Figuring out Figuration
A cognitive linguistic account
Authors
This book combines explanatory breadth with analytical delicacy. It offers a comprehensive study of a broad array of traditional figures of speech by systematizing linguistic evidence of the cognitive processes underlying them. Such processes are explicitly linked to different communicative consequences, thus bringing together pragmatics and cognition. This type of study has allowed the authors to provide new definitions for all the figures while making their dependency relations fully explicit. For example, hypallage, antonomasia, anthimeria, and merism are studied as variants of metonymy, and analogy, paragon, and allegory as variants of metaphor. An important feature of the book is its special emphasis on the combinations of figures of speech into conceptually more complex configurations. Finally, the book accounts for the principles that regulate the felicity of figurative expressions. The result is a broad integrative framework for the analysis of figurative language grounded in the relationship between pragmatics and cognition.
[Figurative Thought and Language, 14] 2022. ix, 296 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements | p. ix
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Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–6
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Chapter 2. Figurative thought and language: An overview of approaches | pp. 7–50
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Chapter 3. Foundations of cognitive modeling | pp. 51–104
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Chapter 4. Metaphor and metonymy revisited | pp. 105–178
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Chapter 5. Hyperbole | pp. 179–226
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Chapter 6. Irony | pp. 227–258
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Chapter 7. Conclusion | pp. 259–264
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References | pp. 265–289
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Index | p. 290
“Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza's book, which has an impressive bibliography, is a daring and robust step in the invaluable project of developing a modern, cognitivist-oriented trope framework. The authors admirably dare to adapt, or even by-pass, older views to explain how the various tropes need to be positioned vis-a-vis each other. One of the strengths of their approach is that they provide concrete, applicable criteria to distinguish between related tropes. Their categorizations and subcategorizations are meticulously precise.[...] The framework provided in this monograph will also be beneficial in sorting out which tropes can be combined [...]. Moreover, it can help making progress in another challenging task, one that naturally flows from accepting that tropes reflect cognitive processes: charting how tropes can be expressed in other media than language. Other media (pictures, film, music), have structure, but not grammar, and this has serious consequences for how one can identify tropical patterns in them. In turn, cognitive linguists, whose perspective is necessarily limited by the fact that they are…well, linguists, may profit from the work that is beginning to be done by cognitivist scholars working on tropes in non-verbal and multimodal media.”
Charles Forceville, University of Amsterdam, in Journal of Pragmatics 202 (2022).
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Athanasiadou, Angeliki
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José & María Asunción Barreras Gómez
2022. Linguistic and metalinguistic resemblance. In Figurativity and Human Ecology [Figurative Thought and Language, 17], ► pp. 15 ff. 
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Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009030: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Pragmatics
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022006133