Testing and evaluation of metaphoric competence (with reference to Hindi) (original) (raw)
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The main concepts of metaphor in linguistics
The paper reviews the main approaches to the problem of metaphor that contribute to understanding the nature of this linguistic phenomenon emphasizing its significant and multifaceted functions.
Metaphor Making and Processing
Journal of Literary Semantics, 1999
For a long time, metaphor has been considered "äs a sort of happy extra trick with words" (Richards, 1936: 90)-a device of the poetic Imagination in which the poet coats his feelings to bestow on the language in which they are wrapped a touch of beauty or unfamiliarity. Accordingly, it has been relegated within this tradition to an ancillary function of mere embellishment. It is only in the early 1970s that its Status started to be rethought, thanks to the progress made in the fields of the philosophy of language, psychology, linguistics, stylistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. This period has actually witnessed a proliferation of symposia and publications such äs Black's Models and Metaphors (1962), Shibles's Metaphor. Annotated BMography and History (1971), Sacks's On Metaphor (1979), Ortony's Metaphor and Thought (1979), and Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live Bj (1980), to name only a few. The outcome of this research has been the questioning of the view of metaphor äs an achievement of the unordinary mind. Hence, it has been claimed that "to be able to produce and understand metaphorical Statements is nothing to boast about" (Black, 1979: 181), and that "children do not learn to speak metaphorically äs a kind of crowning achievement in the apprenticeship of language learning" (Cohen & Margalit, 1972: 723). It has also been claimed that metaphor is not only not a mark of excellence, but also "an incurable infirmity of the human mind" 2 to perceive reality äs it is (Bally: 1951:188). The paper is divided into sections, each studying a pair of dualities. The justification for dealing with metaphor in these terms could be found in the nature of metaphor itself which has been claimed to be "no different from any other kind of duality of meaning" (Morgan, 1979: 139), such äs ambiguity, irony, and indirect Speech acts. The first section will be devoted to dealing with the review of the massive literature about metaphor and the framework. The second section includes the pair imagnation-rationaKty, which is at the heart of metaphor making and processing. The third pair, assertion-speech act, investigates the logical Status of metaphor, and argues that metaphor cannot be approached in terms of truth claims. The fourth couple, convention-intention, seeks to draw a line between what is conventional and what is intentional in metaphor. The fifth, Speaker meaning-sentence meaning exploits the traditional distinction between literal and figurative meaning to show the continuum between the two.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2000
Goatly's book The language of metaphors is an extensive description of the linguistic appearances of metaphors and their functions and purposes. New insights into the analysis of metaphorical interpretation are provided. Many corpus examples (from literature and common use) are analyzed, with respect to the different grammatical forms in which Vehicle, Topic, Ground, or marker of metaphorical interpretation each may occur in discourse. This review will not provide the most pleasant reading experience you ever had. Apart from the capabilities of the reviewer, there are three reasons why encapsulating The language of metaphors does not lead to a neat review. The first is that Goatly discusses many different approaches to the subject of metaphor, introducing a lot of terminology. Secondly, his way of analyzing metaphor consists of categorizing many different appearances of metaphors, which leads to mentioning a lot of category names. The last reason is that Goatly uses capital letters to indicate terminology and categorizing terms. Frankly, it does not make the book itself a pleasure to read. With respect to the use of capital letters, I have chosen to keep a term capitalized (e.g. Topic), whenever I cite one. When I use similar terminology myself, explaining aspects of Goatly's work, I do not capitalize (e.g. topicalize). So, a capitalized word in this review is always taken from Goatly's book. Terms that are not capitalized in the review, but obviously stem from the book, did not have capitals in the book either. The term 'metaphor', for instance, is not capitalized in The language of metaphors. The chapters of the book can be divided into three groups: the first four chapters are involved with various linguistic approaches to the analysis of metaphorical meaning. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are dedicated to an analysis of how the linguistic appearance of a metaphor or one of its constituting parts influences its interpretation. Chapters 5 and lO treat the communicative functions of metaphors.
The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor
1993
concepts like time, states, change, causation, and pur pose also turn out to be metaphorical. The result is that metaphor (that is, cross-domain mapping) is absolutely central to ordinary natural language semantics, and that the study of literary metaphor is an extension of the study of everyday metaphor. Everyday metaphor is characterized by a huge system of thousands of cross-domain mappings, and this system is made use of in novel metaphor. Because of these empirical results, the word metaphor has come to be used differently in contemporary metaphor research. The word metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system. The term metaphorical expression refers to a linguistic expression (a word, phrase, or sentence) that is the surface realization of such a cross-domain mapping (this is what the word metaphor referred to in the old theory). I will adopt the contemporary usage throughout this chapter. Experimental results demonstrating the cognitive reali ty of the extensive system of metaphorical mappings are discussed by Gibbs (this volume). Mark Turner's 1987 book, Death is the mother of beauty, whose title comes from Stevens' great line, demonstrates in detail how that line uses the ordinary system of everyday mappings. For further examples of how literary metaphor makes use of the ordinary metaphor system, see More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, by Lakoff and Turner (1989) and Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science, by Turner (1991). Since the everyday metaphor system is central to the understanding of poetic metaphor, we will begin with the everyday system and then turn to poetic examples.
Notes towards the analysis of metaphor (2000)
Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: …, 2000
G. LAKOFF and M. JOHNSON's theory of cognitive linguistics and their definition of metaphor and metaphorical concepts have led to a variety of qualitative approaches whose common aim is to reconstruct metaphorical concepts and metaphorical reasoning in everyday language. Targets of these approaches were cross-cultural, cultural, subcultural, individual matters and metaphoric interaction. To illustrate this, two different strategies for a systematic procedure are briefly outlined.
Researching and applying metaphor
Metaphor has become an important area of investigation where fundamental and applied research on language and its use meet. This article presents metaphor as a rapidly developing area of study for applied linguists who are adding an interventionist dimension to the more fundamental research on metaphor pursued in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. First a brief history of the study of metaphor since the 1980s will be offered, in order to relate the cognitive-linguistic view of metaphor to general interest in metaphor in linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Then a few comments will be made about a number of important aspects of metaphor in applied linguistics, including metaphor identification and the distinction between deliberate versus non-deliberate metaphor. Finally an impression will be offered of the applied-linguistic study of metaphor in a few distinct domains of discourse, including politics and health. These topics are intended to demonstrate that metaphor forms an interesting opportunity for applied linguists to engage with complex aspects of meaning and use in a variety of ways in order to develop effective applied research.
Cognitive linguistics and metaphor research: past successes, skeptical questions, future challenges
DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 2006
An important reason for the tremendous interest in metaphor over the past 20 years stems from cognitive linguistic research. Cognitive linguists embrace the idea that metaphor is not merely a part of language, but reflects a fundamental part of the way people think, reason, and imagine. A large number of empirical studies in cognitive linguistics have, in different ways, supported this claim. My aim in this paper is to describe the empirical foundations for cognitive linguistic work on metaphor, acknowledge various skeptical reactions to this work, and respond to some of these questions/criticisms. I also outline several challenges that cognitive linguists should try to address in future work on metaphor in language, thought, and culture.
Metaphor in language and thought: How do we map the field
This paper suggests that metaphor research can benefit from a clearer description of the field of research. Three dimensions of doing metaphor research are distinguished: metaphor can be studied as part of grammar or usage, it can be studied as part of language or thought, and it can be studied as part of sign systems or behaviour. When these three dimensions are crossed, eight distinct areas of research emerge that have their own assumptions about metaphorical meaning which have their own implications and consequences for the aims and evaluation of research. It is suggested that these distinctions will help in clarifying the validity of claims about the role of conceptual metaphor in language.
The conceptual and the linguistic factors in the use of metaphors
DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 2006
The purely cognitive representation of metaphor poses some difficulties. It is proposed that these difficulties can be tackled down in the alternative view proposed in this article, according to which there is an interdependence of conceptual and linguistic factors in the use of metaphor. Some linguistic regularities are identified in the interpretations of some types of metaphor, such as personification, and is argued that a richer description of these types of metaphor is obtained if the linguistic knowledge and semantic compositionality of topic and vehicle are taken into account.