Chokecherry Tree(s) v : Operative Modes of Metaphor in (original) (raw)

Metaphor clusters, metaphor chains: Analyzing the multifunctionality of metaphor in text

Metaphorik.de 5: 115-134, 2003

This paper applies Halliday's (1994) theory of the interpersonal, ideational and textual meta-functions of language to conceptual metaphor. Starting from the observation that metaphoric expressions tend to be organized in chains across texts, the question is raised what functions those expressions serve in different parts of a text as well as in relation to each other. The empirical part of the article consists of the sample analysis of a business magazine text on marketing. This analysis is two-fold, integrating computer-assisted quantitative investigation with qualitative research into the organization and multifunctionality of metaphoric chains as well as the cognitive scenarios evolving from those chains. The paper closes by summarizing the main insights along the lines of the three Hallidayan meta-functions of conceptual metaphor and suggesting functional analysis of metaphor at levels beyond that of text.

Metaphorising memory: reconfiguration in modernist and postmodern writings

Etudes Anglaises 56.3, 2003

I address the speculative discourse of modernist and postmodern writers which involves conflating mimesis and metaphor, the historical and ahistorical, experiential event and remembrance, for aesthetic and ontological purposes. I confront the late modernist Canadian author Ernest Buckler with writers from Faulkner, Stein, Proust, and Ponge to Atwood and Ondaatje, so as to to identify the aesthetic convergences and their epistemological and axiological shifts.

Cognition and the semantics of metaphor

Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 1993

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)?

Metaphors of pain: the use of metaphors in trauma narrative with reference to Fugitive pieces

Literator, 2009

This article is a contribution to the recent interdisciplinary discourse between psychoanalysis, trauma theory and narrative by discussing the traumatic experiences of characters in the novel “Fugitive pieces” by Anne Michaels, with a specific focus on the metaphorical style of this novel. The article addresses the role of metaphor in the memory of trauma while comparing the relation between trauma, narrative and memory with reference to the work of Cathy Caruth, Van der Kolk and Margaret Wilkinson. Recent neurobiological research in the working of the brain during trauma and the insights of Borbelly in the role of metaphor during therapy are discussed. Insights of Lacan, Modell and Laplanche are integrated with those of psychologists like Knox, Borbelly and Van der Hart to counter arguments against the criticism brought against some of the metaphorical themes in “Fugitive pieces”. Metaphor is seen as one possible way of saying the inexpressible and the progression in the use of met...

Literary Metaphor: Salience, Form and Function in a Contemporary Author’s Prose Writing

2008

Anyone who has enjoyed a good novel, short story or poem will surely have paused, pondering some turn of phrase, image, or metaphor so memorable that it begs to be committed to memory, repeated, shared with friends. At the other extreme, the same reader will have scanned much wording that is so unremarkable as to simply go unnoticed. The goal of this paper is to discuss factors involved in mapping the complex and mysterious territory between those two extremes, using example metaphorical types that occur in the prose of one novelist, acclaimed Canadian writer Margaret Atwood.

The Ascending Staircase of the Metaphor: From a Rhetorical Device to a Method for Revealing Cognitive Processes

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2020

This paper is concerned with cognitive research advances in a comparative study of the metaphor within educational contexts. By focusing on the role of metaphorical processes in reasoning, we investigate the metaphor over a period of time from 334 B.C. to 2014: specifically, from Aristotle's seminal rhetorical theorytradition acknowledges him as the founding father of the metaphor as a research method and as a scientific toolup to Lakoff and Johnson's [1] and Gola's [2] arguments. The pivotal role of metaphor in the evolution of linguistics and neuroscience is represented through three diagrams in a Cartesian reference system, highlighting its ascending staircase paradigm: the undisputed star of many essays and theories, as stated by Eco and Paci [3], either despised or cherished as it happens with any star. The abscissas (i.e., x-axis) and the ordinates (i.e., y-axis) draw the biography of metaphor: since birth, Aristotle describes its embellishment qualities in the linguistic labor limae, but it is even more exalted as a sign of ingeniousness which develops different research perspectives. This paper aims to clarify the development path of the metaphor: until the seventeenth century, after losing its cognitive quality detected in paternal writings, it was diminished as a similitudo brevior, a "will-o'-the-wisp" or sentenced to a sort of "linguistic deceit". Furthermore, the paper aims to share a theoretical and methodological approach which releases the metaphor from the rhetorical cage where it has been enveloped by some ancient and modern authors of the rhetorical tradition. Indeed, we embrace the idea that metaphor is not merely a part of language, but reflects a primordial part of people's knowledge and cognition. In so doing, we show who and how has outlined that the pervasiveness of metaphors cannot be overlooked in human understanding and life, although, among the mysteries of human cognition, metaphor remains one of the most baffling.

Metaphor, Genre, and Recontextualization

Metaphor and Symbol, 2013

Earlier studies have demonstrated the dynamic properties of metaphor by showing how the meanings and functions of metaphorical expressions can flexibly change and develop within individual texts or discourse events (Cameron 2011). In this paper, we draw from Linell's (2009) typology of 'recontextualization' in order to analyze the development of particular metaphors in three pairs of linked texts, each produced over a number of years, on the topics of medicine, politics and the parenting of children with special needs. We show how key metaphorical expressions from earlier texts or conversations are re-used by later writers, in different genres and registers, to convey new meanings and serve new functions. We account for these new meanings and functions by considering the relevant domain of activity and the differences between the original context of use and the context(s) in which the metaphor is re-used. Our study contributes, from a diachronic perspective, to the growing body of literature that recognizes the dynamic and context-bound nature of metaphorical language. Earlier studies have identified and discussed the dynamic properties of metaphor within individual texts and conversations. In particular, Cameron and other scholars have argued that the meanings of metaphorical expressions are inherently flexible, and emerge in different ways in different contexts of use. As a result, the same metaphorical expressions are sometimes re-used within the same text or discourse event with different meanings and functions (Cameron and Low 2004, Cameron and Gibbs 2008, Cameron 2011). It has also been shown that particularly prominent metaphors for specific topics can be employed in different ways in different contexts. Such metaphors seem to evolve over time as they are used and re-used by different speakers and writers in different texts or interactions (Musolff 2010). Moreover, a number of studies have demonstrated that the density, forms and functions of metaphors in language can vary substantially depending on context of use, or, more specifically, on