I. Olza, Veronika Koller, I. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Paula Pérez-Sobrino, E. Semino
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments, health agencies, public institutions and the media around the world have made use of metaphors to talk about the virus, its effects and the measures needed to reduce its spread. Dominant among these metaphors have been war metaphors (e.g. battles, front lines, combat), which present the virus as an enemy that needs to be fought and beaten. These metaphors have attracted an unprecedented amount of criticism from diverse social agents, for a variety of reasons. In reaction, #ReframeCovid was born as an open, collaborative and non-prescriptive initiative to collect alternatives to war metaphors for COVID-19 in any language, and to (critically) reflect on the use of figurative language about the virus, its impact and the measures taken in response. The paper summarises the background, aims, development and main outcomes to date of the initiative, and launches a call for scholars within the metaphor community to feed into and use the #ReframeCovid collection in their own basic and applied research projects.
{"title":"The #ReframeCovid initiative","authors":"I. Olza, Veronika Koller, I. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Paula Pérez-Sobrino, E. Semino","doi":"10.1075/msw.00013.olz","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.00013.olz","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments, health agencies, public institutions and the media around the\u0000 world have made use of metaphors to talk about the virus, its effects and the measures needed to reduce its spread. Dominant among these\u0000 metaphors have been war metaphors (e.g. battles, front lines, combat), which present the virus as an enemy that needs to be\u0000 fought and beaten. These metaphors have attracted an unprecedented amount of criticism from diverse social agents, for a variety of reasons.\u0000 In reaction, #ReframeCovid was born as an open, collaborative and non-prescriptive initiative to collect alternatives to war metaphors for\u0000 COVID-19 in any language, and to (critically) reflect on the use of figurative language about the virus, its impact and the measures taken\u0000 in response. The paper summarises the background, aims, development and main outcomes to date of the initiative, and launches a call for\u0000 scholars within the metaphor community to feed into and use the #ReframeCovid collection in their own basic and applied research\u0000 projects.","PeriodicalId":51936,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and the Social World","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42791073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this work, I explore pain descriptions by women who live with the life-altering gynaecological disease of endometriosis. This condition causes incapacitating pain, which tends to be dismissed and normalised as part of the female condition (Cumberbatch, 2019). My aim is to explore the general patterns of pain conceptualisation by women with endometriosis and outline how an in-depth examination of salient elements of narrative scenarios may contribute towards providing a comprehensive understanding of the pain experience. I first examine patterns of metaphorical pain collocates from a corpus generated from online forum contributions. Following this, I explore metaphorical scenarios of pain, focusing on stories that reference popular texts or genres from a conceptual integration perspective. I argue that the combination of metaphor analysis of naturally-occurring data and conceptual intertextuality and interdiscursivity analysis in the metaphorical scenarios of elicited data constitute a methodological niche that allows a holistic assessment of the pain that can potentially be used in consultations and may help tackle the alarming diagnosis delay of endometriosis, which is currently 7.5 years.
{"title":"“The bloodiness and horror of it”","authors":"Stella Bullo","doi":"10.1075/msw.19002.bul","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.19002.bul","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In this work, I explore pain descriptions by women who live with the life-altering gynaecological disease of endometriosis. This condition causes incapacitating pain, which tends to be dismissed and normalised as part of the female condition (Cumberbatch, 2019). My aim is to explore the general patterns of pain conceptualisation by women with endometriosis and outline how an in-depth examination of salient elements of narrative scenarios may contribute towards providing a comprehensive understanding of the pain experience. I first examine patterns of metaphorical pain collocates from a corpus generated from online forum contributions. Following this, I explore metaphorical scenarios of pain, focusing on stories that reference popular texts or genres from a conceptual integration perspective. I argue that the combination of metaphor analysis of naturally-occurring data and conceptual intertextuality and interdiscursivity analysis in the metaphorical scenarios of elicited data constitute a methodological niche that allows a holistic assessment of the pain that can potentially be used in consultations and may help tackle the alarming diagnosis delay of endometriosis, which is currently 7.5 years.","PeriodicalId":51936,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and the Social World","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41960379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
After a brief flurry of attention following its introduction by Dawkins (1976), the concept of memes has largely disappeared from mainstream social and cognitive science discourse. A significant exception is Dennett’s (1995; 2017) writings on the philosophy of mind. In his most recent book, Dennett (2017) develops what he presents as a comprehensive account of cultural evolution, based on the claims that memes, defined as a “way of behaving (roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught…,” develop through evolutionary processes more or less identical to the processes through which biological organisms and their genes evolve, and that both memes and genes are active agents in their own evolution. Although Dennett presents some very interesting ideas about the co-evolution of culture and human brains, he couches his argument in a system of personification, organism, war, and object metaphors that implicitly assign mental activities including intending, competing, and planning to memes. In this paper I analyze Dennett’s metaphors and argue that they effectively distract attention from the psychological and cultural processes that actually determine whether a behavior pattern (i.e. a meme) is learned, remembered, and reproduced (none of which Dennett acknowledges). I then show how the substance of Dennett’s argument can be rephrased in language that avoids the obfuscating effect of his metaphors. In addition to countering a common metaphor-based misconception in evolution theory, this analysis illustrates the importance of close attention to the entailments of conceptual metaphors used as theoretical arguments.
{"title":"The “thinking meme” meme","authors":"L. Ritchie","doi":"10.1075/msw.19010.rit","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.19010.rit","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000After a brief flurry of attention following its introduction by Dawkins (1976), the concept of memes has largely disappeared from mainstream social and cognitive science discourse. A significant exception is Dennett’s (1995; 2017) writings on the philosophy of mind. In his most recent book, Dennett (2017) develops what he presents as a comprehensive account of cultural evolution, based on the claims that memes, defined as a “way of behaving (roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught…,” develop through evolutionary processes more or less identical to the processes through which biological organisms and their genes evolve, and that both memes and genes are active agents in their own evolution. Although Dennett presents some very interesting ideas about the co-evolution of culture and human brains, he couches his argument in a system of personification, organism, war, and object metaphors that implicitly assign mental activities including intending, competing, and planning to memes. In this paper I analyze Dennett’s metaphors and argue that they effectively distract attention from the psychological and cultural processes that actually determine whether a behavior pattern (i.e. a meme) is learned, remembered, and reproduced (none of which Dennett acknowledges). I then show how the substance of Dennett’s argument can be rephrased in language that avoids the obfuscating effect of his metaphors. In addition to countering a common metaphor-based misconception in evolution theory, this analysis illustrates the importance of close attention to the entailments of conceptual metaphors used as theoretical arguments.","PeriodicalId":51936,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and the Social World","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43657688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Metaphor-based accounts of expressions involving a set of metaphors do not indicate how complex meaning is generated. For instance, meaning of the expression ‘this surgeon is a butcher’ is taken to arise from one metaphor: a person who performs actions with certain characteristics is a member of a profession known for those characteristics (Lakoff, 2008). But this metaphor does not explain its negative meaning. Blending Theory, in contrast, offers a convincing solution to this issue. Notwithstanding, it regards the expression as nonmetaphorical. I aim to combine Metaphor Theory and Blending Theory into a broad approach that best describes complex metaphorical expressions. I will apply it, first, to ‘this surgeon is a butcher’ and, second, to a pair of related proverbs: ‘God is in the details’ and ‘the devil is in the details’. Meanings of these proverbs will be assumed to emerge from three integration networks. Each operation uses two metaphors as inputs and yields a blend, comprising a new metaphor and a coded illocutionary force. The new metaphor structures their meanings, whereas the illocutionary force determines their conditions of use. The proverbs will be shown to behave, paradoxically, both as synonyms and antonyms.
{"title":"Metaphorical blending in complex proverbs","authors":"El Mustapha Lemghari","doi":"10.1075/msw.19004.lem","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.19004.lem","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Metaphor-based accounts of expressions involving a set of metaphors do not indicate how complex meaning is\u0000 generated. For instance, meaning of the expression ‘this surgeon is a butcher’ is taken to arise from one metaphor: a person\u0000 who performs actions with certain characteristics is a member of a profession known for those characteristics (Lakoff, 2008). But this metaphor does not explain its negative meaning. Blending Theory,\u0000 in contrast, offers a convincing solution to this issue. Notwithstanding, it regards the expression as nonmetaphorical. I aim to\u0000 combine Metaphor Theory and Blending Theory into a broad approach that best describes complex metaphorical expressions. I will\u0000 apply it, first, to ‘this surgeon is a butcher’ and, second, to a pair of related proverbs: ‘God is in the details’ and ‘the devil\u0000 is in the details’. Meanings of these proverbs will be assumed to emerge from three integration networks. Each operation uses two\u0000 metaphors as inputs and yields a blend, comprising a new metaphor and a coded illocutionary force. The new metaphor structures\u0000 their meanings, whereas the illocutionary force determines their conditions of use. The proverbs will be shown to behave,\u0000 paradoxically, both as synonyms and antonyms.","PeriodicalId":51936,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and the Social World","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43932465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article reviews Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation: An Inquiry into Cross-Lingual Translation Practices 978-1-138-93431-3
本文综述了《翻译中的科学隐喻研究——跨语言翻译实践探究》978-1-138-93431-3
{"title":"Shuttleworth, M. (2017). Studying Scientific Metaphor in\u0000 Translation: An Inquiry into Cross-Lingual Translation Practices","authors":"A. G. Dorst","doi":"10.1075/msw.00012.dor","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.00012.dor","url":null,"abstract":"This article reviews Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation: An Inquiry into Cross-Lingual Translation Practices 978-1-138-93431-3","PeriodicalId":51936,"journal":{"name":"Metaphor and the Social World","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44954415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}