Sandra Handl Livres

Cognitive linguists assert that linguistic structures are deeply influenced by our experiences and perceptions, shaping how we conceptualize them. This volume compiles papers that explore linguistic phenomena reflecting key cognitive processes like metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending, which significantly impact linguistic conceptualization. The first section addresses theoretical and methodological issues, including metaphor identification and its relevance to children's understanding. The subsequent sections apply the theoretical frameworks of conceptual metaphor, metonymy, and blending to linguistic data. Contributions critically examine the explanatory potential of these theories, creating connections between them and integrating other approaches such as construction grammar and common ground. They reveal conceptual regularities and cognitive models that influence our language use across various domains. The linguistic structures analyzed range from compounds and premodified noun phrases to constructions and texts, including jokes and political speeches. The methods employed encompass psycholinguistic experiments, analyses of authentic language corpora, and discourse-analytical approaches, providing a comprehensive view of the interplay between language and cognition.

The book is the first in-depth study that aims to identify the conceptual rules and regularities underlying the (un)conventionality of figurative ways of speaking and reasoning. Using a combination of corpus-linguistic and cognitive-linguistic methods it investigates a large number of metonymies as well as metaphors, focusing on the former, less studied phenomenon. It provides an overview of their relative frequencies of occurrence in natural discourse and offers a systematic account of why some figurative expressions and/or conceptual mappings are preferred while others are less successful in the speech community and thus shape our language and thought to a lesser degree. Based on a critical examination of existing theories and material from the British National Corpus, the book points out similarities and differences between metonymy and metaphor as well as between different types of the two phenomena with regard to their conventionality and moreover demonstrates the value of usage-based studies for the cognitive-linguistic enterprise.