The objective of this article is to throw light on what Internet metaphors – i.e. the metaphors used every day by English and French native speakers – reveal about their perception of the Internet. Within the framework of cognitive linguists such as Lakoff & Johnson, Sweetser, Turner, etc., I will analyze Internet metaphors to bring out the conceptual metaphors generating the various Internet m...

this study investigates the conceptual metaphors of happiness in a representative corpus of modern persian. making use of persian linguistic database, we sampled a corpus of contemporary written texts, to represent modern colloquial persian; then we tried to extract the relevant conceptual metaphors of happiness. the sample corpus contains 14 texts written by contemporary iranian writers. analy...

Is income inequality more of a blemish or a failing organ in our economy? Both metaphors capture something about wealth disparities, but only failing organ seems to emphasize the fact that our economy is a complex system where activity in one region may lead to a cascade of problems in other parts of the system. In the present study, we introduce a novel method for classifying such “systemic” m...

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...

Languages exhibit striking semantic diversity, but different languages often share core metaphors. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) claims that universal human experiences give rise to conceptual representations that are then expressed in language. But languages change slowly, making it difficult to observe implicit conceptualization affecting linguistic convention in real ti...

In this paper we discuss the advantages of writing with others and suggest metaphors to describe different writing relationships. We discuss our own writing relationships and find that our metaphors to describe them are different due, for example, to cultural differences. There are no necessarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ways of working (or metaphors that represent these), as whatever works is appropria...

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...

Composite Interface Metaphors 2 Two experiments describe how a composite metaphor interface (CMI) for performing website tasks can be developed using an iterative and theory-based design approach. The CMI consisted of two semantically unrelated metaphors: the library metaphor and the travel metaphor. A new componential model for predicting the effectiveness of CMIs is described and used for der...

Metaphors are extremely pervasive in language. They provide a powerful manner of making abstract concepts explicit. For these reasons, they are frequently utilized to describe emotional state. The current research supports the idea that metaphors used in emotional domains tend to be conventionalized. This conventionalization is what makes it possible to identify common themes in the metaphors r...