The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) started a new approach to viewing metaphors in languages. Traditionally, metaphor is considered as one of the rhetorical devices. Conceptual metaphor, however, is an approach for us to understand abstract notions in terms of relatively concrete concepts. The HEART metaphor in Chinese…

The relationship between language and thought has fascinated us for centuries. The relationship between the two is far beyond what the two words represent on the literal level, and the discussions around it have been covered in various fields from philosophy and psychology to linguistics. Even complicating the situation, the relationship between…

Language is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, demanding explanation in a theory of human cognition. However, language presents unique practical challenges for quantitative empirical research, making many linguistic theories difficult to test at naturalistic scales. Artificial neural network language models (LMs) provide a new tool for studying…

The study examines formulaic politeness expressions used in Jordanian Arabic by looking into two salient features that characterize this set of idioms: figuration and traces of religious texts. One main goal is to explore the conceptual metaphors that are represented in these idioms and show their coherence and consistency with cultural values.…

This dissertation analyzes the problem of metaphor identification in linguistic and computational semantics, considering both manual and automatic approaches. It describes a manual approach to metaphor identification, the Metaphoricity Measurement Procedure (MMP), and compares this approach with other manual approaches. The dissertation then…

Two of the major claims of the cognitivist approach to metaphor, the paradigm which has emerged as dominant over the last three decades, are (1) that metaphor is a conceptual, rather than strictly linguistic, phenomenon, and (2) that metaphor exemplifies processes which are at work in cognition more generally. This view of metaphor is here placed…

Osundare's writing is generally acknowledged as coterminous with the contentious issues of language, style and meaning in Anglophone modern African literature, and because he is seen as representing a generation of African writers, this study highlights and analyzes aspects of Osundare's creative processes of meaning for his thematic project.…