This detailed study of fire metaphors provides a deep understanding of the purposeful work of metaphor in discourse. It analyses how and why fire metaphors are used in discourses of awe (mythology and religion) and authority (political speeches and media reports). Fire serves as a productive and salient lexical field for metaphors that seek to create awe and impose authority. These metaphors offer a rich linguistic and conceptual resource for authors of mythologies, theologies, literature, speeches and journalism, and provide insight into the rich interplay of thought, language and culture. This book explores the purpose of fire metaphors in genres ranging from the Norse sagas to religious texts, from Shakespeare to British and American political speeches. Ultimately it arrives at an understanding of the rhetorical work that metaphor accomplishes in communicating evaluations and ideologies.

Alchemy is popularly viewed as a secret way of turning worthless base metal into gold, and then a precursor to modern chemistry. This is often taken as a metaphor for psychological development. This book describes an innovative "third way" for both the education and exercise of an alchemical imagination that embraces both material matters and psychological insight: alchemy as lyrical poetics, or the intensive production of embodied metaphor. Alchemy here is viewed as an immanent set of metaphor-driven "best practices" for indwelling complex and contradictory earthly matters in a sensual, artistic and humane manner. Or, again, it describes best psychotherapeutic practice. Alchemy is read not as a medium for "personal growth", but optimal co-existence with the natural world. It is an eco-logical rather than ego-logical project with deep aesthetic concerns (education of the senses in close noticing) and political intentions (a democracy of worldly things). The book echoes post-Freudian developments in psychoanalysis that avoid the mysticism of symbol systems to work rather with everyday signs and linguistic registers such as embodied metaphors, keeping the focus on known and sensed phenomena rather than abstractions.

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist

This study is an attempt to uncover the structure of three emotion concepts: anger, pride and love. The results indicate that the conceptual structure associated with these emotions consists of four parts: (1) a system of metaphors, (2) a system of metonymies, (3) a system of related concepts, and (4) a category of cognitive models, with a prototypical model in the center. This goes against an influential view of the structure of concepts in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, according to which the structure of a concept can be represented by a small number of sense components.

Anger is one of the basic emotions of human emotional experience, informing and guiding many of our choices and actions. Although it has received considerable scholarly attention in a number of disciplines, including linguistics, a basic question has still remained unresolved: why do variations in the folk model of anger exist across languages if it is indeed a basic emotion rooted in largely universal bodily experience? By drawing on a wide selection of comparable linguistic data from dozens of languages (including a number of less-researched languages), this volume provides the most comprehensive account of what is universal and what is variable in the folk model of anger – and why. It also investigates the role that metonymies might play in the emergence of anger-related metaphors and in what ways context influences or shapes anger metaphors and thereby the resulting folk model of anger. No such volume exists in the (cognitive) linguistic literature on anger – or on emotions for that matter. The book is thus an essential contribution to the study of anger and will serve as basic reading for any researcher interested in how the conceptualization of anger is constructed via the interplay of bodily experience, language and the larger cultural context.

This clear and lucid primer fills an important need by providing a comprehensive account of the many new developments in the study of metaphor over the last twenty years and their impact on our understanding of language, culture, and the mind. Beginning with Lakoff and Johnson's seminal work in Metaphors We Live By, Kövecses outlines the development of "the cognitive linguistic theory of metaphor" by explaining key ideas on metaphor. He also explores primary metaphor, metaphor systems, the "invariance principle," mental-imagery experiments, the many-space blending theory, and the role of image schemas in metaphorical thought. He examines the applicability of these ideas to numerous related fields.

Metaphors show students how to make connections between the concrete and the abstract, prior knowledge and unfamiliar concepts, and language and image. But teachers must learn how to use metaphors and analogies strategically and for specific purposes, helping students discover and deconstruct effective comparisons. Metaphors & Analogies is filled with provocative illustrations of metaphors in action and practical tips.