figurative language use. It is argued the present proposals flesh out a key aspect of the conceptual integration perspective promoted by Fauconnier and Turner, with which LCCM Theory is continuous. In part, the paper attempts to advance the prospect of a ‘joined up’ cognitive linguistic account of figurative language understanding.

Where do we recruit novel and unconventional conceptual materials from when we speak, think and act metaphorically, and why? This question has been partially answered in the cognitive linguistic literature but, in my view, a crucial aspect of it has been left out of consideration or not dealt with in the depth it deserves: it is the effect of various kinds of context on metaphorical conceptualization. Of these, I examine the following: (1) the immediate physical setting, (2) what we know about the major entities participating in the discourse, (3) the immediate cultural context, (4) the immediate social setting, and (5) the immediate linguistic context itself. I suggest that we recruit conceptual materials for metaphorical purposes not only from bodily experience but also from all of these various contexts. Since the contexts can be highly variable, the metaphors used will often be variable, novel, and unconventional. The phenomenon can be observed in both everyday forms of language and literary texts.

In this article we apply one of the key concepts in cognitive linguistics, the radial category, to inflectional morphology. We advance the Paradigm Structure Hypothesis, arguing that inflectional paradigms are radial categories with internal structure primarily motivated by semantic relationships of markedness and prototypicality. It is possible to construct an expected structure for a verbal paradigm, facilitating an empirical test for our hypothesis. Data tracking an on-going morphological change in Russian documents the distribution of conservative vs. innovative forms across the cells of the verbal paradigm. A logistic regression model that takes into account the sources of variation (the frequencies of individual verbs and paradigm slots, and individual verb preferences) shows that the language change is implemented differently across the paradigm forms, confirming the expected structure. In addition to markedness and prototypicality, we investigate the impact of frequency and show that there is a good, albeit not perfect match between the expected hierarchy and frequency. We conclude that the diachronic change analyzed in this article gives evidence for the structure of paradigms modeled on the radial category.

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities, advantages and difficulties of corpus-based analyses of semantic and pragmatic aspects of language in one particular field, namely the linguistic expression of emotion concepts. For this purpose, a methodological procedure is proposed and an exemplary analysis of the emotion concept “fear” in English is performed. The procedure combines Kövecses' lexical approach and Stefanowitsch's metaphorical pattern analysis with additional concepts from corpus linguistics such as semantic preference and semantic prosody. The results of the study show that such a corpus-based analysis of emotion words offers several advantages. Firstly, by exploring the surroundings of the search word in a vast amount of text, we are not only able to find evidence of conceptual metaphor and metonymy that structure the emotion concept and of related emotion concepts, but also we can enrich the description of the emotion concept with information from a series of dimensions and add a pragmatic viewpoint by revealing an explicit or implicit evaluation of the emotion. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach lies in the possibility of quantifying results, i.e., comparing the frequency, productivity and creative use of individual metaphors and metonymies, which is especially interesting in view of contrastive studies.

This paper examines patterns of metaphor in usage. Four samples of text excerpts of on average 47,000 words each were taken from the British National Corpus and annotated for metaphor. The linguistic metaphor data were collected by five analysts on the basis of a highly explicit identification procedure that is a variant of the approach developed by the Pragglejaz Group (Metaphor and Symbol 22: 1–39, 2007). Part of this paper is a report of the protocol and the reliability of the procedure. Data analysis shows that, on average, one in every seven and a half lexical units in the corpus is related to metaphor defined as a potential cross-domain mapping in conceptual structure. It also appears that the bulk of the expression of metaphor in discourse consists of non-signalled metaphorically used words, not similes. The distribution of metaphor-related words, finally, turns out to be quite variable between the four registers examined in this study: academic texts have 18.5%, news 16.4%, fiction 11.7%, and conversation 7.7%. The systematic comparative investigation of these registers raises new questions about the relation between cognitive linguistic and other approaches to metaphor.