Compared with other common nouns, human body words (hereinafter referred to as HBWs) are strikingly polysemous. Cognitive studies of the polysemy of HBWs have obtained many achievements in recent years, but there still exist some deficiencies, which is dealt with in this book. Based on Embodied Philosophy, category theory, metaphor and metonymy, the book aims to analyze the meanings of HBWs, particularly “foot” and “blood” in order to discuss the essence of polysemy from cognitive perspective, and then on the basis of the theoretical research the book proposes some practical implications for English vocabulary learning. The book focuses on the research of metaphorical and metonymic characteristics of HBWs by analyzing the meanings of “foot” and “blood”. There are two kinds of metaphorical mappings based on similarity, i.e. the interactional mapping between body domain and non-body domain, among which there are three sub-mappings from body domain to non-body domain: mappings of shape and appearance, mappings of situation and mappings of function. As to metonymy, there are mainly three types of metonymies concerning body parts: body part for person, body part for its relevant characteristics and body part for its relevant action. The meanings of “blood” are more polysemous when describing the relevant characteristics. The students should lay emphasis on the interaction between human body and the world, on the basic-level terms rather than spending too much time in reciting those infrequent words, and on the role of metaphor and metonymy rather than memorizing the words mechanically.

Anthropolinguistics is a core topic of the majority of books on linguistics today. Still there are different approaches to word study within this field. This book provides a comprehensive survey of historic semantic changes of English polysemous words. Anthropolinguistic Aspect of English Polysemy is a wide-ranging account not only of how words witness history, but also of how evolution change is reflected in word semantics and of links between our past and present. It is available to a large audience as it sheds light on problems of evolution of human cognition that remain at the centre of contemporary linguistics.

This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

This book deals with the interplay between word-formation and metonymy. It shows that, like metaphor, metonymy interacts in important ways with morphological structure, but also warns us against a virtually unconstrained conception of metonymy. The central claim here is that word-formation and metonymy are distinct linguistic components that complement and mutually constrain each other. Using linguistic data from a variety of languages, the book provides ample empirical support for its thesis. It is much more than a systematic study of two neglected linguistic phenomena, for a long time thought to be unimportant by linguists. Through exposing and explaining the intricate interaction between metonymy and word formation from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the reader is presented with a sense of the amazing complexity of the development of linguistic systems. This book will be essential reading for scholars and advanced students interested in the role of figuration in grammar.

This book constitutes the refereed selected papers from the 14th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2013, held in Zhengzhou, China, in May 2013. The 68 full papers and 4 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 153 submissions. They are organized in topical sections covering all major topics of lexical semantics; lexical resources; corpus linguistics and applications on natural language processing.

By exploring the associations that people make between emotions and colours, looking at how they vary across languages, and exploring the explanations that people provide for the associations that they make, this Element provides insight into the ways in which humans express emotions through colour, and the reasons why they do so. Metaphoric (and metonymic) language and thought play a key role on several levels in the formation of emotion–colour associations, interacting with physical, environmental and social factors. A strong metaphorical connection between the valence of the emotion and the lightness of the colours with which it is associated, and between the intensity of an emotion and the saturation level of the colours with which it is associated is found. However, the strength of this association varies according to the linguistic background of the speaker, and the gender in which the emotion is presented.

Traveling Conceptualizations is a monograph which is concerned with African cultural conceptualizations in Jamaican. It contributes to the study of Transatlantic relations between Africa and Jamaica, and in particular to the understanding of African influences in Jamaican linguistic practices. The book constitutes a first study of these phenomena from a cognitive-linguistic perspective and investigates traveling conceptualizations at the intersection of language, culture and cognition. The author explores Jamaican linguistic practices in different domains namely conceptualizations involving parts of the (human) body, conceptualizations of events, roles and relations underlying serial verb constructions, and conceptualizations of kinship and names. The study can be regarded as an innovative contribution as it looks not only at linguistic expressions on the surface but discusses the underlying cultural and cognitive basis of semantic structures. The study thus aims at making African-Jamaican connections on the conceptual level visible and also discusses notions of consciousness, agency and emblematicity.