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Metaphor & Metonymy

I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World by James Geary (Harper)

From President Obama's political rhetoric to the housing bubble bust, James Geary proves in this fascinating and entertaining book that every aspect of our experience is molded by metaphor.

"It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!" This is one of Shakespeare's most famous lines and one of the most well-known metaphors in literature. But metaphor is much more than a mere literary device employed by love-struck poets when they refer to their girlfriends as interstellar masses of incandescent gas. It is also intensely yet inconspicuously present in everything from ordinary conversation and commercial messaging to news reports and political speeches. Metaphor is at work in all fields of human endeavor, including economics, business, science, and psychology.

In I Is an Other, James Geary takes readers from Aristotle's investigation of metaphor right up to the latest neuroscientific insights into how metaphor works in the brain. Along the way, he demonstrates how metaphor affects financial decision making, how metaphor lurks behind effective advertisements, how metaphor inspires learning and discovery, and how metaphor can be used as a tool to achieve emotional insight and psychological change. Geary also explores how a life without metaphor, as experienced by some people with autism spectrum disorders, significantly changes the way a person interacts with the world. As Geary demonstrates, metaphor has leaped off the page and landed with a mighty splash right in the middle of our stream of consciousness.

Witty, persuasive, and original, I Is an Other showcases how a simple way with words, which in the past was considered a tool only for poets, is really a driving force in our society. This book will open your eyes to the secret life of metaphor and its role in swinging elections, moving markets, and powerfully influencing daily life.

In later life, Arthur Rimbaud was an anarchist, businessman, arms dealer, financier, and explorer. But as a teenager, all he wanted to be was a poet. In May 1871, the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud wrote two letters, one to Georges Izambard, his former teacher, and one to Paul Demeny, a publisher he was keen to impress.

Rimbaud waited around for Izambard every day, palely loitering outside the school gates, eager to show the young professor his most recent verse. He also peppered Demeny with copies of his work, accompanied by notes in which he effused about his poems and dropped heavy hints that he would not be at all averse to seeing them in print.

In these two missives, known together as the Seer Letters, Rimbaud outlined his vision for a new kind of poetry. "A Poet makes himself a visionary," he lectured Demeny, "through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses." Only that, Rimbaud argued, could create a language that "will include everything: perfumes, sounds, colors, thought grappling with thought."

Rimbaud's poetic program involved upsetting conventional orders of perception, deranging habitual ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting, and rearranging them in novel combinations. Fresh, vivid, sometimes shocking images resulted when sense impression jostled sense impression, when thought grappled with thought.

"I got used to elementary hallucination," Rimbaud wrote in "A Season in Hell." "I could very precisely see a mosque instead of a factory, a drum corps of angels, horse carts on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake."

To achieve this systematized disorder, Rimbaud believed the poet needed to see similarity in difference and difference in similarity. Things are never just things in themselves; a visionary company of associations, correspondences, semblances always attends them. Everything can be seen—and, for Rimbaud, everything should be seen as something else.

Rimbaud summarized his poetic mission, and his working method, in the phrase:

I is an other.

"I is an other" is more than just the Seer Letters' grandest dictum. It is metaphor's defining maxim, its secret formula, and its principal equation. Metaphor systematically disorganizes the common sense of things—jumbling together the abstract with the concrete, the physical with the psychological, the like with the unlike—and reorganizes it into uncommon combinations.

Metaphor is most familiar as the literary device through which we describe one thing in terms of another, as when the author of the Old Testament Song of Songs describes a lover's navel as "a round goblet never lacking mixed wine" or when the medieval Muslim rhetorician Abdalqahir Al-Jurjani pines, "The gazelle has stolen its eyes from my beloved."

Yet metaphor is much, much more than this. Metaphor is not just confined to art and literature but is at work in all fields of human endeavor, from economics and advertising, to politics and business, to science and psychology.

Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions.

These are just some of the ways metaphor pervades our daily lives and daily minds. But there is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch. Once you twig to metaphor's modus operandi, you'll find its fingerprints on absolutely everything.

Metaphorical thinking—our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another, for equating I with an other—shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover, and invent.

Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words.

Our understanding of metaphor is in the midst of a metamorphosis. For centuries, metaphor has been seen as a kind of cognitive frill, a pleasant but essentially useless embellishment to "normal" thought. Now, the frill is gone. New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways. Metaphor has finally leapt off the page and landed with a mighty splash right in the middle of our stream of consciousness. The waves rippling out from that impact are only just beginning to reach us.

Edouard Claparède, a Swiss neurologist and early investigator of memory who died in 1940, studied individuals with brain lesions and other neurological damage that affected their abilities to create new memories and recall old ones. One of his patients was a woman who had no short-term memory whatsoever. She had perfect recollection of the more distant past, including her child-hood, but the recent past was a total blank. Unable to form any new memories, this woman saw Claparède every day at his clinic yet had no recollection of ever meeting him. Each time they met, it was as if for the very first time.

Claparède wanted to test whether some part of this woman's brain did indeed remember him. So one day he concealed a pin in his hand and, when the woman arrived for her next session, he shook her hand. The woman cried out in pain and withdrew her hand.

The following day, the woman arrived as usual for her appointment and, as usual, professed that she had never seen Claparède before. But when Claparede proffered his hand to shake, she hesitated, fearing another jab. The experiment proved that, on some unconscious level, the woman recalled the physical pain associated with Claparède's handshake. Therefore, Claparède concluded, some vestige of her short-term memory was still at work.

Like Claparède's handshake, metaphor slips a pin into the quotidian. By mixing the foreign with the familiar, the marvelous with the mundane, metaphor makes the world sting and tingle. Though we encounter metaphor every day, we typically fail to recognize it. Its influence is profound but takes place mostly outside our conscious awareness. Yet once metaphor has us in its grasp, it never lets us go, and we can never forget it.

Windows to the Mind: Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Blending  by Sandra Handl and Hans-Jorg Schmid (Cognitive Linguistic Research; De Gruyter Mouton) Focusing on a wide range of linguistic structures, the articles in this volume explore the explanatory potential of two of the most influential cognitive-linguistic theories, conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory and conceptual blending theory. Whether enthusiastic or critical in their stance, the contributors seek to enhance our understanding of how conventional as well as creative ways of thinking influence our language and vice versa.

Windows to the mind: Metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending

The cognitive turn in linguistics, triggered to a large extent by key publications such as Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff (1987), and Langacker (1987), has led to the now widely shared view that our linguistic behaviour is constrained by the way we experience and perceive the world and by how we conceptualize and construe these experiences and perceptions in our minds. This suggests that the study of language allows us to catch a glimpse of otherwise hidden mechanisms of human thinking. In addition to opening up windows to the mind, the structure and use of language arguably also has an influence on the way our minds work.

Right from the beginning of cognitive linguistics, the realm of figurative language proved to be an especially fruitful area for studying this reciprocal relation between language and other cognitive abilities. Mostly concentrating on metaphor, research has shown that figuratively motivated expressions abound in everyday language. These conventional figurative expressions can be traced back to deeply entrenched mappings, i.e. well-established mental connections between different domains of experience, characteristically between a more concrete source domain and an abstract target domain. Starting out from typically inconspicuous linguistic examples, such as (1) or (2), conceptual metaphor theorists identify underlying patterns of thinking:

1 He has strong beliefs.'

2 That belief died out years ago.

In both examples, mental issues are assigned the ontological status of concrete entities. (1) bears witness to the fact that essentially abstract concepts such as BELIEFS, IDEAS, and the like can be conceptualized as concrete entities one can possess. In (2), BELIEFS are construed differently, i.e. as BEINGS WITH A LIFE CYCLE. Both types of conceptualization lead to further, related metaphorical ideas: Possessions, for example, can be acquired, bought, and sold, therefore it is possible to do the same with beliefs (cf. 3— 5). When BELIEFS are conceptualized as LIVING BEINGS, they can be re-garded as PLANTS, whose growth stands for the development of the beliefs (cf. 6), whose roots signify the basis for the beliefs (cf. 7), and whose culti-vation entails encouragement of the beliefs (cf. 8). Beliefs can, however, just as easily be construed as BELOVED (HUMAN) BEINGS (cf. 9), especially as CHILDREN or PETS one has to take care of (cf. 10-11).

3 He acquired his beliefs during childhood.

4 I really buy what he's saying.

5 He tried to sell me a load of hooey.

6 This is a flourishing belief in his culture.

7 This is a deeply rooted belief

8 I cultivated a belief in my infallibility among my subordinates.

9 He espoused that belief publicly.

10 He nourished his belief with weekly church visits.

11 He fostered the belief within himself.

Illustrative as these examples may be, they also raise some methodological questions, mainly regarding the identification of metaphorical expressions and conceptual mappings. Frequently, studies of conceptual metaphor (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Kövecses 2000, 2002) use invented examples to prove the existence of conceptual mappings. One can even suspect that, at least in some cases, what researchers have in mind first is the mapping rather than the examples, i.e. that they construct examples to fit the mappings proposed. This is certainly a problem, as what is at issue are not the possible conceptualizations language users have at their disposal, but those which are frequently used and shared by the majority of the members of a given speech community, i.e. the conventional metaphors. It cannot be denied that in strong contexts speakers are able to use and understand almost any metaphorical conceptualization.' This, however, only reveals something about speakers' competence with regard to conceptualizing and decoding, but not about how the mind is structured, about how humans commonly perceive and understand the world. And while examples like (1) — (11) sound natural enough, this does not tell us anything about their au-thentic use in everyday language. For this reason, the focus of more recent metaphor research has shifted towards usage-based studies. They concentrate mostly on finding out how frequently different metaphorical mappings are actually used either in a language as a whole, by relying on large corpora like the British National Corpus, or in various more specific types of discourse, such as political discourse or journalistic discourse.

These data-driven approaches go hand in hand with a shift towards more functional considerations. Since metaphors are first of all ways of thinking about topics, they are not only informative about how speakers or writers conceive of a given issue. Especially in text-types such as newspaper articles and political speeches, they can be and certainly sometimes are used consciously to influence the hearers' or readers' perception of certain issues. Just as it matters whether a BELIEF is construed as a POSSESSION one can acquire, buy, and sell more or less at one's one discretion, or whether it is construed as a PET or CHILD one has the moral obligation to take care of and cater to, metaphorical conceptualizations of current events or problems proposed and publicized by politicians or journalists are apt to affect our views of these issues. The language chosen to talk about something thus also has effects on the addressees' minds, whose current metaphorical structures are therefore continuously updated by linguistic input.

It can be argued that the figurative structures entrenched in a person's mind arise from, and are sustained by, linguistic as well as non-linguistic sources, which constantly influence each other reciprocally (cf. Figure 1). One the one hand, taking a `Whorfian' perspective, figurative thought is influenced by the conventionalized figurative expressions which are part of and current in the surrounding language(s). For instance, if a speaker's native language 'teaches' her or him to talk about TIME in terms of MONEY, it may not seem far-fetched to argue that they will eventually come to conceptualize TIME that way. On the other hand, an individual's system of figurative thought is shaped by (non-linguistic) perceptions and experiences. These can rely on individual and personal memories, opinions or attitudes,

which, however, do not tend to develop in isolation, but rather under the influence of socio-cultural models and values shared by larger groups of people (e.g. the culture-specific Japanese conceptualization of ANGER as being located in the hara, literally 'belly' cf. e.g. Matsuki 1995). In addition to social factors, universal, as it were pan-human, ones such as bodily experience play a role, manifested for example in the metaphorical conceptualization of GOOD as UP. Closing the feedback loop and again taking a Whorfian stance, the way these essentially non-linguistic memories and experiences are processed and structured by individuals may be influenced by linguistic structures and patterns. The conceptualization of GOOD as UP just mentioned, in addition to being based on the fact that people usually adopt an erect posture when they are happy, may to some degree also be an effect of linguistic conventions. In short, the figurative expressions conventionalized in a given language function both as a central determinant and a mirror image of how the minds of the speakers of the language are structured and work. It is from this perspective that figurative language can be seen as opening up a (methodological) window to the notorious black box.

As suggested by the crucial role attributed to shared experiences, cultural
models, and, last but not least, shared knowledge about a language, patterns of figurative thought entrenched in one individual's mind can be assumed to be similar to patterns in the minds of speakers with a comparable linguistic and cultural background. This is essentially what conventionality is all about (cf. Langacker 2008: 21). However, it is far from exceptional that we come across novel or previously unfamiliar ways of conceptualizing entities or events. And this concerns not only novel or unfamiliar figurative cognitive construals, but also any other kind of conceptually multi-layered expression.

One theory which has considerable potential to explain how we deal with such new or unusual cognitive construals is conceptual blending (also called conceptual integration theory), introduced by Turner and Fauconnier (1995) and further developed in multiple publications, notably Fauconnier and Turner (1998) and (2002). As opposed to conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual blending emphasizes the on-line processes which lead to our understanding of linguistic expressions. Blending theory developed out of Fauconnier's (1994) mental space theory, an account which underlines that language only prompts us to construct meaning, since it does no more than provide us with "minimal, but sufficient, clues" (1994: xviii). Accordingly, any linguistic input leads to the formation of temporary mental representations, called mental spaces, i.e. "constructs distinct from linguistic structure but built up in any discourse according to guidelines provided by the linguistic expressions" (Fauconnier 1994: 16). A good example to illustrate this are simple metaphorical utterances like (5), repeated here for convenience as (12):

(12) He tried to sell me a load of hooey.

Leaving aside the effect of the verb tried for the time being, conceptual blending would begin by arguing that the two key words sell and hooey will call up two related mental spaces in the hearer's mind, dubbed 'commercial transaction' and 'communication' in Figure 2. As the internal structures of these spaces are based on corresponding frames stored in long-term memory and their components (indicated in the figure), the activation of these mental spaces is presumably automatic and effortless. The next assumption of conceptual blending theory is that hearers construct a blended space by projecting selected information from the two input spaces and integrating it. The details of what is projected and how it is integrated depend on a number of so-called vital relations such as identity, similarity, and cause-effect and are restricted by a set of governing principles, among

them compression, integration, and relevance (see the papers in Part III for more details). This is in fact where the verb tried comes in, since the collocation tried to sell conjures up a scene where it is the seller rather than the buyer who profits from the commercial transaction. This idea is integrated with information projected from Input Space 2, especially the strongly evaluative expression a load of hooey, in such a way that the hearer arrives at the interpretation, represented in the blended space, that the referent of he is trying to deceive the speaker or at least to make him or her believe things that may not be true. While conceptual metaphor theory would presumably try to trace this example to conventionalized metaphors such as IDEAS ARE OBJECTS and the well-known conduit-metaphor of communication (cf. Reddy 1993), it would leave unexplained central components of the interpretation emerging from the juxtaposition of the two domains. These, on
the other hand, play an important role in conceptual blending theory and are accounted for in terms of notions like compression, integration, and emergent structure.

[A further aspect which would be highlighted more by blending theory than by conceptual metaphor theory is the following difference between selling goods and convincing somebody of an idea: Once sold, objects belong exclusively to the buyer, but 'sold' ideas are not 'possessed' solely by the person recently convinced of them. They are usually still shared by the person convincing the other as well. The invariance principle proposed by conceptual metaphor theory (cf. e.g. Lakoff 1990) to solve such problems is not too successful in explaining this inconsistency, since both the source and the target involve events which have largely the same schematic structure. Blending is much more flexible and explicitly allows inconsistencies between mental representations which are related by a conceptual integration network. A concise and useful overview of further similarities and differences between the conceptual theory of metaphor and conceptual blending theory is pro-vided, for example, by Grady, Oakley, and Coulson (1999).]

 

Like conceptual metaphor theory, the theory of conceptual blending has attracted much criticism, since — at least in its early versions, before the optimality principles controlling the most effective generation of blends had been introduced — it seemed much too unconstrained (cf. e.g. Gibbs 2000). However, it is possibly also the open-ended and all-encompassing nature of the cognitive process of conceptual integration proposed by this theory that has made it so attractive to researchers interested in quite di-verse types of linguistic structures of different sizes: Blending has proven a powerful tool in explaining long stretches of discourse (cf. e.g. Oakley and Hougaard 2008), advertising texts (cf. e.g. Herrero Ruiz 2006; Joy, Sherry, and Deschenes 2009), riddles and jokes (cf. e.g. Coulson 2001: 179-185; Fauconnier and Turner 1998: 136-142), metaphorical and non-metaphorical phrases and sentences (cf. e.g. Coulson 2001: 125-161; Grady, Oakley, and Coulson 1999), counterfactuals (cf. e.g. Coulson 2001: 203-212; Perez Hernandez 2002), constructions (cf. e.g. Broccias 2006; Mandelblit and Fauconnier 2000), as well as word-formation processes (cf. e.g. Benczes 2006, Ungerer 2007).

Similarly to conceptual metaphor theory, blending theory thus elucidates structural and regular principles of human cognition as well as pragmatic phenomena. However, there are also some noteworthy differences between the two theories. While blending theory has always been more oriented towards real-life examples, conceptual metaphor theory had to come of age before it was put to the test with data-driven approaches. A further difference between the two theories already alluded to is that blending theory focuses more on I the decoding of creative examples, whereas conceptual metaphor theory is well-known for its interest in conventional examples and mappings, i.e. in what is stored in people's minds. But again, the difference is one of degree and not an absolute one. Blending processes can be routinized and stored if their outcome proves to be useful on more than one occasion. And conceptual metaphor theory is able to explain and accommodate novel figurative linguistic expressions as long as they are compatible with the more general metaphorical makeup of the human mind. Another, perhaps somewhat less important difference lies in the fact that while from the start conceptual blending has pointed to the importance of metonymic construals and thinking for cognitive processes, the conceptual metaphor paradigm has long underestimated the role of metonymy, a fact already evident in the name commonly used to refer to the theoretical framework. Even though metonymy is already mentioned in Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the book which largely triggered the by now uncountable publications in this area, and even though it has been repeatedly underlined that metonymy might very well be the cognitively more fundamental process, the lion's share of attention is still devoted to metaphor. This is probably also the reason why equally appropriate names for the more general area of research, like conceptual theory of metaphor and metonymy or conceptual theory of figurative language, still sound somewhat strange and unfamiliar.

Although both conceptual metaphor (and metonymy) theory and conceptual blending theory are no longer new and have undergone considerable scrutiny, both theoretical and empirical, there are still fundamental questions to be answered. For the conceptual metaphor paradigm, this relates to questions such as how the conventionality of linguistic expressions and conceptual mappings can be established or the extent to which conceptual mappings as such are cognitively real, i.e. the role adults' and children's knowledge of source domains plays in the understanding of a metaphor. For blending theory, this pertains, among other issues, to the cognitive status and relative weighting of the above-mentioned optimality principles, i.e. to the question as to how exactly the generation of a blend is governed by aspects such as integration, unpacking, or relevance. In addition, and despite several attempts to redress this shortcoming, both theories still suffer from a certain lack of methodological rigour which (indeed) invites justified criticism. The articles in this volume are intended as a contribution to a better understanding of the explanatory potential as well as possible limitations of the two frameworks by taking up basic methodological questions and providing empirical foundations for contested theoretical assumptions.

The present collection originated mainly from the Second International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, held in Munich on 5 — 7 October 2006, with some additional, solicited papers which fit the overall focus of the volume. The articles assembled here all share the central idea that cognitive approaches to the study of language open a window to how the human mind works and is possibly influenced by available linguistic structures and choices. The volume is divided into three parts. The first and second build in various ways on the conceptual theory of metaphor and metonymy, while the third is devoted to studies set in the framework of conceptual blending theory.

The first part addresses fundamental issues in the study of metaphor and metonymy. It begins with a strong, albeit controversial, methodological statement by Zoltan Kövecses. His article is a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the extent to which analyses of conceptual metaphor which are not data-driven can be informative about the role metaphors play in language users' minds. Kövecses tackles criticism recently levelled at more 'traditional' studies of conceptual metaphor by proponents of usage-based, bottom-up approaches, such as Dobrovol'skij and Piirainen (2005) and Stefanowitsch (2007), concerning three different but related points: Firstly, regarding what has been called intuitive metaphor analysis, i.e. the fact that many researchers in the field base their arguments on introspection. Such an approach entails that, secondly, traditional studies potentially miss out on the irregular character of metaphorical language found when looking into natural data. And thirdly, that owing to their intuitive methods, they are hardly able to draw a complete picture of all the possible metaphorical conceptualizations of different target domains. While Kövecses admits that all these criticisms are justified to a certain extent, he builds a strong case for the theoretical and practical value of intuitive studies, mainly by claim-ing that the results of data-driven research have so far confirmed rather than refuted the assumptions based on intuitive analyses.

Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij's paper focuses on the relationship between the semantics of idioms and their conceptual grounding, and argues that the linguistic description of the semantics and syntax of idioms can profit very much from insights gained by cognitive research. The fact that many idioms like to spill the beans or to let the cat out of the bag are motivated by underlying metaphors has been amply illustrated within cognitive-linguistic research (cf. e.g. Gibbs and O'Brien 1990; Nayak and Gibbs 1990). Dobrovol'skij addresses the problem of the semantic analyzability or decomposability of idioms, a phenomenon which has been the subject of many, also non-cognitively-oriented, publications (cf. e.g. Abel 2003; Geeraerts 1995; Gibbs, Nayak, and Cutting 1989; Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994). Analyzability is related to the more or less autonomous semantic status of some of the constituents of the idiom within the actual, non-literal meaning conveyed by the idiom as a whole. Dobrovol'skij holds that whether or not the status of the constituents can be seen as autonomous depends on the mental metaphors underlying the idiomatic expressions. If the structure of the metaphorical mental image and that of the idiom's lexicalized meaning correlate, the idiom is analyzable. The fact that this also has considerable effects on the discursive behaviour, i.e. the syntactic flexibility, of idioms, is illustrated with natural data taken from the internet.

Fundamental questions related to conceptual metaphor theory are also addressed by Aivars Glaznieks. Like Dmitrij Dobrovol' skij, he investigates metaphorically-based idiomatic expressions, but Glaznieks focuses on how children's understanding of such expressions develops. At the age of four, children have acquired the general ability to comprehend metaphors, i.e. metaphorical competence. Still, not each and every metaphorical expression is understood at this age. It has been found that the further development of children's metaphorical competence is dependent on their knowledge of the domains involved in the metaphorical mappings (cf. Keil 1986). It could be assumed that it is their knowledge of the source domains rather than that of the target domains that is vital in this respect, since the source domains act as explanatory devices for the targets. Glaznieks, however, provides experimental evidence from children aged five, eight and ten, suggesting that knowledge about the source domains of metaphors may in fact be less important for their acquisition and understanding than was previously believed.

Shifting the focus to metonymy, Sandra Handl's contribution proposes an empirical framework for investigating the hitherto much neglected issue of the conventionality and salience of metonymic meanings. Handl discusses the results of a usage-based study which show that metonymic construals vary a great deal in terms of their conventionality, operationalized as being mirrored in the relative frequency of metonymic meanings of lexemes and expressions in natural discourse. She demonstrates that the conventionality of metonymy can be approached, especially as far as reversible mappings are concerned (e.g. PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT vs. PRODUCT FOR PRODUCER), by applying the laws of ontological salience, as proposed for example by Kövecses and Radden (1998). However, it is argued that a full account of the phenomenon, which explains conceptual regularities and linguistic irregularities alike, can only be given if these more general preferences are supplemented by a consideration of what Handl calls target-in-vehicle salience, a term which captures the degree to which target-related attributes are salient in the vehicle concept that is used to convey a meto-nymic meaning.

The second part of the volume collects papers which share a strong empirical grounding in authentic data and the goal of applying the cognitive-linguistic theory of metaphor in the service of superordinate aims. Both Brigitte Nerlich and Monica Petrica study strategies, exploitations, and effects of the use of metaphor in public discourse. Nerlich examines the role of metaphor in disease management discourses relating to two recent types of disease which received considerable media coverage in the last years, foot and mouth disease and avian influenza. Using UK print media as the source for her empirical investigations, she shows how different metaphor scenarios are created and employed in the media, which then heavily influence public opinion about such socio-political issues (cf. also Musolff 2006). Nerlich suggests that the metaphorical conceptualization of diseases and its change over time can, in general, be explained by a source-path-goal schema, which entails the extensive use of journey metaphors. Accordingly, a virus which has not yet 'arrived' in a given country, is construed as travelling. However, once it has reached its goal, i.e. the country, the conceptualization changes and war metaphors prevail.

The variance of metaphor usage is also the topic of Monica Petrica's contribution. She looks into the Maltese journalistic discourse covering the EU-membership of the country. Based on a corpus of English-language newspapers, she identifies metaphor variance of two types: overt and covert. Overt variation describes the more obvious differences between metaphors commonly used in countries like Great Britain or Germany, i.e. the more powerful member states, and Maltese metaphors, i.e. the metaphors of one of the weaker members. These intercultural differences between European and nation-specific metaphors manifest themselves in the use of dif-ferent source domains. While the former are dominated by sources like FAMILY, GAMES, or BUILDING, the latter depict the EU as a body exercising pressure upon Malta or even as abusing it. Covert variation designates two different forms of variation: Firstly, the use of identical source domains across countries which are, however, linked to different targets in the different states. Secondly, cases in which it seems at first glance as if the sources and targets employed were the same as in other countries, whereas a closer analysis reveals that the sources are actually conceptually different. Petrica shows that the intra-cultural, covert variation in particular can only be noticed and analyzed if the cultural context is taken into account to a sufficient degree.

Kathleen Ahrens' paper is also concerned with political discourse. Her aim lies in uncovering the underlying cognitive models in the speeches of US presidents Ronald Reagan, George HAW. Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush Jr. Ahrens takes the criticism of Lakoff s (1996, 2002) ideas concerning the two dominant cognitive models related to the two political parties in the US — i.e. the strict father model (MORALITY IS STRENGTH) for the Republicans and the nurturant parent model (MORALITY IS NURTURANCE) for the Democrats — as her starting-point, and proposes a methodology for the identification of metaphorical models through the examination of lexical frequency and co-occurrence patterns in small computerized corpora. An analysis of the frequencies of keywords associated with the two different models proposed by Lakoff as well as a subsequent examination of collocational patterns is revealing in two respects, as Ahrens demonstrates: Firstly, with regard to the more general political convictions of the different presidents, and secondly, concerning how they adjust their metaphors to different types of audiences.

Like Ahrens' paper, Beate Hampe's contribution relies on corpus data and has a strong methodological focus. Hampe investigates the semantics of grammar and combines metaphor theory and construction grammar in her study of the so-called causative resultatives, which include the Caused-Motion Construction (e.g. The warm air pushes other air out of the way), and the Resultative Construction (e.g. If you have fresh maggots, riddle them clean of the sawdust; both examples taken from the International Corpus of English — GB). By way of collostructional analysis, it is demonstrated that the postulation of the Resultative Construction and its extensions does not exhaustively account for the semantic potential of the complex-transitive argument structure with adjectival predicative, as there are multiple form-function mappings. In particular, there is a strong, non-resultative verb class, which is referred to by Hampe as the attributive class. This class covers cognition verbs, and the constructional meaning underlying these expressions can be described as (X THINK [Y BE Z]). While metaphorical polysemy links can account for a wide variety of uses of the two types of causative resultatives, it is shown that is is not likely that attributive uses of this argument structure are derived via a metaphorical inheritance link from resultatives ones. Based on this main finding, Hampe differentiates metaphorical links between constructions on different levels of generality, i.e. the schematic and the local level.

The third and last part of the volume reflects the growing interest in conceptual blending theory, and is structured along the size of the linguistic units investigated. The section starts with Hans-Jörg Schmid's study of the understanding of novel N+N-compounds. Based on data on the comprehension of invented compounds such as bean-garden or hamburger-shrub investigated by Ryder (1994), Schmid tests the predictions made by concep-tual blending theory as to how humans are likely to cope with situations in which they are forced to make sense of novel combinations of existing lexical material. The theory predicts that the process of 'running the blend' is constrained by the governing or optimality principles (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002). It turns out that the principles of relevance as well as the maximization of vital relations like CHANGE, SPACE, IDENTITY, and CAUSE-EFFECT can explain large parts of the data analyzed. However, some of the vital relations, i.e. ROLE, REPRESENTATION, ANALOGY, and DIS-ANALOGY, are not confirmed by the data. Due to the restricted data set, this, however, does not falsify Fauconnier and Turner's assumptions. More importantly, the data suggest further conceptual links not yet explicitly covered by blending theory, such as CONTAINER- or MADE-OF-relations, which are all motivated by the relevance principle hitherto quite unspecified with-in the framework of blending. Schmid therefore concludes that this principle should be strengthened and amended by adopting a simplified notion of optimal relevance in line with Sperber and Wilson's (e.g. 1995) relevance theory.

The paper by Reka Benczes also applies blending theory to compounds. Benczes tests the potential of the theory to explain creative ad-hoc metaphorical and metonymic N+N-compounds, which have been largely neglected by traditional approaches due to their semantic non-transparency. After an introduction to the general explanatory potential of blending with respect to creative compounding, Benczes's contribution provides detailed accounts of the meanings of two such compounds, sandwich generation and flame sandwich. It is argued that their actual meanings have developed out of a sequence of different blending operations, all initiated by a first, physical-material blending process which has led to the original meaning of the word sandwich. The paper ends with some theoretical remarks on the justification of using of blending theory to explain N+N-compounds.

Elena Tribushinina's contribution takes the section on blending from word-formation to the semantic structure of premodified noun phrases. In her analyses, which concentrate on 'simple' noun modifications via predi-cating colour adjectives (e.g. red house as opposed to more exotic cases like dolphin-safe or fool-proof), she combines blending theory and ideas from Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, especially his notions of active zones (e.g. 1984, 1987) and reference points (1993). It is shown that, contrary to what has been pointed out by Murphy (1990), for example, even the understanding of 'simple' predicating adjectives like red is context-dependent. It varies with the active zone of the ENTITY SPACE, i.e. the space containing information about the modified noun, which is determined by factors such as e.g. perceptual salience, and discourse relevance. The active zone of the PROPERTY SPACE, i.e. the space containing information about the colour, is accessed, however, via a number of reference points within the spectrum of a given colour. What is more, it is argued that the emergent structure, typically described as being a characteristic of the blended space only, is not restricted to this space. Emergent structure is said to pertain to the whole conceptual integration network, since no one fixed and predeter-mined reference point exists in the PROPERTY SPACE in the case of pre-modified noun phrases, but rather different ones among which the decoder has to choose in order to establish mental contact with the relevant active zone.

The section closes with Siaohui Kok and Wolfram Bublitz's contribution, which takes up the register of political discourse also investigated by Nerlich, Petrica as well as Ahrens, but exploits the potential of blending theory to explain the fundamental pragmatic phenomena of common ground and stance/evaluation. They provide detailed analyses of two texts, one political joke and one short extract from a political speech, where the evaluative meaning is not encoded in the lexical or structural surface, but has to be arrived at by way of more complex cognitive processes. Pragmatic theory alone, it is argued, is not sufficient to account for how what is actually meant is inferred from what is said in such cases. In line with blending theory, it is proposed that the addressees' construal of evaluative meaning depends on setting up and mapping mental spaces which allow them to align their 'inside-world' to the speaker's/writer's. By doing so, common ground is created, which is accordingly characterized as an emergent configuration composed of semantic as well as attitudinal aspects. Only when this empathetic process of creating common ground is success-fully accomplished can the intended evaluative meaning be derived or inferred — either by relying on stored cognitive domains or frames or by constructing short-lived mental spaces.

Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar edited by Klaus-Uwe Panther, Linda Thornburg, Antonio Barcelona (Human Cognitive Processing: John Benjamins Publishing Company) Figurative language has been regarded traditionally as situated outside the realm of grammar. However, with the advent of Cognitive Linguistics, metonymy and metaphor are now recognized as being not only ornamental rhetorical tropes but fundamental figures of thought that shape, to a considerable extent, the conceptual structure of languages.

The present volume goes even beyond this insight to propose that grammar itself is metonymical in nature (Langacker) and that conceptual metonymy and metaphor leave their imprints on lexicogrammatical structure. This thesis is developed and substantiated for a wide array of languages and lexicogrammatical phenomena, such as word class meaning and word formation, case and aspect, proper names and noun phrases, predicate and clause constructions, and other metonymically and metaphorically motivated grammatical meanings and forms. The volume should be of interest to scholars and students in cognitive and functional linguistics, in particular, conceptual metonymy and metaphor theory, cognitive typology, and pragmatics.

"Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar is a fascinating collection of thought-provoking chapters offering a new understanding of what we mean by grammar of natural languages. I wholeheartedly recommend this volume to all linguists who are open to rethinking the basics of their discipline." -John Newman, University of Alberta

"This book proposes that the grammar — syntax and morphology — reflect metaphorical and metonymic processes of conceptualization. It offers an exciting and innovative perspective on a variety of topics in a wide range of languages and is an important addition to the growing literature on the conceptual and functional basis of grammar." John Taylor, University of Otego

Many linguists, if not most, would answer the question "What does figuration have to do with grammar?" by shaking their heads and retorting "Nothing whatsoever". Given the widespread skepticism of linguists about finding any connections between figuration and grammar, a book on metonymy and metaphor in grammar requires a sufficiently clear conception of grammar, on the one hand, and of figuration, on the other, to make a case for the interaction between the two. In the sections that follow we suggest some answers to the question of how figuration relates to grammar, focusing in particular on how figurative thought might influence grammar. In Section 2, we start out with a brief overview of some overarching features of cognitive linguistics, contrasting it with its main competitor, generative grammar, from and against which it historically emerged. In Section 3, we continue the discussion of generative and cognitive linguistic models focusing on how these models view the position of grammar in the overall architecture of language. In Section 4, we develop a reference frame for analyzing the relation between figuration and grammar. Sections 5 and 6 present data in support of the hypothesis that conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy motivate the distributional properties of grammatical elements. Section 7 characterizes the contributions to the present volume and relates them, where possible, to the framework developed in Section 4. Section 8 closes this introductory chapter with some suggestions for future research — stressing in particular the importance of figuration for the diachronic development of grammatical categories and its relevance to typological studies.

The contributions to the present volume cover a variety of linguistic phenomena that exhibit interactions between metonymy and metaphor and lexicogrammatical structure. We have organized the contributions into five parts, largely on the basis of the kinds of lexicogrammatical phenomena investigated by the authors. Languages and language varieties analyzed in some depth include: Aghul (East Caucasian), Brazilian Portuguese, Croatian, English, Singaporean and Malaysian English, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Udi (East Caucasian). In the subsequent sections, we provide brief summaries of the content of the contributions.

Part 1: Word class meaning and word formation

The three contributions in Part 1 are dedicated to grammatically relevant metaphoric and metonymic operations on the word level. Wiltrud Mihatsch considers the empirical evidence for postulating a metaphorically based THING schema for nouns. Margarida Basilio discusses the metonymically motivated sense extensions of agent suffixes in Brazilian Portuguese, and Gary Palmer, Russell S. Rader, and Art D. Clarito provide an in-depth analysis of the Tagalog prefix ka-, which functions as a "metonymic operator".

In her chapter "Nouns are THINGS: Evidence for a grammatical metaphor?" Wiltrud Mihatsch takes up the age-old question whether parts of speech, here nouns, have a conceptual basis. Her point of departure is Ronald Langacker's postulate that nouns exhibit a THING schema that is metaphorically derived from the concept PHYSICAL oBJECT. Mihatsch discusses morphological, typological, semantic, and psycholinguistic properties that distinguish nouns from other parts of speech, as well as paths of lexical change that provide evidence for the THING schema. She also shows that nouns derived morphologically from other parts of speech are not semantically equivalent to their bases, but acquire lexicogrammatical and conceptual properties of nouns as a result of the nominalization process. This observation is in line with the hypothesis (10i) outlined in Section 4.2. that the source meaning of (grammatical) metaphors has an impact on the grammatical (distributional) properties of their targets. Thus, for example, in a verb-based nominal, the THING schema metaphorizes a Process as a PHYSICAL object-like entity. Finally, Mihatsch analyzes overt manifestations of the noun schema, i.e. the use of lexemes such as thing as placeholders. Although the grammaticalization paths of these placeholder nouns do not reveal any metaphorical extensions from the concept PHYSICAL object, the synchronic properties of these nouns point to a metaphorical noun schema THING.

Margarida Basilio, in her chapter "The role of metonymy in word formation: Brazilian Portuguese agent noun constructions", investigates the workings of conceptual metonymy in the creation of polysemy. Basilio's aim is to show that metonymy is fundamental to the functioning of the lexicon as a dynamic storage system of symbolic forms. The author demonstrates that agent nouns in Portuguese are interpreted on the basis of metonymic models.' Agent nouns in this language include formations in -dor (e.g. governador 'governor'), -nte (e.g. estudante `student'), -eiro (porteiro `doorman'), and -ista (e.g. neurologista `neurologist'). These suffixes are polysemous, i.e., they form families of metonymically related meanings. The term 'agent noun' of course does not cover the full range of meanings of these nouns, but it is motivated to the extent that e.g. the use of -dor for INSTRUMENT nouns (as in e.g. refrigerador 'refrigerator') is metonymically derivable from the source meaning AGENT. The derived`INSTRUMENT sense is conceptually prominent, but the source`meaning AGENT is still a (backgrounded) part of the foregrounded instrumental reading; thus the distributional properties of such metonymically derived -dor nouns would be expected to follow from their metonymically derived meaning (Hypothesis (10ii) in Section 4.2).

The closing paper of this part is Gary Palmer, Russell S. Rader, and Art D. Clarito's contribution "The metonymic basis of a 'semantic partial': Tagalog lexical constructions with ka-". The authors' analysis of constructional polysemy manifested by Tagalog ka and its variants finds that ka- is a metonymic operator. It evokes and marks what t authors term a 'semantic partial, which they define as "the conventionalized profiling an element that is selected or abstracted from the conceptual base evoked by a linguis root or stem". Subsumed by the PARTIAL schema are the categories of INDIVIDUATIoN ai ABSTRACT QUALITY. When the analysis of ka- as a semantic partial is applied to col plex constructions, it reveals motivations missed by other approaches. Their findings o compared to Panther and Thornburg's (2001, 2002) analysis of metonymy in the English nominalizer verb.

Part 2: Case and aspect

The papers of this section are dedicated to two kinds of core grammatical phenomemena case and aspect. Wolfgang Schulze offers a new approach to the analysis of case in E; Caucasian languages, arguing that it has a metaphorical basis. Klaus-Uwe Panther a Linda L. Thornburg analyze conceptual conflicts between grammatical aspect and lexical aspect in French, their resolution through coercion (semantic shift), and their translati equivalents in English.

The first paper in this section is Wolfgang Schulze's "A new model of metaphors; tion: Case semantics in East Caucasian". This contribution takes the case systems of ti East Caucasian languages (Aghul and Udi) as a point of departure for elaborating a mode of metaphorization that is embedded in the framework of Cognitive Typology. Based the assumption that metaphorization represents a procedural continuum including be metonymic and metaphorical output types, Schulze argues that this continuum can modeled in terms of a 'Mirror Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, metaphorization represents an entrenched cognitive routine that is characterized by fractal-like process of inflation in language production as well as by deflation processes in comprehension The Mirror Hypothesis itself makes strong reference to Neurocognitive Linguistics wit out, however, abandoning the camp of Analytical Cognitive Linguistics.

In their chapter "Aspect and metonymy in the French passe simple", Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg discuss a case of semantic conflict resolution betwe two linguistic units. One possibility of resolving such a conflict is to shift or coerce the cc ceptual content of one unit so that it becomes conceptually compatible with the other ur Panther and Thornburg argue that the availability and activation of high-level metor mies facilitate the resolution of semantic conflicts. The focus of their chapter is on cases which the grammatical aspect marking of a verb (here: the passe simple, a perfective asp, in French) conflicts with the aspectual meaning (aktionsart) of the verb itself. The conflicting grammatical-aspectual and lexical-aspectual meanings can be avoided either (i) selecting the "right verb", or (ii) by shifting the meaning of the verb metonymically so as accord with its grammatical-aspectual meaning. Relying on various parallel French-English corpora, Panther and Thornburg explore how these two languages differ as to which of the two coding strategies they tend to use with regard to the construction of aspect meaning. The results of such an investigation shed light on conceptual metonymy a typologically relevant parameter.

Part 3: Proper names and noun phrases

The chapters of Part 3 are mostly concerned with the metonymic interpretation of proper names and noun phrases. Ginter Radden develops an account of generic reference in English in terms of metonymy and conceptual blending theory. Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabo consider metonymic uses of place names in four languages. Mario Brdar argues in his contribution that there are metonymies "we live without" and, like the preceding chapter, focuses on cross-linguistic differences in the exploitation of metonymies.

Gunter Radden's contribution "Generic reference in English: A metonymic and conceptual blending analysis" argues that generic reference in English is conceptually motivated by way of the metonymies INSTANCE For TYPE, TYPE For SUBTYPE, and the conceptual blending of instance and type. These conceptual processes motivate the particular uses of four types of generic reference in English. Radden's contribution supports Hypothesis (10ii) proposed in Section 4.2 and exemplified in Section 6 above that metonymic target meanings have an impact on the distribution of lexicogrammatical elements. As has often been observed, the choice of tenses and aspects in generic statements is limited. Thus, in a sentence such as The tiger had been hunting by night, the noun phrase the tiger is a definite description that refers to a specific tiger; the sentence cannot receive a TYPE interpretation, a restriction that follows straightforwardly from the fact that the progressive past perfect blocks the tiger from being interpreted generically.

Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabo's contribution "The (non-)metonymic use of place names in English, German, Hungarian, and Croatian" investigates the function of metonymy from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The authors begin with the observation that much recent research seems to indicate that referential metonymies are relatively unconstrained. However, in their corpus-based study on metonymically used place names, in particular the CAPITAL For Government metonymy in the language of the media, Brdar and Brdar-Szabo find that, while this type of metonymy is ubiquitous in English and German, it seems much less frequently used in Hungarian and Croatian. The constraints appear to be due to cognitive, discourse-pragmatic, and cultural factors. A detailed analysis reveals that some of the contrasts can be attributed to the fact that English and German metonymically-used locative NPs that function as subjects often find their counterparts in Hungarian and Croatian in prepositional phrases, or in attributively used adjectives. Brdar and Brdar-Szabo claim that such phrases, which maintain topic-continuity, are also full-blown referential metonymies. Their paper points to the importance of considering not only how metonymy influences grammar, but also how a language's typological properties may influence the syntactic form and function of a metonymic vehicle.

In his contribution "Metonymies we live without", Mario Brdar starts from the assumption that one of the central properties of metonymy is the contingence of the relationship between the metonymic source and its target. One of the less obvious corollaries of this claim is that metonymy can in general be dispensed with in language: the intended or targeted meaning can always be expressed by some alternative means and not necessarily by means of a metonymic source. In one case study Brdar discusses metonymic extensions from nouns denoting countable entities to a mass/substance sense. A second case study on the metonymic interpretation of manner-of-speaking predicate adjectives concerns itse with clausal grammar, paving the way to the papers in Part 4 of this volume. Brdar's charter focuses on metonymy avoiding and metonymy marking strategies, which, according to him, are used to different degrees in languages such as English, German, Hungarian Croatian, and Spanish in order to restrict the proliferation of metonymy-induced polysemy. Brdar attempts to correlate these strategies with the grammatical features of these languages, showing that the relation between metonymy and grammar is bidirectional.

Part 4: Predicate and clause constructions

The chapters in Part 4 are concerned with the impact of metonymy and metaphor on predicate and clause structure. Rosario Caballero postulates a fundamental bias in humans to view static arrangements as dynamic configurations, a tendency that finds metaphoric expression in the way architecture is described in specialized magazines. Debra Ziegeler and Sarah Lee investigate a causative construction found in Singaporean and Malaysia English whose properties are motivated by metonymy. Rita Brdar-Szabo takes a typolog cal stance, analyzing stand-alone conditionals with a conventional directive function i four languages.

In her chapter "Form IS Motion: Dynamic predicates in English architectural discourse", Rosario Caballero investigates the high frequency of terms such as crouch, meander clamber, or melt to characterize built forms in their sites. This frequent construal of inherently static spatial arrangements as events involving motion is consistent with what Cognitive Linguists have suggested is the human cognitive bias towards dynamism. Caballero chapter illustrates the ways architectural texts differ from general discourse in the use motion predications, paying attention to the types of trajectory, landmarks, and yengi employed in the description of architectural artifacts. As well, she undertakes to revert to the figurative motivation underlying the use of motion predications in these description Specifically, it is proposed that dynamic relational predications are motivated by visual informed metaphors subsumed under the formula Form IS Motion, in which particular layouts or appearances (i.e. the targets in the mapping) are seen as reminiscent of the kir of movement encapsulated in motion verbs — i.e. the metaphorical sources. Furthermore the paper explores a more innovative and complex way of describing spatial arrangement In this particular kind of motion predicate the cross-domain mapping goes the other w round: that is, it is the shape of well-known functional objects together with the direction sense of the accompanying particle that is mapped onto and specifies the kind of move me suggested by built space. This metaphor might be formalized as SHAPE (Motion) IS For and is illustrated by expressions portraying buildings as fanning out or stairs as scissoring down through space. Both metaphors underlie the figurative and graphic construal of ti relationship between buildings and sites responding to architects' visual concerns and it proposed that these metaphors may themselves be metonymically motivated.

In their chapter "A metonymic analysis of Singaporean and Malaysian English cau ative constructions" Debra Ziegeler and Sarah Lee investigate a causative constructor in Singaporean and Malaysian English. A common feature of these varieties of English found to a lesser extent in British and U.S. English — is the 'conventionalized scenario(Goldberg 1995), i.e. a causative construction in which an intermediate causee is neither expressed nor necessarily recoverable from context and common ground. The authors' study provides empirical data on the use of conventionalized scenarios in Singaporean and Malaysian English and explains their link with resultative constructions in terms of a reversal of the RESULT For Action metonymy (Panther & Thornburg 2000), i.e. an Action For RESULT grammatical metonymy. In this metonymy, the passive action implied in the resultative participle becomes reactivated in a simple transitive construction and the causer now stands for both the causer and causee together. Language contact features in the dialects may also influence the extent of its usage.

A study that analyzes the role of metonymy in a speech act construction from a cross-linguistic perspective is Rita Brdar-Szabo's chapter "Metonymy in indirect directives: Stand-alone conditionals in English, German, Hungarian, and Croatian". Brdar-Szabo's paper is concerned with cross-linguistic variation in the exploitation of illocutionary metonymy in conventional indirect speech acts, specifically with indirect directives in English, German, Hungarian, and Croatian. The focus is on one special construction type - stand-alone conditionals used as indirect directives as e.g. English If you could come to order now. This construction type is productively exploited in English and German, but apparently not used in Hungarian and Croatian. In a search for an explanation for this distribution, metonymy is pointed out as a central motivating factor. It is argued here that metonymy as motivation can be approached from at least three perspectives: (i) correlation with the productivity of other metonymic models in general, (ii) differences in the availability of various functional types of metonymies, and (iii) the complexity of metonymic layering.

Part 5: Metonymic and metaphoric motivations of grammatical meaning

The first chapter in the last section relates metonymic and metaphoric processes to their experiential correlates while the second contribution explores metonymy as an inferential device in meaning creation. Sandra Pena Cervel and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez argue that two image-schema transformations are metonymically and metaphorically grounded, reversing (at least partially) George Lakoff's (1987) assumption that image schemas are the input for many metaphoric processes. Antonio Barcelona investigates how metonymic reasoning shapes the meaning and form of a variety of constructions, including morphemes, lexical items, and syntactic constructions.

M. Sandra Peria Cervel and Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez's chapter "The metonymic and metaphoric grounding of two image-schema transformations" provides evidence for the claim that at least some image-schema transformations have a metaphoric and metonymic basis. Lakoff (1987, 1989) proposes image-schema transformations as cognitive mechanisms in the creation of radial structure in conceptual categories. Image-schema transformations are natural relationships between image schemas, grounded in experience. There is, for example, a natural relationship between the path of a moving object and the static position of the object when it stops (path-end-of-path transformation). In Pena Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza's view, underlying image-schema transformations there is high-level (i.e. abstract) metaphoric and metonymic activity. In order to substantiate this point, the authors examine the cognitive grounding in metaphor and metonymy of two image-schema transformations: path-end-of-path and multiplex-mass. The former explained in connection to the high-level metonymy Action For RESULT, while in the latter the authors distinguish two subcases. In one subcase there is metaphorical activity whereby groups of entities are perceived as substances. This subcase often exploits the high-level metonymy PROCESS For Action as a natural consequence of the fact that substances an characteristically seen as exhibiting non-intentional behavior. In the second subcase then is a necessary combination of metaphor and metonymy, where the heterogeneous parts of an individual entity (or any group of entities of the same kind) are seen as a single unifled object (without parts) that is further perspectivized through a metonymy in terms o its constituting material. All these phenomena are seen as natural manifestations of what Langacker refers to as "profile/active-zone discrepancy". Finally, Pena-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza discuss the syntactic and morphological consequences of the( high-level metonymies proposed in their application to image-schema transformations.

In the final chapter "Motivation of construction meaning and form: The roles of metonymy and inference" Antonio Barcelona resumes the topic of the ubiquity of metonym, in lexicogrammar expounded by Langacker in this volume. Barcelona argues for a metonymic motivation of "prototypical" and "non-prototypical" meanings of a number o constructions, among them some morphological constructions (derivation, conversion compounding), the quantifier a lot, instances of polysemous extension, and a clausal construction (the epistemic conditional). The paper also discusses several cases of metonymy motivated non-prototypical lexical meaning that often involve a change in grammatical behavior (e.g. the emergence of the intransitive "slimming" sense of the verb reduce`, Barcelona demonstrates that metonymy can also motivate constructional form (a number of instances are discussed in the chapter). If the set of forms of a construction is regarded as a small cognitive category where canonical forms have prototype status, then it should be subject to (some of) the same cognitive operations (among them metaphor and metonymy) as other categories. Finally, the author argues that metonymy is fundamentally inferential and that its motivational and referential roles follow from its inferential nature.

Figuration in grammar: Prospects for future research

We have argued in this introductory chapter that the widespread view in modern linguistics, which considers lexicogrammatical and figurative conceptualization as complete] unrelated areas of study, is misguided. The present volume can be regarded as an invite tion to skeptical readers to reconsider this kind of "modular" thinking and to envisage the possibility that figuration has an impact on lexicogrammatical. For the lexical portion on the lexicogrammatical continuum, this claim is almost a platitude - at least in Cognitive Linguistics. However, as far as grammatical structure is concerned, the "figuration motivates-grammar" hypothesis is less firmly established, although a number of studies (provides evidence that this is indeed the case (see Section 6). We believe that the contributions to this volume present not only robust evidence for metaphorical and metonym motivation in the lexical portion of the lexicogrammatical continuum, but also perhaps regarding the motivational links between conceptual metonymy/metaphor and grammatical structure, in particular, the problem of directionality of the motivational processes The second research area constitutes largely uncharted territory, despite some important work conducted by various scholars. It concerns cross-linguistic variations in the exploitation of metaphor and metonymy, and the grammatical factors that license constrain, or block the exploitation of high-level metonymies and metaphors. Such word takes a fresh perspective on the field of linguistic typology and promises to yield new an important insights into the structuring of language and languages. Even more importantly in the current research context, make a case for the metonymic and metaphoric motivation of elements traditionally seen as "grammatical", rather than "lexical". We have suggested that the metonymic target meaning and metaphoric source meaning have potential impact on grammatical structure. This is most probably an oversimplification, but it may serve as a useful heuristic guiding future research in grammatical metonymy and grammatical metaphor.

In this introductory chapter we have discussed mainly how figurative thought motivates lexical and grammatical properties, but there are good reasons to believe that the influence can go in the opposite direction (see Brdar 2007). For example, with regard to metaphor, in Section 5 we presented data that suggest a bidirectional interaction of grammatical gender and conceptual (natural) gender in German. There is a culturally grounded conceptualization of the arts as females, but this metaphorical personification is licensed, i.e. "encouraged", by the grammatically feminine gender of the noun Kunst 'art. Grammatical constraints on metonymy have been postulated e.g. by Brdar and Brdar-Szabo (2003). Whereas in English the RESULT For Action metonymy is exploitable, i.e. licensed, in what we have called 'action constructions' (Panther & Thornburg 2000), e.g. Know thyself, where a stative verb is coerced into an actional meaning 'do something to the effect so that you know yourself, in German the RESULT FoR ACTIoN metonymy is much more constrained in comparable action constructions. Thus, Know thyself must be rendered in German with a dynamic mental verb in the expression Erkenne dich selbst, literally 'Recognize yourself' It is thus possible that figuration and lexicogrammar are mutually dependent and accommodate each other.

The findings collected in this volume thus lead to a conception of the relation between grammar and figuration that is at odds with much of formalist linguistics, especially generative grammar, and they open up new avenues of research, which scholars have begun to explore only recently. To conclude this chapter, we name two such areas that, to our mind, are especially promising and will, it is hoped, increasingly attract the attention of cognitive and functional linguists. The first area of research concerns the crucial role of conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, and figuration in general, in the evolution of grammatical (functional) words and bound morphemes. The importance of metaphor and metonymy in grammaticalization has been recognized for some time (see e.g. Traugott and Dasher 2002 for a good overview), but there are still many open questions

Metonymy and metaphor index

In this index we follow the widespread convention of notating metonymies as source FOR TARGET and metaphors as TARGET Is source. Some page numbers, however, direct the reader to a discussion of a particular metonymy or metaphor where this strict notation is not used. Most metonymies in this index are of the WHOLE FOR PART, PART FOR WHOLE, OR PART FOR PART types, but are not classified into these types because this classification is normally quite obvious and because not all metonymies can be grouped under these types. However, the pages in the chapters where these terms are used explicitly appear in the index.

Metonymies

A

ABILITY (To ACT) FOR REQUEST (TO ACT)

ABSTRACT QUALITY FOR FOCUS OF ATTENTION

ACTION FOR INSTRUMENT

BREAKING FAST FOR MEAL WITH WHICH THIS IS DONE

ACTION FOR PATIENT COURSE OF ACTION DECIDED FOR OBJECT AFFECTED

ACTION FOR PROCESS

ACTION FOR RESULT

CASTING LOTS FOR DECIDING BY CASTING LOTS

CAUSING X TO BECOME REDUCED FOR X BECOMING REDUCED

CHOOSING BY CASTING LOTS FOR CHOICE SO MADE

ACTIVE ZONE METONYMY

See also CAR FOR GASOLINE TANK, ENTITY FOR SALIENT PROPERTY, INTERROGATION ON THE REASON OF A STATE OF AFFAIRS FOR THAT REASON, RELATION FOR CONCOMITANT SUB-RELATION, WHOLE SCALE FOR UPPER END OF SCALE

ACTIVITY FOR (CAUSED) EVENT

ACTIVITY FOR SOCIAL ROLE

AGENT FOR INSTRUMENT

APPEARANCE FOR REALITY

AUTHOR FOR WORK FOR MEDIUM

B

BEING AT A LOCATION FOR MOVEMENT TO THE LOCATION

BOTTOM OF SCALE FOR TOP OF SCALE

BOUNDED EVENT FOR LEFT-BOUNDED EVENT

C

CAPABILITY TO DO ACTION FOR ACTION

CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT

CAR FOR GASOLINE TANK

CATEGORY FOR MEMBER

BECOMING REDUCED IN GENERAL FOR BECOMING REDUCED IN WEIGHT

FORWARD MOTION FOR FORWARD MOTION BY / ALONG A STATIC ENTITY

MOTOR VEHICLE FOR MOTOR CAR

VEHICLE FOR MOTOR VEHICLE

CATEGORY FOR SUBCATEGORY

CAUSED ACTION FOR CAUSED ACTION + RESULT

CAUSED ACTION FOR CAUSED ACTION-RESULT

CAUSED ACTION FOR CAUSEE-CAUSED ACTION-RESULT

CAUSED ACTION + RESULT FOR CAUSEE-CAUSED ACTION + RESULT

CAUSED ACTION-RESULT FOR CAUSEE-CAUSED ACTION-RESULT

COME TO DO ACTION FOR ACTION

COMPANY FOR WORKERS

CONCEPT FOR IDEOLOGY

CONTAINER FOR CONTENT

See also VERTICALITY FOR QUANTITY

CONTENT FOR CONTAINER

CONTROLLER FOR CONTROLLED

CONVICTION FOR ADEPTS

COUNTRY FOR GOVERNMENT

CUTTING PROCESS FOR CUT OFF PIECE

D

DEFINING PROPERTY FOR CATEGORY

EATING TOO MUCH FOR GLUTTON 394 DESTINATION FOR MOTION

DISTINCTIVE PROPERTY OF A CATEGORY FOR THE CATEGORY

POLITICAL-GEOGRAPHICAL PROPERTY (LINKING TWO STATES) OF FREEWAYS / HIGHWAYS FOR FREEWAYS / HIGHWAYS

E

EFFECT FOR CAUSE

DYING OF INDIGESTION FOR EATING TOO MUCH

GRATITUDE TO GOD FOR A BENEFICIAL SITUATION) FOR THE RELIEF (PROVIDED BY THAT SITUATION)

EFFECT FOR SUBSTANCE

ENTITY FOR SALIENT PROPERTY

PART FOR CONNECTION TO PARTS AND TO WHOLE

PORTION FOR MEASURABILITY

EYE FOR LOOK AT

EYE FOR TAKE TO (BE ATTRACTED TO)

F

FRUIT FOR FRUIT TREE 102 FUNCTION FOR OBJECT 101-5

H

HAND FOR PERSON

HAND FOR WORKER

I

ILLNESS FOR PATIENT

INSTANCE FOR TYPE

INSTITUTION FOR OCCUPATION

INSTRUMENT FOR ACTION

OBJECT USED IN CASTING LOTS FOR CASTING LOTS

INSTRUMENT FOR OCCUPATION

INSTRUMENT FOR PLAYER

INTENDED ACTION FOR FUTURE

INTERROGATION ON THE REASON OF A STATE OF AFFAIRS FOR THAT REASON

K

KNOW FOR LEARN

L

LOOK AT FOR TAKE TO (BE ATTRACTED TO)

M

MANNER FOR (LINGUISTIC) ACTION

MATERIAL FOR PRODUCT

MEMBER FOR CATEGORY

DIVISION BY CASTING LOTS FOR DIVISION IN GENERAL

INSIGNIFICANT THING FOR PEJORATIVE THING

PEOPLE OR THINGS FOR ANY ENTITIES

SMALL ANNOYING THING FOR PEJORATIVE THING

SPECIFIC INDEFINITE FOR INDEFINITE

MOVEMENT FOR INTENDED ACTION

N

NAME FOR PERSON

NON-CONTROL FOR PROBLEMATIC COLLECTIVE ACTION

0

OBJECT FOR MATERIAL CONSTITUTING THE OBJECT

ORDER FOR CUSTOMER

P

PART FOR WHOLE

PART-FOR-PART FOR WHOLE

PARTICIPANT FOR SITUATION

PEAK FOR MOUNTAIN

PLACE FOR ABSTRACT QUALITY

PLACE FOR CENTER OF ATTENTION

PLACE FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION

PLACE FOR (CUSTOMARY) ACTIVITY

PLACE FOR INSTITUTION

PLACE FOR OCCUPATION

PLACE FOR PEOPLE

PLACE FOR POSITION ON SCALE

PLACE FOR RESULT

POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY

PROCESS FOR ACTION

PRODUCT FOR SELLER

PROPER NAME FOR CONVICTIONS

PROPERTY FOR A THING THAT HAS THE PROPERTY

PROPERTY FOR PERSON

R

RELATION FOR CONCOMITANT SUB-RELATION

CAUSAL CONNECTION BETWEEN CONDITION AND RESULT FOR THEIR IMPLICIT EPISTEMIC CONNECTION

COMPLEX RELATION [MANNER -I- EQUIVALENCE] FOR SUB-RELATION [EQUIVALENCE]

RESULT FOR ACTION

RESULTANT ACHIEVEMENT FOR ACCOMPLISHMENT

S

SALIENT PART OF FORM FOR WHOLE FORM

MODIFIER FOR MODIFIER-HEAD CONSTRUCTION

SALIENT PROPERTY FOR ENTITY

ROLE AS CONTINENTAL DIVIDE FOR THE ROCKIES

SOCIAL ROLE FOR PERSON

SOUL FOR EMOTIONS

SPECIALITY FOR SPECIALIST

STATE FOR ACCOMPLISHMENT OF STATE

STATE FOR ACHIEVEMENT OF STATE

STATE FOR ONSET & STATE

STATEMENT FOR COMMISSIVE SPEECH ACT

STATIVE FOR DYNAMIC

SUBCATEGORY FOR CATEGORY

T

TEMPORARY STATE FOR LEFT-BOUNDED STATE 188 TOOLS FOR PRODUCT

TOPOLOGY / SHAPE FOR FAN / SCISSORS / RAKED HEAP

TYPE FOR INSTANCE

TYPE FOR SUBTYPE

U

UNBOUNDED STATE FOR LEFT-BOUNDED STATE

UNBOUNDED STATE FOR TEMPORARY STATE

UPPER END OF QUANTITATIVE SCALE FOR WHOLE SCALE

V

VERTICALITY FOR QUANTITY

DEGREE TO WHICH A CONTAINER IS FILLED FOR QUANTITY OF CONTAINER'S CONTENT

W

WHOLE FOR PART

WHOLE EVENT FOR PART OF EVENT

WHOLE SCALE FOR UPPER END OF THE SCALE

Metaphors

A

A BUILDING / BUILDING ELEMENT IS AN OBJECT WITH A CHARACTERISTIC SHAPE / TOPOLOGY

A NOUN IS A CONTAINER

A NOUN IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT

A PAIR OF (EMBRACING HUMAN) ARMS IS A CONTAINER

A SIBLING IS A CUT OFF PIECE

A STATE IS A CONTAINER

ACTIVITIES ARE SUBSTANCES

AFFECTION IS MOTION TOWARDS A GOAL

AFTER TIME PERIOD IS FROM ON [-CONTACT]

AGENTHOOD IS FOCUS (ON CONTROLLING FORCE)

AN ABSTRACT QUALITY IS A PLACE

ART IS A YOUNG WOMAN

B

BENEFACTIVE IS ONTO [-CONTACT]

BUILDINGS ARE ANIMATE BEINGS

BUILDINGS / BUILDING ELEMENTS ARE MOBILE ARTIFACTS

BUILDINGS / BUILDING ELEMENTS ARE OBJECTS 287 BUILT SPACE IS A FLUID

C

CAPABILITIES ARE POSSESSIONS

CATEGORY STRUCTURE IS PART-WHOLE STRUCTURE

CAUSAL IS TEMPORAL IS LOCAL

CAUSE IS FROM BEHIND

CAUSE-EFFECT IS FIGURE-GROUND

CITIES ARE HUMAN FEMALES

COMITATIVE IS BEHIND

COMITATIVE IS BETWEEN

COMPLEX OBJECTS ARE SEXED ANIMATE BEINGS

CROWDS / HUMANS ARE LIQUID SUBSTANCES

E

EMOTIONS ARE FLUIDS

EVENTS ARE OBJECTS

F

FORM IS MOTION

G

GENERAL POSSESSION IS BEHIND

INSTRUMENT IS FOCUS (ON NON-CONTROLLING FORCE)

INSTRUMENT IS ONTO [-CONTACT]

K

KNOWING IS SEEING

L

LOVE IS A JOURNEY

N

NEAREST IS FIRST

0

OBJECT OF SPEAKING IS FROM ON [-I-CONTACT]

OBJECTHOOD IS MOTION TOWARDS GOAL

ORGANIZATIONS ARE HUMANS

P

PAST IS PRESENT

PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS / PLANTS

PEOPLE ARE CONTAINERS

POSSESSION IS MOTION FROM SOURCE

PROCESS IS PHYSICAL OBJECT

PROCESSES ARE SUBSTANCES

Q

QUANTITY IS SIZE

R

RELATIONSHIP IS PROXIMITY

REPLACEMENT IS FROM BEHIND

S

SCALES OF FREQUENCY ARE SCALES OF QUANTITY

SCALES OF INTENSITY ARE SCALES OF QUANTITY

SHAPE (MOTION) IS FORM 33 SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS

T

TEMPORAL POSSESSION IS AT, ON, IN

THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR EMOTIONS

THING (SCHEMA) IS PHYSICAL OBJECT

THINKING IS WEIGHING

TIME IS SPACE

V

VISIBLE IS KNOWN

 

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