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The fifth chapter describes cognitive semantics. Cognitive semantics is the psychologically and cognitively oriented approach to semantics that developed from 1980 onwards. Innovations brought to the study of word meaning by cognitive semantics include prototype theory, conceptual metaphors, and frame semantics. Judged by the sheer amount of publications, this is probably the most productive framework in present‐day lexical semantics.

This chapter examines the roles that metaphor might play in conceptual representation. Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory argues that abstract concepts, such as “theory”, are understood in terms of concrete concepts such as “buildings” via the metaphor “theories are buildings”. Such metaphors underlie our ability to talk about theories in terms of buildings, e.g., “His theory has a weak foundation” or “The theory has a leaky roof”. Conceptual metaphor as a theory of conceptual representation is critically analyzed and found wanting on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Conceptual metaphor as a theory of metaphor and idiom comprehension is also critically examined. The available evidence is that people ordinarily understand metaphors and idioms without recourse to conceptual metaphoric mappings. However, when novel expressions such as “His bloated ego gobbled up his integrity and used the airwaves as a toilet” are encountered, then people may infer a metaphorical mapping between arrogance and digestion. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis in the context of theories of metaphor comprehension.

This chapter contends that conceptual metaphors constitute a form of distributed cognition. But while Lakoff and Johnson (1999) propose a transhistorical theory of conceptual metaphor, the present essay, following Trim (2007, 2011), presents a diachronic account of conceptual metaphor that allows for cultural evolution and historical change. Originally presented as a companion piece to Lochman, this chapter offers a case study of metaphors of emotional and cognitive enaction that were prominent during the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, and that throw into relief certain premodern perceptions of intersubjectivity and synchrony. Conceptual metaphors frequently entail notions of gender, in addition to those of embodiment, extension, and enaction. Drawing attention to the gendered aspect of the history of distributed cognition helps us to understand our own embodiment better, while also enabling us to perceive and to critique in new ways the long history of real and imagined gender differences, as well as the political, social, and conceptual hierarchies that have been naturalized in and by our metaphors.

This chapter proposes a new method for relating protolanguages to archaeological complexes based on the cognitive process known as conceptual metaphor. Material metaphors of the people who created archaeological complexes can be deciphered from patterns in material culture that conform to empirical generalizations on figurative speech in everyday language use. The metaphors of proto-languages can also be reconstructed through etymology, polysemy, and semantic change across cognates in a language family. As a result, archaeological complexes can be related to protolanguages using conceptual metaphors as the common currency. A case study that links Mesa Verde archaeology to the Tewa pueblo language is presented to illustrate the utility of this approach.

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.

The chapter reports on work concerned with the issue of how conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) functions as a link between culture and cognition. Three large areas are investigated to this effect. First, work on the interaction between conceptual metaphors, on the one hand, and folk and expert theories of emotion, on the other, is surveyed. Second, the issue of metaphorical universality and variation is addressed, together with that of the function of embodiment in metaphor. Third, a contextualist view of conceptual metaphors is proposed. The discussion of these issues leads to a new and integrated understanding of the role of metaphor and metonymy in creating cultural reality and that of metaphorical variation across and within cultures, as well as individuals.

The opening chapter sets the scene with respect to ways in which language ideologies evolve discursively. The argument is sociocognitive. At the bottom of all discursive activity lie conceptual metaphors of language and other related abstract concepts such as the “nation-state”. Possible statements derived from these conceptual metaphors form the stuff of which culturally valid myths are constructed, and these drive the construction of hegemonic discourses on language. As no discursive formations can be free of ideology (in the political and nonpolitical sense of the term), hegemonic discourses will eventually lead to the formation of discourse archives, in which certain things may be said (i.e., are “true”) and others not, and it is through the power of archives to shape our construction of the language worlds in which we live that canonical “histories” appear. A further argument here is that canons, linguistic or literary, must be challenged.

This chapter elaborates on the theoretical foundation of the book. This includes the origin and development of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), the experiential and embodied aspects of concepts—a central theme in CMT—and the notion of conceptual transfer in terms of skeuomorphs—which are not a central theme of CMT. In order to display the importance for law and regulatory development, in its relationship to technological development, the terminology of path dependence is developed in this chapter as well. This is a way to emphasise normative linkages—in both design and concepts—over time. Lastly, in order to relate the cognitive and conceptual theory to law as well as to social norms, these concepts are outlined from a sociolegal basis of theory in sociology of law, and combined with CMT.

This chapter introduces Barnardo’s use of metaphor, employing conceptual metaphor theory to explain how comparing an organization to an ‘open door’ inculcated the values of Christian hospitality in the public perception of Barnardo’s work: particularly inclusivity and unconditionality. It argues that the ‘open door’ metaphor worked to characterize Barnardo’s values and institutional processes in putative opposition to the state mechanisms dealing with destitute children, most notably the workhouse ‘solution’ that operated unproductively to demean children rather than train up new ‘citizens’. It draws on Derrida’s work on hospitality, as well as George Simmel and Martin Heidegger on liminality and dwelling. The chapter analyses a range of Barnardo’s recursive ‘hospitable’ practices, such as the annual teas and suppers for ‘waifs’ and ‘factory girls’. Such events doubled as charity mechanisms and promotional manoeuvres, since subsequent celebratory reports circulated in media around the world. It concludes by discussing how the ‘open door’ metaphor operates as a form of condensed narrative regarding Barnardo’s practice of child reform.

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 introduces an interdisciplinary approach to the study of religious discourse, inspired by the observation that the tradition of negative theology, rediscovered by postmodern philosophy and theology, shares major points of interest with the cognitive theory of language. Its primary goal is an attempt to compare two epistemological systems in a fruitful and promising way. There are three major parts. The first deals with aspects of apophatical (or negative) theology and presents its rediscovery by postmodern theology. The second describes central aspects of cognitive semantics, with special attention to the theory of conceptual metaphor. The third brings the two theories together in search of both similarities and differences. It will be shown that there are common points of interest and methodology, and that each approach can contribute to the other, offering possible benefits to theology.

This is a study of the metaphorical expressions in the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, with a special emphasis on five concepts, SPACE, TIME, LIFE, BUDDHIST PRACTICE and EMPTINESS. It is found that the Buddhist SPACE is AN UNSUBSTANTIAL EMPTINESS, structured along ten directions and filled with an immeasurable number of dusts, which in turn constitute an immeasurable number of SHI-JIE (WORLD) on four different levels. The Buddhist TIME follows the root TIME-AS-SPACE metaphor. The Buddhist LIFE, constrained along both the temporal dimension and the spatial dimension, is A CYCLIC JOURNEY IN THE WHEEL OF SIX PATHS. BUDDHIST PRACTICE is A JOURNEY FROM REINCARNATION TO NIRVANA. These metaphors help construct a Buddhist world which is distinct from but also related to the mundane world that we all dwell in.

The chapter uses embodiment and the experiential basis of conceptual metaphor theory, especially the work of Lakoff and Johnson with regard to its relationship to spatialisation, to argue for the metaphorical essence of abstract legal thought. Abstract concepts like ‘law’ and ‘justice’ need to borrow from a spatial, bodily, or physical prototype in order to be conceptualised, which is seen, for example, in the fact that justice preferably is found ‘under’ law. Three embodied categories of how law is understood are examined in this chapter: law as an object, law as a vertical relation, and law as an area. The Google Ngram Viewer, based on the massive library of books that Google has scanned, has been used to study legally relevant expressions over time within each of these three categories, from 1800 to 2000.

The notion of property is at the core of our culture, but the bond between the form and function of property has been under constant negotiation, especially regarding the “intellectual” and non-material property of a digitised age. This chapter deals with copyright regulation meeting the societal changes associated with digitalisation. It does so through reinterpreting Karl Renner’s classical texts on form vs. function in the light of contemporary cognitive theory of conceptual metaphors and embodiment. Legal norms only appear to be unchanged; the contemporary push for copyright as property is related to enduring historical claims along with de facto legal revisions in the concept of intellectual property (IP) faced with digitalisation. Of particular relevance here is what Renner described (in terms of property) as an “institution of domination and control”, and thus the increased measures for control that are added to a digital context in the name of copyright.

A paradox about emotions is that although we experience them directly through our minds and bodies, they appear to be vague and elusive when we try to talk about them. Consequently, most of the language used to speak about emotions is metaphorical. This observation is consonant with cognitive linguistics, which views metaphors as conceptual rather than purely verbal mechanisms. Emotions are one of the central matters of Buddhist philosophy, and language used to talk about them abounds in conceptual metaphors. This article inspects metaphorical expressions used in the canonical collection of early Buddhist texts. It reveals fundamental differences in the way emotions are thought of in Buddhist and Western culture. While in the West emotions are typically conceptualized in terms of FORCE, Buddhism conceives them in terms of FORCE, OBJECT or both. These variations are not incidental and results from fundamental differences between Christian and Buddhist worldviews and philosophy.

The chapter explores the semantics of timbre through an analysis of the metaphorical conventions of timbre description, particularly its ubiquitous crossmodal comparisons to vision and touch. Accounting for this synesthetic borrowing using cognitive linguistic methods—including image schema and conceptual metaphor theory—it argues that common verbal descriptions of timbre reflect coherent, embodied, and fundamentally transformative characteristics of sonic experience. Evidence for this timbre sematic theory is drawn from the author’s perceptual and corpus linguistic research on how we verbalize aspects of timbre. It identifies a number of common metaphorical mappings for timbre and concludes by proposing a theory of timbre concepts. Demonstrating the shared processing of timbre, metaphor, and other sensory domains, the chapter affirms that words for timbre are not just descriptive, but performative.

Metaphor is dangerous. The act of metaphoring—mapping between unlike domains—has iconic power, power to transform our conventional ways of seeing and, by so doing, to change or modulate our minds and our behavior. First, the chapter lays the groundwork for a cognitively oriented view of metaphor by discussing two contrasting views of what happens when one either takes metaphor literally or sees it as a model of reality. It then explores the ways in which good metaphor has been traditionally understood in literary criticism in order to suggest a more interconnected approach between ourselves and the worlds of our experience. The chapter compares the present view of metaphorical function in structuring a poem as icon with two Peircean-influenced approaches, and introduces hierarchic metaphoric processing at the linguistic, conceptual, and sensory-emotive levels. Finally, the chapter builds on the model of blending to explain how metaphoring functions in the creation of a poetic icon.