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This article offers my personal assessment of the recent efforts to censor certain metaphors in higher education within the United States. Many universities have created extensive speech codes that censor various metaphorical words and phrases for their potential harm, especially for possibly being offensive to different individuals and marginalized communities. I discuss some of the problems with these efforts and offer a brief defense of the importance of metaphors, good or bad, in our public conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaphors are frequently seen in individuals' descriptions of their illness and healing experiences. These figurative phrases are not ornamental, or distracting, but often reveal the particularities of what it is like to be ill or healing. Culture plays a big role in shaping the particular metaphors employed to express one's thoughts about illness and different healing rituals. However, a significant reason why metaphor emerges in illness narratives is because people ordinarily reason via embodied simulation processes in which they imaginatively project themselves into different real-world and fantastic situations, such as imagining one's struggle with cancer as being a complex dance with the disease. These simulations can play a major role in therapeutic interventions to help those who are ill and in distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers our reply to Wolfgang Teubert. 2021. Embodiment is not the answer to meaning: A discussion of the theory underlying the article by Carina Rasse and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. in JLS 50(1). Journey of Literary Semantics 50. 89–106. Teurbert's article examined discussion of our earlier publication in this journal on metaphorical thinking in people's literary experiences of J.D. Salinger's novel "The Catcher in the Rye." Teubert makes several points about our advocacy of an embodied perspective on literary meaning and interpretation. He argues that literary experience is best characterized in terms of people's verbalized, reflective statements about the meanings of literary texts. Data from cognitive linguistic analyses and behavioral experiments are less compelling, in his view, because these studies examine embodied metaphors from a discourse-external perspective and mostly focus on people's fast, mostly unconscious processing of verbal metaphors. Our reply highlights the importance of studying linguistic understanding, and literary experience, along varying time-dimensions, the fact that many linguistic and behavioral studies examine embodied metaphorical thinking in more reflective, social circumstances, exactly as Teubert recommends. Finally, we suggest that looking at literary experience from an embodied perspective is tightly associated with a discourse-analytic point of view. Scholars can never dismiss the reality of embodiment in literary experience because it provides a critical, but not exclusive, constraint on how we express ourselves and enable others to create specific patterns of meaning in the words they read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether metaphorical experiences are better characterized in terms of contiguity or cross-domain mappings. My claim is that many facets of concrete experience are infused with metaphoricity as part of our ordinary understanding of these events. Many source domains in conceptual metaphors may also be interpreted via different metaphorical ideas. If both source and target domains in metaphorical concepts may be characterized in metaphorical terms, then the relationship between them may be related via contiguity or metonymy rather than cross-domain mappings. For this reason, metaphorical concepts and language may originate in the contiguous, and at times almost isomorphic, relationships between concrete actions and larger metaphorical ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how literary texts, in this case the novel "Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger, elicit metaphorical thinking as a major part of readers' interpretive experiences. Our main argument is that metaphorical thinking does not arise only given our encounter with individual verbal metaphors, but emerges in various ways as part of our habitual forms of imaginative metaphorical understandings. Metaphorical thinking is closely linked to embodied simulation processes by which readers project themselves imaginatively into the lives of story characters. Embodied simulation processes capture readers' rich phenomenological characteristics (e.g., immersion, absorption, transportation) of literary experience. Metaphorical thinking unfolds in hierarchical layers across different time spans during literary reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When athletes make significant plays in sporting competitions, such as scoring a goal in soccer, a touchdown in American football, they often immediately express their joy by performing some bodily action for others to see and understand. Many sports celebrations are staged pantomimes that express metaphorical meanings as a part of athletes' pretending to perform certain source-path-goal sequences of action from other competitive events. This article examines the possible metaphoricity in different sports celebrations and whether casual observers may understand these actions as conveying metaphorical messages. Studies 1 and 3 present analyses of some of the important, possibly metaphorical, characteristics of a corpus of sports celebrations, both those that are performed by individual athletes (Study 1) and those where several athletes jointly enact some celebratory action (Study 3). Studies 2 (individual athletes) and 4 (group performances) investigated whether casual spectators interpret some celebrations as conveying metaphorical messages beyond simply expressing an athlete's positive emotions. These studies demonstrate that many sports celebrations express metaphorical meanings where athletes provide bodily commentary on the significance of what they have just accomplished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaphor plays a major role in the ways people speak and write about money and other economic concepts. One long-standing belief is that most verbal metaphors are clichéd or dead, and do not evoke active metaphoric thinking. However, research in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science demonstrates how verbal metaphors about money are pervasive in discourse, and emerge from vitally alive metaphoric concepts, most of which are rooted in pervasive patterns of embodied experience. An important part of embodied metaphoric language and thought is embodied simulation processes that enable people to talk about abstract concepts, such as money, via imaginative projections of themselves into the actions referred to in language. Studying the language of money and economic action demands examination of the bodily based metaphorical concepts that underlie these types of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When people talk about politics, they often employ metaphors, sometimes in extended sequences, in which a metaphorical idea is referred to across a larger segment of discourse (e.g., talk about political debates as wars, boxing matches, or games of chess). Empirical studies from psychology indicate that, at least in some cases, metaphors can have great persuasive value. My primary claim in this article is that many political metaphors in discourse are often understood as instances of allegory. Allegories refer to extended metaphors in which an entire narrative introduces and elaborates upon a metaphorical source domain to present a rich symbolic understanding of people and events. I describe several notable instances of political allegory and go on to suggest that people can readily interpret many of these allegories via 'embodied simulations' by which they imagine themselves participating in the very actions referred to in the language. These embodied simulations are automatic and sometimes tap into enduring allegorical themes that have symbolic value within different cultural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of public interviews with the American actor Charlie Sheen during a difficult time in his life when he appeared to be speaking and acting crazy. Sheen's metaphoric descriptions of his life mostly referred to common conventional metaphoric concepts. However, closer examination of the metaphoric discourse revealed that he characterized his life and thoughts using various allegorical themes, most of which relate to fantasy characters, and thought of himself as a special destructive machine. Sheen may possibly have been experiencing the symptoms of certain mental disorders. But we argue that his metaphoric discourse was creative and coherent through his engaging in allegorical thought which is grounded in common embodied simulation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaphoric thought is often viewed as a property of individual minds that is quite separate from people's social, communicative actions with metaphoric language and gesture. My goal in this article is to argue that metaphoric cogni-tion is fundamentally linked to human social activities. I defend this idea by focusing not only on metaphor use in overt communicative situations, but by suggesting ways that individual metaphoric cognition is implicitly social. Many of the experimental tasks used in psychology to demonstrate the psychological reality of conceptual metaphors reflect intricate couplings between cognitive and social processes. This argument demands a reorientation in how metaphor scholars interpret empirical findings related to conceptual metaphor theory, and more broadly aims to dissolve the long-standing theoretical divide between metaphoric cognition and metaphoric communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined university students' interpretations of a passage from the novel 'The Anthologist' that notably described a poet's career as his clinging onto an infinitely tall ladder leading up into the blinding blue. Understanding this excerpt requires readers to engage in 'metaphor processing' where one applies a metaphoric reading to some instance of language or a situation to obtain allegorical meaning, as opposed to 'processing metaphor' in which individual words and phrases are given metaphoric meaning. Students' interpretations of both the individual segments and the entire text revealed significant allegorical abilities, many of which we centered on their elaboration of the common metaphorical theme LIFE IS A JOURNEY. But participants also clearly created textured, personal readings of fictional texts that gave each interpretive act it own unique, creative flavor. Although this study focused on the 'products' of people's interpretation for allegory, we speculate on the cognitive 'processes' required for readers to produce their rich, detailed understandings of allegory in fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between people's mental imagery for their experiences of paths and roads and the metaphorical use of path and road in discourse. We report the results of two studies, one a survey examining people's mental imagery about their embodied experiences with paths and roads, with the second providing a corpus analysis of the ways path and road are metaphorically used in discourse. Our hypothesis is that both people's mental imagery for path and road, and speakers' use of these words in metaphorical contexts are strongly guided by their embodied understandings of real-world events related to travel on paths and roads. The results of these studies demonstrate how bodily experiences with artifacts partly constrains not only how specific conceptual metaphors emerge, but how different metaphorical understandings are applied in talk about abstract entities and events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific study of literature raises a number of critical issues on the best methods to explore how people create, interpreted and are affected by literature and other media. One approach that is widely employed in psychology is to assess the behaviors of groups of individuals in some task, and from there infer underlying cognitive structures and processes that are the likely causal basis for the observed literary behaviors. Adopting this approach allows scholars to make broad scientific generalizations about the ways that people, most generally, interact with literature. But many scientific methods fail to account for individual differences in literary interactions, and as importantly, the unique individual character of literary experience. I explore this concern in the context of some of my own previous work on conceptual metaphor theory in reading poetry, and advocate a scientific approach to literary experience, based on dynamical, self-organizational theory, that may provide the conceptual tools for proper analysis of the individual in the scientific study of literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some metaphor scholars have proposed that certain notable metaphorical expressions in speech and writing may have been deliberately composed, and quite consciously employed for their special rhetorical purposes. Deliberate metaphors are different from conventional ones, which are typically produced automatically and thoughtlessly, something that speakers and listeners, authors and readers, tacitly recognize when they engage in metaphoric discourse. This article explores some of these common assumptions about deliberate metaphor in light of contemporary research in cognitive science on meaning, consciousness and human action. My claim is that deliberate metaphors, contrary to the popular view, may not be as ‘deliberate’ in their creation and use as is traditionally believed, and therefore are not essentially different from other forms of metaphoric language. Moreover, engaging in deliberative thought processes is often exactly the wrong way to create novel, apt verbal metaphors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses people's interpretations of different XYZ metaphors, or the interaction of X or art, Y or sex, and Z or imagination. The results of an experiment involving a group of university students completing two different interpretation tasks are examined. It explains the conceptual blending theory and conceptual metaphor theory for complex XYZ metaphorical meanings. It also mentions the relevance theory which focus on the emergent properties of the XYZ metaphors.

We demonstrate in two experiments that real and imagined body movements appropriate to metaphorical phrases facilitate people's immediate comprehension of these phrases. Participants first learned to make different body movements given specific cues. In two reading time studies, people were faster to understand a metaphorical phrase, such as push the argument, when they had previously just made an appropriate body action (e.g., a push movement) (Experiment 1), or imagined making a specific body movement (Experiment 2), than when they first made a mismatching body action (e.g., a chewing movement) or no movement. These findings support the idea that appropriate body action, or even imagined action, enhances people's embodied, metaphorical construal of abstract concepts that are referred to in metaphorical phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the trade-off between cognitive effort and cognitive effects during immediate metaphor comprehension. We specifically evaluate the fundamental claim of relevance theory that metaphor understanding, like all utterance interpretation, is constrained by the presumption of optimal relevance ( Sperber and Wilson, 1995, p. 270) : the ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it, and the ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences. One important implication of optimal relevance is that listeners follow a path of least effort and stop processing at the first interpretation that satisfies their expectation of relevance. They do this by trying to minimize cognitive effort while maximizing cognitive effects. Some relevance theory scholars suggest that metaphors should require additional cognitive effort to be understood, and that in return they yield more cognitive effects than does literal speech. Others claim that metaphors may be understood quickly, as soon as people infer enough effects for the speaker’s utterance to meet their expectation of optimal relevance. Our analysis of the experimental evidence suggests that there is no systematic relationship between cognitive effort and cognitive effects in metaphor comprehension. We conclude that relevance theory need not make any general predictions about the effort needed to comprehend metaphors. Nevertheless, relevance theory is consistent with many of the findings in psycholinguistics on metaphor understanding, and can account for aspects of metaphor understanding that no other theory can explain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive theories of metaphor understanding are typically described in terms of the mappings between different kinds of abstract, schematic, disembodied knowledge. My claim in this paper is that part of our ability to make sense of metaphorical language, both individual utterances and extended narratives, resides in the automatic construction of a simulation whereby we imagine performing the bodily actions referred to in the language. Thus, understanding metaphorical expressions like ‘grasp a concept’ or ‘get over’ an emotion involve simulating what it must be like to engage in these specific activities, even though these actions are, strictly speaking, impossible to physically perform. This process of building a simulation, one that is fundamentally embodied in being constrained by past and present bodily experiences, has specific consequences for how verbal metaphors are understood, and how cognitive scientists, more generally, characterize the nature of metaphorical language and thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do people’s embodied experiences have in their use and understanding of metaphor? Contrary to the traditional belief that metaphor transcends human experience and best reflects metaphysical truths, there is substantial evidence from cognitive science that demonstrates how metaphor is fundamentally grounded in embodiment. We review this empirical evidence and discuss the methodological strategies employed by linguists and psychologists seeking connections between embodiment and metaphor. A case study of how people think and speak of desire in terms of hunger, specifically shows how systematic patterns of bodily experience serve as the source domains for many cross-linguistic metaphorical mappings. These data provide strong evidence in favor of the idea that metaphorical thought and language arises from, and is grounded in, embodiment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Many scholars and medical professionals argue over the importance of metaphor in thinking about, and speaking of, cancer and other illnesses. Our study presents an analysis of the metaphors used by 6 women in their narratives of their experiences with cancer. We claim from our analyses that metaphorical talk about cancer reflects enduring metaphorical patterns of thought. Women used multiple, sometimes contradictory metaphors to conceptualize their complex cancer experiences. Many of their metaphors used to understand cancer are actually based on ordinary embodied experiences such that people still refer to the healthy body in trying to understand cancer even when their own bodies have been disrupted. We discuss the importance of our findings for understanding the relation between language and thought in regard to human illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents comments on metaphor identification. Textual analysis of metaphor identification; Cognitive-linguistic comments; Psycholinguistic comments.

In 4 experiments we examined differences in how people understand ironic and metaphoric statements. Our hypothesis was that irony requires more complex inferencing to understand than does metaphor because irony reflects speakers' second-order, metarepresentational thoughts. We investigated the implications of this idea for how people process identical statements (e.g., "This one's really sharp") that had either ironic or metaphoric meaning in different contexts. Experiment 1 showed that people take longer to understand these statements when used ironically than when seen as metaphors. Experiment 2 revealed that people draw second-order metarepresentational inferences about speakers' intentions and beliefs when understanding ironies but not metaphors. Experiments 3 and 4 studied the processes and meaning products associated with understanding statements that were either simple ironies or metaphoric ironies. Overall, the data from these experiments lend support to the idea that irony is understood differently than metaphor partly because of the metarepresentational reasoning needed to infer ironic messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the findings from three studies examining the role of mental imagery in interpreting poetic metaphor, specifically image metaphors that express mappings of concrete perceptual images from source domains to dissimilar target domains. The first study showed that ordinary readers interpret image metaphors by mapping concrete mental images across domains, but not by mapping more general knowledge across domains. The second and third studies demonstrated more precisely how people's detailed imagistic knowledge about different concepts underlies their understanding of image metaphors. These studies most generally illustrate the importance of concrete mental images in the interpretation of poetic metaphor and suggest how metaphor theories must be amended to account for the prominence of imagery in metaphor use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the people's understanding and memory for slang metaphors in the United States. Suggestion that slang metaphors can be understood without having to analyze the literal meanings of these expressions before determining their non-literal interpretations; Role of slang metaphors in allowing the speaker to convey propositional information and his/her attitude toward that information; Pragmatic properties of slang metaphors that make these expressions easier to understand and remember.

A major difficulty in studying figurative thought and language from an interdisciplinary perspective is that scholars can misunderstand the goals, methods, and terminology of researchers in academic fields different from their own. Our understanding of how people think, speak, and understand figuratively has indeed greatly benefited from interdisciplinary investigations published in Metaphor and Symbolic Activity. However, unfortunate misunderstandings of interdisciplinary ideas do arise, especially when scholars attempt to relate data from one field to theories proposed in neighboring disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psycholinguistic research has shown that, with appropriate context, people take no longer to understand metaphors than to understand semantically comparable literal language. This finding is often taken to suggest that identical mental processes drive the comprehension of both literal and metaphorical utterances. We suggest that this claim does not necessarily follow from the experimental results. Various masking processes could foster the "incorrect illusion'' of equivalence. However, a parsimonious account of the processes underlying comprehension can be motivated for both metaphorical and literal utterances. What makes metaphor "special" is in the products of comprehension, not in the process by which metaphorical meanings are understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses issues concerning deliberate metaphor. It mentions that deliberateness in metaphors, which should not be linked whether a metaphor is novel or conventional, alive or dead. It states that Gerard Steen argues that metaphors are possibly deliberate and make special rhetorical effects. It also cites suggestions in psycholinguistics, in which categorization metaphors lack metaphorocity and that metaphor is a product of coordination among various dynamical constraints.

Focuses on the use of metaphor comprehension in the cognitive sciences. Process of comprehension for figurative language; Effects of metaphoric language on discourse processing; Correlation between metaphor and symbolic activity.

Focuses on the study of metaphor. Interactions among metaphor scholars; Importance of metaphor in linking the mind, body, language, and culture; Development of the learning ability of the students.