PDF The Metaphoric Mind Download
- Author: Bob Samples
- Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
- ISBN:
- Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
- Languages : en
- Pages : 242
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"Dr. Joe challenges the reader to examine both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal approaches to the world and demonstrates the differences between Indigenous knowledge and Western thought."--Ed Buller.
Explores the physical, psychological and social factors that shape the way in which people engage with embodied metaphor, including, for example, the shape of one's body, age, gender, physical or linguistic impairments, ideology and religious beliefs. It will appeal to students and researchers in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology.
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
Understanding metaphor raises key questions about the relationship between language and meaning, and between language and mind. This book explores how this understanding can impact upon the theory and practice of language teaching. After summarising the cognitive basis of metaphor and other figures of speech, it looks at how this knowledge can inform classroom practice. Finally, it sets out how we can use these insights to re-appraise language learning theory in a way that treats it as consonant with the cognitive nature of language.
Metaphor has been an issue of intense research and debate for decades (see, for example [1]). Researchers in various disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, computer science, education, and philosophy have developed a variety of theories, and much progress has been made [2]. For one, metaphor is no longer considered a rhetorical flourish that is found mainly in literary texts. Rather, linguists have shown that metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in everyday language, a major force in the development of new word meanings, and the source of at least some grammatical function words [3]. Indeed, one of the most influential theories of metaphor involves the suggestion that the commonality of metaphoric language results because cross-domain mappings are a major determinant in the organization of semantic memory, as cognitive and neural resources for dealing with concrete domains are recruited for the conceptualization of more abstract ones [4]. Researchers in cognitive neuroscience have explored whether particular kinds of brain damage are associated with metaphor production and comprehension deficits, and whether similar brain regions are recruited when healthy adults understand the literal and metaphorical meanings of the same words (see [5] for a review) . Whereas early research on this topic focused on the issue of the role of hemispheric asymmetry in the comprehension and production of metaphors [6], in recent years cognitive neuroscientists have argued that metaphor is not a monolithic category, and that metaphor processing varies as a function of numerous factors, including the novelty or conventionality of a particular metaphoric expression, its part of speech, and the extent of contextual support for the metaphoric meaning (see, e.g., [7], [8], [9]). Moreover, recent developments in cognitive neuroscience point to a sensorimotor basis for many concrete concepts, and raise the issue of whether these mechanisms are ever recruited to process more abstract domains [10]. This Frontiers Research Topic brings together contributions from researchers in cognitive neuroscience whose work involves the study of metaphor in language and thought in order to promote the development of the neuroscientific investigation of metaphor. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, it synthesizes current findings on the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor, provides a forum for voicing novel perspectives, and promotes avenues for new research on the metaphorical brain. [1] Arbib, M. A. (1989). The metaphorical brain 2: Neural networks and beyond. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [2] Gibbs Jr, R. W. (Ed.). (2008). The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge University Press. [3] Sweetser, Eve E. "Grammaticalization and semantic bleaching." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Vol. 14. 2011. [4] Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. Basic books. [5] Coulson, S. (2008). Metaphor comprehension and the brain. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 177-194. [6] Winner, E., & Gardner, H. (1977). The comprehension of metaphor in brain-damaged patients. Brain, 100(4), 717-729. [7] Coulson, S., & Van Petten, C. (2007). A special role for the right hemisphere in metaphor comprehension?: ERP evidence from hemifield presentation. Brain Research, 1146, 128-145. [8] Lai, V. T., Curran, T., & Menn, L. (2009). Comprehending conventional and novel metaphors: An ERP study. Brain Research, 1284, 145-155. [9] Schmidt, G. L., Kranjec, A., Cardillo, E. R., & Chatterjee, A. (2010). Beyond laterality: a critical assessment of research on the neural basis of metaphor. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 16(01), 1-5. [10] Desai, R. H., Binder, J. R., Conant, L. L., Mano, Q. R., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2011). The neural career of sensory-motor metaphors. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(9), 2376-2386.
Describing how to give individuals an opportunity to discover how their symbolic perceptions are organized, what needs to happen for these to change, and how they can develop as a result, this text includes three client transcripts.
An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination—a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity. In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities—poets, philosophers, and critics—and from the sciences—psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and computer scientists. He begins each chapter with a poem—by poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Du Fu, William Butler Yeats, and Pablo Neruda—and then widens the discussion to broader notions of metaphor and mind. Holyoak uses Whitman's poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to illustrate the process of interpreting a poem, and explains the relevance of two psychological mechanisms, analogy and conceptual combination, to metaphor. He outlines ideas first sketched by Coleridge—who called poetry “the best words in their best order”—and links them to modern research on the interplay between cognition and emotion, controlled and associative thinking, memory and creativity. Building on Emily Dickinson's declaration “the brain is wider than the sky,” Holyoak suggests that the control and default networks in the brain may combine to support creativity. He also considers, among other things, the interplay of sound and meaning in poetry; symbolism in the work of Yeats, Jung, and others; indirect communication in poems; the mixture of active and passive processes in creativity; and whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity. Guided by Holyoak, we can begin to trace the outlines of creativity through the mechanisms of metaphor.
Cognitive linguists are convinced that the nature of linguistic structures is strongly influenced by the way we experience and perceive the world and by how we conceptualize and construe these experiences and perceptions in our minds. At the same time, the study of linguistic structure and usage is credited with the potential to open windows to how our minds work. The present volume collects papers investigating linguistic phenomena that reflect the key cognitive processes of metaphor, metonymy and conceptual blending, which have proven to be highly influential in linguistic conceptualization. Theoretical and methodological issues, such as metaphor identification and the relevance of the target domain for children's understanding of metaphor, are focused on in the first section. The second and third parts are devoted to the application of the theoretical frameworks of the conceptual theory of metaphor and metonymy and the theory of conceptual blending to linguistic data. The contributions critically explore the explanatory potential of these theories, build bridges between them, link them with other approaches and notions (such as construction grammar, common ground and stance/evaluation), and uncover conceptual regularities and cognitive models that underlie and shape our language use in specific domains. The linguistic structures under consideration span the range from compounds and premodified noun phrases to constructions and texts such as jokes and political speeches. Methods applied include psycholinguistic experiments, analyses of data culled from authentic language corpora and discourse-analytical approaches.