Cognition and the semantics of metaphor (original) (raw)
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Imagery is manifestly a basic and omnipresent constituent of the mental life of human beings, a cognitive prerequisite of symbolization and thought. The study of the poetic functions of imagery offers us a window into the cognitive semantics of the imaginative mind, but the literary contribution should not limit itself to illustrating the generalities of the mind; it should also address the issue of literature as such: what compelled humans to create art, poetry, and fiction, and in which sense can we be said to have a ‘literary mind’ (cf. Turner 1996)? Imagery is a universally central dimension in poetic meaning production. Yet, cognitive poetics has made little effort so far to elucidate its semantic and semiotic mechanisms. Important as it is, imagery appears to constitute an issue exempt from deeper inquiry not only by the inherent difficulties and complexities of iconic structure but also by uncomfortable feelings about the entire field of mental representations in behaviorist psychology, analytic philosophy of mind, and anti-phenomenological thinking in general. In order to develop the study of poetic imagery in the framework of a cognitive semantics and semiotics, we suggest interrelating plain literary reading and cognitive research as directly as possible, and thus openly focusing on and exploring meaning production as it occurs in the poetic text, rather than using poetry only to illustrate certain notions in cognitive semantics. Here, we will limit ourselves to analyzing two cases of reprocessed imagery, followed by some overall theoretical considerations on cognitive literary studies. Keywords: cognitive poetics; imagery; representation; simile; metaphor; mental spaces; blending; schemas; relevance European Journal of English Studies Vol. 9, No. 2 August 2005, pp. 117–130 ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4243 online ª 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13825570500171861
2012
The basic idea that grounds the cognitive poetics Program, initiated by G. , starts from the assumption that the process of meaning creation in poetic texts is illustrated by the same principle as the one that guides the "metaphors we live by", i.e. the conceptual metaphors which are the very core of our ordinary language. Moreover, the authors claim that the power of poetic metaphor consists in the poet's "talent" and "skills" to master the conventionalized metaphors in such ways as to consciously "extend", "elaborate", "compose" or "question" the conventionalized metaphors from our ordinary language 1 . Perhaps the most controversial ingredient of this theory is represented by the claim that the four mentioned "transformations" are "unessential" and thus, they do not "invalidate" neither "the generic structure of the target domain" of the metaphor (or of the "target image") nor our commonly shared "model of the world".
Journal of English Linguistics 30.1: 73-90, 2002
When I was in graduate school in Amherst, Massachusetts, over thirty years ago, an entire semester's seminar was devoted to the poetry of Robert Frost. At the time, he was considered the great man of American poetry. The peak of his reputation came when John F. Kennedy invited him to read a poem at his inauguration in 1961. By contrast, Emily Dickinson was barely a blip on the horizon; she appeared briefly (in half of a one three-hour session) in a seminar on nineteenth century American poetry. Both poets claimed Amherst as their home, Dickinson having been born and lived her entire life there, and Frost settling in Amherst as his final dwelling place. Today, there is what is becoming a well known sculpture in the Amherst triangle next to the Dickinson houses. It features the figures of Dickinson and Frost in conversation. In the accompanying photograph, Dickinson's rock is bigger than Frost's, and the perspective from which the photograph was taken suggests also that she occupies the higher ground.
Multimodalities of Metaphor: A Perspective from the Poetic Arts
Poetics Today, 2016
In this article the author explores the notion of possible bidirectionality in metaphor through an examination of Black’s (1962, 1993) interaction theory, Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) blending theory, and several studies that document cases of interdomain influence in metaphorical expressions. In particular, the author reviews Forceville’s (1995) examples of possible bidirectionality in film, advertisement, poetry, and a real-life incident. In further exploring more general notions of metaphorical workings in various genres, the author concludes that not only is metaphorical bidirectionality possible, it explains how the arts enable us to iconically connect with the world through our embodied cognition, not as objective observers in the Western classical sense but as participatory sharers of that world. Keywords conceptual metaphor, blending, interdomain influence, iconicity, emergent structure