Volume 10, Issue 2 - Metaphor and Culture: A Relationship at a Crossroads?

The choice of metaphor used to refer to a particular concept or event can often be linked to the social, economic, political, or even physical environment in which it is used. Commonly used metaphors, for instance, seeing a political campaign in the context of a war, can be extended to a march toward capturing the seat of the government. This dynamic use of metaphors is illustrated aptly in the Asian Economic Crisis from 1997–1999, which was described in Malaysia using metaphors of colonialism, thus reflecting the political ideology of the leadership of the time (Kelly 2001). Added to these dimensions are the cross-cultural differences that manifest themselves through the choice of metaphors used to refer to the same event. Malaysia and Singapore went through the same 2008 economic crisis but internal circumstances produced different reactions from both countries. Differences in the historical traditions and cultures of Malaysia and Singapore may have lead to differences in the types of metaphors that were selected to attain similar rhetorical objectives for the event. Relationships between the two countries, while cordial at most times, still carry uneasy undercurrents since their separation in 1965. This study compares the metaphors used to describe and report the 2008 global economic crisis in major newspapers in Malaysia and Singapore. Using the tools of corpus linguistics, keywords were extracted, then concordanced to identify dominant metaphorical source domains. They were then analyzed using the critical metaphor approach, which looks at how metaphors filter reality to reflect the choices made by writers to present the ideological bias of their texts. In addition, events and issues occurring during the period in question were charted to show that these elements were also instrumental in explaining the choice of particular metaphors in constructing or de-constructing reality.

This paper describes an English-Polish theoretical and empirical cognitive study of the axiological aspects of the concept(s) death / śmierć and conceptualizations to which they refer. The pragmatic tool of a language mask is presented and applied to death, a generally difficult topic. A two-part survey was conducted to test the valuing of expressions where death / śmierć was used in the literal sense and in figurative senses, often idiomatic and not referring to the end of life of an organism (Part 1), as well as expressions where death / śmierć was masked – conveyed indirectly, by means of other concepts – mostly using metaphors and metonyms (Part 2). Death is a carrier of negative axiological charge as a source domain of metaphors (as seen in Part 1). Metaphor and metonymy are treated as language masks, i.e., pragmatic tools of pretending, used to modulate the valuing of death / śmierć (in Part 2). Valuing of seemingly equivalent or similar expressions varies cross-linguistically. Humor is a very controversial aspect in terms of its axiological parameter.

In this paper, we propose an analysis of a set of metaphorical expressions of jealousy in American English and in peninsular Spanish. Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus de Referencia del Español, we have analyzed all the occurrences of English jealousy and Spanish celo(s) (and their derivates) in order to make a list of metaphorical source domains for this emotion. The domains identified here have been classified into groups, after which we have compared, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the metaphorical expressions for jealousy in the two languages. Special attention has been paid to the role of sensorial perception in the metaphors articulating the ways speakers from the two cultures feel this emotion. According to our analysis, in spite of the basic role of touch in both languages, American English speakers make use of a wide variety of sensory-related metaphors (including vision, hearing, smelling, and tasting), which, much more frequently than in Spanish, foreground the physical component of this emotion.

This paper discusses the role that culture plays in the configuration of one of the most crucial meaning mechanisms in cognitive linguistics, namely conceptual metaphors, which are defined as mappings between two different conceptual domains. These mappings are embodied, that is, grounded in our sensorimotor, cultural, and social experience of the world around us. This paper argues that culture is a key concept for the explanation of how conceptual metaphors emerge from our knowledge structures. It proposes the need of a culture sieve that manipulates culture elements in two ways. On the one hand, it “filters” those elements that are in accordance with the premises of a given culture, and on the other, it “impregnates” the mapping with touches of a culture in contrast with other cultural and social systems. The paper is divided in two main parts: First, an overview of the relationship between metaphor, embodiment and culture in cognitive linguistics is provided. Second, the importance of the culture sieve is illustrated with two case studies from two popular conceptual domains in metaphor studies: perception and body-parts.

This paper reports on a study of a particular cultural problem in contemporary English-Arabic translation, namely pedagogical metaphors in popular science writing. Pedagogical metaphors are argued to be crucial to the communicative intent of this genre, namely the dissemination of knowledge about complex scientific phenomena from expert to non-expert. Seen by some scholars as a type of translation in itself, popular science writing presents particular translation challenges for culturally distant languages such as English and Arabic. Whilst traditional studies of metaphors in translation have focused on the un/translatability of linguistic expressions, the present study adopts a conceptual approach emphasizing the contribution made by related sets of metaphorical linguistic expressions to the scientific “story.” Following an account of metaphor types and functions, the paper outlines the construction of a 287,306-word parallel corpus of selected articles from Scientific American and its Arabic equivalent Majallat Al-Oloom (1995–2009). Extending previous monolingual/manual corpus analytical methods, the study reports on a range of intercultural problems and their translation solutions, bearing in mind the pedagogical function of the metaphors analyzed. It is concluded that a range of translation strategies is used to accommodate the cultural expectations and experience of the Arabic readership, indicating that popular science is culturally nuanced. In this sense, translations cannot therefore be seen simply as different language versions of the same material.