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What Is Metaphor Mean?

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Ungerer & Schmid (2006) say that the ‘traditional way of looking at metaphors and metonymy is that they are considered to be figures of speech’, in other words ‘as more or less ornamental devices used in rhetorical style’ (114). Some famous examples are phrases like ‘you are my sunshine’, referring to a person is happy and bright, ‘he is a walking Encyclopaedia’ suggesting he is full of knowledge. Then we have famous metonymies; ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ where the pen means ‘the written word’ and swords stands for ‘military aggression and force’. Additionally, we can use words metonymically: ‘crown’ stands for a royal person, ‘ears’ for attention and ‘eyes’ for sight and so forth. Gibbs (2017), on the other hand, says that ‘metaphors provide evidence on the embodied foundation of abstract thinking and action while conceptual metaphor theory (hereafter CMT) advances the way we think and understand the links between bodily experiences and ubiquitous thought patterns about abstract topics’ (7). Additionally, he proposes, that …show more content…

A so-called ‘Whorfian’ perspective is explained as a figurative thought which is influenced by the conventionalized figurative expressions which are included in the surrounding language(s). Functioning as, if a person’s native language teaches the person to talk about TIME in terms of MONEY, he or she will probably conceptualize TIME AS MONEY. On the other hand, an individual’s system of figurative thoughts is formed by non-linguistic perceptions and experiences which rely on individual and personal memories, opinions or attitudes. However, these tend not to develop in isolation, they do develop under influence of socio-cultural models and values which they share with a large group of people (e.g. the culture-specific Japanese conceptualization of ANGER located in the hara, ‘belly’; cf. e.g. Matsuki 1995) (2011:

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