They play an important discourse-structuring function. Isolated metaphors are also linguistic expressions motivated by concep- tual metaphors, but their impact on discourse is limited to one sentence or sentence fragment only. Other rhetorical strategies may, or may not be motivated by conceptual metaphors but they contribute to the overall imagery and often enhance the rhetorical effect of the text. The next section gives a brief overview of the Conceptual Meta- phor Theory to consolidate the presentation so far.
Then we turn to other conceptual structures ICM, image schemata, force dynamics organiz- ing our mental processes to finish with Blending Theory and axiological semantics. He structures the taxonomy of metaphors around four coinciding dimensions: Both conceptual and linguistic metaphors can be highly conven- tionalised or novel unconventional. A distinction mentioned before in 2.
As far as the nature of metaphors is concerned, they can be either knowledge-based or image-based with a specific sub-type: When it comes to the level of generality, metaphors can either be specific or generic. These two concepts are related to natural taxonomies with basic level representatives of a category and the hyperonym, the general label for the category. In the case of the conceptual metaphor the generic-level is represented by e.
It offers a more structured account of the metaphorical construal of the world and the interaction between meta- phorical expressions and metaphorical concepts. Idealized Cognitive Models Lakoff developed his theory of meaning further in his Women, Fire and Dangerous Things where he proposed the existence of Idealised Cognitive Models as the reference constructs for understanding concepts. He defines them as follows Lakoff In his discussion of the Dyirbal classifier system, based on Dixon , he isolated what he believes to be the general principles of hu- man categorization There are eight such principles.
Cen- trality distinguishes the basic from the peripheral members of the cate- gory. Chaining allows for the structuring of complex categories, so that the basic members can be chained to less central members, and these in turn to the members even further away from the centre. Not all the members are chained to each other, but those which are may be a testi- mony to the extension of the category.
Experiential domains and Ideal- ized Models motivate the links in the chains. They may but need not be culture specific. Specific Knowledge supersedes general types. Category members do not have to share common properties. These principles may explain motivate the existing categories, but cannot predict the new members. An analysis of the Japanese classifier hon enables Lakoff Finally, he suggests that there are four types of cognitive models: If cognitive models are synonymous to ICMs, it re- mains unclear why one should posit the three last types.
The existence of image schemata has been posited by Langacker , , and meta- phoric and metonymic mappings explained in Lakoff — Johnson That is, are 13 Moreover, the status of ICM vs. Fillmorian propositional structure is not deline- ated, either. If and how they differ is not spelt out. Conceptual metaphor and its implications for discourse 39 propositional structures and image schemata parts of ICMs or are they ex- ternal to ICMs?
Are metonymy and metaphor principles cum rules or processes responsible for the change within the models? All of these doubts amount to a fundamental question: Do we need ICMs at all? Do we need an empty label that can be filled in with any concept posited by other authors? It seems that Lakoff does not give an adequate grounding for the independent existence of ICMs. He simply does not de- fine how they differ from constructs posited earlier and in what way they improve the descriptive adequacy of cognitive linguistic theory. He claims that our meaning construction emerges from our bodily experience.
The physical experience of the human body is the basis for a series of image schemata, which recur in a wide range of human everyday activities. For example, there are gestalts for complex categorical structures, for metaphorical projections, and for uni- fied narrative patterns. There are seven basic im- age schemata, which underlie the notion of force.
Blockage represents a situation in which our force meets an obstacle which stops or resists it. Di- version is viewed as a variant of counterforce, where as a result of the in- teraction of two or more forces their vector is changed. Removal of re- straint is a case in which the obstacle blocking our force is removed by an external force. Attraction takes place when through the operation of magnetic field or gravitation one ob- ject is pulled towards another.
After these detailed considerations Johnson admits that these schemata and features do not exhaust the list of distinct force gestalts and suggests a few more, i. It is difficult at this stage not to see the obvious problem of all se- mantic investigations, that is the number and identity of elements necessary for a description of meaning. Feature semantics could not solve the prob- lem. Image schemata do not seem to solve it either.
Perhaps a desire for a complete definition cannot be satisfied? Johnson used his force gestalts to explain the structure of the Eng- lish modal verbs. His endeavour was based on the work of Talmy and Sweetser The investigation led him from the experientially grounded gestalts to the abstract notion of modality.
In this way he hoped to have proven that even the most abstract of human concepts emerge from bodily experience. Force dynamics As a representative of the moderate wing of cognitivism, Talmy is clearly rooted in the generative tradition, as evidenced by the representations he uses Still, he is truly cognitive in an attempt to identify the structuring common to various cognitive systems, such as language, visual perception and reasoning. Despite the cognitivist demand for real-occurring data, Talmy uses constructed examples and formulates claims which could not be tested statistically, and therefore reduces possible empirical arguments to a manner of speech, as in: That is, linguistic expressions that manifest fictive motion far outnumber ones that manifest fictive stationariness.
In other words, linguistic expression exhibits a strong bias toward conceptual dynamism as against staticism Talmy In this passage, expressions such as more, far outnumber, a strong bias toward could be referring to some real statistical values. Instead, they are used as if they were intensifiers. An Event Frame consists of conceptual elements and interrelationships between them, which are often evoked together or co-evoked. First of all, Talmy stresses both the co- existence and the exclusion of certain elements from the frame window- ing vs.
For example, the force-dynamic event frame consists of such sche- matic elements as Agonist and Antagonist, an intrinsic force tendency as- cribed to them — either towards action or towards rest, resultant of the force interaction — either action or rest, balance of strengths — weaker vs. As can be easily noticed, the elements of the event frame pattern into opposing dyads, receiving additional support from and even more basic characteristics of human reasoning — a propensity for dichotomy. According to Talmy In addition, force—dynamic principles can be seen to operate in discourse, pre- eminently in directing patterns of argumentation, but also in guiding dis- course expectations and their reversal.
He expands this idea in the following passage Talmy This antagonist represents a sense of responsibility or propriety and appears as an internalization of external social values. In effect, per- haps, a force-dynamic opposition originating between the self and the sur- roundings seems here to be introjected into an opposition between parts of the self. Correspondingly, the desiring part is understood as more central and the blocking or spurring part as more peripheral. Blending Theory Fauconnier presents his Blending Theory as an attempt to under- stand how language processing as well as other cognitive processes can be performed at such a staggering speed.
There are three types of mental spaces: Generic space can be understood as a tertium comparationis for the input spaces. This generic space reflects some common, usually more abstract, structure and organi- zation shared by the inputs and defines the core cross-space mappings be- tween them.
Candidates for generic space concepts are image schemas, force dynamic interactions, abstract motion, or the superordinate concepts envisaged by Glucksberg — Keyser [].
However, the list of possible GS elements has not been clearly deline- ated. In fact, it remains an open research programme Turner and Brandt p. The cross-space mappings between at least two input spaces allow for a partial projection into the blend, which is supplemented with three interrelated processes: Conse- quently, the counterparts from the input spaces can be projected into the blend separately; they can be fused, as a result of the projection; or only one of them is projected.
In this way, a part of the blend structure is inher- ited from the inputs, and a part emerges from the above mentioned proc- esses. It remains unclear if the Generic Space has any direct influence on the Blend or is only mediated by the Input Spaces. Another perennial problem in the studies of meaning that is shared by both feature-based semantics on the one hand, and CMT and BT on the other, is the limit to the detail of definition.
Cognitive semantics has criticized feature semantics for not being able to provide a finite, exhaus- tive list of definitional features. It seemed that when the distinction be- tween the encyclopaedic and dictionary definition of lexical items is blurred15 and supplemented with a radial structure of prototype-based categorization, the problem will be solved. But it is not the case. In meta- phorical mappings of CMT as well as cross-space mappings and input — blend projections, the number or nature of these mappings is not clearly determined. Conceptual metaphor and its implications for discourse 45 age-schematic constraint Turner , which has been formulated in rather weak terms: Second, the constraint is not inviolable; however, if it is violated, the violation is to be taken as a carrier of significance Turner As in so many of the examples reviewed in the book, a striking feature of the blended construction is its underspecification.
Although there are strong constrains on blending, which I shall recapitulate below, there is no recipe for knowing what will be projected from the inputs and what will be projected back. In that respect the system is very flexible. In view of the critique of the feature theory on very similar grounds, it is difficult to see this flexibility as a theoretical gain of the new approach. It seems that the only way out of this conundrum is to change the perspec- tive on the issue. Within the regions, it is possible to recognize areas of greater salience, easier to identify and name than others, which can be represented in network nodes.
In this way what was regarded as a weakness of lexical semantic studies can be changed into their strength. Approximate definitions are not incomplete, because of defective or im- perfect lexical analyses, but are a result of the dynamic nature of lexical meaning itself. But it may take a lot of elaboration for the speaker and the hearer to converge on sufficiently similar constructions. And, then again, there is no need for convergence. The folk theoretical illusion that each expression of language has a meaning that we all retrieve in basically the same way allows interlocutors to interact under the impression of mutual comprehension, when in fact they may be engaged in quite different men- tal space construction.
Without at least partial con- vergence of communicated conceptualizations, any social activity would be doomed to failure, which is not the case. The proposal presented in Fauconnier is further elaborated in Fauconnier — Turner One of the issues they expand on is the comprehensive description of the constitutive and governing principles of blending. The constitutive principles, or the structure of the mental spaces and the basic relations obtaining between them, do not differ much from what was proposed in Fauconnier The governing principles are a new development.
They are all, by definition, open to modification. Conceptual metaphor and its implications for discourse 47 and a number of Principles for Compression All of these prin- ciples facilitate the achievement of the overarching goal: This goal can be subdivided into several subgoals such as Com- press what is diffuse, Obtain global insight, Strengthen vital relations, Come up with a story, Go from many to one. In the running of the blend, the principles and goals can cooperate or compete: Compression helps human scale, human scale helps getting a story, getting a story helps global insight, going from Many to One helps the blend achieve human scale.
Similarly, integration competes with unpacking since absolute integration leaves a blend that carries no sign of its distinctive inputs Fauconnier — Turner Cognition is embodied, and the spectacular intellectual feats that human beings perform depend upon being able to anchor the integration networks in blends at human scale, using the vital relations that are employed in perception and action. It also claims a neurological reality through connections, as indicated on page In the neural interpretation of these cognitive processes, mental spaces are sets of activated neural assemblies, and the lines between elements corre- spond to coactivation-bindings of a certain kind.
When it comes to the relationship between blending and conceptual metaphor, Fauconnier He formulates it in the following words: I have a reservation concerning point 1. Likewise, I disagree with the claim Grady et al. It is therefore not the case that metaphor is responsi- ble for the mappings in the blending process, but rather that blending may be a more general cognitive process, the result of which and not the cause of which is the metaphoric structuring of some concepts.
Coulson employs BT, CMT and frame shifting a reorgani- zation of frame elements in semantic representations resulting from a re- stricted deployment of background knowledge on the part of the speaker in order to explain a wide array of semantic leaps phenomena. An important aspect which she brings forth in her dis- cussion of the abortion debate is the framing of moral discourse.
She also points out that, unlike rhetoric theorists, 18 Coulson Semantic leaps is not a technical term, but, rather, a family of interesting natu- ral language phenomena. It includes all sorts of non-standard meanings absent from dictionaries and, typically, not computable by traditional parsers. Leaps include things such as metaphoric and metonymic expressions, hyperbole, un- derstatement, and sarcastic quips.
They also include things such as innuendo, subtle accusations, and the private meanings which arise when people live or work closely together. Conceptual metaphor and its implications for discourse 49 such as Black and Perelman — Olbrechts-Tyteca , cognitive linguists rarely address the issue of values in such constructions. The development of the Blending Theory can contribute to con- ceptual metaphor studies in that it draws the attention of the analysts to the common underlying elements of the Source and Target Domains.
Axiological semantics A notable exception to the generalization expressed by Coulson is the work of Krzeszowski , a , who promotes the idea of axiologi- cal semantics. He further develops this idea: This must be so, because Man is a valuating being. All our actions, our thinking, our attitudes and interactions with the world and with the other people, and last but certainly not least, our emotions are connected with or laden with certain values.
To appreciate the presence of values as well as to valuate we need a platform of reference upon which valuations can be made. In other words, we need to recognize some sys- tem of values. Valuations constitute an aspect of all categorizations, and categorizations directly manifest themselves in language. This establishes a direct link between values and language Krzeszowski a: He further goes on to dis- cuss the axiological aspects of metaphors.
A summary of the chapter and an outline for the analysis Conceptual Metaphor Theory is an attempt to elucidate the mental proc- esses responsible for our understanding. It claims that metaphor-based understanding consists in a co-activation of the source and target do- mains, which can be formalised in terms of metaphorical mappings. As a method of linguistic analysis of metaphorically structured concepts it first requires a description of the concept in terms of the folk model. The sec- ond step is to identify and name possible conceptual metaphors the evi- dence for which is found in linguistic expressions.
Then metaphoric map- pings underlying groups of expressions are formulated. In CMT-informed discourse analysis attempts are made to explain the discourse function of conceptual metaphors Cameron — Deignan , Charteris-Black , Musolff , Nerlich They may in- fluence the representation of the world through their affective power re- lated to the hiding and highlighting of certain elements of the target do- main filtered through the source domain structure. These concepts form the theoretical underpinning of the present work. The work itself though 19 This element emerged from the data analysed in Fabiszak — Kaszubski It was a pilot study for the present research consisting in a corpus-driven analysis of the meaning of two VPs: Conceptual metaphor and its implications for discourse 51 does not make any claims concerning the conceptual structure of the human mind.
It has a much more modest objective. In Chapter Four, conceptual metaphor theory is applied to discourse analysis of war reports in Polish and British newspapers, so that the rhetorical strategies used in the repre- sentation of military conflicts could be effectively elucidated. It is hoped that this analysis will allow me to give a comparative overview of the lin- guistic and cultural similarities and differences permeating the political dis- course. Chapter Five focuses on the corpus-based contextual analysis of the words commonly considered within the CMT as indicators of the use of the X IS WAR metaphor and tries to link frequency with sense salience and metaphor identification and categorisation.
In Chapter Two, we turn to a short presentation of corpus linguis- tic methods and of language of the press, as they seem a necessary foun- dation for Chapters Four and Five. Chapter II Corpus linguistics and the language of mass media 1.
Conceptual metaphor - Wikipedia
Introduction As indicated in the previous chapter, the leitmotifs of cognitive linguistics have been present in the works of many European linguists, such as e. Jakobson, Baldinger or Ullman. Then, even though in many cognitive lin- guistic publications it seems as if the ideas promoted there are a complete novelty, the belief in this novelty should be taken with caution as a result of the domination of Chomskyan theory in American linguistics starting from the s.
What is interesting about the development of Cognitive Linguistics is the fact that despite its criticism of unrealistic, linguist- invented examples of transformational-generative grammars corpus based Cognitive Linguistic studies have not gained much ground until the s, and even then they were mostly conducted in Europe. Therefore, in the first part of this chapter I would like to give a brief sketch of the development of language corpora, and show how they can facilitate lexi- cal studies of meaning.
The variation within surface structure reflects the variation in significa- tion. The rudimentary example, the approach to which differs in cognitive and generative theory, is the passive voice. For generativists it is a passive transformation — they stress the link between the active and passive form of the sentence and view the latter as the transformation of the former or both as the transformation of one underlying form.
Cognitivists, on the other hand, concentrate on the change of perspective, on what is fore- grounded and what is downplayed in either construction of meaning. A similar approach to meaning as construed: As the present study is also concerned with data coming from the press, the second part of this chapter offers a succinct review of the most recent lit- erature devoted to media and their language.
The beginnings of language corpora A brief history of corpus linguistics is given in Teubert He claims that the first corpus of the English language in the modern sense has been gathered by Sir Randolph Quirk in the late s. The Survey of Eng- lish Usage, as the project was called, was not originally computerized. Surprisingly, though, it did not gain much interest in America once it was completed. The third well-known English language corpus was the Lancaster- Oslo-Bergen Corpus used in the studies of grammar and word frequency by, among others, such scholars as Johansson, Leech and Hofland.
The first corpus which was constructed with the intention of con- ducting lexical research was the one gathered by John Sinclair in Edin- burgh. His corpus-driven investigations into meaning have led him to doubt the claim that a word should be the basic unit of investigating meaning, so that he started to emphasize the importance of collocation Sinclair Words abstracted from the context did not seem to have unambiguous meaning assigned to them, whereas those used in discourse could be interpreted easily.
The corpora found an obvious practical application in lexicography, so that saw the publication of the first corpus-based dictionary: Collins-Cobuild English Language Dictionary. It is discourse then, where we should look for meaning. When a speaker encounters a unit of meaning in discourse, the process of understanding starts. A part of this process is a reverberation of this unit with all the previous uses of it that the language user has encountered. This is the social dimension of understanding. This is the psycho- logical dimension, different for every member of the speech community.
Soon it was realised that form could actually be a determiner of meaning, and a causal connection was postulated, inviting arguments from form to meaning. Then conceptual adjustment was made, with the realization that the choice of a meaning, anywhere in a text, must have a profound effect on the surrounding choices. It would be futile to imagine otherwise.
There is ultimately no distinction between form and meaning Sinclair It is important to stress, though, that for first generation cognitive linguists meaning resides in the brain mentalism , whereas in the approach presented here it resides in discourse. Tognini-Bonelli introduces a distinction she deems impor- tant in research involving corpora. She talks about corpus-based and cor- pus-driven studies. In corpus-based investigations the corpus is used only as a source of data which is supposed to support the hypotheses based on a preconception originating from sources other than the corpus itself e.
The corpus data cannot falsify a hy- pothesis; it can only corroborate it. In corpus-driven research the ap- proach is different: The theory has no independent existence from the evidence and the gen- eral methodological path is clear: To start an observation the analyst must first ask a question — put forward a hypothesis, which could be tested against the data. A corpus-driven approach is represented by Stubbs [] , who stresses the empirical nature of his work.
He distinguishes between three types of linguistic examples: Having made this distinction, in building his analyses and generalizing the results, he depends solely on the corpus data. Among other things, he analyzes the distribution and meaning of such lexical items as, for exam- 4 Lakoff — Johnson They explain it by referring to spatial metaphors structuring our understanding of lin- guistic expression. Corpus linguistics and the language of mass media 57 ple, seek; large, big, great — series; cause vs. In the study Stubbs identifies a number of lucid rules for conducting corpus- based lexical semantic research.
He suggests that in order to avoid arte- facts, the results received from one corpus should be checked against data from another. The frequency counts can be regarded as guidance to the in- terpretation of the meaning of words, but the infrequent collocations should not be altogether neglected, as an exclusive concentration on only the most frequent collocations may hide variation in the language. Second, collocations may differ quite sharply in different text-types.
Many text-types are specialized in their uses of language, and no corpus can fairly represent every one of them Stubbs When it comes to the representativeness of corpus data, Stubbs admits that for technological reasons of data gathering even the most balanced corpora are biased towards written language, and within this type towards the newspaper genre. In addition, newspa- per texts are the most widely read texts, and thus the most influential. Hence language corpora based on, or consisting in a significant part of newspaper articles, can shed light on the problem of discourse prosody.
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk , an experienced lexicographer and semanticist, discusses a range of possible analyses of lexical mean- ings carried out with the help of a language corpus. What might be useful for the present study is her observation that corpus material facilitates the uncovering of the properties of verbal senses, such as participants of an action, relations, and circumstantial properties.
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Another valuable application of corpora allows one to identify the semantic prosody of lexical meanings in utterances. They both reverberate of the Hallidayan focus on the choice of pre-set constructions. Moon, among many types of fixed expressions, discusses meta- phors and says Metaphors, initially transparent, come in from sporting, technical, and other specialist domains: As neologisms become institutionalized and divorced from their original contexts of use, the explanation or motivation for the metaphor may become lost or obscure. They accordingly undergo processes of semantic depletion or semantic shift Moon She seems to adhere to the view that metaphoric expressions with time lose their figurative power, wear off and as a result of historical processes cease to be meta- phors.
This belief may have resulted from the terminological confusion discussed in Chapter One, Section 2. It may also be motivated by the ahistoricism of Lakoffian approach criticised by Taylor , see Chapter One, Section 2. Apart from her disputing the metaphoricity of dead metaphors, Moon also stresses one important methodological point about corpus- driven research, i. This claim goes against an observation made by Fabiszak — Kaszubski and , namely, that quite often corpus data, even if the context is extended to a paragraph or a number of paragraphs, may remain uniterpretable in terms of literacy vs.
It may also be the case that expressions are inherently ambiguous, so that the judgment of various readers may vary, and also the judgment of the same reader on different occasions may di- verge. In addition, Moon notices a certain genre-specificity of journalistic writing That is, journalese seems to employ these words in their metaphorical uses significantly more often than other investigated genres, i.
The same kind of distribution was also observed in the compilation of CCDI,6 which systematically recorded negative and posi- tive evaluations. It is possible that negative evaluations are simply more salient, and so negative orientations are more likely to be noticed: However, it is equally possible that negatively evaluating FEIs are indeed commoner than positively evaluat- ing ones or neutral ones. If this is the case, it may be because FEIs are per- ishrastic and used as politeness devices or euphemisms … Note that there appear to be some distinctions here between British and American English: For example, evidence in BofE suggests 5 Metaphors and other forms of figurative language as well as the use of implication are often discussed in CDA writing as veiled evaluation strategies.
Similarly to Moon, who notices the problem of genre specificity, Partington stresses that claims about metaphors can benefit from the genre sensitivity of the studies. He concentrates on the journalistic business writing and using various press corpora for example the edition of The Times on CD-Rom devises a practical way of discovering metaphors popular in this genre. Using WordSmith Tools he identifies two lists of words: The frequency lists indicated that busi- ness language is dominated with vocabulary related to an up and down motion.
- The Passing of a Day.
- Pattaya Memories (Pattaya Adult Cartoons Book 5).
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- Tales of Troy and Greece.
- Matilda Montgomerie; or, The Prophecy Fulfilled With Illustrated.
In fact, in the genre of press business reports, as Partington puts it: When, for example, costs, debts, inflation or unemployment are up, then this is far from good Partington The less-frequent-words list did not give rise to a new set of metaphors common in business journalism, of course, but only gave an indirect evidence supporting the more frequent list findings. For exam- ple, a relatively rare use of past forms such as was and did Partington puts down to the fact that business seems to be more interested in the future than in the past. His investigations lead Partington For example, currency can be weak, but by no means can it be ill.
This is akin to what Goatly pointed out in his study of root metaphors. At the end of the chapter devoted to corpus-driven metaphor re- search, Partington The truth is, of course, that such metaphors have become genre-specific technical language. They have no figurative content, and to all intents and purposes are no longer metaphors at all. On the other hand, this is not a data-driven conclusion, but rather a state- ment of conviction particular to the author.
It seems that his view of metaphor is more related to pragmatic theory, which sees metaphor as a clash between the literal meaning of the context and figurative meaning of the words used in a metaphor. These reservations about dead metaphors have already appeared in Black , see Chapter One, Section 2. Partington, however, carefully distances himself from this conundrum. He stresses that metaphors definitely pervade language, but whether they pervade thought is something that cannot be established on the basis of corpus-based research. She also notices other limitations of the corpus driven approach: Intuition is also needed to decide whether a linguistic metaphor is a realisation of a particular conceptual metaphor.
Further, the computer cannot tell the researcher which word forms to study. Concordancing is a powerful observational tool, but no more than a tool; a researcher is needed to decide what to examine and how to interpret the resulting data Deignan On top of that, corpora are of limited usefulness in investigating innova- tive metaphor and require a bottom-up approach to theory building. Deignan discusses problems inherent in metaphor theory research as well. She sees distinguishing metaphor from other related phenomena as the major problem. There are three aspects to this problem, i.
One of the most recent approaches to metaphor in combination with corpus linguistics is Charteris-Black , in which he integrates the insights from CMT and discourse analysis. His investigations focus on specific-domain corpora, such as the British party political manifestos, American presidential speeches, sports reporting, financial reporting and religious discourse the Bible and the Koran. For example, in analysing financial reporting he checked the frequency of po- tentially metaphoric words in The Economist sub-corpus and the entire Bank of English corpus and found out that words such as attack and ha- ven were far more frequent in the general corpus.
This led him to con- clude that metaphors including these words are general and not domain- specific. Yet another recent investigation of metaphor, which combines corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and conceptual metaphor theory is Koller In her study of metaphors in business media discourse, she uses two self-compiled, purpose-built corpora from British and American business magazines and newspapers.
Her aim is to study the rhetoric of the language of business press reports. She finds out that there are three metaphors dominating this type of discourse, namely those of war, sports and evolutionary struggle. She also notices that in the analysed texts busi- ness is constructed as a masculinised social domain. Fabiszak — Kaszubski contained a pilot study of the full- scaled project described in the present book.
The results are summarised as follows: An analysis of genre distribution of metaphoric expressions, even within such a small-scale pilot study as the present one, can bring about interesting results. They also reach the highest frequency in history texts. The high frequency of metaphoric expressions in the mass media in com- parison to other genres corroborates earlier claims concerning the high use- fulness of conventional metaphoric expressions in persuasive texts. This can also be partly explained by synonym specialisation Fabiszak — Kaszubski It therefore seems that if the metaphoric potential of lexemes from the domain of WAR is to be analysed in the present work, the data coming from the press may be the most promising source for the investigation.
The results can be checked against the general corpus, to offer a broader perspective for the study. A review of literature on war coming from various disciplines is endeavoured in Chapter Three, prior to the linguistic analysis of data, with the hope that a definition of war will emerge from the review. Our second pilot study Fabiszak — Kaszubski was con- ducted so that the potential of corpora for metaphor research could be tested. We discovered that the most useful data retrieving and sorting techniques were the sorting of concordances by their left and right envi- ronment, calculating z-score and retrieving the related compounds.
All of these allowed us to construct semantic frames for the lexemes in question and to identify those elements which participated in metaphoric mapping. The custom was also followed during some of the late 19th c. Corpus linguistics and the language of mass media 65 tionship. Sampson , for instance, describes the scientific method in simple words: Summarize what you hear and see in hypotheses which are general enough to lead to predictions about future observations.
Keep on testing your hypotheses. When new observations disconfirm some of them, look for alternative explanations compatible with all the evidence so far available; and then test these explanations in their turn against further observational data. This is the empirical scientific method Sampson For some reason, though, he rejects a possibility that the meaning of words can be investigated in a similar fashion.
The reason behind it may be that he refers to the generative linguistic approach to meaning as the theory of meaning and rejects it as erroneous on the grounds that word meaning, a fluid phenomenon, cannot be fully predicted by linguistic rules. At the same time he acknowledges the value of dictionaries provid- ing definitions of words in everyday English: The best dictionary does not pretend that its definitions have the exactness of a physical equation, but that is not a shortcoming in the dictionary: He also makes a remark dear to the heart of any cognitivist: These words seem to indicate that he is close to the stance that artificial languages of logic are not the way to describe linguistic meaning, and to favour natural language definitions.
This seems to be an irreconcilable contention between linguists who claim that a scien- tific investigation of linguistic meaning is not possible and those who claim the contrary. Needless to say, I belong to the second group. The common grounds for both is the view that communication is a social phenomenon and can be value-laden. The language of the mass media, discourse analysis and metaphor Bell sees media language as one of the most influential language input individuals experience today. The media can be divided into several genres with news and advertising as probably the most prominent.
One of the advantages of analysing media language is its availability: The average newspaper may provide you with , or more words of text. The problem is not so much getting enough language to analyse but deciding how to restrict yourself to a manageable amount Bell A journalist himself, Bell has a hands-on experience of how the news is constructed, and shows a more sensitive view of the genre distinctions within the news. The major division he stresses, although occasionally blurred by the journalists themselves, is the one between the hard news and the soft news feature articles.
Therefore he sees the genre division of language corpora as a weakness if the aim of the study is the news styles. He quotes Brown Corpus and LOB as the corpora who lump the hard and the soft news to- gether under one heading: Like Langacker and Sinclair with reference to the form and mean- ing of linguistic expressions, Bell believes that the form and content of the news are inseparable: We cannot separate news form and news content.
The values of news drive the way in which news is presented Bell In his book Bell mentions in passing four different traditions in in- vestigating the news media language: Content analysis stems from the communication studies and was designed to investigate propaganda bias by means of quantitative study: When it comes to critical linguistics, Bell points out both its strong points and its drawbacks.
This research is at its strongest in the direct comparison of different media accounts of the same event, demonstrating how language is a vehicle of covert interpretation in supposedly neutral reporting Bell He sees two major shortcomings of the approach, i. The semiotic tradition consists in close reading of media texts with the aim of identifying and decoding the ideology beneath the media re- porting.
Conceptual metaphor
Bell also discusses a change in reporting style between the 19th century chronology-based narration to one based on the lead, which comes first and summarises the main points of the story. Bell discusses changes that the language of the media has undergone between Capt. One of the most striking dif- ferences is the technological one: Carey in his article on press reportage stresses the similar- ity in the construction of the news and of fiction. The reception of both is dependent on the willed credulity of the readers. She sees the development of electronic communication as a threat to the public service of the mass media, as it may become a forum for strongly partisan views presented without any editorial checks.
Wei in a study similar to the one I intend to conduct in the present book shows how the Taiwanese political press discourse differs from that of the West. She demonstrates how the choice of rhetoric, and in particular of conceptual metaphor, is closely linked with the socio- cultural values of the society it is designed to inform and influence. All three studies are cor- pus-driven. The present study suggests that newspaper prose has been linguistically innovative in other ways designed to achieve a compressed style.
That is, devices like noun—noun sequences, heavy appositive post-modifiers, and noun complement clauses are especially characteristic of newspaper prose. These features are all literate devices used to pack information into rela- tively few words. These devices are also commonly used in academic prose, together with functionally similar devices like attributive adjectives and prepositional phrases as postmodifiers.
However, the features dis- cussed above are noteworthy because they are considerably more common 11 Charles Alexis de Tocqueville was a 19th c. French historian and politician, the founder of liberalism who described the emerging democratic society and the processes characteristic of it. Corpus linguistics and the language of mass media 69 in newspaper prose. That is, at the same time that news has been develop- ing more popular oral styles, it has also been innovative in developing lit- erate styles with extreme reliance on compressed noun-phrase structures.
Ni compares the stylistic differences between four different genres which he calls registers: As could be expected, all of them differ with respect to the use of NPs. Ayto attempts to demonstrate that the press are responsible for ei- ther the introduction or at least the popularisation of many lexical blends. In this way he also suggests that the language of the press is distinct from other forms of writing. When it comes to press reports, Aitchison A significant characteristic was the large number of different lexical items involved, all relating to disaster and tragedy. These were often polysyllabic, and were frequently combined into longer sequences.
Sunday Times on Sept. There seem to be three possible reasons behind this difference: Ease of count in a North as opposed to a South country see Bell on the unequal representation of various nations affected by news values, such as proximity, eliteness, meaningfulness. Presence of press agencies and reporters. That is the press, radio and TV often mediate sic! Linguists analysing the language of politics, especially in the past, often use media as a source of text.
This was the case with Bralczyk , who analysed the language of the political propaganda of the s in Poland on the basis of three sources: The author admits that the dominant source consisted in texts from Trybuna Ludu, because he believed that this newspaper had the widest range of readers in comparison to other sources. In his study Bralczyk focuses on the pragmatic functions of political propaganda, i. Significantly, in discussing the linguistic means applied to achieve the latter function, Bralczyk These are just two out of seven semantico-syntactic tools used in the introduction of propaganda values in discourse.
The sender of political propaganda texts formulates a certain system of values. He introduces, most often not overtly, certain properties accorded to the world presented by propaganda, always tendentiously, up to the point of fictitiousness. Thus, the world is accorded the same properties twice: He further elaborates the idea of the represented world on Bralczyk It is a world not altogether fictitious, but sub- ordinated to certain idealizations: Another example of the analysis of the language of the media, or at least written for a publication in press, is Cap He shows how language is used in a construction of the political identity of Russia, Byelorussia, Latvia and the Ukraine; their identity framed in opposition to the expan- sion of NATO.
Assertions, simplifications and implications abound in this linguistic narrative, which often employs a thesis-antithesis argumentative structure. Majkowska — Satkiewicz investigate the language of the Polish media in the s and notice its increasing informality and ex- pressivity. They contrast the results of their analysis of the Polish head- lines with that conducted by Pisarek and emphasize that thirty years ago they did not contain emotionally or stylistically loaded words, while today they approach the rhetoric of advertising slogans.
Their pri- mary function is no longer to inform, but to shock and in this way to catch the attention of the readers. The intensification of dramatic effect is often achieved through a recourse to the rhetoric of conflict, full of aggression, accusations, and strong value judgements. The function of the news seems no longer to present information in a transparent language, but rather to draw the attention of its consumers to the media themselves. The media become self-reflective. Frankowska applies Conceptual Metaphor Theory to an analysis of Polish political press texts and identifies a number of meta- phors employed by the authors.
She also shows that metaphors from different domains can co-occur in one sen- tence. This leads her to suggest that it is possible to claim a synthetic, overarching metaphor: A slightly different, philological approach is presented in Hughes , who attempts to give a social history of certain semantic fields of the English vocabulary. In its history he points to the development of journalism as one of the forces driving semantic change.
He emphasizes that the first news reports were occasional, i. Such regularity of publication required the con- struction of news on an everyday basis. Also, as the major objective of the newspaper publishers was to make profit, rather than primarily to inform the public opinion, so the news presentation and the choice of newswor- thy items could not remain unbiased. Hughes believes that the popular press simplify the represented world in order to make sense of it. Further, such categorisation used to increase clarity results in stereotyping. The reification of abstract concepts leads to vagueness as in pseudo-sociological phrases, such as the permissive society, the stag- nant society, the human condition or the silent majority Hughes Sports and finance are often reported in what Hughes terms meta- phors of violence and contain sexual innuendoes, as if to make the reports more entertaining, so that battles, fights, massacres, slaughters, carnage and blitzes become the usual terms describing economic relations Hughes The positional terminology in sport is replaced with the more aggressive imagery, for instance backs, forwards and inside- forwards are supplanted by defenders, attackers and strikers Hughes The financial market conceived of in masculine terms hard- ens, firms, spurts ahead or spills over Hughes Journalese is also responsible for a revival of many archaisms and for coining new compounds, which Hughes terms Thesaurustone.
It is not only the development of journalism but also the spread of democracy and the use of ideologically loaded propaganda which, ac- cording to Hughes, contribute to these semantic changes. Corpus linguistics and the language of mass media 73 statements so that they ensure the support of many groups of voters. Thus the politicians increase the use of vague terms, as Hughes In an attempt to cover xenophobic concepts in politically correct disguise, the so-called cosmetic semantics is employed.
New and yet unmarked terms are used to refer to the same entities without true recon- ceptualization, as was the case with the South African government, which replaced apartheid, by separate development, and later by plural democracy, vertical differentiation and multinationalism Hughes Such opaque new labels, similarly to latinizations extermina- tion for killing and the borrowing of foreign terms, are a common euphemistic technique, which allows one to refer to an entity without calling up its image and its rich evaluative network of associations.
Conclusion Technological development allowing researchers to create and search multimillion word corpora, linguists are able to rely more on language-in- use evidence, so that their own intuition is no longer the major source of reference. The linguistic corpora, however, reflect only a certain part of language, mostly written.
As a result the investigations of contemporary language often focus on a specific register: Journalists in their drive for a scoop, and in the attempt to sell, frequently use inflated rhetoric, respon- sible for the introduction of highly emotional vocabulary into the lan- guage of the news. The value-laden, simplified picture of the world as represented by the media becomes the world for its recipients.
In Chapter Five the most frequent words from the semantic field of war identified in the purpose-built corpus are searched for in the general corpus BNC to show to what extent they can be interpreted as indicative of the X IS WAR conceptual metaphor. Introduction This chapter starts with an overview of the 19th century theoretical ap- proach to war and warfare proposed by the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz. His theory is contrasted with this of the Swiss Henri Jomini, a general in the French and Russian army. They both laid the foundation for the contemporary theory of war.
Section 3 presents the views on the nature of war in the late 20th century of a philosopher and international relations expert Pierre Hassner. Section 4 is devoted to a review of a sociological analysis of war on the example of the Second Gulf War and the American intervention in Af- ghanistan in These two sections are the basis of the expert model of war proposed in Section 8. Section 5 leaves the expert investigations and moves into an examination of the image of war as represented in Polish and British literature. This section is followed by a review of a his- tory of war journalism.
They both contribute to the folk model of war, which is proposed in Section 8. Section 7 surveys linguistic analyses of the language used in the media representation of war. Clausewitz and Jomini on war General Carl von Clausewitz formulated his first reflections on the nature of war in a treaty of known in English as The Principles of War which he wrote for the crown prince of Prussia, to whom he was a tutor. As Bassford notes, this treatise was heavily influenced by another great soldier and theoretician of warfare, the Swiss, Henri Jomini.
On war the original German ver- sion appeared in , the first English translation in , however, is highly critical of the early writings of Jomini Traite de grande tactique of What were then their observations on war? He advocated civilian control over the military. He believed that political objectives are the main causes of war, but they may be enhanced by traditional stereotyping of the opponent or historical aversion between two nations.
In an endeavour to define war Clausewitz starts with a simple definition relating war to any use of force, as he writes: He de- velops the definition further, by adding the human factor, i. In cognitive linguistics , conceptual metaphor , or cognitive metaphor , refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain , in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality e.
A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain. This idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By in Since then, the field of metaphor studies within the larger discipline of Cognitive Linguistics has increasingly developed, with several, annual academic conferences, scholarly societies, and research labs contributing to the subject area.
Some researchers, such as Gerard Steen, have worked to develop empirical investigative tools for metaphor research, including the Metaphor Identification Procedure , or MIP. Other cognitive scientists , for example Gilles Fauconnier , study subjects similar to conceptual metaphor under the labels " analogy ", " conceptual blending " and " ideasthesia ". Conceptual metaphors are seen in language in our everyday lives. Conceptual metaphors shape not just our communication, but also shape the way we think and act.
An example of one of the commonly used conceptual metaphors is "argument is war". It is not uncommon to hear someone say "He won that argument" or "I attacked every weak point in his argument". The very way argument is thought of is shaped by this metaphor of arguments being war and battles that must be won. Argument can be seen in other ways than a battle, but we use this concept to shape the way we think of argument and the way we go about arguing.
Conceptual metaphors are used very often to understand theories and models. A conceptual metaphor uses one idea and links it to another to better understand something. For example, the conceptual metaphor of viewing communication as a conduit is one large theory explained with a metaphor. So not only is our everyday communication shaped by the language of conceptual metaphors, but so is the very way we understand scholarly theories. These metaphors are prevalent in communication and we do not just use them in language; we actually perceive and act in accordance with the metaphors.
In the Western philosophical tradition, Aristotle is often situated as the first commentator on the nature of metaphor, writing in the Poetics , "A 'metaphorical term' involves the transferred use of a term that properly belongs to something else," [6] and elsewhere in the Rhetoric he says that metaphors make learning pleasant; "To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest.
This has been sometimes called the "Traditional View of Metaphor" [8] and at other times the "Classical Theory of Metaphor". In his work Institutio Oratoria , Quintilian states," In totum autem metaphora brevior est similitudo" or "on the whole, metaphor is a shorter form of simile".
Janet Soskice , Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge , writes in summary that "it is certain that we shall taste the freshness of their insights only if we free them from the obligation to answer questions that were never theirs to ask". A mapping is the systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of the source and the target domain. Many elements of target concepts come from source domains and are not preexisting.
To know a conceptual metaphor is to know the set of mappings that applies to a given source-target pairing. The same idea of mapping between source and target is used to describe analogical reasoning and inferences. A primary tenet of this theory is that metaphors are matter of thought and not merely of language: The metaphor may seem to consist of words or other linguistic expressions that come from the terminology of the more concrete conceptual domain, but conceptual metaphors underlie a system of related metaphorical expressions that appear on the linguistic surface.
Similarly, the mappings of a conceptual metaphor are themselves motivated by image schemas which are pre-linguistic schemas concerning space, time, moving, controlling, and other core elements of embodied human experience. Conceptual metaphors typically employ a more abstract concept as target and a more concrete or physical concept as their source.
For instance, metaphors such as 'the days [the more abstract or target concept] ahead' or 'giving my time' rely on more concrete concepts, thus expressing time as a path into physical space, or as a substance that can be handled and offered as a gift. Different conceptual metaphors tend to be invoked when the speaker is trying to make a case for a certain point of view or course of action. For instance, one might associate "the days ahead" with leadership, whereas the phrase "giving my time" carries stronger connotations of bargaining.
Selection of such metaphors tends to be directed by a subconscious or implicit habit in the mind of the person employing them. The principle of unidirectionality states that the metaphorical process typically goes from the more concrete to the more abstract, and not the other way around. Accordingly, abstract concepts are understood in terms of prototype concrete processes. The term "concrete," in this theory, has been further specified by Lakoff and Johnson as more closely related to the developmental, physical neural, and interactive body see embodied philosophy.
One manifestation of this view is found in the cognitive science of mathematics , where it is proposed that mathematics itself, the most widely accepted means of abstraction in the human community, is largely metaphorically constructed, and thereby reflects a cognitive bias unique to humans that uses embodied prototypical processes e. The conduit metaphor is a dominant class of figurative expressions used when discussing communication itself metalanguage. It operates whenever people speak or write as if they "insert" their mental contents feelings, meanings, thoughts, concepts, etc.
Thus, language is viewed as a "conduit" conveying mental content between people. Defined and described by linguist Michael J. Reddy, PhD, his proposal of this conceptual metaphor refocused debate within and outside the linguistic community on the importance of metaphorical language. In their work, Lakoff and Johnson closely examined a collection of basic conceptual metaphors, including:.
The latter half of each of these phrases invokes certain assumptions about concrete experience and requires the reader or listener to apply them to the preceding abstract concepts of love or organizing in order to understand the sentence in which the conceptual metaphor is used. There are numerous ways in which conceptual metaphors shape human perception and communication, especially in mass media and in public policy. Lakoff and Johnson focus on English, and cognitive scholars writing in English have tended not to investigate the discourse of foreign languages in any great detail to determine the creative ways in which individuals negotiate, resist, and consolidate conceptual metaphors.
Andrew Goatly in his book Washing the Brain [15] considers ideological conceptual metaphors as well as Chinese conceptual metaphors.