The article presents results of research into the media debate on education in the context of higher education reform in Poland. The body of press materials comprised 884 texts. The theoretical basis included critical and post-Foucauldian discourse analysis. The study revealed five themes: (1) mechanisms of economic thematization; (2) expanding…

Intermediary organizations play an increasingly important role in public policy related to higher education, particularly related to the completion agenda. This study addresses strategies employed by intermediary organizations to communicate to policymakers regarding college completion. Using rhetorical analysis, we examine 72 documents to…

Metonymic and metaphoric language are thoroughly present in everyday language, so much so that they hold in themselves strong explanatory capacity to uncover and even influence underlying individual or social/cultural ideological systems and beliefs about the world around us (Catalano & Waugh, 2013; 2014; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The…

One of the central challenges educators face today, especially in higher education, is the gap between warranted (domain-specific) knowledge and the prior beliefs students hold about certain concepts and phenomena (preconceptions). In the Internet age, students often self-directedly acquire knowledge from an increasingly large number of…

It has been suggested that metaphors have a crucial influence on the way we perceive and construct the world. As a result, metaphor analysis has been used as a way to reveal, analyse and understand conceptions of teaching in higher education. This paper introduces a different way to analyse metaphors for teaching than the ones previously used in…

Many European countries are currently witnessing an increased development and expansion of continuing higher education at universities. In Germany, this development has until now been rather modest in comparison to countries such as England, France, Finland and the United States. The status of continuing education still seems just as unclear as…

In the face of land confiscations and other forms of imperialism characteristic of the 19th century in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the second Maori King Tawhiao devised a number of sayings that seem at first glance to be entirely mythical. Highly metaphorical and poetic, they appear to refer, as Bakhtin would have it in his discussion of the epic, to a…

Higher education institutions are increasingly interested in offering more flexible teaching and learning delivery methods that are often independent of place. Where foreign language learning is concerned, telecollaboration is gaining ground. This paper focuses on synchronous webconferencing-supported teaching and examines how different semiotic…

A familiar discourse about higher education and social change today relates to higher education's socio-economic role within knowledge societies in a globalizing world. This paper addresses how issues of social justice feature in such discourses; whether social justice in higher education has been appropriated into a neo-liberal strategy for…

Currently, global society is delicately poised on a civilisational threshold similar to that of the feudal era. This is a time when outmoded institutions, values, and systems of thought and their associated dogmas are ripe for transcendence by more relevant systems of organization and knowledge (Davidson, 2000). The foundations of the modern era…

This article takes the "public intellectual" trope as a theoretical case study, and traces how it has been used in the elite public sphere of the contemporary United States since its coining in 1987. The analysis challenges the notion that the "public intellectual" is primarily about broad democratic publics. It documents instead how the trope is…

Outlines five competing ideas about how the literal meanings of sentences can be determined. Studies people's intuitive sense of the literal meanings of sentences. Examines through two experiments people's judgments about the literality of sentences containing figurative language. Discusses implications of findings. (HB)

Describes the results of two studies indicating that people do not ordinarily process the complete literal or compositional interpretations of idiomatic expressions, and that people are automatically biased toward interpreting such language as idioms before deriving their intended literal meanings. (HTH)

Differences between metaphors and similes have often been overlooked in the experimental literature, and the comparison theory addressing comprehension of simile may be less appropriate to the more transformational properties of metaphor. It is proposed that one of the variables associated with the difference is affective response, leading to the…

Three universes of discourse are at work when writers create or use a metaphor: the analogical or metaphorical universe from which they borrow words, things, and relationships (sometimes called the "vehicle"); the contextual universe in which the analogy is being used (sometimes called the "topic"); and the metauniverse, or the comprehensive…