This book investigates the interaction between new English lexis and metaphor/metonymy - figures meticulously defined and contrasted in terms of similarity/contiguity. It advances three main hypotheses: (i) derived lexis is more likely to be figurative in meaning and usage than the bases from which it is derived; (ii) derivation obscures the figurative origins of this lexis to varying degrees depending on differing processing strategies; (iii) lexicalisation is determined by Relevance (in Sperber and Wilson's sense) to the needs of a culture or its powerful interest groups, where culture, following Norman Fairclough, is characterised as an ensemble of recognised action/discourse genres. This volume is distinctive in exploring the relations between grammar and metonymy and providing numerous examples of metaphorical and metonymic lexis as it reflects society's changing needs and (contested) ideologies.

This book investigates the interaction between new English lexis and metaphor/metonymy – figures meticulously defined and contrasted in terms of similarity/contiguity. It advances three main hypotheses: (i) derived lexis is more likely to be figurative in meaning and usage than the bases from which it is derived; (ii) derivation obscures the figurative origins of this lexis to varying degrees depending on differing processing strategies; (iii) lexicalisation is determined by Relevance (in Sperber and Wilson’s sense) to the needs of a culture or its powerful interest groups, where culture, following Norman Fairclough, is characterised as an ensemble of recognised action/discourse genres. This volume is distinctive in exploring the relations between grammar and metonymy and providing numerous examples of metaphorical and metonymic lexis as it reflects society's changing needs and (contested) ideologies.

This volume contains seven synchronic and diachronic empirical investigations into the expression and conceptualization of linguistic action in English, focusing on figurative extensions. The following issues are explored: • Source domains, and their relation to the complexities of linguistic action as a target domain. • The role of axiological parameter, the experiential grounding of metaphors expressing value judgements and the part played by image-schemata, how value judgements come about and their socio-cultural embedding. • The graded character of metaphoricity and its correlation with degrees of recoverability/salience. • The interaction of metonymy and metaphor, e.g. the question what factors motivate the conventionalization of metonymies, which includes the perspective that conventionalized metaphors frequently have a metonymic origin. • The role of image-schemata in the organization and development of a lexical subfield, which raises new questions on the nature of metaphor, the identification of source and target domains and the Invariance Hypothesis.

This volume offers new insights into figurative language and its pervasive role as a factor of linguistic change. The case studies included in this book explore some of the different ways new metaphoric and metonymic expressions emerge and spread among speech communities, and how these changes can be related to the need to encode ongoing social and cultural processes in the language. They cover a wide series of languages and historical stages.

The present book provides a detailed criticism of experientialist semantics, focusing both on philosophical issues connected with experientialism and on cognitive approaches to metaphor and metonymy. Particular emphasis is placed on the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, but other cognitivists are also taken into consideration. Verena Haser proposes a new approach to the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, which contrasts with familiar cognitivist models, but also builds on some insights gained in cognitivist research. She also offers an account of metaphorical transfer which dispenses with the notion of conceptual metaphors in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson. She argues that conceptual metaphors are not a useful construct for explaining metaphorical transfer, and that the clustering of metaphorical expressions is better accounted for in terms of family resemblances between metaphorical expressions. Another major goal of this work is a reassessment of the relationship between experientialism and traditional Western philosophy (often subsumed under the vague term "objectivism"). This book contrasts with most other critical approaches to experientialism by providing close readings of key passages from the works of Lakoff and Johnson, which enables the author to pinpoint theory-internal inconsistencies and other shortcomings not noted in previous publications. This book will be relevant to students and scholars interested in semantics and cognitive linguistics, and also in psychology and philosophy of language.

The book elaborates one of Roman Jakobson's many brilliant ideas, i.e. his insight that the two cognitive strategies of the metaphoric and the metonymic are the end-points on a continuum of conceptualization processes. This elaboration is achieved on the background of Lakoff and Johnson's twodomain approach, i.e. the mapping of a source onto a target domain of conceptualization. Further approaches dwell on different stretches of this metaphor-metonymy continuum. Still other papers probe into the specialized conceptual division of labor associated with both modes of thought. Two new breakthroughs in the cognitive linguistics approach to metaphor and metonymy have recently been developed: one is the three-domain approach, which concentrates on the new blends that become possible after the integration or the blending of source and target domain elements; the other is the approach in terms of primary scenes and subscenes which often determine the way source and target domains interact.

Cognitive linguists are convinced that the nature of linguistic structures is strongly influenced by the way we experience and perceive the world and by how we conceptualize and construe these experiences and perceptions in our minds. At the same time, the study of linguistic structure and usage is credited with the potential to open windows to how our minds work. The present volume collects papers investigating linguistic phenomena that reflect the key cognitive processes of metaphor, metonymy and conceptual blending, which have proven to be highly influential in linguistic conceptualization. Theoretical and methodological issues, such as metaphor identification and the relevance of the target domain for children's understanding of metaphor, are focused on in the first section. The second and third parts are devoted to the application of the theoretical frameworks of the conceptual theory of metaphor and metonymy and the theory of conceptual blending to linguistic data. The contributions critically explore the explanatory potential of these theories, build bridges between them, link them with other approaches and notions (such as construction grammar, common ground and stance/evaluation), and uncover conceptual regularities and cognitive models that underlie and shape our language use in specific domains. The linguistic structures under consideration span the range from compounds and premodified noun phrases to constructions and texts such as jokes and political speeches. Methods applied include psycholinguistic experiments, analyses of data culled from authentic language corpora and discourse-analytical approaches.