Table Of ContentFrancesca Ervas, Elisabetta Gola, Maria Grazia Rossi (Eds.)
Metaphor in Communication, Science and Education
Applications of
Cognitive Linguistics
Editors
Gitte Kristiansen
Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez
Honorary editor
René Dirven
Volume 36
Metaphor
in Communication,
Science and Education
Edited by
Francesca Ervas
Elisabetta Gola
Maria Grazia Rossi
ISBN 978-3-11-054748-1
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-054992-8
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-054812-9
ISSN 1861-4078
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Table of contents
Francesca Ervas, Elisabetta Gola and Maria Grazia Rossi
How embodied cognition still matters to metaphor studies | 1
Part I: Theoretical perspectives
Zoltán Kövecses
Metaphor and metonymy in folk and expert theories of emotion | 29
Tony Veale
Metaphor and Metamorphosis | 43
Amitash Ojha, Bipin Indurkhya and Minho Lee
Is language necessary to interpret visual metaphors? | 61
Valentina Cuccio and Sabina Fontana
Embodied Simulation and metaphorical gestures | 77
Part II: Communication
Kathrin Fahlenbrach
Audiovisual metaphors and metonymies of emotions and depression in moving
images | 95
Elena Negrea-Busuioc
Leading the war at home and winning the race abroad: Metaphors used by
President Obama to frame the fight against climate change | 119
Larisa Iljinska, Marina Platonova and Tatjana Smirnova
Secret codes of metaphor: Anatomy of architecture | 135
Micaela Rossi
Some observations about metaphors in specialised languages | 151
vi Table of contents
Part III: Science
Silvano Tagliagambe and Luca Guzzardi
Classical physics as a metaphorical tool for evoking quantum world | 171
Carmela Morabito
Integration and differentiation at the basis of metaphor: Dexterity in behaviour
and degeneracy in the nervous system | 189
Giulia Frezza and Elena Gagliasso
Building metaphors: Constitutive narratives in science | 199
Clara Inés López-Rodríguez and Maribel Tercedor-Sánchez
Identification and understanding of medical metaphors by non-experts | 217
Part IV: Education
Graham Low
Eliciting metaphor in education research: Is it really worth the effort? | 249
Susanne Niemeier
Teaching (in) metaphors | 267
Susan Nacey and Bård Uri Jensen
Metaphoricity in English L2 learners’ prepositions | 283
John C. Wade
Metaphor and the shaping of educational thinking | 305
Index | 321
Francesca Ervas, Elisabetta Gola and Maria Grazia Rossi
How embodied cognition still matters to
metaphor studies
1 Embodiment and metaphor theory
In recent decades, the ideas developed within the framework of embodied cogni-
tion have strongly influenced the understanding of the nature of reasoning and
communication (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Gibbs 2006). The idea of language and
reasoning as logic-formal systems that process abstract symbols has received
strong criticism from cognitive linguistics and psychology of reasoning (Evans
and Frankish 2009; Kahnemann 2003). There seems to be no real point of return
to Cartesian dualistic models of reasoning. The importance of metaphor in the
process of knowledge construction is widely recognised in the field of cognitive
science, as metaphors contribute to model our way of thinking and in building
bridges between abstraction and perception (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999).
There indeed exists a strong relationship between metaphor and communica-
tion processes, including comprehension and learning. In metaphor studies, the
pivotal work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) has drawn fully from the
ideas of embodied cognition model demonstrating how language is rooted in the
way we structure our bodily experience and hence conceptualise life.
Since Lakoff and Johnson, different meanings have been evinced to the
concept of “embodied”. An ever growing literature on embodiment has proposed
different views, from the physiological to the cultural, the neural to the social
(Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Kövecses 2005; Svensson and Ziemke 2004). As pointed
out by Manuela Romano and Maria Dolores Porto (2016: 4), after a “first genera-
tion” of scholars focus “on the bodily, material basis of cognition and language”,
a “second generation” of scholars extended the notion of embodiment to include
the social and cultural basis of our conceptual and linguistic structures (Rohrer
2006, 2007). Given the various dimensions (linguistic, neural, intercultural, soci-
ological, etc.) of embodiment, the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the
problem of embodied cognition has been emphasized. The object of this research
field focused, therefore, on embodiment with a pluridimensional approach. This
was open to comparison with theoretical proposals and results reached by every
discipline that studies the meaning of “embodied”.
Francesca Ervas, University of Cagliari
Elisabetta Gola, University of Cagliari
Maria Grazia Rossi, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart
DOI 10.1515/9783110549928-001
2 Francesca Ervas, Elisabetta Gola and Maria Grazia Rossi
Nonetheless, this intrinsic polysemy of embodiment and the consequent
interdisciplinarity of approaches has often constituted the main reason for dif-
ficulty. For instance, Margaret Wilson (2002), by reviewing six views of embodi-
ment, points out that the diversity of claims in the field is quite problematic. With
the same intention of disentangling different claims and concepts in the field,
Tom Ziemke (2003) presents six different notions of embodiment: 1) structural
coupling between agent and environment, 2) historical embodiment as a result of
a history of agent-environment interaction, 3) physical embodiment, 4) organis-
moid embodiment, i.e. organism like bodies (e.g. humanoid robots), 5) organis-
mic embodiment of autopoietic, living systems, and 6) social embodiment. There-
fore, by trying to define embodiment, and by analysing the concepts involved
in its definition, various approaches have produced a misleading multitude of
terminologies (e.g. also “situatedness”, cf. Zlatev 1997; Linblom and Ziemke
2002, or “sociocultural cognition”, cf. Sharifian 2011, 2015; Frank et al. 2008).
As a result the greatest difficulty seems to be the definition of the object itself:
understanding what “embodiment” is and what “embodied” means (Zlatev 1997;
Rohrer 2006, 2007; Ziemke and Frank 2007; Ziemke et al. 2007; Frank et al. 2008).
As pointed out by Zouheir Maalej and Ning Yu (2011) a good starting point
is the definition of embodiment by Tom Ziemke and Roslyn Frank (2007: 1) as
“the bodily and sensorimotor basis of phenomena such as meaning, mind, cogni-
tion and language”. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) present a notion of embodi-
ment that puts together the four phenomena (meaning, mind, cognition and
language), by focusing on metaphor and its role in people’s understanding of
language. Lakoff and Johnson’s conception of embodiment deeply influenced the
landscape of metaphor studies and prevailed over other trends, which especially
aimed at analysing and explaining the role of metaphor in communication, more
than in language and cognition. However, despite according great importance
to the communicative dimension of metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson’s theory con-
flated communication with both language and cognition, maintaining that it
could be fully explained by the linguistic and (even more) by the embodied roots
of metaphor.
However, in the meantime, an alternative view to Lakoff and Johnson (1980)
has been proposed by a number of studies on metaphor from the field of applied
linguistics (Cameron and Low 1999; Low and Cameron 2002; Cameron 2003;
Deignan 2005, 2010; Charteris-Black 2004; Caballero Rodriguez 2006; Koller
2004), cognitive linguistics (Cienki, Luka, and Smith 2001; Cienki and Müller
2008; Müller 2008; Grady 2000; Kövecses 2005), conversation and discourse anal-
ysis (Musolff 2004; Semino 2008; Steen et al. 2010), interactional sociolinguistics
(Drew and Holt 1998), artificial intelligence (Barnden 2008), psycholinguistics
(Katz et al. 1998; Giora 2003; Glucksberg 2001, 2008; Gibbs 1994, 1999, 2006),
How embodied cognition still matters to metaphor studies 3
and psychology of discourse (Kintsch 1998; Steen 2004, 2006; Van Dijk 2008;
Macnamara and Magliano 2009; Graesser and Millis 2011). These perspectives
have showed that the peculiar communicative dimension of metaphor cannot be
conflated or reduced to the linguistic and conceptual aspects of metaphor (Steen
2008, 2011; Gola and Ervas 2016).
The aim of this book is to present an overview of some recent trends in meta-
phor studies which – departing from the standard embodied cognition frame-
work – propose new directions of research or further developments/improve-
ments of the embodied cognition perspective, which could give an explanation
of the specific traits of the communicative aspects of metaphor. The theme of the
volume is thus at the crossroads of the wide range of ways metaphor is theorised
and used in the communicative contexts of the real world. The volume devotes
particular attention to the fields of science and education. The book consists of
a selection of papers presented at the Conference Metaphor in Communication,
Science and Education, the 10th International Conference of the Association for
Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM), held at the University of Cagliari
(Italy) in June 2014.
The collection is divided into four sections. The first section, “Theoretical
Perspectives”, introduces new trends in the embodied cognition perspective
applied to metaphor studies. The chapters present different theoretical perspec-
tives, ranging from computational to neuroscientific approaches, on how the
embodied cognition model should be defended or improved in order to better
fit an adequate and comprehensive explanation of both visual and verbal meta-
phors. The second section, “Communication”, specifically focuses on the com-
municative aspects of metaphor in different fields, such as cinema, politics, and
architecture. Even though embracing the standard embodied cognition para-
digm presupposed by the conceptual theory of metaphor, the chapters included
in this section suggest that the communicative dimension of metaphor has spe-
cific features and functions that disallow complete reduction to its linguistic and
cognitive dimensions.
The third section, “Science”, investigates the role of metaphors in proposing
a structure and categorisation of scientific knowledge as well as in exploring new
meanings and models. Indeed, as metaphors are possibly useful, and sometimes
indispensable, to describe things in everyday communicative situations, they
prove to be also powerful devices in generating insights and promoting under-
standing in scientific enquiry. The chapters included in the section show why
metaphors play such an essential role in theory-making, both suggesting inter-
esting questions and fruitful ideas and using specific communicative devices to
allow non-experts’ comprehension. The fourth section, “Education”, considers
the large use of metaphor in teaching almost every type of knowledge in both
4 Francesca Ervas, Elisabetta Gola and Maria Grazia Rossi
human and natural sciences. The chapters included in the section aim to explore
the role metaphors play in education, for instance, reaching a better understand-
ing of a concept or generating new ideas, by anchoring abstract concepts to stu-
dents’ bodily experience. In order to do this – the authors argue – metaphors
need to have specific communicative traits which emerge in teacher/learner or in
peer to peer communication in educational contexts.
2 Theoretical perspectives
Recent theoretical research in metaphor studies has proposed new ways to criti-
cise and/or rehabilitate the embodied roots of metaphor. Starting from different
methodological approaches and traditions, the chapters included in this section
focus attention on specific theoretical areas of metaphor studies to draw, at least
in part, some conclusions on the embodied aspects of metaphor.
In the chapter Metaphor and metonymy in folk and expert theory of emotions,
Zoltan Kövecses defends Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphors
against criticism of groundlessness by discourse-oriented metaphor scholars
(see, e.g., Cameron and Maslen 2010). In particular, the author aims to show
that not only folk theories but also expert theories are grounded on conceptual
metaphor based on our bodily experience of emotions. Both folk and expert theo-
ries extensively make use of metaphors to better understand emotions’ nature
and functioning. More specifically, folk theories can be described with reference
to conceptual metaphors (e.g. pride is a fluid in a container, to be proud
is to be big/up/high) based on underlying metonymies (e.g. erect posture/
head held high for pride, chest (thrust) out for pride). The author shows
various examples supporting the view that many metaphorical source domains
are common to both folk and expert theories of emotions. In this respect, the case
of emotions as fluids inside a container is a prime example: for instance, Kövec-
ses supports the thesis that Davitz’s (1969) technical notion of “enhancement”
(i.e. the phenomenon of reporting experiences related to pride such as “I feel
taller/stronger/bigger/strong inside”) is based upon the fluid in a container
metaphor.
Kövecses examines some implications of this thesis for the applied linguis-
tic view of metaphors by discussing the role of conceptual metaphor in human
thought. In support of this claim, the author argues that conceptual metaphors
are creative instruments of thought: the way in which experts modify and develop
folk theories of emotions is brought as an evidence of the cognitive role played by
conceptual metaphors within the emotional domain. However, in claiming that
