Pub Date : 2023-05-25DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2022.2153337
Lorena Bort-Mir
{"title":"Flashbacks in Film: A Cognitive and Multimodal Analysis","authors":"Lorena Bort-Mir","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2022.2153337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2022.2153337","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43425510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-25DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2022.2142472
Gavin Brookes
ABSTRACT This article examines the metaphors that are used to represent dementia in British tabloid newspapers over a ten-year period (2010–2019). The analysis takes a corpus-based approach to metaphor identification and analysis, utilizing in particular the corpus linguistic technique of collocation analysis. Metaphors are considered in terms of the ‘targets’ they frame, which include the following aspects of dementia: (i.) prevalence; (ii.) causes; (iii.) symptoms and prognosis; (iv.) lived experience; and (v.) responses. A range of metaphors are identified, with the tabloids exhibiting a particular preference for metaphors which construct dementia as an agentive and violent entity and people with dementia as passive victims, and which foreground preventative responses to dementia such as pharmacological intervention and individual behavior change. It is argued that such metaphors have the potential to contribute to dementia stigma and place focus on preventing or eliminating dementia while backgrounding responses which may help people to “live well” with the syndrome in the here-and-now. Metaphors which frame dementia as a companion or which the experience of dementia as a journey are put forward as potentially less stigmatizing alternatives which might better reflect the particularities of this complex public health issue.
{"title":"Killer, Thief or Companion? A Corpus-Based Study of Dementia Metaphors in UK Tabloids","authors":"Gavin Brookes","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2022.2142472","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2022.2142472","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the metaphors that are used to represent dementia in British tabloid newspapers over a ten-year period (2010–2019). The analysis takes a corpus-based approach to metaphor identification and analysis, utilizing in particular the corpus linguistic technique of collocation analysis. Metaphors are considered in terms of the ‘targets’ they frame, which include the following aspects of dementia: (i.) prevalence; (ii.) causes; (iii.) symptoms and prognosis; (iv.) lived experience; and (v.) responses. A range of metaphors are identified, with the tabloids exhibiting a particular preference for metaphors which construct dementia as an agentive and violent entity and people with dementia as passive victims, and which foreground preventative responses to dementia such as pharmacological intervention and individual behavior change. It is argued that such metaphors have the potential to contribute to dementia stigma and place focus on preventing or eliminating dementia while backgrounding responses which may help people to “live well” with the syndrome in the here-and-now. Metaphors which frame dementia as a companion or which the experience of dementia as a journey are put forward as potentially less stigmatizing alternatives which might better reflect the particularities of this complex public health issue.","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41770337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-25DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2022.2153336
Laura Hidalgo-Downing, Niamh A. O’Dowd
ABSTRACT Concern for global warming, climate change and pollution has grown in recent years, with countries across the world facing natural disasters on unprecedented scales. The communication of environmental protection is therefore a necessary area of enquiry, especially from a Conceptual Metaphor Theory perspective. The present article explores (1) how the themes of global warming, climate change, pollution and activism are conceptualized in a corpus of 51 noncommercial advertisements, (2) the interaction of metonymy with metaphor, (3) the distribution across verbal and visual modes of metaphoric source and target domains, and (4) how value is evoked. Findings show that half of the corpus frames environmental themes through source domains such as weapons, predators and natural disasters. The other half triggers incongruous mappings, such as between concrete entities, and relies on metonymic processes of inference to access the main rhetorical message. Among the most frequent metonymies, CAUSE-EFFECT and CATEGORY FOR SALIENT PROPERTY highlight the negative effects of the represented phenomena. Multimodality usually occurs within source and/or target domains rather than across the metaphoric mapping. Most of the campaigns project mixed value, where a negative evaluation of a theme is accompanied by a positive message, inviting the audience to take action.
{"title":"Code Red for Humanity: Multimodal Metaphor and Metonymy in Noncommercial Advertisements on Environmental Awareness and Activism","authors":"Laura Hidalgo-Downing, Niamh A. O’Dowd","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2022.2153336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2022.2153336","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Concern for global warming, climate change and pollution has grown in recent years, with countries across the world facing natural disasters on unprecedented scales. The communication of environmental protection is therefore a necessary area of enquiry, especially from a Conceptual Metaphor Theory perspective. The present article explores (1) how the themes of global warming, climate change, pollution and activism are conceptualized in a corpus of 51 noncommercial advertisements, (2) the interaction of metonymy with metaphor, (3) the distribution across verbal and visual modes of metaphoric source and target domains, and (4) how value is evoked. Findings show that half of the corpus frames environmental themes through source domains such as weapons, predators and natural disasters. The other half triggers incongruous mappings, such as between concrete entities, and relies on metonymic processes of inference to access the main rhetorical message. Among the most frequent metonymies, CAUSE-EFFECT and CATEGORY FOR SALIENT PROPERTY highlight the negative effects of the represented phenomena. Multimodality usually occurs within source and/or target domains rather than across the metaphoric mapping. Most of the campaigns project mixed value, where a negative evaluation of a theme is accompanied by a positive message, inviting the audience to take action.","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47097805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2022.2034471
K. Holyoak
ABSTRACT I consider poetry composition from both the “inside” view of a poet and the “outside” view of a cognitive psychologist. From the perspective of a psychologist, I review behavioral and neural studies of the reception and generation of poetry, with emphasis on metaphor and symbolism. Taking the perspective of a poet, I discuss how the seeds for a poem may arise. Finally, I consider the prospects for future developments in a field of computational neurocognitive poetics.
{"title":"Poet and Psychologist: A Conversation","authors":"K. Holyoak","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2022.2034471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2022.2034471","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT I consider poetry composition from both the “inside” view of a poet and the “outside” view of a cognitive psychologist. From the perspective of a psychologist, I review behavioral and neural studies of the reception and generation of poetry, with emphasis on metaphor and symbolism. Taking the perspective of a poet, I discuss how the seeds for a poem may arise. Finally, I consider the prospects for future developments in a field of computational neurocognitive poetics.","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43508021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2022.2058398
Van-Hoa Phan, Quynh-Thu Ho-Trinh
ABSTRACT This paper aims to uncover the underlying metaphorical expressions regarding the importance of love to human life in English and Vietnamese poetry based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which suggests that metaphor is based on human thought as well as on language. For metaphor identification, the authors use a five-step procedure based on Pragglejaz Group’s method for metaphorical expressions and a self-proposed three-step procedure for conceptual metaphors. The findings reveal that love is metaphorically expressed to have a considerable influence on both the physical and mental aspects of human life. This paper is also a comparative investigation showing both similarities and differences in the love-life metaphorical expressions between the two languages. The similarities are explained by the same grounding of metaphor-embodiment and the universality of conceptual metaphors. The differences are attributed to cultural distinction.
{"title":"A Cognitive Investigation into the Love-life Relationship Expressed in Poetry","authors":"Van-Hoa Phan, Quynh-Thu Ho-Trinh","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2022.2058398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2022.2058398","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper aims to uncover the underlying metaphorical expressions regarding the importance of love to human life in English and Vietnamese poetry based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which suggests that metaphor is based on human thought as well as on language. For metaphor identification, the authors use a five-step procedure based on Pragglejaz Group’s method for metaphorical expressions and a self-proposed three-step procedure for conceptual metaphors. The findings reveal that love is metaphorically expressed to have a considerable influence on both the physical and mental aspects of human life. This paper is also a comparative investigation showing both similarities and differences in the love-life metaphorical expressions between the two languages. The similarities are explained by the same grounding of metaphor-embodiment and the universality of conceptual metaphors. The differences are attributed to cultural distinction.","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41783008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2021.1941970
Jake Young
ABSTRACT Poetry is a process. While people typically refer to poems as textual objects, our experience of poetry is inherently embodied and enacted, meaning that we experience poems as events that we contextualize as gestalt representations. We experience metaphors, too, as processes, which arise from experiential gestalts, that extend gestalt structures and lay the conceptual foundation for our experience of the world. This article argues that, like metaphors, poetic gestalts can be mapped onto other experiences to help people navigate their worlds. While this kind of poetic thought has largely been considered by scholars to have existed only since the emergence of the modern human mind sometime in the last 60,000 years, the author suggests that poetic thought likely arose prior to modern cognition, and may have in fact given rise to it. A crucial aspect of the embodied and enactive approach to poetry outlined in the article is that people’s experience of poetry is fundamentally contextual and emotional. Furthermore, because emotions are a primary source of meaning, our emotional responses to poetry make it a useful tool for extending our own conceptual apparatuses, enhancing emotional intelligence, and for generating shared values.
{"title":"Why Poetry?: Semiotic Scaffolding & the Poetic Architecture of Cognition","authors":"Jake Young","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2021.1941970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2021.1941970","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Poetry is a process. While people typically refer to poems as textual objects, our experience of poetry is inherently embodied and enacted, meaning that we experience poems as events that we contextualize as gestalt representations. We experience metaphors, too, as processes, which arise from experiential gestalts, that extend gestalt structures and lay the conceptual foundation for our experience of the world. This article argues that, like metaphors, poetic gestalts can be mapped onto other experiences to help people navigate their worlds. While this kind of poetic thought has largely been considered by scholars to have existed only since the emergence of the modern human mind sometime in the last 60,000 years, the author suggests that poetic thought likely arose prior to modern cognition, and may have in fact given rise to it. A crucial aspect of the embodied and enactive approach to poetry outlined in the article is that people’s experience of poetry is fundamentally contextual and emotional. Furthermore, because emotions are a primary source of meaning, our emotional responses to poetry make it a useful tool for extending our own conceptual apparatuses, enhancing emotional intelligence, and for generating shared values.","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47284137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2022.2156796
Roi Tartakovsky, Yeshayahu Shen
ABSTRACT Zeugma (“The storm sank my boat and my dreams”) is a well-recognized figure of speech whose mechanism of operation is less well understood. We suggest treating zeugma as a breach of syntactic iconicity: the syntactic form of the coordinative construction statement implies an equivalence or semantic proximity between the two objects of the verb (boat and dreams), while the objects supplied are semantically very distant. Unlike nominal metaphors and similes, in zeugmas two metaphorically-related, nonsymmetrical objects are put in syntactically symmetrical positions. This feature, the breach of iconicity, registers as a surprise, an effect wholly different from that of metaphors and similes. Seeing zeugma in these terms makes it possible not just to explain its functioning beyond broad pronouncements about yoking together different items, but to tease apart syntactic and semantic factors that contribute to the level of the breach of iconicity and subsequently to the zeugma’s strength. Moreover, understanding zeugmas as a surprising breach of iconicity leads to the question of how this breach may be accommodated or made sense of. In the second part of the essay, we introduce three types of accommodation strategies, each with a distinct focus: the language, the objects, and the speaker.
{"title":"The Storm Sank My Boat and My Dreams: The Zeugma as a Breach of Iconicity","authors":"Roi Tartakovsky, Yeshayahu Shen","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2022.2156796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2022.2156796","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Zeugma (“The storm sank my boat and my dreams”) is a well-recognized figure of speech whose mechanism of operation is less well understood. We suggest treating zeugma as a breach of syntactic iconicity: the syntactic form of the coordinative construction statement implies an equivalence or semantic proximity between the two objects of the verb (boat and dreams), while the objects supplied are semantically very distant. Unlike nominal metaphors and similes, in zeugmas two metaphorically-related, nonsymmetrical objects are put in syntactically symmetrical positions. This feature, the breach of iconicity, registers as a surprise, an effect wholly different from that of metaphors and similes. Seeing zeugma in these terms makes it possible not just to explain its functioning beyond broad pronouncements about yoking together different items, but to tease apart syntactic and semantic factors that contribute to the level of the breach of iconicity and subsequently to the zeugma’s strength. Moreover, understanding zeugmas as a surprising breach of iconicity leads to the question of how this breach may be accommodated or made sense of. In the second part of the essay, we introduce three types of accommodation strategies, each with a distinct focus: the language, the objects, and the speaker.","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41620225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2021.1997550
S. Chatti
ABSTRACT Classical Arabic poetry is replete with animal and fruit metaphors commonly used for endearment purposes. The comparative analysis of love metaphors in classical ghazal shows, however, a shift in the poetics of love from the use of animal metaphors in Badi poetry to the occurrence of fruit imagery in Bedouin ghazal. Based on a selection of classical Arabic love poetry, the paper traces the journey of love and sexuality to illustrate the conceptual change from the prevalence of the gazelle metaphor in Bedouin ghazal of pre- and early Islam times to the emergence of fruit metaphors in Badi poetry of the Abbasid era. Evidenced in poetry, the metaphorical shit mirrors a change in the portrayal of women, who cease to be conceived as wild preys, fearing and fleeing male hunters to become exotic ripe fruits, waiting for the male to pick. Seemingly fortuitous, the shift in love imagery is reminiscent of sociocultural changes that help redefine the poetics of love in classical Arabic literature and inform gender dynamics in medieval Arabia.
{"title":"Metaphors We Love By: The Shift from Animal to Fruit Metaphors in Classical Arabic Ghazal","authors":"S. Chatti","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2021.1997550","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2021.1997550","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Classical Arabic poetry is replete with animal and fruit metaphors commonly used for endearment purposes. The comparative analysis of love metaphors in classical ghazal shows, however, a shift in the poetics of love from the use of animal metaphors in Badi poetry to the occurrence of fruit imagery in Bedouin ghazal. Based on a selection of classical Arabic love poetry, the paper traces the journey of love and sexuality to illustrate the conceptual change from the prevalence of the gazelle metaphor in Bedouin ghazal of pre- and early Islam times to the emergence of fruit metaphors in Badi poetry of the Abbasid era. Evidenced in poetry, the metaphorical shit mirrors a change in the portrayal of women, who cease to be conceived as wild preys, fearing and fleeing male hunters to become exotic ripe fruits, waiting for the male to pick. Seemingly fortuitous, the shift in love imagery is reminiscent of sociocultural changes that help redefine the poetics of love in classical Arabic literature and inform gender dynamics in medieval Arabia.","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44903573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2021.2011285
J. Nick Reid, Hamad Al-Azary, A. Katz
ABSTRACT In this paper we examine the effect of two cognitive variables, Semantic Neighborhood Density and Interpretive Diversity, in first, distinguishing between literary (poetic) and nonliterary metaphor, and second, in determining what makes for a good metaphor. Analyses of items taken from a widely used set ofmetaphor norms indicated that while literary and nonliterary metaphor did not differ in many ways, the poetic items tended to 1) contain concepts that came from a more dense semantic space, 2) contain topic and vehicles that came from equally dense semantic space, 3) suggest a greater number of possible interpretations as the topic and vehicle became more semantically dissimilar, and 4) evoke more emergent interpretations (i.e., less likely to be a characteristic of the topic or vehicle when considered separately). In addition, we found one way that the two variables were related to metaphor goodness: better metaphors were those with vehicles that came from increasingly less dense semantic space. This correlation was only reliable for literary, poetic items, presumably because these items were taken from a richer semantic environment suggesting many more alternative possibilities.
{"title":"Cognitive Factors Related to Metaphor Goodness in Poetic and Non-literary Metaphor","authors":"J. Nick Reid, Hamad Al-Azary, A. Katz","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2021.2011285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2021.2011285","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this paper we examine the effect of two cognitive variables, Semantic Neighborhood Density and Interpretive Diversity, in first, distinguishing between literary (poetic) and nonliterary metaphor, and second, in determining what makes for a good metaphor. Analyses of items taken from a widely used set ofmetaphor norms indicated that while literary and nonliterary metaphor did not differ in many ways, the poetic items tended to 1) contain concepts that came from a more dense semantic space, 2) contain topic and vehicles that came from equally dense semantic space, 3) suggest a greater number of possible interpretations as the topic and vehicle became more semantically dissimilar, and 4) evoke more emergent interpretations (i.e., less likely to be a characteristic of the topic or vehicle when considered separately). In addition, we found one way that the two variables were related to metaphor goodness: better metaphors were those with vehicles that came from increasingly less dense semantic space. This correlation was only reliable for literary, poetic items, presumably because these items were taken from a richer semantic environment suggesting many more alternative possibilities.","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47982419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2023.2172821
A. Katz, Carina Rasse, Herbert L. Colston
The genesis for this special issue arose in a rethinking of the presence of poetry in the cognitive and language sciences that arose as a consequence of two seminal moments in the 1990s. Gibbs (1994) book, “The poetics of mind” presented a comprehensive review of metaphor and other tropes in which they argued, and presented empirical evidence, in support of the thesis that the human mind was profoundly poetic and figurative in nature. At about the same time, George Lakoff (1993) updated his earlier work with Mark Johnson (1980) in his chapter the “Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” There he argues that metaphoric expression is conceptual (and not merely a matter of language) and that this conceptual structure underlies both literal and poetic language. In both of these seminal works, the focus was on understanding the structure and functions of the mind through the analysis of language, including poetic language. We decided to frame this special issue around the obverse question: In the 30 years since the initial writings of Gibbs and of Lakoff, what have we learned from the cognitive and language sciences about poetry? We have gone off and explored metaphor and other meaning-making processes in practically everything that is human, but what has gone on in the world of poetry, where many people used to believe metaphor originated? We were cognizant of the fact that poetry is a ubiquitous feature of human beings (Rasse, 2022), found in pre-literate societies and in the earliest examples of written literature. As such, we wanted to throw the net widely and put out a call for papers that said in part: “We are seeking works that go beyond the mere documentation of metaphor in poetry.” We wanted papers that spoke to general themes about poetry qua poetry. We wanted to have a set of papers that, taken together, looked at poetry in different linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts. We wanted some papers that were largely empirical. We wanted some papers that were largely theoretical. Knowing that there were scholars who, in addition to their academic work, were poets in their own right (as, in fact, is the case with the three editors of this special issue) we hoped that some of these scholars would submit papers that integrated ideas drawn from their academic work along with their embodied experiences in producing poems. We are delighted that the set of papers bound in this special issue met our hopes. There are papers that examine aspects of poetry in Arabic, English, Serbian, and Vietnamese. There are papers that compare poetry across different languages, or from a historical perspective, or that examine the role played by specific psychological characteristics. There are papers that emphasize metaphoric expression in poetry and others that consider conceptual metaphor and figurative construction types such as zeugma. And, there are papers written by scholars who have published books on poetry and bring to bear that experience in thinking more ge
{"title":"On Poetry and the Science(s) of Meaning","authors":"A. Katz, Carina Rasse, Herbert L. Colston","doi":"10.1080/10926488.2023.2172821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2023.2172821","url":null,"abstract":"The genesis for this special issue arose in a rethinking of the presence of poetry in the cognitive and language sciences that arose as a consequence of two seminal moments in the 1990s. Gibbs (1994) book, “The poetics of mind” presented a comprehensive review of metaphor and other tropes in which they argued, and presented empirical evidence, in support of the thesis that the human mind was profoundly poetic and figurative in nature. At about the same time, George Lakoff (1993) updated his earlier work with Mark Johnson (1980) in his chapter the “Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” There he argues that metaphoric expression is conceptual (and not merely a matter of language) and that this conceptual structure underlies both literal and poetic language. In both of these seminal works, the focus was on understanding the structure and functions of the mind through the analysis of language, including poetic language. We decided to frame this special issue around the obverse question: In the 30 years since the initial writings of Gibbs and of Lakoff, what have we learned from the cognitive and language sciences about poetry? We have gone off and explored metaphor and other meaning-making processes in practically everything that is human, but what has gone on in the world of poetry, where many people used to believe metaphor originated? We were cognizant of the fact that poetry is a ubiquitous feature of human beings (Rasse, 2022), found in pre-literate societies and in the earliest examples of written literature. As such, we wanted to throw the net widely and put out a call for papers that said in part: “We are seeking works that go beyond the mere documentation of metaphor in poetry.” We wanted papers that spoke to general themes about poetry qua poetry. We wanted to have a set of papers that, taken together, looked at poetry in different linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts. We wanted some papers that were largely empirical. We wanted some papers that were largely theoretical. Knowing that there were scholars who, in addition to their academic work, were poets in their own right (as, in fact, is the case with the three editors of this special issue) we hoped that some of these scholars would submit papers that integrated ideas drawn from their academic work along with their embodied experiences in producing poems. We are delighted that the set of papers bound in this special issue met our hopes. There are papers that examine aspects of poetry in Arabic, English, Serbian, and Vietnamese. There are papers that compare poetry across different languages, or from a historical perspective, or that examine the role played by specific psychological characteristics. There are papers that emphasize metaphoric expression in poetry and others that consider conceptual metaphor and figurative construction types such as zeugma. And, there are papers written by scholars who have published books on poetry and bring to bear that experience in thinking more ge","PeriodicalId":46492,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and Symbol","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41565825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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