Two issues pertaining to the use of metonymy that plays a central role in Slabakova et al. (2016) are mentioned in the very title of their study--novel metonymy and regular metonymy. In this article I draw attention to some problems with the identification of these as well as with the assumption that these are opposites of each other.

The present study continues research that takes non-serious language more seriously (Cekaite and Aronsson 2005) by focusing on a central second language (L2) Metaphoric Competence factor, Metaphor Language Play (MLP). For willing learners, MLP offers a diversity of benefits (Bushnell 2009; Bell 2012a) despite being one of the most challenging…

In 1988 and 2006, "Applied Linguistics" published Low's and Littlemore and Low's seminal theoretical accounts of second language (L2) metaphoric competence (MC). Meanwhile, attempts to elicit metaphor-related skills/competences have been mixed. Instrumentation has varied in reliability, been limited in scope, and used arguably flawed…

This article investigates the connection between multilingual experiences and creative metaphoric competence. As multilingualism has been shown to bring cognitive advantages in creative thinking, this article explores whether the ability to interpret creative metaphors differs in participants with less versus more multilingual experience. The…

The literature provides diverging perspectives on the universality and stability of economic metaphors over time. This article contains a diachronic analysis of economic metaphors describing trade in a corpus of 225 years of US State of the Union addresses (1790-2014). We focused on two types of change: (i) replacement of a source domain by…

To date, research in advertising has focussed almost exclusively on metaphor, with linguists and marketing scholars paying very little attention to alternative types of figurative expression. Beyond the finding that metaphor leads to an increased appreciation of advertisements, there has been surprisingly little research into how consumer response…

The "trans-" perspectives offered in this special issue are heady stuff. Post-structuralism (philosophy) meets the digital age (electronics), meets globalization (economics), and meets translingual practice (linguistics) to create a perfectly utopian or placeless space for future exploration. I want to first add my voice to the…

Experts are generally in agreement that anthropogenic climate change is happening and will increase in severity, but this view is not clearly reflected in more non-specialist texts. Research has shown that school students have a limited and sometimes faulty understanding of climate change. Metaphors are used by scientists in developing thought and…

Formulaic expressions (such as idioms, proverbs, and conversational speech formulas) are currently a topic of interest. Examination of prosody in formulaic utterances, a less explored property of formulaic expressions, has yielded controversial views. The present study investigates prosodic characteristics of proverbs, as one type of formulaic…

The current article investigates teachers' metaphoric modeling of foreign language teaching and learning at the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University. It makes use of teaching philosophy statements as a corpus. Our objective is to analyze the underlying conceptualizations of teaching/learning, the teachers' perception of the…

This article presents results of two off-line comprehension tasks investigating the acceptability of unconventional and conventional metonymy by native speakers of Korean and Spanish who speak English as a second language. We are interested in discovering whether learners differentiate between conventional and unconventional metonymy, and whether…

John Sinclair's Idiom Principle famously posited that most texts are largely composed of multi-word expressions that "constitute single choices" in the mental lexicon. At the time that assertion was made, little actual psycholinguistic evidence existed in support of that holistic, "single choice," view of formulaic language. In…

Recent studies in linguistics have shown that metaphor is ubiquitous. This has important consequences for language learners who need to use it appropriately in their speech and writing. This study aims to provide a preliminary measure of the amount and distribution of metaphor used by language learners in their writing across Common European…

This article reports a study on metaphor comprehension by the international students whose first language is not English, while attending undergraduate lectures at a British university. Study participants identified words or multiword items that they found difficult in extracts from four academic lectures, and they interpreted metaphors from those…

Multilingual lexicons are needed in various applications, such as cross-lingual information retrieval, machine translation, and some others. Often, these applications suffer from the ambiguity of dictionary items, especially when an intermediate natural language is involved in the process of the dictionary construction, since this language adds…