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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]

Much of the work in experimental pragmatics is devoted to testing empirical hypotheses that arise within the study of linguistic and philosophical pragmatics. The focus in much of this work is focused on those aspects of communicated meaning that are “inferred” rather than understood through linguistic “coding” processes. Under this view, pragmatic meanings emerge secondarily after purely linguistic meanings are accessed or computed. Our aim in this article is to greatly broaden the scope of experimental pragmatic studies by calling for much greater emphasis on the complete pragmatics of language use. Pragmatics is continuously present and constrains people’s real-time production and processing of language in context. Experimental pragmatics should attend more to the particularities of pragmatic experience through closer examination of the people we study, the specific tasks used to assess understanding, as well as the actual complex meanings people interpret in diverse contexts. The many specifics of human pragmatics demand the study and theoretical inclusion of many bodily, linguistic, and situational factors that make up each instance of meaning making. [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]

This article argues that the relationship between humor and the body is far more complex, and less linear, than typically presumed in theories of humor. First, cognitive linguistic studies suggest that our folk concepts of humor are fundamentally embodied, as well as mostly metaphorical. Second, psychological research demonstrates that people produce and understand stimuli as being humorous via embodied simulation processes in which they imaginatively project themselves into language or some real world event. Finally, the pervasive influence that bodily thoughts and actions have on humorous experiences greatly complicates attempts to empirically study how humor works and to theoretically describe the behavioral antecedents and consequences of humor in everyday life. Proper recognition of the tight link between humor and the body opens up many empirical and theoretical possibilities for future studies in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]