Group items tagged

This article discusses how the brain responds when hearing textural metaphors and literal sentences.

What our speech reveals about us

rather funny take on American metaphors from a Hungarian linguist

Excerpts from book

Article touching upon the usage of sports metaphors in our culture

By George Lakoff. Includes indexes of conceptual metaphors, e.g., - A force is a moving object- A problem is a body of water- Psychological forces are physical forces- Time is a landscape we move through- Words are weapons Includes examples for each. E.g., for "A problem is a body of water": - He dived right into the problem.- The murky waters of the investigation frustrated him.- He'd been fishing for the answer for weeks.- Finally the answer surfaced.- The answer's just floating around out there.

AHH! We needed this. Thanks, Ryan!

This article discusses what goes on in the brain when hearing similes as opposed to metaphors. The article was created after interviewing 24 men and women.

To explore metaphors more fully on your own, there are three directions you can go. The first is simply to start noticing whenever you meet one. Jane Hirshfield slipped metaphors into many of the things she said in this lesson.

This article talks about how metaphors are everywhere and are always present in our lives. It talks about how using metaphors can help to improve the user friendliness of online websites.

Both metaphor and grammar influence how people think about political candidates and elections. voters' attitudes can be influenced by a number of factors, including which information the media chooses to emphasize and how it is slanted. Framing, how a message is worded to encourage particular interpretations and inferences, can influence the perception of political candidates. Negative framing is often used to make opposing candidates seem weak, immoral and incompetent. It is persuasive because it captures attention and creates anxiety about future consequences. Grammar, though seemingly innocuous, also encodes meaning and is linked to mental experience and physical interactions with the world. Information framed with past progressive caused people to reflect more on the action details in a given time period than did information framed with simple past. Using grammatical aspect to frame campaign information, positive or negative, appears to be an effective tool for influencing how people perceive candidates' past actions. It may also be tweaked to invite inferences about what candidates will do in the future because it influences inferences about how events transpire.

Neuroscientists are testing the embodied cognition metaphor theory articulated by Lakoff and Johnson using fMRI technology. Lakoff and Johnson argue that human cognition is embodied-that human concepts are shaped by the physical features of human brains and bodies, or as Lakoff puts it, "Our physiology provides the concepts for our philosophy."

Language describes reality. That is its primary, most self-evident function. We use words to define for ourselves, and communicate to others, what's going on out there. Less evident, but almost as potent, is language's role in shaping reality. The meaning of what is out there changes with the words we choose to describe it.

Dr. Geary explains how metaphors are used to veil the true meaning of what one is trying to say in hopes to either deceive a group or to promote good feelings among a population. Consider his examples of Bush's "Axis of Evil" and Obama's desire to extend a warm hand to countries across the globe. This book sounds much like Steven Pinker's lecture for the RSA Animate video, "Language as a Window into Human Nature", and both the video and book aren't too different; both simply look at the same topic in different ways (innuendo vs. metaphor - though these hardly seem different if one were to really think about it). Link to Pinker's RSA Animate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU

"Participants in the warm room used more concrete, physical language to describe the film and reported feeling socially closer to the experimenter than did the participants in a cold room... participants in a warm room were more likely to recognise the "relational similarity" between objects." Related to temperature metaphors, e.g. "Holding warm feelings toward someone" and "giving someone the cold shoulder". Actual study at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19732385

course description with links on metaphor