Despite their apparent arbitrary nature, numerous figurative idioms can in fact be taught and learned in an insightful way, as opposed to random and blind memorisation. Controlled experiments in recent years have shown, for example, that learners’ recall of L2 figurative idioms is facilitated by the explicit use of imagery in the presentation stage. This imagery technique can only be fruitful t...

Metaphor is a central phenomenon of language, and thus a central problem for natural language understanding. Previous work on the analysis of metaphors has identified which target concepts are being thought of and described in terms of which source concepts, but this is not adequate to explain what motivates the use of particular metaphors. This work proposes the use of conceptual schemas to re...

IRELAND Please address all correspondence (re paper and requests for reprints) to Tony Veale at the above address. Abstract Once viewed as a rhetorical and superficial language phenomenon, metaphor is now recognized to serve a fundamental role in our conceptual structuring and language comprehension processes. In particular, it is argued that certain experiential metaphors based upon intuitions...

The most sustained and innovative recent work on metaphor has occurred in cognitive science and psychology. Psycholinguistic investigation suggests that novel, poetic metaphors are processed differently than literal speech, while relatively conventionalized and contextually salient metaphors are processed more like literal speech. This conflicts with the view of “cognitive linguists” like Georg...

Since Lakoff and Johnson proposed their far-reaching theory of conceptual metaphor, people's interpretation metaphor has changed from a rhetorical approach to way thinking. In recent years, multimodal metaphors have gradually received attention scholars at home abroad, been applied different forms media research such as advertisements, comics, gestures, films, thus greatly contributing the adva...

Metaphors pervade discussions of sociopolitical issues and influence the way we think. One challenge facing researchers, however, is that it can be difficult to make principled predictions about exactly how metaphors will influence thought. Here, we use an explicit comparison task to quantify the persuasive capacity of metaphors. In Experiment 1, people were given two metaphors and two policy r...

What is the form of mental representation? One very influential contemporary answer to this question starts from the assumption that the brain functions like a Turing machine. This assumption, which is basically a metaphor, provides the foundation for much theoretical speculation in cognitive science and related fields. According to one version of the computer metaphor, the atoms of mental repr...

Starting from views on traditional metaphor and mental/conceptual model theory this paper describes the possible influence of the »evolutionary epistemology« (EE) theory to the HCI theory base. This theory is particularly important to HCI especially because of its culture independence on the proposed basis and its coverage of unconscious processes. The first had been a long struggle and still i...

IRELAND Please address all correspondence (re paper and requests for reprints) to Tony Veale at the above address. Abstract Once viewed as a rhetorical and superficial language phenomenon, metaphor is now recognized to serve a fundamental role in our conceptual structuring and language comprehension processes. In particular, it is argued that certain experiential metaphors based upon intuitions...