Search results for "Metaphor"
showing 10 items of 271 documents
From Metaphor to Practice: Operationalizing the Analysis of Resilience Using System Dynamics Modelling
2017
This paper operationalizes an analysis of resilience for social-ecological systems using system dynamics (SD) modelling. Resilience is a versatile concept that continues to gain popularity among researchers who study ways to reduce the vulnerability of social-ecological systems to a wide range of disturbances. However, its application in the policymaking domain still remains underdeveloped because it is difficult to understand the mechanisms that might enhance resilience and to measure the impact of potential policies. This paper proposes to use SD modelling as a tool to analyse resilience using simulations to quantify system response to disturbances and a causal analysis to identify ways t…
How women are imagined through conceptual metaphors in United Nations Security Council Resolutions on women, peace and security
2017
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 is a landmark pronouncement on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Not only does this resolution highlight the important role of the involvement of women in peace processes, but it also stresses the importance of their equal participation in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace. Furthermore, it also triggers the approval of some other resolutions, which are all further elaborations on that first document. The aim of this paper is to analyse, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the way in which women are actually narrated in these pronouncements by means of the two conceptual metaphors that are most often repeated: WOME…
Study of the polysemic term of minerality in wine: Segmentation of consumers based on their textual responses to an open-ended survey
2016
International audience; Over the past 20 years, the word "minerality" has been increasingly used in the description of wines. However, a precise definition of the concept of minerality appears to be inexistent, and no consensual meaning, even among wine professionals, can be identified. Although this word usage seems to spread out from wine professionals to consumers, research on what consumers assume about minerality is scarce. This paper aims to study the various concepts about minerality held-by consumers by using an open-ended questionnaire.A total of 1697 French-speaking consumers responded to an, online survey and their free answers were analysed using statistical textual methods. The…
Defining sensory descriptors: towards writing rules based on terminology
2007
International audience; Descriptive analysis relies upon the use of sensory descriptors. They are words generally associated to a definition aimed at helping their understanding. However, the writing rules for such definitions remain implicit. The present work is a collaborative attempt from sensory analysts and linguists to get further insight into how definitions are elaborated.Definition formulations were analyzed according to linguistic criteria, syntactic (type and number of nouns, verbs and adjectives) as well as semantic ones (relations of synonymy, metaphor or analogy between the descriptors and their definitions). Such a linguistic analysis was performed on one hundred descriptor d…
Metaphor comprehension in children with and without autism spectrum disorder
2020
Abstract Metaphor comprehension was studied in three groups of children from 6 to 12 years old: a group with autism spectrum disorder with level 2 severity (ASD, n = 22) and two comparison groups with typical development: one matched with the ASD group on chronological age (TCD group, n = 22) and the other matched on linguistic age (TLD group, n = 22). The TCD group performed better than the TLD group, which performed better than the ASD group, on the comprehension of both conventional and novel metaphors, with better performance found on conventional metaphors than on novel ones. We suggest that both linguistic and extralinguistic competencies (usually limited in level 2 ASD) would be nece…
Attributional and relational influence of numerals in S’ncamtho metaphors
2020
AbstractYouth varieties in Africa such as S’ncamtho, the Ndebele-based youth variety in Zimbabwe, and urban vernaculars interact with urban and modern experiences which offer them new materials and experiences to base their metaphors on compared to older metaphors in the base languages. This paper explores the use of numeral qualities and associations in the conceptualisation and orthographic representation of S’ncamtho metaphors. S’ncamtho is popular with urban youth and this makes social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS and Instagram key in the performance of the youth variety, a performance that includes the creation, use and contraction of metaphors. Numerals off…
The language of recovery
2020
Abstract The present study attempts to make a comparative analysis of two Spanish and American political speeches, which belong to two different debate traditions, in terms of the metaphors used. For that purpose, we analyze the Economy sections of the 2015 State of the Union Address in the US and in the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain. The present study aims at answering the following research questions: What metaphors do President Obama and Prime Minister Rajoy use in the American and Spanish political speeches to convince their audiences of America’s and Spain’s economic victory? What are the similarities and differences between the representations depicted by metaphor use in th…
Hope and equilibrium in the dystopian world of The Hunger Games
2021
This paper provides evidence of the fruitfulness of combining analytical categories from Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis for the analysis of complex literary characterizations. It does so through a detailed study of the “tributes”, i.e. the randomly selected children who have to fight to death in a nationally televised show, in The Hunger Games. The study proves the effectiveness of such categories to provide an analytically accurate picture of the dystopian world depicted in the novel, which is revealed to include a paradoxical element of hope. The type of dehumanization that characterizes the dystopian society of Panem is portrayed through an internally consistent se…
The Metaphorical New Synthesis: Toward an Eco-Evolutionary Theory of Metaphors
2016
ABSTRACTMetaphors are a genuinely human construction. They are used to improve communication and they are a very powerful tool that might have an influence in human evolution. In this article I argue that metaphors, transformed in powerful memes, adapt to a new communicative niche and contribute to transform it. In order to prove this hypothesis, I study 319 cartoons published in the wake of the Germanwings air crash, where I inventory 144 metaphors. The study shows the conceptual metaphor evolution for a period of 2 weeks, and how the metaphors changed as a result of the variations in the communicative niche, becoming much more efficient communicatively.
Figurative language and multicultural education: metaphors of language acquisition and retention
2015
Linguistics has long recognised that figurative language in the form of metaphorical expressions structures and communicates attitudes towards the ideas and concepts being expressed and that multilingual students also employ linguistic figures frequently in their writing. In this study, multilingual students use figurative language to both critique and describe experiences related to language acquisition and retention. Faced with the task of using three or more languages, the L3 English language students studied often turn to metaphor to describe the relationships between their languages and the different contexts in which they use the linguistic resources available to them. The following a…