From ecological cognition to language : When and why do speakers use words metaphorically?

• The idea that metaphorical meaning is guided by speakers’ experiences of the world is central to Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Yet little is known about the ways in which speakers’ understandings of objects in the world around them influence how they use words in metaphorical and nonmetaphorical ways. This article is a corpus linguistic analysis of the collocational patterns of metaphorical and non-metaphorical bridge instances from the Corpus of American English Corpus of Contemporary American English. The study shows that metaphorical and non-metaphorical uses of words are systematically linked to different types of real world experiences. It is argued that lexical metaphors are, in fact, lexico-encyclopedic conceptual metaphors (i.e., conceptual mappings that involve speakers’ understandings of specific target concepts by means of the specific source concepts that they refer to in metaphorical language), and that they are constrained by cognitive salience.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Keyword

collocations

metaphor theory

lexico-encyclopedic conceptual (LEC) metaphors

embodied experience

affordances

cognitive salience

Linguistics

lingvistik

language studies

språkvetenskap

Psychology

psykologi

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)