What Can Metaphors Tell Us About Culture? (original) (raw)
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Metaphorical Thinking in Engilsh and Chinese Languages
Asian Culture and History, 2011
This study examines the metaphoric meanings in English and Chinese and explores the similar patterns and variations. With specific reference to metaphors with human bodies and animals, the study analyzes the cultural conceptions behind the metaphors and discovers that the interpretation of metaphorical meanings lies in the different cultural values and attitudes. The awareness of metaphor usages in different languages may contribute to smooth intercultural communication.
Metaphor Interpretation and Cultural Linguistics
Metaphor use is characterised by conceptual variation that can be explained with reference to culture-specific discourse traditions. Cognitively oriented metaphor analyses that are interested in cultural relativity have so far concentrated mainly on the production side of metaphors and their misunderstanding by ESL learners. This study, by contrast, focuses on variation in metaphor interpretation across groups of ESL/EFL users from 31 cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Its data consist of a questionnaire survey, administered in 10 countries, which gave students the task of applying the metaphor of the “body politic” to one’s home nation. The results show systematic variation between four interpretation models for this metaphor, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY, NATION AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, NATION AS PART OF SELF and NATION AS PART OF INTERNATIONAL/GLOBAL STRUCTURE, as well as some evidence of elaborate polemical and/or political elaboration. The two main versions, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY and NATION AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, were represented across all cohorts but exhibited opposite frequency patterns across Chinese v. Western cohorts, with the former favouring GEOBODY-based, the latter functional interpretations. This finding and the evidence of elaborate metaphor interpretations lead to culture-specific motivations of variation in metaphor interpretation (as well as in metaphor production), specifically with regard to the frequency and distribution patterns of source concepts. Metaphor interpretation analysis can thus contribute to a cognitive metaphor analysis in general and especially to “cultural linguistics” approach to metaphor.
Language, Figurative Thought, and Cross-Cultural Comparison
The articles in this special issue shed refreshing new light on a number of issues in the cross-cultural study of metaphor and its use in teaching and learning foreign languages. The theory of conceptual metaphor is emerging in this volume as a new tool that is capable of providing serious assistance to both teachers and students of these languages. Yet, the main attraction of the articles, at least for me, is that in addition to giving us this new tool, the articles point to new directions in the cross-cultural study of metaphor. Boers (this issue) put together a set of exciting articles that will, I believe, stimulate a great deal of future research both in applied and cognitive linguistics, or as some scholars would call this fledgling field, "applied cognitive linguistics" .
Cross-cultural variation in deliberate metaphor interpretation
This paper presents results of a pilot survey eliciting interpretations for the metaphors a nation is a body/a nation is a person from an international sample of respondents in 10 different countries. ESL/EFL users from diverse cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds were asked to apply the metaphorical idiom body politic to their home nations. The responses show systematic variation in preferred metaphor interpretations, some of which can be linked to dominant cultural traditions, as well as evidence of polemical and/or ironic elaboration. Neither of these findings is predicted by classic conceptualist models that describe metaphor understanding as an automatic and unconscious process. Instead, when paying special attention to metaphoricity, informants seem choose between diverse interpretation versions and in some cases elaborate them further to achieve social pragmatic effects. These findings provide new supporting evidence for Deliberate Metaphor Theory by highlighting deliberate...
Metaphor and Cultural Cognition
Cultural cognition is a multidisciplinary concept that links anthropology, linguistics, psychology and sociology. This study focuses on the culture-specific interpretation of collective, specifically national, identities, constructed through conceptual metaphor. Its data consist of a questionnaire survey, administered in 10 countries to students from 31 linguistic backgrounds who were given the task of applying the metaphor of the NATION AS A BODY to their home nation. The results show systematic variation of four main interpretations, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY, AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, AS PART OF SELF and AS PART OF GLOBAL STRUCTURE, plus of a non-primed interpretation NATION AS PERSON. The two dominant interpretation patterns, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY and NATION AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, were represented across all cohorts but showed opposite frequency patterns for Chinese v. Western cohorts; in addition, the Chinese NATION AS PERSON interpretations showed a marked preference for MOTHER-personifications. These findings can be linked to culture-specific conceptualisations and discourse traditions and contribute to a constructivist, non-essentialising definition of cultural cognition as a central issue of Cultural Linguistics.
To see and appreciate the relationship between metaphor and culture in its complexity, we have to deal with a number of basic issues. By metaphor in this paper, I will primarily mean "conceptual metaphor" that can have a number of linguistic manifestations (see Kövecses 2002. A conceptual metaphor consists of a set of correspondences, or mappings, between a "source" and a "target" domain. The meaning of particular metaphorical linguistic expressions is based on such correspondences.
The interplay between metaphor and culture
The general issue I address in the paper is how metaphor and culture interact. From among the many ways of this interaction, I single out three that I find especially important from a cognitive and cultural perspective. First, I look at how metaphors interact with what many anthropologists call cultural models. Second, I consider the issue of why some conceptual metaphors are universal and why some vary both cross-culturally and intraculturally. Third, I ask what the specific contextual factors are that lead to divergent uses of metaphors in particular discourse situations.
Metaphors across languages, cultures and discourses: A research agenda
Metaphors across languages, cultures and discourses: A research agenda, 2024
This special issue explores metaphor across languages, cultures, and discourses, bringing together papers that reflect the diversity and scope of this research area. The aim is to foster discussion and exchange ideas concerning the role of metaphor in conceptualization, persuasion, and the construction of meaning. In this introductory article, we focus on the two main themes: (1) the universality of metaphor versus cultural variations in its usage; (2) the communicative function of metaphor in discourse. Within these main themes, we discuss case studies that highlight specific domains, including universal and cross-cultural variation in metaphor usage, discursive and communicative aspects of metaphor, and multimodal metaphor. In this article, we provide a summary of the contributions of our authors that represent up-to-date research on issues involving metaphor from a wide scope of perspectives and manage to open up a methodological discussion within metaphor studies. Finally, we summarize the main results and suggest a brief avenue for further research.