Conceptual integration—“blending”—is a general cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing. It serves a variety of cognitive purposes. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and grammar, and it often performs new work on its previously entrenched products as inputs. Blending is easy to detect in spectacular cases but it is for the most part a routine, workaday process that (...) escapes detection except on technical analysis. It is not reserved for special purposes, and is not costly.In blending, structure from input mental spaces is projected to a separate, “blended” mental space. The projection is selective. Through completion and elaboration, the blend develops structure not provided by the inputs. Inferences, arguments, and ideas developed in the blend can have effect in cognition, leading us to modify the initial inputs and to change our view of the corresponding situations.Blending operates according to a set of uniform structural and dynamic principles. It additionally observes a set of optimality principles. (shrink)

Metaphor has a double life. It can be described as a directional process in which a stable, familiar base domain provides inferential structure to a less clearly specified target. But metaphor is also described as a process of finding commonalities, an inherently symmetric process. In this second view, both concepts may be altered by the metaphorical comparison. Whereas most theories of metaphor capture one of these aspects, we offer a model based on structure-mapping that captures both sides of metaphor processing. (...) This predicts (a) an initial processing stage of symmetric alignment; and (b) a later directional phase in which inferences are projected to the target. To test these claims, we collected comprehensibility judgments for forward (e.g., “A rumor is a virus”) and reversed (“A virus is a rumor”) metaphors at early and late stages of processing, using a deadline procedure. We found an advantage for the forward direction late in processing, but no directional preference early in processing. Implications for metaphor theory are discussed. (shrink)

A recent perspective proposed by cognitive linguistics allows overcoming the traditional trend by confronting the special rhetorical strength of metaphor with its evident argumentative nature. In such a direction the psycho-semiotic approach frames each human event of sense making within the notion of diatext, underlining the dialogical tension between “text” and “context” of enunciation. Metaphor is a relevant resource of diatextual analysis since it opens unexpected views on the mysterious procedures that translate claims of meaning into discursive modes suitable to (...) specific situations. A corpus of empirical evidences, collected within the organizational context through narrative interviews, allows better understanding of the creative power of metaphors. (shrink)

Les comparaisons figuratives peuvent être introduites en anglais non seulement par des comparatifs mais aussi en combinant un nom et un terme de couleur pour former un adjectif composé du type "lily-white" ou "hearse-black". Ce travail étudie ce type de comparaisons figuratives dans un corpus de fiction britannique du 19e et du 20e siècle en se focalisant sur leur structure et leur contexte d’utilisation. Plus concrètement, il s’agit de déterminer si, tant au niveau de leur distribution que de leur emploi (...) stylistique, ces termes de couleur se distinguent des comparaisons figuratives traditionnelles employant des couleurs. En outre, il est proposé une classification de ces adjectifs de couleur en fonction de leur originalité. (shrink)

Philosophers have often adopted a dismissive attitude toward metaphor. Hobbes (1651, ch. 8) advocated excluding metaphors from rational discourse because they “openly profess deceit,” while Locke (1690, Bk. 3, ch. 10) claimed that figurative uses of language serve only “to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.” Later, logical positivists like Ayer and Carnap assumed that because metaphors like..

Zeugma (“The storm sank my boat and my dreams”) is a well-recognized figure of speech whose mechanism of operation is less well understood. We suggest treating zeugma as a breach of syntactic iconicity: the syntactic form of the coordinative construction statement implies an equivalence or semantic proximity between the two objects of the verb (boat and dreams), while the objects supplied are semantically very distant. Unlike nominal metaphors and similes, in zeugmas two metaphorically-related, nonsymmetrical objects are put in syntactically symmetrical (...) positions. This feature, the breach of iconicity, registers as a surprise, an effect wholly different from that of metaphors and similes. Seeing zeugma in these terms makes it possible not just to explain its functioning beyond broad pronouncements about yoking together different items, but to tease apart syntactic and semantic factors that contribute to the level of the breach of iconicity and subsequently to the zeugma’s strength. Moreover, understanding zeugmas as a surprising breach of iconicity leads to the question of how this breach may be accommodated or made sense of. In the second part of the essay, we introduce three types of accommodation strategies, each with a distinct focus: the language, the objects, and the speaker. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

Increasingly, metaphors are the target of political critique: Jewish groups condemn Holocaust imagery; mental health organizations, the metaphorical exploitation of psychosis; and feminists, “rape metaphors.” I develop a novel model for making sense of such critiques of metaphor.

Analogies must be symmetric. If a is like b, then b is like a. So if a has property R, and if R is within the scope of the analogy, then b (probably) has R. However, analogical arguments generally single out, or depend upon, only one of a or b to serve as the basis for the inference. In this respect, analogical arguments are directed by an asymmetry. I defend the importance of this neglected – even when explicitly mentioned – (...) feature in understanding analogical arguments. (shrink)

A theory of analogy must describe how the meaning of an analogy is derived from the meanings of its parts. In the structure‐mapping theory, the interpretation rules are characterized as implicit rules for mapping knowledge about a base domain into a target domain. Two important features of the theory are (a) the rules depend only on syntactic properties of the knowledge representation, and not on the specific content of the domains; and (b) the theoretical framework allows analogies to be distinguished (...) cleanly from literal similarity statements, applications of abstractions, and other kinds of comparisons.Two mapping principles are described: (a) Relations between objects, rather than attributes of objects, are mapped from base to target; and (b) The particular relations mapped are determined by systematicity, as defined by the existence of higher‐order relations. (shrink)

This article explores the significance of the following fact: in neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey does one find a simile about Zeus. I argue that just as ancient Near Eastern texts characterize a god by declaring it impossible to fashion a comparison about him or her, so the Homeric epics characterize Zeus by avoiding statements in the shape “Zeus (is) like X.”.

Since Aristotle, many writers have treated metaphors and similes as equals: any metaphor can be paraphrased as a simile, and vice-versa. This property of metaphors is the basis for psycholinguistic comparison theories of metaphor comprehension. However, if metaphors cannot always be paraphrased as similes, then comparison theories must be abandoned. The different forms of a metaphor—the comparison and categorical forms—have different referents. In comparison form, the metaphor vehicle refers to the literal concept, e.g. 'in my lawyer is like a shark', (...) the term 'shark' refers to the literal fish. In categorical form, 'my lawyer is a shark', 'shark' refers to an abstract (metaphorical) category of predatory creatures. This difference in reference makes it possible for a metaphor and its corresponding simile to differ (a) in interpretability and (b) in meaning. Because a metaphor cannot always be understood in terms of its corresponding simile, we conclude that comparison theories of metaphor are fundamentally flawed. (shrink)

This paper addresses two issues: what it is for a metaphor to be either alive or dead and what a metaphor must be in order to be either alive or dead. Both issues, in turn, bear on the contemporary debate whether metaphor is a pragmatic or semantic phenomenon and on the dispute between Contextualists and Literalists. In the first part of the paper, I survey examples of what I take to be live metaphors and dead metaphors in order to establish (...) that there is a phenomenon here to be explained. I then propose an explanation of metaphorical vitality in terms of the dependence of the interpretation of a metaphor on a family or network of expressions specific to its context of utterance. I then argue that only a Literalist account of metaphor — one that posits metaphorical expressions )—and not Contextualist and Gricean approaches can accommodate this explanation. Finally, I discuss some objections to my Literalist account and sketch an explanation of types to counter Platonistic objections to my metaphorical expression types. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore ways in which metaphors contribute to hermeneutical resistance, that is, to practices that overcome and/or ameliorate hermeneutical injustice. I distinguish two aspects of hermeneutical injustice and two corresponding kinds of resistance: exoteric and esoteric hermeneutical injustice/resistance. The former injustice consists in unjust harm due to an inability to make one's experience understood to others. The latter consists in such a harm due to an inability to fully understand one's own experiences. In exoteric hermeneutical resistance, metaphors (...) can overcome resistances in others to understand oppressed agents' contributions because of its automatic processing and anti-deniability. In esoteric hermeneutical resistance, metaphors may highlight common structures in various aspects of marginalised agent's experiences, they can provide means of denoting social properties obscured by hermeneutical injustice and they can exhibit hermeneutical injustice by resisting interpretation. I illustrate these practices through works by Emily Dickinson, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. Those examples show the power of metaphors in hermeneutical resistance. (shrink)

This article analyzes how the conceptualization LIFE IS A JOURNEY is conveyed within a series of paintings ranging from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century. While the previous research on visual metaphor generally aims to describe how the domains of metaphorical conceptualization interact or discusses the rhetorical effect that visual metaphor is able to induce, this article takes a historical perspective in order to identify the main conceptual aspects shared by the paintings under consideration. It is proposed that the (...) concept of a JOURNEY is associated with a PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY that involves the start of the journey and its termination as two qualitatively different moments that are faced as a collective/shared experience and that are inspired by some human wish. This article also shows how the conceptual potential of metaphor tends to maintain a coherent representation although the paintings represent different historical sensitivities and artistic approaches. (shrink)

In this paper we present the results of two experiments. The first is on the categorization of texture words in the English language. The goal was to determine whether there is a common basis for subjects' groupings of words related to visual texture, and if so, to identify the underlying dimensions used to categorize those words.Eleven major clusters were identified through hierarchical cluster analysis, ranging from “random” to “repetitive”. These clusters remained intact in a multidimensional scaling solution. The stress for (...) a three‐dimensional solution obtained through multidimensional scaling was 0.18, meaning that 82% of the variance in the data is explained through the use of three dimensions. It appears that the major dimensions of texture descriptors are repetitive versus nonrepetitive; linearly oriented versus circularly oriented; and simple versus complex.In the second experiment we measured the strength of association between texture words and texture images. The goal was to determine whether there is any systematic correspondence between the domains of texture words and texture images. Pearson's coefficient of contingency, a measure of the strength of association, was found to be 0.63 for words corresponding to given images and 0.56 for images corresponding to given words. Thus the texture categories in the verbal space and those in the visual space are strongly tied.In sum, our two experiments show (a) that despite the tremendous variety in the words we have to describe textures, there is an underlying structure to the lexical space which can be derived from the experimental data; and (b) that the association between a category of words and a category of images was strongest when both categories represent the same underlying property. This suggests that subjects' organizations of texture terms are systematically tied to their organization of texture images. (shrink)

People mentally represent the shapes of objects. For instance, the mental representation of an eagle is different when one thinks about a flying or resting eagle. This study examined the role of shape in mental representations of similes (i.e., metaphoric comparisons). We tested the prediction that when people process a simile they will mentally represent the entities of the comparison as having a similar shape. We conducted two experiments in which participants read sentences that either did (experimental sentences) or did (...) not (control sentences) invite comparing two entities. For the experimental sentences, the ground of the comparison was explicit in Experiment 1 (“X has the ability to Z, just like Y”) and implicit in Experiment 2 (“X is like Y”). After having read the sentence, participants were presented with line drawings of the two objects, which were either similarly or dissimilarly shaped. They judged whether both objects were mentioned in the preceding sentence. For the experimental sentences, recognition latencies were shorter for similarly shaped objects than for dissimilarly shaped objects. For the control sentences, we did not find such an effect of similarity in shape. These findings suggest that a perceptual symbol of shape is activated when processing similes. (shrink)

This study will focus on the differences in the way that Roman Paganism and Christianity organize systems of beliefs. It rejects the theory that “beliefs” have no place in the Roman religion, but stresses the differences between Christian orthodoxy, in which mandatory dogmas define group identity, and the essentially polythetic nature of Roman religious organization, in which incompatible beliefs could exist simultaneously in the community without conflict. In explaining how such beliefs could coexist in Rome, the study emphasizes three main (...) conceptual mechanisms: polymorphism, the idea that gods could have multiple identities with incompatible attributes, orthopraxy, the focus upon standardized ritual rather than standardized belief, and pietas, the Roman ideal of reciprocal obligation, which was flexible enough to allow Romans to maintain relationships simultaneously with multiple gods at varying levels of personal commitment. (shrink)

This article discusses various metaphorical texts where the authors construct or ‘make up’ their own sources. Such data contrast with the kinds of examples usually found in studies of metaphor, where the source is typically one that is ‘pre-given’. From a discourse perspective, it becomes interesting to ask under what circumstances a speaker/writer would attempt to create a brand new source instead of simply drawing upon pre-existing entities and events. The article shows that constructed sources tend to be used when (...) the goal is the clarification of complex concepts. The complexity of the target concepts means that existing events and entities often lack the right structure that can easily be mapped onto the target, whereas the construction of their own sources allows the authors to have structures that are homologous with that of the target. (shrink)

Two main goals of the emerging field of neurocognitive poetics are the use of more natural and ecologically valid stimuli, tasks and contexts and providing methods and models allowing to quantify distinctive features of verbal materials used in such tasks and contexts and their effects on readers responses. A natural key element of poetic language, metaphor, still is understudied insofar as relatively little empirical research looked at literary or poetic metaphors. An exception is Katz et al.’s corpus of 204 literary (...) metaphors by authors such as Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas, for which various rating data are available. We reanalyzed their corpus using a combination of quantitative narrative analysis, latent semantic analysis, and machine learning in order to identify relevant features of the metaphors that influenced the ratings. The combined application of computational tools sheds light on surface and affective-semantic features that co-determine the reception of poetic metaphors and successfully predicted the period of origin, authorship and goodness ratings of the metaphors. The present results can be used for generating quantitative hypotheses or selecting and matching verbal stimuli in empirical studies of literature and neurocognitive poetics. (shrink)

This paper investigates the ways English speakers employ the predicates like, similar, and resemble to express similarity in natural speech. A corpus of 450 instances was created and manually coded, and an acceptability rating experiment was conducted. Converging evidence from the corpus analysis and the experiment shows that the three predicates occur with the same range of uses, but differ in their propensities to occur with particular dimensions of similarity. Specifically, like is associated with metaphorical comparisons, and resemble is associated (...) with visual comparisons. A synchronic account of these findings is developed, based on a distinction between conventionally encoded meaning and prototypical usage. A diachronic account is also proposed, highlighting the commonality in the predicates’ conceptual origins and the differences in their historical usage. This work has theoretical and methodological implications for the study of similarity. In particular, it raises the possibility that previous findings may be distorted due to a reliance on certain similarity predicates in the phrasing of experimental instructions and stimuli. It also ties into debates on synonymy, suggesting a shift in attention from a distinction between denotational and associative meaning, to the aforementioned distinction between conventional and prototypical meaning. (shrink)

The focus of the current study is the individual and environmental attributes of inventiveness among children and adolescents. Research was conducted on the young inventors who were part of a nation-wide inventive ideation contest for children and adolescents in P. R. China. A total of 621 4th to 12th grade students from 112 schools all over China participated in the study. Among them, 38 reported holding one or more patents. Independent t-test showed, compared to their lower-level counterparts, higher-level young inventors (...) were more intrinsically motivated for inventive endeavours and were more open to new experiences. They also reported more encouragement and resources for invention from their schools. Logistic regression showed that school encouragement made the major contribution in discriminating these two groups. 2×3 MANONA revealed a significant main effect of gender and age group but no significant interaction between the two factors. Results of the univariate tests challenged the stereotyped view against the inventive ability of girls. Girls scored higher in Openness and lower in executive thinking style. The aesthetic appeal of their inventive products was also rated higher by experts. Albeit this superiority, girls, however, reported less encouragement from their parents to make inventions. Results of the cross-sectional study of the different age groups did not support a hypothesized growth of inventiveness from the lower to the higher grades. Instead, an uneven developmental pattern in inventiveness and the relevant domains were revealed, which was on the large part attributed to the influence of the educational environment. Taken together, the results of the current study highlight the important role the environmental factors play in fostering or hindering the development of inventiveness among children and adolescents. (shrink)

Incorporation of a learning philosophy into an existing learning environment can be challenging to the point of abandoning the process or failing to realize any improvements.

Human cognition is striking in its brilliance and its adaptability. How do we get that way? How do we move from the nearly helpless state of infants to the cognitive proficiency that characterizes adults? In this paper I argue, first, that analogical ability is the key factor in our prodigious capacity, and, second, that possession of a symbol system is crucial to the full expression of analogical ability.

People mentally represent the shapes of objects. For instance, the mental representation of an eagle is different when one thinks about a flying or resting eagle. This study examined the role of shape in mental representations of similes (i.e., metaphoric comparisons). We tested the prediction that when people process a simile they will mentally represent the entities of the comparison as having a similar shape. We conducted two experiments in which participants read sentences that either did (experimental sentences) or did (...) not (control sentences) invite comparing two entities. For the experimental sentences, the ground of the comparison was explicit in Experiment 1 (“X has the ability to Z, just like Y”) and implicit in Experiment 2 (“X is like Y”). After having read the sentence, participants were presented with line drawings of the two objects, which were either similarly or dissimilarly shaped. They judged whether both objects were mentioned in the preceding sentence. For the experimental sentences, recognition latencies were shorter for similarly shaped objects than for dissimilarly shaped objects. For the control sentences, we did not find such an effect of similarity in shape. These findings suggest that a perceptual symbol of shape is activated when processing similes. (shrink)

We argue that are no such things as literal categories in human cognition. Instead, we argue that there are merely temporary coalescences of dimensions of similarity, which are brought together by context in order to create the similarity structure in mental representations appropriate for the task at hand. Fodor contends that context‐sensitive cognition cannot be realised by current computational theories of mind. We address this challenge by describing a simple computational implementation that exhibits internal knowledge representations whose similarity structure alters (...) fluidly depending on context. We explicate the processing properties that support this function and illustrate with two more complex models, one applied to the development of semantic knowledge , the second to the processing of simple metaphorical comparisons . The models firstly demonstrate how phenomena that seem problematic for literal categorisation resolve to particular cases of the contextual modulation of mental representations; and secondly prompt a new perspective on the relation between language and thought: language affords the strategic control of context on semantic knowledge, allowing information to be brought to bear in a given situation that might otherwise not be available to influence processing. This may explain one way in which human thought is creative, and distinctive from animal cognition. (shrink)

Hong Kong is undergoing two overlapping crises: social unrest over anti-government protests, and COVID-19. The media has linked these events in both objective and subjective ways. While some liken the social unrest to COVID-19, others do the opposite. This is an intriguing real-world instance of source-target reversibility with interchangeable source and target resulting in two apt variants. This paper reports a survey study of the links between crisis perceptions and the aptness of metaphor variants. Participants (N = 93) rated 30 (...) matched items on the effects of both crises on trust in governance, interpersonal relations, the economy, physical/mental health, and Hong Kong’s future. This determined, for each participant, a correlation coefficient reflecting perceived structural similarity, and absolute/raw difference scores reflecting perceived substantive similarity of the crises. They then explained which (or neither) of two constructed headlines depicting the SOCIAL UNREST as COVID-19 or COVID-19 as the SOCIAL UNRESTwas more apt. Logistic regression analyses showed that i) metaphor aptness was predictable from structural but not substantive similarity, and ii) the worse crisis was preferred as source domain, but only for its more experientially concrete aspects. The study exemplifies socio-culturally situated’ theoretical investigation and how metaphor research can shed light on crisis perceptions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper takes up the much-neglected figure of the closed simile, a simile in which the ground is explicitly stated, as in “the dress is as black as coal.” In the typical case, which we c...

Categorisation models of metaphor interpretation are based on the premiss that categorisation statements and comparison statements are fundamentally different types of assertion. Against this assumption, we argue that the difference is merely a quantitative one: ‘x is a y’ unilaterally entails ‘x is like a y’, and therefore the latter is merely weaker than the former. Moreover, if ‘x is like a y’ licenses the inference that x is not a y, then that inference is a scalar implicature. We defend (...) these claims partly on theoretical grounds and partly on the basis of experimental evidence. A suite of experiments indicates both that ‘x is a y’ unilaterally entails that x is like a y, and that in several respects the non-y inference behaves exactly as one should expect from a scalar implicature. We discuss the implications of our view of categorisation and comparison statements for categorisation models of metaphor interpretation. (shrink)

This article presents an exploratory analysis of the metaphoric structure of five artistic paintings within “Think aloud” protocols, in which a group of 14 English speakers with a low self-rated level of expertise in art and history of art expertise were asked to verbalize all their thoughts, ideas and impressions of the artworks. The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows: (1) multiple interpretations for the same artwork are possible, (2) the interpretations of the metaphorical structures described (...) by the participants often diverge from those advanced by the researchers. These findings challenge the methods by which metaphor identification and analysis in pictorials is currently approached. As a matter of fact, most of the research in pictorial metaphors tends to reduce stimuli such as artistic paintings to unique metaphoric interpretations generally produced by a single researcher by means of introspection. By addressing this methodological problem in metaphor research, this article contributes to the development of a theoretical and operational participant-based framework that takes into account the role of metaphoric conceptualization within the domain of art and art cognition. (shrink)

Work on analogy has been done from a number of disciplinary perspectives throughout the history of Western thought. This work is a multidisciplinary guide to theorizing about analogy. It contains 1,406 references, primarily to journal articles and monographs, and primarily to English language material. classical through to contemporary sources are included. The work is classified into eight different sections (with a number of subsections). A brief introduction to each section is provided. Keywords and key expressions of importance to research on (...) analogy are discussed in the introductory material. Electronic resources for conducting research on analogy are listed as well. (shrink)