The Article Of Metaphor

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Cognitive semantic

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-Is a field of study that focuses on understanding and underlining conceptual structures of language use in this course. It explores how our cognitive processes shape the meaning and interpretation of words and phrases.

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Conceptual metaphors #

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# is a conventional way of conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another, often unconsciously.# Phenomenon where one idea or conceptual domain is understood and interrupted in terms of another such as understanding arguments in terms of war. They go beyond near rhetorical devices and play a crucial role in shaping our perception and understanding of the world.

- conceptual farming tells us that lexical choices “provide a different way of framing a situation, giving rise to a different construal”

E.g. football competition vs. football battle.

In the second example above, it is clear that there is a semantico-cognitive component being added to the football game which could be that of a harsh one with a lesser degree of intimacy between the parties. This semantic scenario, I argue, is derived and evoked from the semantic potentiality of the used metaphoric source ‘domain’ or ‘concept ’ of BATTLING and its experiential force dynamic.

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Metaphor in discourse

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Metaphor in discourse is indeed a complex conceptual and linguistic phenomenon that can cognitively trigger the audience attitude in an unnoticeable way based on the associated semantic background information. For example,Argument and War “are different kinds of things- verbal discourse and armed conflict—and the actions performed are different kinds of actions. But ARGUMENT is partially structured, understood, performed and talked about in terms of WAR”

-metaphors are ‘persuasive’, ‘evaluative’ and can ‘evoke a conceptual frame’ of event

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Cognitive conceptual metaphors theory CMT

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(CMT) explains metaphors and accounts for similar practices such as conceptual metonymy where we use PART to represent A WHOLE. For example, using the word “some” to refer to a whole group or when we refer to a whole when but exactly mean some, for instance, “The blue T-shirt wants his coffee” where the blue T-shirt refers to the customer who ordered the coffee.

##It is a framework that suggests our understanding of abstract concept is largely based on metaphorical thinking, where we use concrete, physical experiences to comprehend these abstract ideas. We often describe arguments in terms of war or battle, using phrases like he attacked my point which has an example of the argument as battle metaphor.

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CMT and metaphor in discourse

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Metaphors are very pervasive in poetic emotional, religious, political and many other types of effective discourses.

- In the media or the press discourse, metaphors were found to be an effective tool in constructing a nice news story and sometimes it can reveal the ideological orientation of the newspaper or any other media channel

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CMT criticism

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- Though the CMT has contributed a lot to our understanding of metaphors and proven to provide a new dynamic approach to the study of semantics, it was criticised for being only able to deal with the cognitive processing of metaphors through ‘domains mapping’

- CMT the CMT has provided “a better explanation of how metaphors are understood rather than why they are chosen in a particular type of discourse for the rhetorical purpose of persuasion”

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Metaphor and pragmatics

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A conceptual metaphor is “a conventional way of conceptualising one domain of experience in terms of another, often unconsciously” (Lakoff., 1996, p. 4). In this sense, metaphors are used to represent and conceptualise a particular type of reality with another type of reality, in which the attributes of the source type of reality is borrowed to evoke a particular cognitive reading of the target one as in GOOD IS UP; GOOD MORALS IS UP

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The pragmatic view in discourse

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the pragmatic view is always speculated based on the possible cognitive-experiential inferences a reader can make from the language used and its associated semantic background information. This could be made through the use of particular lexical choices e.g. she defended her ideas versus she presented her ideas.

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Blending theory ( BT ) replacing CMT in cognitive CDA

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The CMT has dominated in cognitive CDA studies until a recent trend has begun to appreciate plausible merits of the Blending Theory (BT)as being more illuminative for making the ideological ‘inferences’ from these background information in discourse ‘possible.

-BT can provide an analytical apparatus for a micro-level analysis of a discourse structure.

-CDA perspective, however, requires a theory that allows for metaphor to be treated as discourse. Herein lays a major contradiction between CMT and CDA, for CMT tends only to focus on the cognitive dimensions of metaphor, maintaining that it is a matter of language and knowledge. BT, on the other hand, accounts for the cognitive operations involved in the discourse process and thus provides a more suitable apparatus for metaphor in CDA

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Cohesion vs coherence add example

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While cohesion “is formally marked in the text”, coherence “is inferred from background knowledge” (Stubbs, 2001, p. 243). Coherence “can be reserved for the conceptual relationships that comprehenders use to construct a coherent mental representation accommodated by what is said in the discourse” (Louwerse, 2005). Text coherence “refers to the linking of ideas within a text to create meaning for readers”

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The conceptual coherence and metaphors in discourse 2

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- while the background knowledge, semantico-cognitive frames and scenarios associated with lexical choices, is necessary for discourse processing, the “ongoing flow of information is central to coherence

-The conceptual blending or integration “proves a solid means of coherence construction, and investigation of the resources it employs helps describe important aspects of discourse coherence” in a conjunction with “large- scope semantic recurrence (lexical, structural, propositional), or the principle ofcommunicative relevance”

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Methodology:

Conceptual Blending Theory and metaphors

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- the Blending Theory can account for more complex cognitive processing of conceptual metaphors.

- Its apparatus ar able to provide inferences about social cognition as a form of discourse practice where it hypothesize about discourse as a cultural concept that can affect “human minds and lead to acts by humans against other humans.

- BT states that the conceptual structure of a metaphor is the product of blending several mental spaces that bring about a distinctive conceptual structure in the blend called the emergent structure.

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Methodology:

Identifying the metaphorical sense of lexical choices in discourse

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-The use of a particular word does not guarantee its metaphorical sense in particular discourse and that is why the corpus-based critical evidence is always sought.

-Critical Metaphor Analysis and the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) are the main methodological procedures developed for the identification of metaphors in discourse.

- The examination of the occurrences of a particular lexical choice in the entire corpus and other discourses or contexts help the analyst identify the potentiality of metaphorical senses a particular linguistic choice may have.

- The point is that the analysts should not deal with the metaphors as a micro-level semantic structure but rather as a macro-one especially when the related scenarios and scenes are conceptually evoked in the remaining discourse.

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Methodology:

Data collection tools and the analytical procedure

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- the methodological approach will utilise corpus-attested evidence from top-down and bottom-up of the discourse sgructure, cf. lexical analysis and themes analysis.

- The WordSmith5 Tools corpus software(WordSmith5, henceforth) was used for a corpus-assisted analysis of news reports.

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- The concordance lines were then examined and the linguistic clusters of the found metaphors were presented.

- In addition,

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WordSmith5

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is a high-quality corpus analysis software that has been developed for corpus-based text analysis, and has been used in several discourse-research projects.

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Atlast-ti

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qualitative data analysis software used to analyse individual text to trace occurrences.

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Immigration and flood.1

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1- there are two constructed mental spaces; their counter-part elements gets projected into the generic space at top circle in the network model before entering into the conceptual integration process at the blend in the bottom square, see figure 1.

2- A new distinctive emergent structure arises in the blended space in the Blend in which two counter-part elements in two distinctive input spaces were combined through composition to bring about conceptual structure in which the migration of people is conceptualised in discourse as a flood of water; with a topoi of danger.

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Immigration and flood. 2

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1- Our knowledge of flood is that of a natural disaster that can bring about destruction and great loss in human societies. Not only this, it also necessitates a collaborative stance from the individual and the elites to stop and prevent anything that can bring about such a disaster,

2- it could also shift the emphasis of the blame from those who cause it to those who do not participate quickly, in taking security measures against such threat.

3- All of these intertwined scenarios and background information are stored in the semantic cognition and contribute to our understanding of pragmaticsin discourse.

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CDA of the representation of the other: cultural and religious minorities and the media discourse

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van Dijk (1998) has stated that the press uses a strategy of showing the good things about the Self and the bad things about the Other, and hide the bad things about the Self and emphasise those of the Other.

# the actor description (van Dijk, 2000) is one factor of representing the other where the “overall ideological strategy is that of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation