Search results for "Figurative language"

Coercive metaphors in news headlines :a cognitive-pragmatic approach

2014

This article explores the application of metaphors in news headlines with a view to interrogating their potential for coercion. Coercion in news discourse is understood as a strategic deployment of pragma-linguistic devices, including metaphors, to foreground the representations of socio-political reality that are compatible with the interests of the news outlet rather than those that inform public debate. It is argued that coercion can be exposed through systematic discourse analysis. Methodologically, the study aims to integrate the cognitive and pragmatic approaches to metaphor in regarding it as both a conceptual building block of news representations and a strategic framing device in n…

The race to educational reform in the USA: the race to the top

2011

From the cognitive perspective of embodiment and relying mostly on the powerful and revealing tool of metaphor, we approach the issue of education in the Obama administration's discourse trying to unveil the ideological preferences hidden behind the use of the different metaphors. It is assumed that this body of metaphors will contribute to the political and cultural understanding of such strategic issue to a nation. The analysis of speeches on education by leading figures plus the media reflection of educational problems (Washington Post) will let us see from a close distance how education is talked about. After the analysis of the four metaphors, it will be seen that traditional values su…

Irony and the moral order of secondary school classrooms

2011

Abstract This paper describes how irony is used to negatively evaluate student behaviour in sequences where students disrupt or resist the official business of the lesson and thus challenge the teacher's authority. Irony-implicative utterances, i.e. utterances hearable as ironic in their context, are examined from two complementary perspectives: (i) the intricate interactional work utterances involve; how utterances are hearable as ironic and how participants negotiate their implications within the sequences of action in which the utterances are occasioned and used, and (ii) the use of irony in the local management of moral orders in the classroom. Findings show that irony-implicative utter…

Metaphors in dialogue: feminist literary critics, translators and writers

2011

This article seeks to investigate the changing perception of the term “translation” in feminist TS thanks to a continuous dialogue with other fields such as, feminist literary criticism, post-structuralism, postcolonial studies and cultural studies that have borrowed and utilised the notion of translation. “Translation” has become a “travelling concept” for feminist scholars who have utilized it in a metaphorical way for a feminist critique of language and ideology. The essay proposes a new approach to feminist translation studies from an interdisciplinary perspective that takes into account key-concepts and figurative language in different feminisms in dialogue. Metaphors of translation an…

Słowo, które staje się obrazem, w tradycji chrześcijan syryjskich

2017

Word which becomes an image in the tradition of Syriac Christians. The paper examines the subject of figurative art in the theological space of the tradition of Syriac Churches. Even if in the early stage of their existence those communities were an integral part of Byzantine Empire, they developed a totally different pattern of the imaging, which didn’t consist in icons or in the other forms of the traditional art. The main focus of the Syriac theological painting was to use the written word. Such an approach wasn’t a result of any prohibition inherited from the Jewish tradition or of an internal iconoclasm, but it arises from the mentality and spiritual sensitivity of the people from the …

Chaoskampf in the orthodox baptism ritual

2018

The present article analyses the occurrence of the Chaoskampf motif in the Orthodox Baptism ritual and its biblical and Near-Eastern backgrounds. Such statements are direct references to Old and New Testament texts in which water has negative connotations, being associated with hostile or chaotic aspects of existence. In the baptismal interpretation of the biblical motif, sea, depths and dragons are figurative names for demons. The liturgical reinterpretation of these biblical references is the preamble of the baptismal exorcisms. Biblical texts about the struggle against chaos were included in the ritual in order to illustrate Christ's supremacy over all hostile forces subduing man before …

Comprehension of metaphors and idioms in patients with Alzheimer's disease - A longitudinal study

2001

Language in patients with Alzheimer's disease has been extensively studied, with the exception of non-literal language comprehension. However, in our speech, we often make use of expressions, which are not necessarily interpreted on a literal ground. Comprehension of metaphors and idioms was examined in 39 patients with probable early Alzheimer's disease. The results showed that the decline of figurative language is not an early symptom of dementia and can occur independently from the impairment of propositional language. It was also found that metaphors and idioms differ as far as the predominant kind of error is concerned.

Prospective mathematics teachers’ self-referential metaphors as indicators of the emerging professional identity

2019

Ideals play a key role in a student teachers’ identity work. They form targets to strive for and a mirror for reflection. In this paper, we examine Finnish mathematics student teachers’ metaphors for the teacher’s role (N= 188). We classified the metaphors according to a model that identified teachers as subject matter experts, didactical experts, and pedagogical experts, with the addition of another two categories, self-referential and contextual. For the exploration of emerging professional identities, we studied the self-referential metaphors, which formed the most common category in the data. We observed that every third metaphor described either student teachers’ personalities or their…

2014

The role of literal meaning during the construction of meaning that goes beyond pure literal composition was investigated by combining cross-modal masked priming and ERPs. This experimental design was chosen to compare two conflicting theoretical positions on this topic. The indirect access account claims that literal aspects are processed first, and additional meaning components are computed only if no satisfactory interpretation is reached. In contrast, the direct access approach argues that figurative aspects can be accessed immediately. We presented metaphors (These lawyers are hyenas, Experiment 1a & 1b) and producer-for-product metonymies (The boy read Boll, Experiment 2a & 2b) with a…

Some Implications for Developing Learners’ Figurative Language Competence Across Modalities: Metaphor, Metonymy and Blending in the Picture Modality

2014

The paper argues for developing learners’ figurative language competence across modalities. Specifically, focusing on the picture modality, the article attempts to show the importance of figurative thinking in the new media age multimodal communication. The sample analysis of pictures and images representing the recent issue of the EU crisis addresses the significance of three conceptual phenomena, namely, metaphor, metonymy, and blending, in the conceptualization of such a highly abstract phenomenon. In general, it is argued that language users almost invariably turn to figurative language resources to conceptualize abstract phenomena that cannot be conceptualized by means of literal langu…