Two puzzle pieces

Fitting discourse context and constructions into cognitive metaphor theory

Carol Lynn Moder | Oklahoma State University

This study examines metaphorical expressions in American radio news magazines appearing in two linguistic forms: NP is a NP and It’s like NP. It integrates Blending Theory (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) with a usage-based approach to grammatical constructions (Goldberg 1995, 2006;Tomasello 2003, and Croft 2001) and analyzes the forms within their dynamic discourse context in terms of noun phrase accessibility (Chafe 1980, 1994; Givón 1983; Ariel 1988) and grounding (Langacker 1999, Oakley & Coulson 2008). The findings indicate that the functions of the grammatical constructions used in the metaphorical expressions were directly related to the non-metaphorical uses of the constructions and that the analysis of the ongoing discourse was essential to understanding the form-meaning pairings inherent in the expressions.

Published online: 11 October 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.3.2.09mod

Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Athanasiadou, Angeliki

2020. In Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language [Figurative Thought and Language, 9], ► pp. 92 ff.

Cuenca, Maria Josep

2015. Beyond compare. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 13:1 ► pp. 140 ff.

Lederer, Jenny

2019. Lexico-grammatical alignment in metaphor construal. Cognitive Linguistics 30:1 ► pp. 165 ff.

Lou, Adrian

2017. Multimodal simile. English Text Construction 10:1 ► pp. 106 ff.

Porto, M. Dolores & Manuela Romano

2017. ‘You’ve just got to walk away’: Mixed viewpoints in radio call-in trauma narratives. Journal of Pragmatics 122 ► pp. 35 ff.

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