Metaphor is a fascinating phenomenon, but it is also complex and multi-faceted, varying in how it is manifested in different modes of expression, languages, cultures, or time-scales. How then can we reliably identify metaphors in different contexts? How does the language or culture of speakers and hearers affect the way metaphors are produced or interpreted? Are the methods employed to explore metaphors in one context applicable in others? The sixteen chapters that make up this volume offer not only detailed studies of the situated use of metaphor in language, gesture, and visuals around the world – providing important insights into the different factors that produce variation – but also careful explication and discussion of the methodological issues that arise when researchers approach metaphor in diverse 'real world' contexts. The book constitutes an important contribution to applied metaphor studies, and will prove an invaluable resource for the novice and experienced metaphor researcher alike.

Within the book of Job, the interlocutors (Job, the friends, and Yahweh) seem to largely ignore one another's arguments. This observation leads some to propose that the dialogue lacks conceptual coherence. Lance Hawley argues that the interlocutors tangentially and sometimes overtly attend to previously stated points of view and attempt to persuade their counterparts through the employment of metaphor. Hawley uses the theoretical approach of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to trace the concepts of speech and animals throughout the dialogue. Beyond explaining the individual metaphors in particular texts, he shows how speech metaphors compete with one another, most perceptibly in the expressions of job's words are wind. With regard to animal metaphors, coherence is especially perceptible in the job is a predatory animal metaphor. In these expressions, the dialogue demonstrates intentional picking-up on previously stated arguments. Hawley argues that the animal images in the divine speeches are not metaphorical, in spite of recent scholarly interpretation that reads them as such. Rather, Yahweh appears as a sage to question the negative status of wild animals that Job and his friends assume in their significations of people are animals. This is especially apparent in Yahweh's strophes on the lion and the wild donkey, both of which appear multiple times in the metaphorical expressions of Job and his friends.

The literary imagination may take flight on the wings of metaphor, but hard-headed scientists are just as likely as doe-eyed poets to reach for a metaphor when the descriptive need arises. Metaphor is a pervasive aspect of every genre of text and every register of speech, and is as useful for describing the inner workings of a "black hole" (itself a metaphor) as it is the affairs of the human heart. The ubiquity of metaphor in natural language thus poses a significant challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems and their builders, who cannot afford to wait until the problems of literal language have been solved before turning their attention to figurative phenomena. This book offers a comprehensive approach to the computational treatment of metaphor and its figurative brethren—including simile, analogy, and conceptual blending—that does not shy away from their important cognitive and philosophical dimensions. Veale, Shutova, and Beigman Klebanov approach metaphor from multiple computational perspectives, providing coverage of both symbolic and statistical approaches to interpretation and paraphrase generation, while also considering key contributions from philosophy on what constitutes the "meaning" of a metaphor. This book also surveys available metaphor corpora and discusses protocols for metaphor annotation. Any reader with an interest in metaphor, from beginning researchers to seasoned scholars, will find this book to be an invaluable guide to what is a fascinating linguistic phenomenon.

This volume presents results from a corpus-based investigation into the metaphorical production of foreign language learners, comparing texts written by Norwegian (L2) learners of English with those written by British (L1) students. Three types of questions are addressed. The first has empirically measured answers: For example, do L2 English writers produce more metaphors than L1 novice writers? How frequent are novel metaphors in an L2, as compared with an L1? The second type has more subjective answers: How creatively do L2 English learners employ metaphor? Are they even expected to be able to produce metaphor at all? The third type combines theoretical and methodological perspectives: How is metaphorical creativity identified? What is the potential role of metaphoric competence? Most importantly, how are metaphors identified? To this end, the newly-developed ‘Metaphor Identification Procedure’ is tested and critiqued. This book is intended for metaphor researchers, corpus linguists, applied linguists and language educators.

Metaphor and Intercultural Communication examines in detail the dynamics of metaphor in interlingual contact, translation and globalization processes. Its case-studies, which combine methods of cognitive metaphor theory with those of corpus-based and discourse-oriented research, cover contact linguistic and cultural contacts between Chinese, English including Translational English and Aboriginal English, Greek, Kabyle, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish. Part I introduces readers to practical and methodological problems of the intercultural transfer of metaphor through empirical (corpus-based and experimental) studies of translators' experiences and strategies in dealing with figurative language in a variety of contexts. Part II explores the universality-relativity dimension of cross- and intercultural metaphor on the basis of empirical data from various European and non-European cultures. Part III investigates the socio-economic and political consequences of figurative language use through case studies of communication between aboriginal and mainstream cultures, in the media, in political discourse and gender-related discourses. Special attention is paid to cases of miscommunication and of deliberate re- and counter-conceptualisation of clichés from one culture into another. The results open new perspectives on some of the basic assumptions of the 'classic' cognitive paradigm, e.g. regarding metaphor understanding, linguistic relativity and concept-construction.

This volume explores linguistic metaphor identification in a wide variety of languages and language families. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in researching language and metaphor, from students to experienced scholars. Its primary goals are to discuss the challenges involved in applying the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) to a range of languages across the globe, and to offer theoretically grounded advice and guidelines enabling researchers to identify metaphors in multiple languages in a valid and replicable way. The volume is intended as a practical guidebook that identifies and discusses procedural challenges of metaphor identification across languages, thus better enabling researchers to reliably identify metaphor in a multitude of languages. Although able to be read independently, this volume – written by metaphor researchers from around the world – is the ideal companion volume for the 2010 Benjamins book A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU.

This book explores the context around why English prepositions are used in figurative language more frequently than nouns and verbs, using corpus-based evidence to examine the most often used prepositions and how they are employed and for what purpose. While research on cognitive approaches to metaphor has significantly expanded in recent decades, little attention has been paid to prepositions as vehicles of figurative language, owing to their polysemous, complex, and inconsistent nature. To bridge this gap, Ounis introduces an innovative conceptual framework that integrates conceptual metaphor theory, diachronic linguistics, and discourse pragmatics. Drawing upon an extensive corpus of American presidential inaugural addresses, this book considers the linguistic, conceptual, pragmatic, and contextual dimensions of English prepositions, revealing the fascinating interplay between language, culture, and cognition. This volume will be of interest to scholars in pragmatics, metaphor studies, English language, rhetoric studies, and historical linguistics.

This volume is addressed to researchers in the field of phraseology, and to teachers, translators and lexicographers. It is a collection of essays offering a comprehensive, modern analysis of phrasemes, embracing a wide range of subjects and themes, from linguistic, both applied and theoretical, to cultural aspects. The contrastive approach underlying this variety of themes allows the divergences and analogies between phraseological units in two or more languages to be outlined. The languages compared here are both major and minor, European and non-European, and the text includes contrastive analyses of the most commonly investigated languages (French-German, English-Spanish, Russian-German), as well as some less frequently investigated languages (like Ukrainian, Romanian, Georgian and Thai), which are not as well-represented in phraseological description, despite their scientific interest.