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.

This volume presents cognitive-linguistic studies on metaphor and metonymy. It includes papers with a theoretical scope and case studies. The topics range from emotion terms, political and scientific discourse, morphology, cross-cultural variation to internet communication. The authors use corpus-based, qualitative and discourse-analytic methods.

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.

This book explores the context around why English prepositions are used in figurative language more frequently than nouns and verbs, using corpus-based evidence to examine the most often used prepositions and how they are employed and for what purpose. While research on cognitive approaches to metaphor has significantly expanded in recent decades, little attention has been paid to prepositions as vehicles of figurative language, owing to their polysemous, complex, and inconsistent nature. To bridge this gap, Ounis introduces an innovative conceptual framework that integrates conceptual metaphor theory, diachronic linguistics, and discourse pragmatics. Drawing upon an extensive corpus of American presidential inaugural addresses, this book considers the linguistic, conceptual, pragmatic, and contextual dimensions of English prepositions, revealing the fascinating interplay between language, culture, and cognition. This volume will be of interest to scholars in pragmatics, metaphor studies, English language, rhetoric studies, and historical linguistics.

In this highly-interdisciplinary volume, we systematically study the role of metaphors and analogies in (mis)shaping our understanding of the world. Metaphors and Analogies occupy a prominent place in scientific discourses, as they do in literature, humanities and at the very level of our thinking itself. But when misused they can lead us astray, blinding our understanding inexorably. How can metaphors aid us in our understanding of the world? What role do they play in our scientific discourses and in humanities? How do they help us understand and skillfully deal with our complex socio-political scenarios? Where is the dividing line between their use and abuse? Join us as we explore some of these questions in this volume.

The contributions in this volume go beyond the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor complementing it in a number of relevant ways. Some of the papers argue for a more dynamic, interdisciplinary approach to metaphor looking into it from semiotic, psychological and socio-cultural perspectives. Other contributions focus on the crucial role played by metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction at a discourse/textual level. Finally, the volume also includes proposals which revolve around the alleged universal nature of metaphorical mappings and their suitability to account for grammatical phenomena. The contributions in this volume display an ample gamut of theoretical approaches pointing to the viability of taking a functional-cognitive stance on the analysis of metaphor and metonymy in contrast to a purely cognitive one. This book is structured into three major sections: i) the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: revisions and recent developments; ii) metaphor and/or metonymy across different discourse/genre types; and iii) the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: current applications. Originally published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9:1 (2011).

This book brings together leading metaphor researchers from a number of disciplines to unite the field of metaphor theory.