Search Results

The introduction presents the main argument of Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare: that metaphors dramatize inward erotic experience on the early modern stage. The opening pages chart the book’s methodology, situate it among other studies of desire, and introduce conceptual metaphor theory via George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner’s foundational work in cognitive linguistics. To illustrate the importance of cognition to erotic experience, the introduction analyses Troilus’s soliloquy in which he anticipates his tryst with Cressida. Troilus’s imagination makes him “giddy” but it also betrays his cognitive performance anxiety—a fear of being unable to conceive of the “subtle” pleasures that await him, dooming them to be lost to him forever. Troilus confirms that our ability to process erotic experience mentally is what grants us access to it; both action and contemplation are vital ingredients in erotic experience. These pages conclude by discussing the value of pairing John Lyly’s and William Shakespeare’s plays to study erotic language. Both playwrights, but especially Lyly, reveal the power of contemplative speech to constitute vibrant, frenzied action on a stage.

In this chapter, two methodologies in the study of emotion conceptualization are compared: the GRID paradigm, stemming from psychology, which looks at the meaning of emotion words using speakers’ ratings of features, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, developed within cognitive linguistics, which investigates regularities in the figurative expressions of a language. We compare the insight provided by each method on the conceptualization of anger in English and Spanish with respect to a number of affective ‘semantic foci’ or aspects of emotion, like intensity, control, or positive/negative evaluation, frequently highlighted by metaphor in the emotional domain. We first provide a characterization of anger according to these foci, as afforded by conceptual metaphor. The GRID is then shown to tap on the same foci, providing results coherent with those from metaphor analysis. Approach-specific insights are also discussed. The semantic foci are proposed as a viable tertium comparationis for interdisciplinary communication and cross-fertilization.

This chapter critically reviews the traditional notion of embodiment in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), arguing that it is characterized by a somewhat inflexible view of the way the human body shapes one’s thinking. Probing more recent developments in CMT, including dynamic systems approaches and cross-cultural studies of metaphor, and confronting these with key theories from phenomenology, psychology, social semiotics, and media theory, the original notion of dynamic embodiment is developed. Accordingly, the degree to which people draw on their own bodies when producing and interpreting metaphors depends not only on the cultural practices and the specific actions in which they are engaged at any given moment, but also on the degree to which they are consciously aware of their physicality, as well as the affordances of the modes and media they are using to communicate.

In the short story Pascale’s Sphere Borges wrote, ‘universal history is the history of a few metaphors’. The history of world politics certainly seems marked by a few recurring concepts and metaphors: the universal and the particular, the inside and the outside, the balance of power, and the ideal of symmetry and actuality of chaos. Across eras, these concepts have shaped the image of world politics held by leaders, citizens and scholars. Such concepts are abstract but become visualised through diplomacy, war and cartography and through the lived experience of world affairs. For critical scholars of International Relations, these concepts and the images they translate into are responsible for conflict, for they become concrete in the states, borders and security dilemmas that propel us from conflict to conflict. It follows that there is a relationship between ‘the image of world politics’ and actual visual images of world politics; between abstract, conceptual understandings of the ontology and mechanics of International Relations and the horrific news and events we witness every day.

This chapter appraises the state of linguistics at the end of the twentieth century in the wake of the Generative/Interpretive Semantics episode. The period saw a huge upswing in Noam Chomsky’s influence with the dominance of his Government and Binding/Principles and Parameters model, but also the development of multiple other competing and intersecting formal models, all of which did away with Chomsky’s totemic concept, the transformation: Relational Grammar (RG), Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), and so many more that Frederick Newmeyer tagged the lot of them Alphabet Grammars (AGs). Alongside these frameworks came George Lakoff’s most far-reaching and influential development, with philosopher, Mark Johnson, “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” (a label the author rejects).