Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner, " The way we think: conceptual blending and the mind's hidden complexities"

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of metaphor (1980, 1999) provides a basis for describing everyday cognitive structures using linguistic models and thus, making it possible to uncover both individual and collective patterns of thought and action. Lakoff and Johnson have not, however, developed a workable system for carrying out qualitative research. This paper outlines the fundamentals of this approach and proposes a procedure for the reconstruction of metaphorical concepts. As is normally the case in qualitative research, such guidelines can only ever represent the interplay between the ability of the researcher to understand the sense of things and the rules of the methodology. An overview of the typical interpretations that a metaphor analysis allows is also given. Key Words: Metaphor Analysis, Subjectivity, Hermeneutics, and Qualitative Research

/pdf/systematic-metaphor-analysis-as-a-method-of-qualitative-2amgfvy01x.pdf

Systematic Metaphor Analysis as a Method of Qualitative Research

Disease metaphors in new epidemics: the UK media framing of the 2003 SARS epidemic.

Women Men And Language A Sociolinguistic Account Of Gender Differences In Language

Debates about new technologies, such as crop and food genetic modification (GM), raise pressing questions about the ways ‘experts’ and ‘ nonexperts’ communicate. These debates are dynamic, characterized by many voices contesting numerous storylines. The discoursal features, including language choices and communication strategies, of the GM debate are in some ways taken for granted and in others actively manipulated by participants. Although there are many voices, some have more influence than others. This study makes use of 50 hours of in-depth interviews with GM scientists, nonexperts, and other stakeholders in the GM debate to examine this phenomenon. We uncover rhetorical devices used by scientists to characterize and ultimately undermine participation by non-experts in areas including rationality, knowledge, understanding and objectivity. Scientists engage with ‘the public’ from their own linguistic and social domain, without reflexive confirmation of their own status as part of the public and the citizenry. This raises a number of interesting ironies and contradictions, which are explored in the article. As such, it provides valuable insights into an increasingly important type of discourse.

The scientists think and the public feels: expert perceptions of the discourse of GM food

In the past, some confusing claims about the meaning of ‘risk’ have been made in the sociology of risk literature. In this article we present and discuss some empirical data from linguistic corpora that elucidate what risk means in ordinary language. This might provide social scientists with a firmer ground on which to base future statements pertaining to the meaning of risk. After a discussion of the problem, we analyse the word ‘risk’, as both noun and verb, with recourse to three corpora containing over a hundred million contemporary English words. We examine whether or not the meaning of ‘risk’ is stable and consistent across a variety of social contexts to test the commonplace view that ‘risk’ is at times manipulated in ideological ways. Data from the corpora, and the methods of corpus linguistics, therefore suggest ways of reconsidering claims about the meaning(s) of ‘risk’.

The meanings of ‘risk’: a view from corpus linguistics:

In diesem Artikel analysieren wir die Maul- und Klauenseuche, die im Jahre 2001 in Grosbritannien grassierte in ihrem kognitiven und soziokulturellen Zusammenhang. Mythen der Landwirtschaft, Metaphern des Krieges und anderer Krankheiten, zusammen mit schockierenden Bildern des Todes und der Zerstorung, hatten einen grosen Einfluss auf die Berichterstattung in den Zeitungen und auf den politischen Diskurs. Bisher herrscht in der kognitiven Linguistik das Analysieren einzelner metaphorischer Satze noch vor. Indem wir die Maul- und Klauenseuche in ihrem sozialen Zusammenhang untersuchen, wollen uber diesen Ansatz hinausgehen. Wir studieren Metaphern als Teile von stereotypischen Narrativen und im Zusammenhang mit anderen semantischen und historischen Bildfeldern. Wir argumentieren, dass Metaphern nicht nur kognitive, sondern auch kulturelle und soziale Phanomene sind. Sie sind Teil der kulturellen Phantasie eines Volkes, sie verstarken kulturelle Stereotypen, sie naturalisieren soziale Vorstellungen und sie beeinflussen die Sozialpolitik. In this article we study the socio-cultural conceptualisation of foot and mouth disease (FMD), which raged in the United Kingdom in 2001. Farming myths and metaphors of war and disease were strong points of reference in the political and media discourse about this epidemic and they also interacted with potent visual images of death and destruction. Analysing FMD as a social and cultural phenomenon allows us to go beyond the singlesentence analysis method, which still prevails in cognitive linguistics, and focus instead on metaphors as part of stereotypical narratives and as used in the context of wider semantic and historical fields of imagery. We argue that metaphors are not only cognitive but also cultural and social phenomena. They tap into a nation’s cultural imagination, they reinforce cultural stereotypes, they naturalise social representations and they shape social policy.

Conceptualising Foot and Mouth Disease: The Socio-Cultural Role of Metaphors, Frames and Narratives 1

I argue that politically subversive texts written in allegorical form attain their significance because they are conceptual blends. Political allegories allow writers to criticise regimes indirectly since writers can count on readers to mentally contruct appropriate blends. Readers are naturally driven to find new values that fit an allegory's fixed roles, often yielding new meaning for texts in different contexts. Unfortunately, politically subversive allegories may be censored when censors run the same blends. The three main texts discussed here ― Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, Orwell's Animal Farm, and Miller's The Crucible ― are often interpreted as political allegories. I turn to conceptual blending theory to show in some detail how those readings arise. When it comes to allegory and censorship, I suggest that conceptual blending theory can offer us new insights into these timeless topics.

Allegory, blending, and censorship in modern literature

"The will of one by being two At every moment is denied." (W. H. Auden, "The Sea and The Mirror," Collected 413) 1. Introduction: Mind, Body, and Personification Despite our traditional view of the body and mind as divided, one figurative way for representing the two in our thought and in our language is the unified method of metaphor. For example, because we have easier access to bodies than to minds, our everyday notion of body language means we "map" from the body to the mind to interpret the behavior of others. As Simon Baron-Cohen has argued, this normal psychological mapping provides us with a "theory of mind" that some autistic children appear to lack for successful social cognition. We may not be fully aware of such mappings, but they conceptually link the body to the mind, making the body indexical of the mind in a way that closely integrates them and nearly negates dualism. Apart from these non-verbal mappings, mappings from the body to the mind in language, according to Eve Sweetser, motivate how physical verbs like grasp take on mental meanings like "know" during a language's evolution. As we would imagine, these connections between mind and body, between the mental and physical, also appear in literature, particularly in bodily descriptions, the language of emotions, and the use of mind or body metaphors. W. H. Auden is one case in point since he was forever writing about the mind and the body in his poems. Usually, Auden depicts body and mind in general via metaphor and personification in particular. What makes Auden's mind and body personifications strange, however, is that they are unlike the imaginary abstractions we often associate with personification. Personification was vital to Auden. According to Bernard Bergonzi, the four main features of Auden's poetic style were the "copious use of the definite article; unusual adjectives and adjectival phrases; surprising similes, which have a reductive or trivializing effect; and personified abstractions" (70). Indeed, Auden's personified abstractions bothered readers like Karl Shapiro, who wrote in his 1947 Essay on Rime, "An all-purpose abstraction is a form / Dear to the tired mind that must malinger / And precious to the talentless [...] History is but one / Of Auden's ill-starred words. Luck is another" (qtd. in Bergonzi 68). Irvin Ehrenpreis also found that "Auden at his best did not stop at personification; he embodied the abstractions in curious or supreme examples" such as southern Italy's limestone landscapes in the poem "In Praise of Limestone" (498-99). Shapiro, Bergonzi, and Ehrenpreis have all recognized Auden's tendency to personify and embody abstractions. However, Auden also tended to personify the mind and the body, entities which are perhaps less abstract than we recognize. We personify when we metaphorically ascribe agency to normally inanimate objects, turning non-existent or imaginary entities into realistic actors or agents. As the cognitive linguist would describe it, to personify is to "map" information from a "source domain" onto a "target domain" (what I. A. Richards once called vehicles and tenors). Mapping occurs simultaneously at conceptual and linguistic levels. Novel metaphors in language often reflect conventional metaphors in thought. In eroding classical boundaries between figures of thought and figures of speech, personification is apt for study from the cognitive viewpoint because a metaphor in language normally reveals a related conceptual metaphor in thought (Gibbs 311). Simply put, one metaphor can hide another. Therefore, it is fruitful to consider personification as both a product of thought and a product of speech. Personification is one of our most basic and frequently utilized metaphors. Its high frequency in children's literature suggests that we can understand it very early in life and that it is our "prototypical metaphor" built from "nonhuman topic--human vehicle" mappings (MacKay 87). …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.36.3.408

Mapping the Mind and the Body: On W.H. Auden's Personifications

1. Introduction (1) "Going cognitive" is one way to define a recent trend in literary studies. Indeed, the term "cognitive" is ubiquitous with "cognitive rhetoric" (Turner Reading), "cognitive stylistics" (Semino and Culpepper), "cognitive poetics" (Tsur Toward; Stockwell; Gavins and Steen), and "cognitive theory" (Richardson and Crane), all in circulation now. Clearly a cognitive turn--some might say a "cognitive revolution" (Steen and Richardson)--has occurred in literary studies. However, "cognitive criticism," the umbrella term we adopt here for all forms of literary criticism for the cognitively-inclined, has never been recognized from the outside-nor coherently defined from the inside--as a single theory, a uniform paradigm, or a formal school of thought. This is no doubt a defensive tactic, enabling cognitive criticism to thrive. As Norman Holland claimed a decade ago, literary theory was based on "a disproven linguistics and a dubious psychology" (qtd. in Wright 530). If so, the cognitive turn was probably made in order to right this wrong. But cognitive criticism's success may be in the eye of the beholder. Its reliance on cognitive neuroscience as an explanatory tool may revive the angst the humanities traditionally feel for the sciences. Resistance to cognitive criticism, as many have noted (Gross; Herman; Jackson), has therefore been predictable albeit futile. Initial encounters with cognitive criticism may reveal strange bibliographies. For instance, Gibbs, Lakoff, Johnson, Tomasello, Rosch, Sperber, Damasio, Edelman, and Turner all seem to have made Freud, Saussure, Nietzsche, Piaget, Wittgenstein, Searle, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Derrida obsolete. Those who are not cognitive critics greet this bibliographical upgrade rather skeptically. Naturally, where one would have cited Husserl in the past as an authority to bolster one's argument, one now cites Damasio. Why? One assumes that yesterday's philosopher is wrong and today's neuroscientist is right. While this may be true, it reveals a fascination many cognitive critics have with cognitive science. Because of a preference now for findings over speculations regarding the mind and language, that fascination makes sense. Likewise, it is justifiable to build literary theories on sound psychology and credible linguistics. Holland felt we desperately needed this, which helps explain the scientific nature of cognitiv e criticism's bibliographies. When science is embraced rather than feared, the new or improved seems more trustworthy than the old or discredited. Even so, an inexplicable bibliographic hole remains in cognitive criticism. That hole is reception theory. The challenge Stanley Fish put to Wolfgang Iser in the early 1980s helps explain the hole. Once Fish told the entire profession that reception theory was doomed, many believed him. In the March 1981 issue of Diacritics, Fish unfavorably reviewed Iser's The Act of Reading. He concluded that Iser's key terms were defined so vaguely as to provide him "in advance with a storehouse of defensive strategies" and that Iser never took a side as to where exactly the production of meaning resided when it came to reading (Fish 12-13). Was it in the text, in the reader, in the author, or in the messy interaction of all three? Iser, Fish claimed, had no answers. Also, Iser's analyses often revealed "the unavailability of two acontextual entities--the free-standing text and the freestanding reader--whose relationship he promises to describe" (Fish 12; our emphasis). When Iser failed to keep his promises, Fish cut short the life of reception theory. Then, when Iser's reply in the September 1981 issue of Diacritics did not rebut all of Fish's points, Iser seemed to have lost the challenge. The consequence: Iser' s version of reception theory essentially vanished from view although New Literary History (Cohen) nevertheless dedicated a special issue to him recently. Ironically, the disappearence of Iser's theory is less common in Germany than it is in Anglo-American universities. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.36.4.640

Craig Hamilton

Papers

The meanings of ‘risk’: a view from corpus linguistics:

Conceptualising Foot and Mouth Disease: The Socio-Cultural Role of Metaphors, Frames and Narratives 1

Allegory, blending, and censorship in modern literature

Mapping the Mind and the Body: On W.H. Auden's Personifications

From Iser to Turner and Beyond: Reception Theory Meets Cognitive Criticism