On 9 December 2011 a new Belgian government was sworn in after a record breaking 541 days of negotiations between all democratic political forces with the aim to alter the constitution and provide more autonomy to the different regions that make up Belgium. In this article, the frequent use of political metaphors by North-Belgian politicians and journalists is analysed through a critical metaph...

System Metaphor is one of the core practices of the software development process known as “Extreme Programming” (XP). Unfortunately, the System Metaphor practice is poorly understood, and is the practice XP teams most commonly choose to ignore. We provide a simple, structural model of system metaphors, based upon Peircean semiotics, giving a fundamental account of the way metaphors can contribu...

SCIENCE COMMUNICATION Väliverronen, Hellsten / THE ROLE OF METAPHORS In public discourse on the environment, scientific knowledge is often mediated by metaphors. In this article, the authors are concerned with the role of metaphors in the communication of biodiversity loss. More specifically, their examination focuses on such popular metaphors as “the library of life,” “biotic holocaust,” and “...

Full natural language understanding requires identifying and analyzing the meanings of metaphors, which are ubiquitous in both text and speech. Over the last thirty years, linguistic metaphors have been shown to be based on more general conceptual metaphors, partial semantic mappings between disparate conceptual domains. Though some achievements have been made in identifying linguistic metaphor...

All thought and talk about learning involves the use of metaphors. Whilst metaphors aid our understanding of things by suggesting novel insights, they can also mislead if too much is read into the supposed likenesses. Acquisition and transfer are easily the most popular metaphors used to understand learning. This article argues that these metaphors commonly mislead when we take them to mean tha...

Miscomprehension of nonliteral ("figurative") language like metaphors, proverbs, idioms, and ironic expressions by patients with schizophrenia is a phenomenon mentioned already in historical psychiatric descriptions. However, it was only recently that studies did differentiate between novel and conventional metaphors, a factor that is known to influence the difficulty of comprehension in health...

Aptness, defined as how the vehicle is well able to cover the salient features of the tenor (e.g., oil is like liquid gold vs. a train is like a worm), is claimed to be an important factor in the preference for metaphors over similes, or vice versa. This study was an attempt to test for the supposed correlation between the perceived degree of aptness and a priori stylistic preference for metaph...

Carrying out research in genetics and genomics and communicating about them would not be possible without metaphors such as "information," "code," "letter" or "book." Genetic and genomic metaphors have remained relatively stable for a long time but are now beginning to shift in the context of synthetic biology and epigenetics. This article charts the emergence of metaphors in the context of epi...

According to modern religious studies, religions are rooted in certain metaphorical representations, so they are metaphorical in nature. This article aims to show, first, how conceptual metaphors employ image schemas to make our language meaningful, and then to assert that image-schematic structure of religious expressions, by which religious metaphors conceptualize abstract meanings, is the ba...