Metaphor in Specialist Discourse presents multiple perspectives on metaphor use in specialist and popularized discourse contexts. Using genre and register as starting parameters for deeper exploration, and pushing the boundaries further to open up new areas and possibilities, ten independent articles investigate metaphor use across a range of specialist domains of discourse, such as biology research articles, psychological counseling, soccer commentaries, workfloor communication, and penal policy documents. Framed by two theoretical chapters, the book is a contribution to the study of metaphor use in distinct discourse settings that will be of value to linguists and metaphor scholars of different persuasions, graduate students of linguistics and related disciplines, and practitioners of specialized areas with an interest in (verbal or gestural) language use in their areas of expertise. It shows that aspects of discourse variation are the beginning of, not an afterthought to, accurate empirical metaphor studies.

This volume sheds light on the argumentative role of metaphor in climate change discourse, unpacking the ways in which stakeholders use specific metaphors to influence perceptions of the climate crisis. While existing research has explored the explanatory function of metaphors in communication on climate change, this book offers an alternative view, one which posits that metaphors can go beyond disseminating scientific observations to promoting biases in the depiction of these observations. Augé analyses oft-used ideas in climate change communication, such as greenwashing, drawn from a wide-ranging corpus spanning media discourse, scientific discourse, NGO communications, political speech, and social media messages in English. The book presents an overview of different arguments conveyed through metaphors around five key themes—climate change mitigation; the evolution of climate change; global and local effects; the significance of climate change in specific countries; and the relationship between climate change and other contemporary social issues. The volume highlights how the complexity of climate change often necessitates the use of metaphor and the value of further research on the argumentative function of metaphor in elucidating its ideological dimensions in climate crisis discourse. This book will be of interest to scholars in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and environmental communication.

The book explores (1) the motivation of motion expressions in Western classical music criticism in terms of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999) in two corpus studies, and (2) their perceived degree of metaphoricity among musicians and non-musicians in a rating study. The results show that while fundamental embodied conceptual metaphors like TIME IS MOTION certainly play a part in explaining why we speak of Western classical music as motion, it is the specific communicative setting of music criticism that determines the particular use of motion metaphors. Furthermore, the perceived metaphoricity of musical motion metaphors varies with participants’ musical background: musicians perceive musical motion expressions as more literal compared to non-musicians, showing that there are individual differences in the perception of metaphoricity.

'Metaphor in Educational Discourse is a superb piece of applied linguistics research that integrates Vygotsky's theory of concepts with current work on metaphor into a coherent framework for investigating how teachers and learners negotiate figurative language in order to promote development in the classroom setting. In what is likely to become the standard for future studies in this area, Lynne Cameron meticulously demonstrates the central role of linguistic metaphors in classroom learning - designed to lead learners to a deeper understanding of complex mathematical and scientific concepts.' James P. Lantolf, Professor of Applied Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University. This book reports research into metaphor in use with school students. The setting for the research is a UK school and the participants are around ten years old, with their first language well established but still developing concepts and understandings. Close examination of a corpus of classroom spoken discourse reveals how metaphor is employed by their teachers, not just in explaining ideas, but, in managing and mediating the activity of the classroom and the learning of the students. Particular issues discussed include: the problems of identifying metaphors in spoken discourse, the conventionalism of metaphors in the discourse of socio-cultural groups, and how a socio-cultural approach can account for systematicity in metaphor use.

Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics: Building and Investigating an English as a Medium of Instruction Corpus offers a model for building a corpus of oral EMI seminars. It demonstrates how incorporating metaphor to the process of corpus building affords a more comprehensive description of the role of metaphor in discourse. EMI is the specific context outlined in this volume, and as such it will be of particular interest to researchers in this area, though the design and model can be easily generalised and applied to other corpora focusing on metaphor. Alejo-González argues for the need to build such a corpus given the scarcity of corpora being tagged for metaphor as well as the shortage of those dealing with the EMI phenomenon. This book will be of practical use and interest to those researchers of corpus linguistics or related areas looking to explore metaphor through their corpus studies.

If thinking can be fast or slow, metaphorical thinking can be fast and slow too. But metaphorical thinking does not occur as often and in the ways that many metaphor scholars today think. Slow metaphorical thinking does mean, however, that we can exert more control over metaphor than has previously been acknowledged. We can even offer resistance to metaphor. Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT) claims that there is an essential processing difference between non-deliberate and deliberate metaphor use which can explain all this. This book is the first full account of the DMT model for metaphor comprehension. It presents explicit conceptualization and formal operationalization, and is based on a well-known cognitive-psychological model for all utterance comprehension in discourse. The original three-dimensional model of DMT is here refined into a four-dimensional model, which reveals new research questions and discoveries about the use of metaphor. The book brings together numerous cognitive-scientific insights into metaphor. It has a high degree of interdisciplinary accessibility to all students of metaphor, whether master students, PhDs, post docs, or established academics.

This collection advocates for a more holistic picture of metaphor, extending the field’s focus beyond the cognitive paradigm and conventional metaphorical concepts to illustrate the possibilities afforded by the study of living metaphors. The volume brings together a diverse range of researchers in the discipline towards critically examining the presuppositions of the cognitive approach. The book shines a light on living metaphors – creative interpretations of conflictual meaning specific to a text or communicative act with their own unique functions – to throw into relief long-held tenets in existing metaphor research. Chapters reflect on the notion that creative metaphors spring from independent sources, not merely from metaphorical concepts, and the subsequent implications for our understanding of the relationship between linguistic forms and conceptual structures and the role of creative metaphors in organizing thought and action. Taken together, the book offers a complementary vision of languages and figures which integrates disparate lines of study within the cognitive paradigm with alternative perspectives for a more comprehensive portrait of metaphors. This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in the study of metaphor, including such disciplines as theoretical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, semantics, literary studies, and philosophy of language.

The communicative act of drawing attention to metaphor is a relatively recent topic in metaphor studies and one that has remained contentious from a cognitive perspective. This book brings philologists of ancient languages together with metaphor experts from several modalities to interrogate whether ancient and modern texts and languages draw attention to figurative tropes in similar ways. In this way, the diachronic, multimodal and pluridisciplinary contributions to this volume critically review the theoretical frameworks underpinning metaphor marking and metaphor analysis from a completely new empirical basis.

This book explores different aspects of metaphoricity in legal discourse, from court proceedings and written institutionalised texts to judges’ argumentation and in spoken records, among others. It brings together linguists and law professionals from six different countries to investigate metaphor as a conceptual phenomenon accessible through language and, more specifically, through actual linguistic contexts of use.

It has become increasingly clear that metaphor needs to be explored in terms of the social and discourse context in which it is used, especially where the aim is to address real-world problems. The notion of 'real world' metaphor research has been developed to describe this important area of investigation. This book starts by describing the nature and scope of real world metaphor research and then illustrates, through 17 detailed, mainly empirically-based studies, the different areas it can apply to, and different methodologies that can be employed. Research problems are explored in areas such as artificial intelligence, language teaching and learning, reconciliation dialogue, university lecture discourse, poetry and wine description. Methods include corpus analysis, experimentation, discourse analysis, cross-cultural analysis and genre analysis. In each case the empirical studies refer back to Gibbs's opening overview of real-world research. The result is an invaluable and cross-referenced collection of papers addressing real-world problems.