Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language

Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language
Author: Annalisa Baicchi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-08-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027261024

This volume brings together twelve usage-based studies conducted by leading researchers in language and cognition that explore core issues of figurativeness from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective. The individual chapters reveal the central function of figurativeness in thought and its impact on language. Cognition relies on knowledge-structuring tools in the construction of meaning both mentally and linguistically. Collectively, the chapters delve into an array of topics that are crucial to future research in figurative meaning construction, especially on questions of identification and structure of figures, the figurative motivation of constructions, the impact of figurativeness on pragmatic and multimodal communication, and the correlation between figures and cognitive models.

Figures of Speech

Figures of Speech
Author: Arthur Quinn
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 101
Release: 1993
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1880393026

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Figurative Language and Thought

Figurative Language and Thought
Author: Albert N. Katz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1998-09-10
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0198026951

Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them. In Figurative Language and Thought, internationally recognized experts in the field of figurative language, Albert Katz, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Cristina Cacciari, provide a coherent and focused debate on the subject. The book's authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, including: What can figures of speech tell us about the structure of the conceptual system? If and how should we distinguish the literal from the nonliteral in our theories of language and thought? Are we primarily figurative thinkers and consequently figurative language users or the other way around? Why do we prefer to speak metaphorically in everyday conversation, when literal options may be available for use? Is metaphor the only vehicle through which we can understand abstract concepts? What role do cultural and social factors play in our comprehension of figurative language? These and related questions are raised and argued in an integrative look at the role of nonliteral language in cognition. This volume, a part of Counterpoints series, will be thought-provoking reading for a wide range of cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers.

It Figures!

It Figures!
Author: Marvin Terban
Publisher:
Total Pages: 61
Release: 1993
Genre: English language
ISBN: 9780395615843

Introduces and explains common figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, personification, and hyperbole with guidelines for their use and illustrative examples.

Figurative Language – Intersubjectivity and Usage

Figurative Language – Intersubjectivity and Usage
Author: Augusto Soares da Silva
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2021-05-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027260036

Intersubjectivity and usage play central roles in figurative language and are pivotal notions for a cognitively realistic research on figures of thought, speech, and communication. This volume brings together thirteen studies that explore the relationship between figurativity, intersubjectivity and usage from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective. The studies explore the impact of figurativity on areas of lexicon and grammar, on real discourse, and across different semiotic systems. Some studies focus on the psychological processes of the comprehension of figurativity; other studies address the ways in which figures of thought and language are socially shared and the variation of figures through time and space. Moreover, some contributions are established on advanced corpus-based techniques and experimental methods. There are studies about metaphor, metonymy, irony and puns; about related processes, such as humor, empathy and ambiguation; and about the interaction between figures. Overall, this volume offers the advantages and the opportunities of an interactional and usage-based perspective of figurativity, embracing both the psychological and the intersubjective reality of figurative thought and language and empirically emphasizing the multidimensional character of figurativity, its central function in thought, and its impact on everyday communication.

Indecorous Thinking

Indecorous Thinking
Author: Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2018-01-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823277933

Indecorous Thinking is a study of artifice at its most conspicuous: it argues that early modern writers turned to figures of speech like simile, antithesis, and periphrasis as the instruments of a particular kind of thinking unique to the emergent field of vernacular poesie. The classical ideal of decorum described the absence of visible art as a precondition for rhetoric, civics, and beauty: speaking well meant speaking as if off-the-cuff. Against this ideal, Rosenfeld argues that one of early modern literature's richest contributions to poetics is the idea that indecorous art—artifice that rings out with the bells and whistles of ornamentation—celebrates the craft of poetry even as it expands poetry’s range of activities. Rosenfeld details a lost legacy of humanism that contributes to contemporary debates over literary studies’ singular but deeply ambivalent commitment to form. Form, she argues, must be reexamined through the legacy of figure. Reading poetry by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth alongside pedagogical debates of the period and the emergence of empiricism, with its signature commitment to the plain style, Rosenfeld offers a robust account of the triumphs and embarrassments that attended the conspicuous display of artifice. Drawing widely across the arts of rhetoric, dialectic, and poetics, Indecorous Thinking offers a defense of the epistemological value of form: not as a sign of the aesthetic but as the source of a particular kind of knowledge we might call poetic.

Figures of Thought in Roman Poetry

Figures of Thought in Roman Poetry
Author: Gordon Willis Williams
Publisher:
Total Pages: 295
Release: 1980
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780300024562

It has long been assumed that the language of Roman poetry was constructed under the dictates of elaborately defined rules of rhetoric, and its content determined according to the system of comparable classifications called invention. This belief has persisted in spite of the difficulty of fitting the works of Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Propertius, and Tibullus into such a rigid scheme. In this book Gordon Williams demonstrates that, although Ovid and his successors did indeed assimilate their poetry to the rhetorical rules devised for prose, the earlier poets employed a quite different method. Williams sees this method as falling into either a metaphorical or metonymic mode, both of which permitted the poet to say one thing and mean another. Delicate and often startling transitions of thought could be grasped-though not necessarily on first reading-by readers assumed by the poet to have a special access to the poet's process of thought. This access presupposed similarities of education, social position, and sympathetic understanding.Through close analyses of many poems, Williams shows how poets in the fifty years before Horace's death exploited metaphor, metonymy, and a third device that he calls thematic anticipation to evoke subtle associations of thought. In doing so he elucidates problems of Latin poems that have been generally misunderstood almost since they day they were written.

Handbook of Literary Rhetoric

Handbook of Literary Rhetoric
Author: Heinrich Lausberg
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 953
Release: 2023-12-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004663215

Lausberg's Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, here made available for the first time in English, received high critical acclaim on its first publication in 1963. It is a monumental work of extraordinary erudition, organisation and comprehensiveness, and enjoys unrivalled authority in its formal description of rhetorical techniques. The present edition is a translation of the second edition of 1973, which was reprinted in 1990. The Handbook has for many years been a standard reference work for all engaged in the study of literature and rhetoric. This translation will ensure its accessibility to a new generation of students of rhetoric.