On a few examples of aquatic metaphors that invoke some of the most important philosophical concepts.
The Peircean iconic metaphor takes the concept of metaphor beyond linguistic and literary metaphors and does not even limit it to the “conventional metaphor” of Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive theory. Given Peirce’s short and somewhat ambiguous definition of the metaphorical icon, a closer study of this category of icons is necessary for a better understanding of a concept that surpasses in many respects the earlier definitions of metaphor. It is also necessary to observe metaphors from the perspective of their creator: a perspective that is not usually adopted in other theories of metaphor, since much of the debates consider only the structure of the metaphor and its function with a focus on its interpretation, and do not discuss how the creator of the metaphor reaches or creates a metaphor. The present article aims at filling the mentioned blanks.
The aim of the paper is to analyze instances of vegetalization, which is the X IS A PLANT metaphor, in John Henry Newman’s collection of sermons, published as Sermons on Subjects of the Day (1843). One group of metaphors are ontological metaphors, whose source domain is an entity (Lakoff, Johnson 2003[1980]). They can be classified as reifications, vegetalizations, animalizations, personifications, and deifications, which corresponds to the hierarchy of the so-called Great Chain of Being. As claimed by Krzeszowski (1997), these metaphors play an important role in expressing the axiological dimension of language, since they can express specific values of their target domains. In Christian discourse, vegetalizations contribute to the conceptualization of such notions from the religious sphere as God, grace, the Kingdom of God, the Christian life, the Church, or evil.
The aim of this paper is to analyse various animal-specifi c complex lexical units together with patterns that can be held responsible for their underlying conceptual structure. Many examples of the data investigated in the paper seem to represent compounds as they are traditionally understood in the literature of the subject (see, among others, Bauer 2003; Katamba and Stonham 2006; Lieber and Štekauer 2009; Fàbregas and Scalise 2012; Bauer et al. 2013); however, others do not meet the basic criteria for compoundhood as postulated by, for example, Altakhaineh (2016). In my research I use the term animal-specifi c complex lexical units with reference to all animal-related composite expressions being the result of the working of metaphor-metonymy interaction.
The aim of the present paper is to discuss metaphorical constructions, based on figurative uses of words, in informal Polish in the field of computers and the Internet. The study is based on the author’s own corpus, compiled on the basis of short informal texts (entries, posts) written on 32 selected Internet forums. Altogether, the corpus consists of 1,541,449 words. The paper, as the title suggests, focuses on one metaphorical formula, i.e. COMPUTERS ARE BUILDINGS. The metaphors which can be subsumed under this heading belong to the most frequent in the corpus (alongside a different type, i.e. COMPUTERS ARE HUMANS). They are discussed within the cognitive framework, as introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Some attention will also be devoted to the possible infl uence of English upon Polish metaphorical constructions used in the area of computers and the Internet.
The text deals with the counterfactual thinking of preschool children. The theoretical justification for the research can be found in the nativist concepts of Alan Leslie and Alison Gopnik, which assumes that even very young children have a natural ability to accept the strangest creations of the imagination and to connect them together into one amazing whole. During the research, recognizing children’s metaphorical meanings required me to act as an interpretively involved observer-as-participant. In doing so, educational interventions enabled me to be situated within the observed phenomena, in close relationship with the children being studied. The observation, meanwhile, embraced the spontaneous activities of the children engaged in symbolic playing and the effect of these activities (mainly artistic concretizations). The liberation of counterfactual thinking in preschoolers being induced with literary texts. The collected material has allowed me to draw conclusions applicable to educational practice.
This article looks at the semantic space of abstract and concrete concepts from the perspective of distributed models of conceptual representations. It focuses on abstract metaphorical classes and the mechanisms through which these concepts are processed. When the metaphor X is a Y is understood, X is included in the abstract metaphorical class of Y. This metaphorical class is abstract because the most of semantic features of Y are filtered out through a suppressiveoriented mode of processing. It is suggested that abstract metaphorical classes of living things are usually defined by a single or a very small set of semantic features. Therefore, such metaphorical classes are highly abstract. On the other hand, abstract metaphorical classes of nonliving things are defined by a relatively larger cluster of semantic features. Therefore, abstract metaphorical classes of nonliving things have a relatively higher degree of concreteness compared to those of living things. In other words, abstract metaphorical classes of living things and nonliving things are rather different in terms of nature and the structure of semantic space.
The aim of this article is to illustrate the most frequent conceptualisations of depression in the contemporary Italian media discourse. The analyses presented in the paper are mainly based on the cognitive theory of metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and form a part of a wider research topic regarding the differences in conceptualisation of depression depending on such factors as the language, the type of the discourse and the personal experience of the author concerning the state of depression. The study revealed that depression is represented the most frequently in the analysed corpus through the frame of disease, and by the metaphors DEPRESSION IS AN ENEMY and DEPRESSION IS A LOCATION, often situated down and taking the form of a container. Less numerous and regular were other kinds of its personifications and representations of depression as an object or danger.
The subject of my contribution is the cognition in the jurisprudence. It focuses on the question of the methods used in the jurisprudence to achieve knowledge of the law and the importance of the language in this process. My considerations focus on the evaluative position of the jurist. It is based on the assumption that the choice of a view requires not only an evaluation but also a kind of hierarchization. Therefore the important question is which evaluations are displaced by jurisprudence, and which ones creep into the theoretical considerations. The arguments on this topic have been drawn from three texts by German jurists of the 19th century.