Metaphoric competence and communicative language ability

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance as well as the ubiquity of metaphor in language. Despite this, the ability of second language learners to use metaphors is often still not seen as a core ability. In this paper, we take a model of communicative competence that has been widely influential in both language teaching and language testing, namely Bachman (1990), and argue, giving a range of examples of language use and learner difficulty, that metaphoric competence has in fact an important role to play in all areas of communicative competence. In other words, it can contribute centrally to grammatical competence, textual competence, illocutionary competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Metaphor is thus highly relevant to second language learning, teaching and testing, from the earliest to the most advanced stages of learning

Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning

Metaphor in Analytic Philosophy and Cognitive Science

This article surveys theories of metaphor in analytic philosophy and cognitive science. In particular, it focuses on contemporary semantic, pragmatic and non-cognitivist theories of linguistic metaphor and on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory advanced by George Lakoff and his school. Special attention is given to the mechanisms that are shared by nearly all these approaches, i.e. mechanisms of interaction and mapping between conceptual domains. Finally, the article discusses several recent attempts to combine these theories of linguistic and conceptual metaphor into a unitary account

Cognitive Semiotics and On-Line Reading of Religious Texts

In this essay a hermeneutic model of the higher level understanding during on-line ritual reading by devotees of their respective sacred literatures is proposed, using the instruments provided by cognitive sciences. The way a devotee reads a sacred text differs from the way he or she would read a common piece of literature or how a lay person might read the same sacred text. After providing an overview of metaphor, anthropomorphism, and the “religious brain”, it is suggested how devotee-readers might make sense of a religious text and why it should be so important for their own personal everyday life. Universals are implicated in this genre of literature and the way it is interpreted

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

Are Aquinas and Whitehead Metaphorical and Analogical All the Way Down?

The paper argues from the perspective of a significant strand of interpretation of Aquinas and from insights in cognitive linguistics that a fruitful dialogue between Whitehead and Thomism needs to take into account that metaphysics and talk about God are metaphorical and analogical all the way down. Cognitive linguistics provides an explanatory scheme for explaining how Aquinas’s tectonic use of analogy shifts the ground of our conventional fields of meanings to create space to conceptualize what otherwise would be beyond grasp and to make inferences possible that otherwise would be unthinkable. The essay concludes with a question, admittedly from a particular trajectory of Thomism and cognitive linguistics, about whether Whitehead’s conception of God adequately accounts for the radically metaphorical “imaginative leap” entailed in the Christian conception of God

Donald Trump’s political campaign rhetoric. A cognitive study

Politicians recruit conceptual metaphors, as these means enable them to talk about abstract political problems in terms of more tangible and commonplace entities. This study aims to explore linguistic aspects of Trump’s presidential campaign and is conducted in light of premises derived from Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Metaphor Theory. The selected speeches were analyzed using a corpus research tool, i.e. Metaphor Identification Process was implemented. Donald Trump’s campaign speeches were retrieved from internet sources. The period from January 24th, 2015 to October 20th, 2016 was chosen for compiling the primary corpus of 20 speeches. The qualitative analysis indicates that the President used metaphorical expressions frequently. The author of the article enumerates some grand metaphorical themes underlying Donald Trump’s campaign speeches.Martyna Awier is a PhD student at the University of Białystok, Poland. 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