27.2968, Review: Cog Sci; Discourse; Gen Ling; Ling Theories: Musolff, Zinken (2015)

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Subject: 27.2968, Review: Cog Sci; Discourse; Gen Ling; Ling Theories: Musolff, Zinken (2015)

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Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 12:00:10
From: Nina Julich [nina_julich at yahoo.de]
Subject: Metaphor and Discourse

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-3897.html

EDITOR: Andreas  Musolff
EDITOR: Jörg  Zinken
TITLE: Metaphor and Discourse
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Nina Julich, Universität Leipzig

Reviews Editor: Robert A. Cote

SUMMARY

This 2015 publication “Metaphor and Discourse” edited by Andreas Musolff and
Jörg Zinken is a paperback version of a book which was first published in
2009. The book is divided into three parts: Part I Metaphor in Discourse:
Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives, Part II Metaphors in Contemporary
Public Discourses: Case Studies, and Part III Metaphor Evolution in Discourse
History. It begins with an introduction by the editors and concludes with a
commentary by Julia Lonergan and Ray Gibbs, one of the leading figures in CMT
research. In the following, each of the 16 papers will be briefly summarized
and discussed.

In the introductory chapter, “A Discourse-Centered Perspective on Metaphorical
Meaning and Understanding” by Jörg Zinken and Andreas Musolff, the editors
sketch out how the study of metaphor in discourse as an applied endeavor may
still challenge and feed theoretical assumptions in important ways. Thus, the
aim of this collection is to bring together empirical analysis and a
theoretical perspective by stressing the importance of context (textually,
socio-culturally, and historically) in metaphor studies. For example, theories
on metaphor like Relevance Theory or CMT often suggest that what is mapped in
a metaphor is very general, i.e. we form abstract ad-hoc categories or we map
between broad domains. Discourse studies, however, have shown that distinct
forms are not irrelevant, and thus cast doubts on the general-mapping
hypothesis. For this reason, Zinken and Musolff invite metaphor scholars to
“take seriously the usage-based credo that things are what they are because of
their use” (4).

Part I. Metaphor in Discourse: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives

In Chapter 2, “Metaphor, Culture, and Discourse: The Pressure of Coherence”,
Zoltán Kövecses  focuses on reasons for variation between the use of
conventional, automatic and probably universal metaphors on one hand and more
varied, individual uses of metaphor in naturally occurring discourse on the
other. The use of the former can be explained in terms of the ‘classic’
Conceptual Metaphor Theory, whereas the latter cannot (at least not fully).
Therefore, Kövecses proposes the Pressure of Coherence Hypothesis. The
principle states that when people use metaphors, their choice of expression is
adjusted to and thus influenced by the respective communicative situation,
physical environment, and social or cultural context. Former FIFA president
Sepp Blatter, for example, uses a football game metaphor to talk about the
international politics of football (19). 

In Chapter 3, “Three Kinds of Metaphor in Discourse: A Linguistic Taxonomy”,
Gerard Steen identifies the following three types of metaphor: regular lexical
metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999), grammatical metaphor (Halliday 1985,
Halliday & Matthiessen 1999), and other forms of metaphor like simile and
analogy. To illustrate the notion of grammatical metaphor, consider the
following two sentences given by Steen: ‘The fifth day saw them at the summit’
versus ‘They arrived at the summit on the fifth day’. The first is a
metaphorical variant of the second because it expresses a (literal) material
process in terms of a mental process of perception. The three types of
metaphor differ in the following way: Regular lexical metaphors present
‘indirect’ language use. Other forms of metaphor like simile or analogy
present ‘direct’ language use via an explicit comparison. Grammatical
metaphor, on the other hand, presents an ‘alternative’ expression that is
afforded by the language system.

In “Reading Sonnet 30: Discourse, Metaphor and Blending”, Paul Chilton
analyses Shakespeare’s Sonnet to show how both linguistic prompts in the text
(the microdiscourse) as well as the cultural environment of the discourse (the
macrodiscourse) give rise to ‘cognitive effects’, i.e. the emergence of
certain meanings or concepts. Chilton shows that the sonnet is structured by
two interwoven conceptual metaphors: the possibly entrenched VALUED
EXPERIENCES ARE VALUED POSSESSIONS and the less conventional CERTAIN KINDS OF
SOLITARY THOUGHT ARE SESSIONS OF A LAW COURT. Chilton highlights, however,
that a metaphorical analysis alone cannot account for the complex imagery
evoked by the poem. Instead, it is also ambiguous expressions activating two
different meanings which both have to be conceptually integrated. In order to
reach maximal coherence metaphorical and ambiguous meanings are conceptually
integrated via Blending.

Christ’l De Landtsheer’s “Collecting Political Meaning from the Count of
Metaphor” is particularly interesting with respect to methodology. The author
emphasis the importance and the power of metaphor in political discourse and
presents a method to measure this influence quantitatively, which is
introduced as “metaphor power analysis” (64). Measuring metaphor power in
discourse involves three variables: metaphor frequency, metaphor intensity,
and metaphor content. De Landtsheer presents case studies which point out for
example that metaphor power in political discourse is higher during times of
crises. Furthermore, language used by more extreme parties (left-wing and
right-wing) tend to use stronger metaphors than parties in the centre and the
news on TV tends to be more metaphorical than written accounts.

John Barnden’s paper “Metaphor and Context: A Perspective from Artificial
Intelligence” deals with the degree of parallelism between source and target
domains. Whereas psychological models of analogy often try to establish a
strong degree of parallelism, Barnden argues that metaphorical utterances
often contain source domain elements that do not have a parallel element in
the target domain. The matter is illustrated with the following example
uttered by an African politician with reference to a Chinese investment for
his country: “I don’t think strings are attached. If there are any they’re
made of nylon - I can’t see them” (79). According to Barnden, the notion of
nylon is crucial to the meaning of the utterance, yet to understand the
utterance we do not have to find a corresponding target domain element. From
an artificial intelligence perspective, a context-issue-driven strategy is
applied which recruits from the metaphorical utterance only as much
information as is needed.

Part II. Metaphors in Contemporary Public Discourses: Case Studies

In the second part of the edited volume, Jonathan Charteris-Black discusses
the persuasive role of metaphor in political discourse in “Metaphor and
Political Communication”. He combines Aristotle’s notions of ethos
(establishing the speaker’s ethical appeal), logos (appeal to reason by
arguments), and pathos (appeal to the emotion) with that of ‘ideology’ (a set
of consciously formed beliefs) and ‘myth’ (an only partially conscious set of
beliefs, attitudes and feelings) as introduced by Barthes. Illustrating his
argument with examples from Fidel Castro’s and Toni Blair’s rhetoric,
Charteris-Black identifies four general functions of metaphor in political
discourse: 1) presenting someone or something as ‘having the right intentions’
(ethos), 2) exploiting metaphorical entailments to legitimize conclusions
(logos), 3) heightening emotional appeal (pathos), and 4) presenting something
as the truth or a set of truths (ideology, myth). Often metaphors fulfill
several of these functions simultaneously.

In Chapter 8, “Missions and Empires: Religious and Political Metaphors in
Corporate Discourse”, Veronika Koller applies a cognitive critical discourse
analysis to mission statements of global companies. Her analysis is based on
the assumption that in modern, post-industrial societies, business has risen
to the new defining power in terms of providing models, beliefs, values and
goals, replacing previous paradigms based on religion and politics. It is the
aim of Koller’s paper to show that, nevertheless, in order to legitimize
action and engage people emotionally, corporate discourse still metaphorically
draws on religion and politics as source domains. Koller applies a
quantitative corpus method using an automatic semantic tagging software (USAS)
to identify key concepts in corporate discourse and significantly used
expressions from the source domains of religion and politics.

“How Business Press Headlines Get Their Message Across: A Different
Perspective on Metaphor” by Michael White and Honesto Herrera analyses
metaphoric patterns in English and Spanish business newspaper headlines. The
particular pattern being investigated is called “literal-figurative interface“
and refers to cases where figurative expressions are motivated by the topic of
the article, thus being both metaphorically and literally used, for example:
“Manchester United boasts three-pronged attack”. Here, the ‘attack’ is
motivated by the topic football and evokes the mental image of an attack by a
striker. At the same time, it refers to the three income sources of the
football club (match day sales, commercials, and media income streams). This
particular pattern contributes to the communicative effect of the headline by
grabbing the reader’s attention and despite or rather because of its
complexity pleases the reader.

The fourth and last case study of Part II of this edited volume, “MRSA –
Portrait of a Superbug: A Media Drama in Three Acts” by Brigitte Nerlich and
Nelya Koteyko, investigates how an emergent risk from a bacterium - MRSA
(Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) - was covered in the UK national
press. The data for this qualitative metaphor analysis is taken from
broadsheet and newspaper articles from three points in time (1995, 2000, and
2005) to diachronically analyse metaphorical construal of
antibiotics-resistant bacteria and related cleanliness issues of hospitals.
Apart from the shift in rhetorical strategies, the analysis also indicates
that metaphorical narratives may have strong performative force inviting
particular actions (here: the strive for cleanliness in hospitals despite the
lack of scientific evidence regarding its effectiveness).

Part III. Metaphor Evolution in Discourse History

In the opening article to the third part of this edited volume, “Shifting
Identities: Metaphors of Discourse Evolution”, Roslyn M. Frank argues in favor
of viewing language and language phenomena such as discourse metaphor as
Complex Adaptive Systems. Traditionally, discourse metaphors, i.e. salient
metaphorical conceptions of key topics in a discourse over a period of time,
have been defined as relatively stable patterns (Zinken et al. 2008). In a
Complex Adaptive Systems approach to discourse metaphor, however, meanings
associated with a given frequent metaphorical expression in a discourse are
socio-culturally situated and may co-evolve in conjunction with developments
of the culture or environment in which they are embedded (175). Thus, metaphor
and analogy are constantly shifting entities that are constructed,
deconstructed and reconstructed (183).

David Cowling’s paper “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’: Linguistic
Mercantilism in Renaissance France” represents a qualitative analysis of
writings by French philologist Henri Estienne published in the sixteenth
century. Estienne was a representative of linguistic purism polemically
defending the French language against borrowings from vernacular Italian.
Focusing on metaphors of economic exchange, Cowling demonstrates the
persuasive power of metaphor as well as its historical situatedness. To
illustrate this, according to Estienne, the French language may declare itself
‘bankrupt’, if it keeps ‘borrowing’ from the Italian language, furthermore the
French are described as poor ‘householders’ that rather borrow from their
neighbor (Italian) than attempting to look for what they seek at home (the
French language). 

In Chapter 13, “Interpretations of the Body Politic and of Natural Bodies in
late Sixteenth-Century France”, Kathryn Banks investigates how the metaphor of
the state as a human body was used in 16th century France and how its
application changed in the 17th century.  Banks notes that in the16th century,
various features of the metaphor were flexibly exploited either for or against
the monarchy, which indicated that the body politic metaphor represented a
versatile tool for voicing a wide variety of attitudes (209). In the 17th
century, however, conceptions of the state as a natural body changed to
conceptions of the state as an artificial body, thereby overcoming
controversies entailed by the natural body politic metaphor (for example that
illness are natural to political systems).

In Chapter 14, “Bodies Politic and Bodies Cosmic: The Roman Stoic Theory of
the ‘Two Cities’”, Jeffery Zavadil investigates a shift of body politic
metaphors in Roman political thought. Initially, Rome was conceived of as a
city state. Thus, many political texts feature the metaphor THE CITY IS A
BODY. As the Roman Empire expanded, however, the conception of it as a
cosmopolitan entity gradually emerged, giving rise to THE COSMOS / WORLD IS A
BODY which in conjunction with the former metaphor gave rise to: THE COSMOS /
WORLD IS A CITY. Zavadil cites various examples from Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus
and Marcus Aurelius and demonstrates how changing (political) environments may
give rise to new metaphorical conceptualizations and how these affect how
people conceive of themselves and their relation within the world.

The last contribution to Part III “Metaphor in the History of Ideas and
Discourse: How Can We Interpret a Medieval Version of the Body-State Analogy”
by one of the editors of the volume, Andreas Musolff, presents an analysis of
the Policraticus, a treatise written by twelfth-century cleric John of
Salisbury. Musolff aims to test a hypothesis put forward by Sontag (1991)
which claims that in the historical evolution of the body-state metaphor
medieval uses present pre-modern instances of the mapping whereas modern
conceptions have been ‘remolded’ and exploited more drastically (236). After
sketching a brief history of the body-state metaphor, Musolff shows that
John’s use of the metaphor is far from pre-modern and that in fact the
metaphor is exploited to serve various functions. He concludes not by
rejecting but by relativizing Sontag’s hypothesis and argues against a linear
account of metaphor evolution but rather opts for context-sensitive embedded
analyses which may inform us about the ‘cognitive potential’ of a metaphor
(244).

In the last chapter, “Studying Metaphor in Discourse: Some Lessons, Challenges
and New Data”, which presents a commentary on the edited volume, Ray Gibbs and
Julia E. Lonergan emphasize that metaphor is always contextualized and thus
inseparable from its discourse. This, however, also poses some challenges.
First, scholars need to be careful when generalizing from their specific data.
Second, explicit criteria for metaphor identification, both linguistically and
conceptually, are needed to render analyses more reliable and replicable.
There exist some attempts from computational linguistics that might be very
promising in this respect, for example MetaBank (Martin 1994) and CorMet
(Mason 2004). The remainder of the chapter presents a study (Lonergan in
prep.) on mixed metaphor which demonstrates that despite the mixing of
metaphors in a short statement participants consistently agreed on what was
being communicated.

EVALUATION

This edited volume presents state-of-the-art research into the field of
metaphor in discourse and conceptual metaphor theory. Despite the fact that
the texts were published in 2009, this paperback publication presents issues
that are still of current importance. The quality of the volume is
characterized by the fact that it brings together leading scholars in the
field of CMT. Furthermore, the various perspectives from discourse studies,
corpus studies, artificial intelligence as well as politics and literature
present and also invite interdisciplinary research. This book is thus aimed at
a variety of metaphor scholars offering them plenty of food for applied as
well as theoretical thought.

What is striking about the volume is that the collection of articles is a very
coherent set, with many of the articles cross-referring to one another.
Koller’s paper, for example, can be seen as providing quantitative evidence
for rather theoretical assumptions laid out by Charteris-Black, demonstrating
that metaphor may be employed to generate myth (that of corporate mission
statements as religion) and legitimize logical reasoning (by mapping political
notions onto corporate discourse).

The papers are slightly shorter than what is usually found in journals.
However, this is not a shortcoming, quite the contrary, for each contribution
is focused, well written and clearly structured. Students of metaphor may find
the book to be a rich overview of discourse approaches to metaphors and may
take this volume as a good starting point for finding a research question.
Similarly, metaphor scholars may find “Metaphor and Discourse” to be a rich
repository of the workings as well as the various shapes of metaphor in
situated communicative contexts. 

Referring back to the editors’ introductory remarks of taking the used-based
credo seriously, this volumes highlights the importance of the
contextualization of metaphor. To use an analogy from Gibbs and Lonergan (this
volume): Metaphor cannot felicitously be studied by taking it out of context
and looking at it in isolation, “much as dead butterflies are pinned down in
glass cases, to understand something about how they work. Just as butterflies
are best understood out in the wild, metaphors are best studied and analyzed
within their natural contexts […]“ (252). However, the linguistic
identification of metaphor as well as its cultural and cognitive foundations
present huge methodological issues when it comes to obtaining reliable
results. The volume presents an important publication with respect to these
methodological issues by first of all putting forward problems that metaphor
studies are still facing, and secondly by introducing software (for example
Koller and Gibbs & Lonergan) for handling metaphor analysis and inviting more
quantitative research into the field. However, many contributions still rely
on introspective analyses. Introspective analyses are a valid research
methodology, yet, it is difficult to make generalizations based on subjective
analyses. If such studies would be complemented by more reliable empirical
methods, their explanatory power could be further improved. Several
contributions of this edited volume point to that issue, and since the first
publication of this book there have been some highly promising developments in
that regard (especially MIP, ‘Metaphor Identification Procedure’ (Pragglejaz
2007), and MIPVU, ‘Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam’ (Steen et al. 2010)). 

REFERENCES

Aristotle. 1991. The Art of Rhetoric. ed. by H.C. Lawson-Tancred. London:
Penguin.

Aristotle. 1996. Poetics. ed. by M. Heath. London: Penguin.

Barthes, R. 1993. Mythologies. Selected and trans. from Mythologies (1957) by
A. Lavers.
London: Vintage.

Halliday, M. 1985. 2nd edn. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London:
Edward
Arnold.

Halliday, M. & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. 1999. Constructing Experience Through
Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition. London: Cassell.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago University Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and
its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Lonergan, J. in prep. Mixed metaphor and conceptual metaphor theory. Doctoral
thesis in preparation. Dept. of Psychology, University of California, Santa
Cruz)

Martin, J. 1994. Metabank: A knowledge base of metaphoric language
conventions. Computational Intelligence 10. 134-49.

Mason, Z. 2004. CorMet: A computational, corpus-based conventional metaphor
extraction system. Computational Linguistics 30. 23-44.

Pragglejaz Group. 2007. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used
words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22. 1-39.

Sontag, S. 1991. Illness as Metaphor. Aids and its Metaphors. London: Penguin.

Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A. A., Krennmayr, T., &
Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to
MIPVU. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.

USAS. UCREL Semantic Analysis System. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/

Zinken, J., Hellsten, I. & Nerlich, B. 2008. Discourse metaphors. in R.M.
Frank, Dirven, R., 

Ziemke, T. & Bernárdez, E. (eds). Body, Language and Mind. Vol. II.
Sociocultural Situatedness. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 363-85.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a PhD student at the Institut for British Studies at Leipzig University,
Germany. My PhD focuses on conceptual metaphor use in classical music
discourse. I am particularly interested in primary metaphors and elaborations
of those in discourse.





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