The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. This book explores the critical role that conceptual metaphors play in language, thought, cultural and expressive actions. It evaluates the arguments and evidence for and against conceptual metaphors across academic disciplines.

This book offers a new definition of metaphor-as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names “visualist,” challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become a site of philosophical analysis. This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and returns to theories of Arnheim and Gombrich and the current evolution of ideas about the visual or material and embodied cognition. Proposing to see visual metaphors in their basic form, she uses a new externalist terminology of ontology, visuality, composition, affordance, construction, and emergence. Setting out a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors.

In this book, Daniel Cohen explores the connections between arguments and metaphors, most pronounced in philosophy because philosophical discourse is both thoroughly metaphorical and replete with argumentation. Cohen covers the nature of arguments, their modes and structures, and the principles of their evaluation, and addresses the nature of metaphors, their place in language and thought, and their connections to arguments, identifying and reconciling arguments' and metaphors' respective roles in philosophy.

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 book explores ways in which common metaphors can play a detrimental role in everyday life; how they can grow in outsized importance to dominate their respective terrains and push out alternative perspectives; and how forms of resistance might act to contain their dominance. The volume begins by unpacking the dynamics of metaphors, their power and influence and the ways in which they are bolstered by other rhetorical devices. Adams draws on four case studies to illustrate their destructive impact when they eclipse other points of view—the metaphor of mental illness; the metaphor of free-flowing markets; the metaphor of the mind as a mirror and the metaphor of men as naturally superior. Taken together, these examples prompt further reflection on the beneficiaries of these "monster metaphors" and how they promote such metaphors to serve their own interests but also on ways forward for challenging their dominance, strategies for preventing their rise and ways of creating space for alternatives. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in the study of metaphor, across such fields as linguistics, rhetoric and media studies.

The West is in cataclysmic decline. Most Westerners don't realize it, just as the citizens of the Roman Empire in its last years were barely aware that their way of life was nearing its end. In the famous metaphor of the boiling frog, if you put a frog in tepid water and then slowly bring the water to the boil, the frog will fail to perceive the danger and be cooked alive. Western culture is being boiled bit by bit and no one understands what it is happening. This book is about the theories of Oswald Spengler and the theorists inspired by him about how and why cultures and civilizations come to an end, about how they lose their energy and dominance and become weak and second-rate. Above all, it's about the means to reverse the decline and to build more glorious cultures and civilizations than have ever existed before.

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.

The last half century witnessed an upheaval in scientific investigation of human meaning-making and meaning-sharing. Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond, is offered as a snapshot of the status of this multidisciplinary endeavor—a peak under the umbrella of what Cognitive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Figurative Language Studies and related fields have morphed into. This volume honors Raymond W. Gibbs, who played no small role in this upheaval. The themes and insights emerging from the chapters (i.e., among others, a need for account integration, a new appreciation of the dynamic nature of figurative [and all] meaning-making, a need for continued broadening of the communicative techniques in our studied topics, greater attention to emotion, a deepened appreciation of social motivations and psychological processes involved, etc.) may guide us in our continued grappling with meaning-making and meaning-sharing, via metaphor, through figurative language, and via other communicative phenomena associated with them.

This book brings together leading metaphor researchers from a number of disciplines to unite the field of metaphor theory.