Table Of ContentFigurativity across
Domains, Modalities
and Research Practices
Figurativity across
Domains, Modalities
and Research Practices
Edited by
Alexandra Bagasheva and Nelly Tincheva
Figurativity across Domains, Modalities and Research Practices
Edited by Alexandra Bagasheva and Nelly Tincheva
This book first published 2022
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2022 by Alexandra Bagasheva, Nelly Tincheva
and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-5275-7787-2
ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-7787-9
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................ 1
Figurativity in Language, Mind and Socio-cultural Experience
Alexandra Bagasheva and Nelly Tincheva
Part I: Figurativity and Words
Chapter One .............................................................................................. 16
Figurativity in Compounds. The Case of Two Modifier-Head Relations
in English and French [NN] Units
N
Pierre J. L. Arnaud
Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 34
Conceptual Metonymies and Metaphors at the Morphological Level:
From Mandarin Affixoids to Social Communication
Shelley Ching-yu Depner
Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 58
Meaning Construal Processes in the Hungarian Technical Terms
of Quality Assurance
Réka Sólyom
Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 79
Synecdoche and the Manifestation of Case by Intonation
Vladimir Phillipov
Part II: Metaphor comprehension and processing
Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 94
Optimal Interpretation of Written Texts Containing Novel Figurative
Language: Evidence from Eye Movement in Secondary School Children
Maria Kiose
Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 131
Nonsense or Metaphor? It’s up to the Context
Fruzsina Krizsai, Anna Babarczy
vi Table of Contents
Chapter Seven ......................................................................................... 148
Understanding Conceptual Metaphor through Literature in an EFL Class:
An Action Research with F Graders in the Greek Primary School
Stavroula Apostolakopoulou, Maria Paparoussi
Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 187
Investigating the Impact of Cultural Embeddedness on Metaphor
Translation and Understanding
Wenjie Hong, Caroline Rossi, Jean-Pierre Chevrot
Part III: Figurativity across Discourses
Chapter Nine ........................................................................................... 212
A Conceptual Blending Analysis of Humor in Late-Night Comedy Shows
(cid:54)(cid:68)(cid:81)(cid:77)(cid:68)(cid:3)(cid:37)(cid:72)(cid:85)(cid:69)(cid:72)(cid:85)(cid:82)(cid:89)(cid:76)(cid:252)(cid:15)(cid:3)(cid:49)(cid:76)(cid:75)(cid:68)(cid:71)(cid:68)(cid:3)(cid:39)(cid:72)(cid:79)(cid:76)(cid:69)(cid:72)(cid:74)(cid:82)(cid:89)(cid:76)(cid:252)(cid:3)(cid:39)(cid:229)(cid:68)(cid:81)(cid:76)(cid:252)
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 242
“Look Ahead in the Past, Look Back in the Future”: TIME IS SPACE
Metaphors in Sanskrit
Gergana Ruseva
Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 271
The NATION IS A PERSON Metaphor in Persian Political Discourse.
Revealing the Metaphorical Potential of Modern Persian
Sirma Kostadinova
Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 283
Denotation Shifts in New Coinages in Media Discourses on Politics
Elena Tarasheva
Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 298
The Cognitive Symphony of Souls in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Nocturnes:
Five Stories of Music and Nightfall”
Yuliya Davydyuk
INTRODUCTION
FIGURATIVITY IN LANGUAGE, MIND
AND SOCIO-CULTURAL EXPERIENCE
ALEXANDRA BAGASHEVA, NELLY TINCHEVA
SOFIA UNIVERSITY “ST. KLIMENT OHRIDSKI”
“At any given moment, we engage in conceptualizing activity at different
levels of awareness and in varied domains of mental experience. It draws
on many types of abilities (perceptual, motor, intellectual) and vast stores
of knowledge (particular and general; physical, social, and cultural;
individual, conventional, and contextual). The problems we now address
pertain to the boundary between “linguistic” and “extralinguistic”
concerns. What in all this counts as language? Which particular skills and
bits of knowledge can we specifically characterize as being linguistic?
Accompanying the production or understanding of any linguistic
expression is a complex and multifaceted stream of conceptualization.
How much of this should we identify as its linguistic meaning?”
(Langacker, 2008: 36; emphasis as in the original).
The human ability to use language non-literally has attracted the interest of
various scholars for thousands of years. Over the centuries, scholars defined
and studied an extensive variety of tropes such as metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche, allegory and irony, and related those to their communicative
effectiveness and stylistic aesthetics. By now it has already become
commonsense to describe those times of interest in non-literality as times of
(a) interpreting tropes simply as figurative linguistic expressions, and (b)
approaching tropes as mere flourishes adding flavour to underlying non-
figurative content.
As any investigation of studies of figurativity, i.e., of non-literality,
will reveal, the turning point in scholars’ treatment of the phenomenon came
in the 1970s, when a group of pioneers (most notably Wallace Chafe,
Charles Fillmore, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, and Leonard Talmy)
undertook a root-and-branch re-evaluation of all linguistic premises at the
time and created the roots of the theoretical paradigm known today as
2 Introduction
Cognitive Linguistics (CL). The actual flourish of research on figurativity
came in the 1980s after the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal
“Metaphors We Live By” (1980) and “Philosophy in the Flesh” (1999).
Since then, CL has regarded metaphor not as linguistic embellishment but
as the backbone of human thinking, a way of reasoning about the world,
which manifests itself in linguistic expressions, among various other
semiotic systems and media. Since then, CL has kept a distinction between
linguistic metaphor and conceptual metaphor. Conceptual metaphor, and
figurativity in general (including all kinds of tropes such as metonymy,
hyperbole, irony, etc.), are currently understood as constitutive of various
processes of human comprehension of the world, of communicative
interactions and of everyday human functioning. Despite the achieved
consensus, researchers are still struggling to find answers to numerous
questions that remain open even today.
The present volume constitutes a representative selection of pieces
of research that seek to provide novel answers to the open questions. The
volume maintains heavy emphasis on metaphor as a figurative cognitive
operation that enables non-literal thought. Accordingly, the contributions
included in Part I of this volume (Figurativity and words) follow the now
classic Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) tradition of starting their
analyses from the linguistic evidence available (i.e., treating linguistic
expressions as tangible clues or cues) and, on this basis, proceeding to the
construction of hypotheses about the human mind, and drawing conclusions
about cognitive processes.
The wealth of research spawned over the past decades by Lakoff
and Johnson’s groundbreaking ideas provides more than just insights into
metaphor and its workings. Other figures of speech also have been given
attention to by scholars, e.g. simile (e.g., Galera 2013; Barnden 2012), irony
(e.g., Giora and Fein 1999; Athanasiadou 2017; Ruiz de Mendoza 2017),
hyperbole (e.g., Brdar and Brdar-Szabó 2005; Barnden 2017), etc. Yet,
regrettably, as of today, research on figurativity can be accused of
displaying a steady tendency for focusing disproportionately on conceptual
metaphor. If there is any other figurative mechanism cognitive research
pays significant attention to, that mechanism would be conceptual
metonymy (see studies by, e.g., Dirven 1993; Panther and Radden 1999;
Barcelona 2000a, 2000b, 2005; Dirven and Pörings 2002; Ruiz de Mendoza
& Pérez-Hernández 2011; Littlemore 2015). Barcelona (2000a: 31) even
maintains that “every metaphorical mapping presupposes a conceptually
prior metonymic mapping” and “the seeds for any metaphorical transfer are
to be found in a metonymic projection”. Thus, a huge portion of the research
on the nature of conceptual metonymy has turned to the joint operation of
Figurativity in Language, Mind and Socio-cultural Experience 3
conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy, or, as Goossens terms it
(1990), metaphtonymy (for research on the nature of the resulting amalgamated
concepts, or ‘conceptual complexes’, see Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez
2011). The present volume follows this general trend and does not limit
itself to the analysis of conceptual metaphor; it pays attention to other
figurative mechanisms as well, most notably, to conceptual metonymy.
As already mentioned above, since the 1980s, figurativity has been
taken to express how figurative language use is, in fact, the outcome of
human cognitive information processing and how figurativity is grounded
and becomes embodied through the sensorimotor system that guides the
human interaction with its environment. The first major aspect of such a
claim has to do with the human physio-neurological build that allows for
conceptual figurativity to operate. In this respect, in more recent times, the
Lakoffian perspective on metaphor has been widened to incorporate
neurobiological findings. Lakoff’s Neural Theory of Metaphor (2009), for
instance, has displayed considerable explanatory potential in revealing how
both conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy occur physiologically
by providing intra-node circuits. Admittedly, as Feldman maintains, “it is
premature (perhaps by centuries) to formulate explicit theories linking
language to neural computation” (Feldman 2006: 4). Nonetheless, Feldman
(ibid.) keeps arguing that we should express a firm support for endeavors
which put forward working models of language and communication,
endeavors which, even when not fully accurate, still keep pointing scholars
in the right direction. Part II in the present volume (Metaphor
comprehension and processing) tries and contributes to general research on
how figurative uses are processed by figurativity producers and users.
The second major aspect of how figurative language use is
grounded and embodied through the human sensorimotor system concerns
the human cognitive environment. Both human figurative thought and
human language have been argued (e.g. Gibbs and Colston 2012) to draw
incessantly on the interaction between physiological experience and its
context. That context can be either cultural or natural. As Gibbs succinctly
puts it, “understanding embodied experience is not simply a matter of
physiology or kinesiology, but demands recognition of how people
dynamically move in the physical and cultural body” (Gibbs 2006: 228).
However, the interplay between non-literal cognition (and its expressions)
and socio-cultural environments has never been easy to trace, let alone
analyse. To make matters worse, the figurative uses of today are not likely
to be the same in, let’s say, 50 years’ time (Deignan 2003). The chapters in
Part III of this volume (Figurativity across discourses) address such issues
specifically. They pursue the goal of demonstrating how the figurative
