Human beings rely on metaphor as a primary cognitive device for interpreting the world around them. Metaphors figure especially strongly in discourse around health, illness, and medicine. It is not just that patients use metaphors to describe their personal experience of being unwell, or that medical professionals employ metaphor to convey a diagnosis, describe a treatment, or explain the funct...

The present study investigates a type of metaphor involving socio-cultural values in their mapping and interpretation. The linguistic data are Japanese metaphorical expressions that conceptualize women as plants or animals. First, the typology of metaphor based on previous research is discussed, focusing on conceptual, correlation, and resemblance metaphors, followed by our proposal to distingu...

A retrospective analysis of cognitive behavior modification reveals that 3 major metaphors have been offered to explain the role that cognitions play in behavior change. These metaphors include cognition as a form of conditioning, information processing, and, currently, narrative construction. The implications of using each of these metaphors are discussed.

Some Internet genres, in particular Weblogs and discussion fora, have a dubious reputation for giving voice to strongly polemical discourses or hate-speech. This paper investigates the use of dehumanizing metaphors, specifically parasite metaphors, in British debates about immigration. It compares the range of metaphors used in Blogs with that used in online fora and in mainstream newspaper cov...

Figurative language is one of the most common expressions of creative behavior in everyday life. However, the cognitive mechanisms behind figures of speech such as metaphors remain largely unexplained. Recent evidence suggests that fluid and executive abilities are important to the generation of conventional and creative metaphors. The present study investigated whether several factors of the C...

This study looks at metaphors from the perspective of cognitive metaphor theory. Using the theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) we examine the use of metaphors by project members in an information system (IS) project. The data was collected from 22 interviews. Interviews were conducted with a range of stakeholders, including representatives of users, software developers, experts and IT...

The activation of conceptual metaphors has always been studied one mapping at a time. What happens when various conceptual metaphors are processed at the same time is still unknown. The experimental design used here enabled the activation of three conceptual metaphors at the same time (past-left/future-right, negative-left/positive-right and negativepast/positive-future). Participants had to ma...

By means of the metaphoric language used by parents and young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners to describe the English learning process, this study aims to reveal the perceptions of 109 young EFL learners in the 8th grade of secondary school and 66 parents in Turkey about learning English. To elicit these participants’ metaphors, they were asked to complete the gaps in the sentence ...