The communicative act of drawing attention to metaphor is a relatively recent topic in metaphor studies and one that has remained contentious from a cognitive perspective. This book brings philologists of ancient languages together with metaphor experts from several modalities to interrogate whether ancient and modern texts and languages draw attention to figurative tropes in similar ways. In this way, the diachronic, multimodal and pluridisciplinary contributions to this volume critically review the theoretical frameworks underpinning metaphor marking and metaphor analysis from a completely new empirical basis.

The last decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a fundamental scientific discovery: the identification of mirror neurons and, consequently, the development of the Embodied Simulation theory. Neuroscientific data on the mechanism of Embodied Simulation and its role in conceptual and linguistic processing, figurative language included, have stimulated a great deal of research on the embodied nature of conceptual metaphors. However, the very definition of the notions of body and embodiment are today still controversial in the Embodied Cognition debate. This book addresses the issue of the specific contribution of the body to conceptual and linguistic processing and provides a new definition for the mechanism of Embodied Simulation. In this light, and in consideration of a revision of the contemporary theory of metaphor recently introduced by Gerard Steen, who distinguished between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor processing, the book also proposes a new model of metaphor processing that brings together the mechanism of Embodied Simulation, on the one hand, and the notion of deliberateness on the other. Modulation of attention during linguistic processing is a key component in explaining how they interact. Potential readers of the book include linguists, psychologists, philosophers and any other cognitive scientists and communication scientists piqued by the topic of metaphor and embodiment.

This book brings together leading metaphor researchers from a number of disciplines to unite the field of metaphor theory.

Offers an extended, improved version of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), updating it in the context of current linguistic theory.

This volume is the first to offer an overview on metaphor and gesture a new multi-disciplinary area of research. Scholars of metaphor have been paying increasing attention to spontaneous gestures with speech; meanwhile, researchers in gesture studies have been focussing on the abstract ideas which receive physical representation through metaphors when speakers gesture. This book presents a snapshot of the state of the art in these converging fields, offering research papers as well as commentaries from multiple perspectives. In addition to conceptual metaphor theory it includes different theoretical approaches to semiotics, and the methods used range from controlled experimentation, to cognitive ethnography, to lexical semantic analysis. The use of metaphor in gesture is shown to reflect idiosyncracies of thought in the moment of speaking as well as structural, cultural, and interactional patterns. The series of commentaries discusses the potential importance of studying metaphor and gesture from the perspectives of such fields as anthropology, cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, psychology, and semiotics.

To what extent and in what ways is metaphorical thought relevant to an understanding of culture and society? More specifically: can the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor simultaneously explain both universality and diversity in metaphorical thought? Cognitive linguists have done important work on universal aspects of metaphor, but they have paid much less attention to why metaphors vary both interculturally and intraculturally as extensively as they do. In this book, Zoltán Kövecses proposes a new theory of metaphor variation. First, he identifies the major dimension of metaphor variation, that is, those social and cultural boundaries that signal discontinuities in human experience. Second, he describes which components, or aspects of conceptual metaphor are involved in metaphor variation, and how they are involved. Third, he isolates the main causes of metaphor variation. Fourth Professor Kövecses addresses the issue to the degree of cultural coherence in the interplay among conceptual metaphors, embodiment, and causes of metaphor variation.

Metaphor pervades discourse and may govern how we think and act. But most studies only discuss its verbal varieties. This book examines metaphors drawing on combinations of visuals, language, gestures, sound, and music. Investigated texts include ad