When experts educate, what do their metaphors say? Complex metaphor structure in the professional conflict resolution literature

This metaphoric analysis of a quarter-million word corpus of an expert literature (conflict resolution and professional mediation) suggests certain implicit assumptions of the experts and gives us an alternate view of the structure of their thinking. Seven highly conventional metaphors are repeatedly used to frame descriptions and explanations, making a complex subject matter more accessible to learners. They have been reported widely in other literatures and genres and are not particular to the field of expertise covered. These metaphors were found in some instances to oversimplify and mislead, mitigated to a degree when combinations of metaphors reconstituted some of the necessary complexity. The seven principal metaphor source domains found are containers, objects, terrain, seeing/viewing, moving, journeying, and structuring. Evidence of frequent and diverse mappings argues that these are conceptual metaphors, revealing possible thinking patterns. The combining and alternating of metaphors in mutually complementary ways shows an interdependence among the seven metaphors. These naturally occurring conceptual groupings clarify and elaborate meaning in the texts in a way comparable to inheritance hierarchies. The discussion of the results focuses on ways these metaphors both help and hinder understanding of the field in question

Metaphor. The good argument in science communication

The relation between metaphor and argumentation in science communication is becoming a crucial tool for critical metaphor studies. In this article, by means of a crossed analysis (epistemological, cognitive and linguistic), I focus especially on a peculiar dynamic of metaphor use in scientific communication showing opposite, paradoxical attitudes towards the use of metaphors, respectively, ubiquity vs. invisibility, inclination vs. resistance, deliberate vs. non-deliberate. In this way, an overall philosophical reflection about the underlying reasons for the ambivalence in the use of metaphor in scientific communication would be proposed and discussed

The effect of cultural background on metaphor interpretation

This article describes a study that investigated the ways in which Bangladeshi students interpreted metaphors used by their lecturers during a short course at a British university. The students were asked to interpret a number of metaphors presented in context. They were also asked to identify the value judgements that were being expressed through these metaphors in these particular contexts. Culture-specific assumptions about the target domains appeared to affect the students’ recognition of the lecturers’ attitudes to the issues they were discussing. In order to identify areas of disparity between the (working) cultures of the Bangladeshi students and their British lecturers, Hofstede’s (1980) cultural values questionnaire was administered. The students were found to be more likely than their lecturers to favour uncertainty avoidance, and to favour high power distance at work. The kinds of (mis)interpretations that the students made of (the evaluative content of) the metaphors appeared in accordance with these cultural differences. Implications of these findings are discussed

The communicative effectiveness of different types of communication strategy

This study examines compensation strategies (techniques for dealing with knowledge gaps between learner and interlocutor), relates them to synoptic and ectenic learning (Ehrman and Leaver, 2002, 2003), and suggests reasons for the fact that ectenic learners, who need conscious control of what they are learning, seemed to communicate meanings of words to judges better than the synoptics, who feel freer to rely on their intuition and pre-conscious processing, but also tend to use more novel and therefore less readily comprehensible figures of speech. The subjects were French learners of English

Using conceptual metaphor and functional grammar to explore how language used in physics affects student learning

This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students' and physicists' talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists' language encodes different varieties of analogical models through the use of grammar and conceptual metaphor. We hypothesize that students categorize concepts into ontological categories based on the grammatical structure of physicists' language. We also hypothesize that students over-extend and misapply conceptual metaphors in physicists' speech and writing. Using our theory, we will show how, in some cases, we can explain student difficulties in quantum mechanics as difficulties with language.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. ST:PE

Metaphor, indeterminacy, and intention

David Cooper has argued that it is a constraint on any acceptable theory of metaphor that it account for the 'indeterminacy' of metaphorical content, that is, the sense that many metaphors admit of more than one acceptable interpretation, none of which can be uniquely demonstrated to be correct. He further argues that the 'speaker's meaning' model of metaphorical content proposed by Searle and others cannot meet this constraint, and thus must be disregarded as a prospective account of such content. In this paper I argue firstly that Cooper's characterisation of the proposed constraint is misguided, and that we should be careful to distinguish the role that intention plays in determining metaphorical content from the question of whether we can have satisfying interpretations of metaphors that do not take speaker intention into account. I then give my own characterisation of the problem, relating it to a more general tension between the intuition that first person ascriptions of intentions carry a certain authority, and the fact that it seems to misrepresent the phenomenology of metaphor production to ascribe to the speaker a pre-existing and precise cognitive content which his metaphorical utterance is intended to convey. I go on to argue that we can resolve this tension by following Crispin Wright in viewing self ascriptions of intention as essentially response dependent; with our best judgements constituting rather than tracking the facts about what we intend. I conclude that while such an account must be refined in order to distinguish intentions related to specifically metaphorical content from the literal case, the general shape of the account is sufficient to remove the intuitions that Cooper's objection trades on

Representation

About the book: This edited volume presents a unique challenge to mainstream political theory • Offers fourteen ‘think pieces’ by renowed international scholars • Presents a comprehensive examination of core political ideologies and core political concept

Metaphors in the Wealth of Nations

This paper reconstructs the ways in which metaphors are used in the text of “The Wealth of Nations”. Its claims are: a) metaphor statements are basically similar to those in the “Theory of the Moral Sentiments”; b) the metaphors’ ‘primary subjects’ refer to mechanics, hydraulics, blood circulation, agriculture, medicine; c) metaphors may be lumped together into a couple of families, the family of mechanical analogies, and that of iatro-political analogies. Further claims are: a basic physico-moral analogy is the framework for Smith’s psychological theory as well as for his overall social theory and for his theory of market mechanisms; a iatro-mechanical analogy is as pervasive as the physico-moral analogy and provides the framework for his overall evolutionary theory of society; the invisible-hand simile relies on the physico-moral analogy, and elaborates on the role of vis attractiva and vis a tergo in mechanics