scholarly journals Emotion or Reason? Heart as a Container in English and Lithuanian

Kalbotyra ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
Inesa Šeškauskienė

Body part lexemes are among the most frequently metaphorised lexemes across languages and cultures. Heart is often conceptualised as a container for feelings and emotions, especially in Western languages and cultures. The paper sets out to examine a typical construction signalling the image schema of heart as a container: in the/my/his/ her heart in English and šird-yje (heart-loc.sg) in Lithuanian to determine the relevance of the image schema for the semantics of the above construction, especially in reference to emotions and feelings. Also types of containers in each language are identified. The investigation is based on corpus data and the key principles of metaphor identification procedure. The results demonstrate that the construction is mostly used metaphorically in both languages and the container image schema is paramount in interpreting the semantics of the construction. It is employed in at least three senses: container for emotions and feelings, centrality and hiding. However, the distribution of the senses in the two languages is quite different with Lithuanian showing more adherence to the metaphor of a container for emotions and feelings and English giving preference to heart as centre of activity and attraction.

Author(s):  
Mohssen Esseesy

This study highlights some notable typological features of ancient and modern Semitic languages. It sheds light on a number of shared intragenetic similarities and parallels within Semitic in the processes and outcomes of grammaticalization. Specifically, it examines the emergence and evolution of prepositionals from certain body-part terms; the shift from synthetic towards more analytic possessive strategies; and independent personal pronouns becoming inherently bound agreement markers as prefixes and suffixes on the imperfective and perfective verb stems, respectively. Moreover, with supporting evidence from corpus data, this study argues for the primacy of third-person pronouns, which assume expanded grammatical functions as copulas, expletives, and discourse-related functions. Finally, this study draws attention to the sociolinguistic factors, such as native speakers’ attitudinal stance, which directly impinge on language change within the diglossic nature of Arabic, and calls for consideration of sociolinguistic factors in the study of language evolution by grammaticalization.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-427
Author(s):  
S. Hamzeh Mousavi ◽  
Mohammad Amouzadeh

Abstract This paper investigates the synaesthetic constructions in Persian with the aim of finding out what motivates them despite their incongruous syntactic-semantic assignments. It is argued that these paradoxical elements require a metaphoric/metonymic frame to assign appropriate lexical units (LUs) to their corresponding syntactic categories (NP + rɑ +VP and NP + AP). The discrepancy derives from the semantic aspects for which frame semantics provides two types of explanations: internal and external frame factors. Internal factors deal with the metaphoric/metonymic compatibility or similarity between frames, while external factors underline the use of lexical items from one subframe to fill the vocabulary gap of a different subframe. The argument is that this gap owes much to the indirect contact between the Phenomenon (e.g., an odorous substance) and the Body-part (e.g., nose) that perceives it. In short, the analysis of our data reveals that synaesthesia is not only an economical strategy for modifying the senses, but also a natural mental strategy for interpreting vague experiences. A configuration of the incongruent construction of ‘smell’ and ‘hearing’ will be proposed to generalize such an analysis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaorong Xia

AbstractIn a constructional approach, the caused-motion construction is productive enough to attract verbs of different types into the construction; however, the distinct senses derived from actual instances indicate it is necessary to posit the caused-motion construction at lower levels because more novel uses present meanings closer to those lower constructions. The present analysis of the corpus data of English motion verbs shows that the senses of manner of caused-motion, manner of causing motion, and accompanied motion arise from their occurrences in the caused-motion construction. From a usage-based perspective, the entrenched use would yield verb class-specific constructions that are productive as well. The lower level of construction, together with the most schematic one, is stored in our memory as part of conceptual representation. The research indicates that creative use of motion verbs in the caused-motion construction is better interpreted with verb class-specific constructions.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moses Gatambuki Gathigia ◽  
Ruth W. Ndung’u ◽  
Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo

Studies in Cognitive Linguistics show that metaphors are fundamental to the structuring of people’s thought and language (Sweetser 1990; Kövecses 2009). It is against this backdrop that this study discusses human body parts as metaphors of conceptualizing love in Gĩkũyũ. To achieve this objective, an interview schedule was administered to 48 respondents of different gender by the researcher assisted by four research assistants. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the main principles of the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) (see Steen et al. 2010) were used in this study. The principles of the MIPVU were employed to find out whether the lexical items collected were metaphorical or not. Using three annotators and the researcher, the study identified 100 Metaphor Related Words (MRWs) as per the annotation guidelines adapted from the MIPVU procedures and three lexical units which were annotated as Discard From Metaphor Analysis (DFMA). From the MRWs, the study identified eight metaphors of human body parts which play an indispensable role in the conceptualization of love in Gĩkũyũ. Further, the study noted that gender is a vital variable that provides people with the prism through which they view love since males registered more lexical frequencies for LOVE IS A HUMAN BODY PART than females. The study concludes that metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics is not only a creative device, but an important mental facility and cognitive instrument.


2019 ◽  
pp. 70-88
Author(s):  
Waheed Mohammed Altohami

This paper explores how the Arab Spring Revolutions (ASRs) are metaphorically represented in journalistic discourse in a way that highlights or hides specific ideologies related to the political events and actors associated with the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions over three years (2011-2013). Drawing on Charteris-Black's (2004) corpus-based approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), the main political events and actors represented metaphorically in the corpus data have been identified, explained and interpreted at different levels of semantic, pragmatic and cognitive analysis. The present study has reached three major findings. First, various source domains were manipulated to report different facets of the ASRs, while the source domain of games was the most dominant. Second, the corpus proved to be textually coherent based on the conceptual key THE ARAB SPRING REVOLUTIONS ARE GAMES which was built around the image schema of competition. Finally, gamification involved three basic scenarios: the first is a general frame of a game; the second clusters games into individual versus team games, and bodily-oriented versus mentally-oriented games; the final scenario represents games as a war. All ideologically-based conceptual metaphors constructed within the frame of gamification are typically Western. Arab Spring Revolutions (ASRs), conceptual metaphor, Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), game, ideology, corpus


Rhema ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 34-49
Author(s):  
V. Vydrin

Separable adjectives represent a morphosyntactic subcategory of the part of speech of adjectives in Bambara (< Manding < Mande < Niger-Congo, Mali, West Africa). A separable adjective is a compound lexeme consisting of a noun root designating most often a body part, a qualitative verb root and a connector -la- ~ -lan- or -ma- ~ -man-. When used predicatively, the final component of a separable adjective (the qualitative verb root) is split from the rest of the form by the auxiliary word ka or man. Separable adjectives express mainly human qualities (moral or physical), and their semantics are very often idiomatic. The productivity of this subclass is limited. In order to establish an inventory of the separable adjectives, two approaches have been followed: elicitation and a search in the Bambara Reference Corpus (which included roughly 4,110,000 words at the time of this study). The potentially imaginable number of lexemes of this type equals 570 (15 noun roots × 19 qualitative verb roots × 2 connectors). Elicitation provided 75 separable adjectives, and the corpus study, 25, 3 of which are absent from the elicitated list. This experiment proves that in studies of derivative morphology, when a linguist needs to fill out a matrix, elicitation cannot simply be replaced by a corpus study. On the other hand, the corpus data provides invaluable supplementary data that cannot be obtained through elicitation


2021 ◽  
pp. 206-226
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Shaver

The second of three chapters exploring spatial imagery, Chapter 8 explores the motif of containment—the idea that Christ’s body and blood are “in” or “under” the bread and wine. The CONTAINER image schema has two significant entailments for eucharistic presence: transitivity (if A is in B and B is in C, A is in C) and concealment (something inside an opaque container cannot be seen). Transitivity enables Christians who take the eucharistic elements into their bodies to understand Jesus in turn to be inside them. Concealment facilitates reflection on the fact that the body and blood of Christ are not accessible to the senses. Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions make significant use of containment imagery; Reformed and Eastern Orthodox traditions have been reticent but have been willing to use it on occasion. The chapter also gives specific attention to transubstantiation as a special combination of change and containment motifs.


2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 5-7
Author(s):  
Lee Ensalada

Abstract Illness behavior refers to the ways in which symptoms are perceived, understood, acted upon, and communicated and include facial grimacing, holding or supporting the affected body part, limping, using a cane, and stooping while walking. Illness behavior can be unconscious or conscious: In the former, the person is unaware of the mental processes and content that are significant in determining behavior; conscious illness behavior may be voluntary and conscious (the two are not necessarily associated). The first broad category of inappropriate illness behavior is defensiveness, which is characterized by denial or minimization of symptoms. The second category includes somatoform disorders, factitious disorders, and malingering and is characterized by exaggerating, fabricating, or denying symptoms; minimizing capabilities or positive traits; or misattributing actual deficits to a false cause. Evaluators can detect the presence of inappropriate illness behaviors based on evidence of consistency in the history or examination; the likelihood that the reported symptoms make medical sense and fit a reasonable disease pattern; understanding of the patient's current situation, personal and social history, and emotional predispositions; emotional reactions to symptoms; evaluation of nonphysiological findings; results obtained using standardized test instruments; and tests of dissimulation, such as symptom validity testing. Unsupported and insupportable conclusions regarding inappropriate illness behavior represent substandard practice in view of the importance of these conclusions for the assessment of impairment or disability.


1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 8-10
Author(s):  
Robert L. Knobler ◽  
Charles N. Brooks ◽  
Leon H. Ensalada ◽  
James B. Talmage ◽  
Christopher R. Brigham

Abstract The author of the two-part article about evaluating reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD) responds to criticisms that a percentage impairment score may not adequately reflect the disability of an individual with RSD. The author highlights the importance of recognizing the difference between impairment and disability in the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (AMA Guides): impairment is the loss, loss of use, or derangement of any body part, system, or function; disability is a decrease in or the loss or absence of the capacity to meet personal, social, or occupational demands or to meet statutory or regulatory requirements because of an impairment. The disparity between impairment and disability can be encountered in diverse clinical scenarios. For example, a person's ability to resume occupational activities following a major cardiac event depends on medical, social, and psychological factors, but nonmedical factors appear to present the greatest impediment and many persons do not resume work despite significant improvements in functional capacity. A key requirement according to the AMA Guides is objective documentation, and the author agrees that when physicians consider the disability evaluation of people, more issues than those relating to the percentage loss of function should be considered. More study of the relationships among impairment, disability, and quality of life in patients with RSD are required.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document