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Figurativity and Human Ecology
Edited by Alexandra Bagasheva, Bozhil Hristov and Nelly Tincheva
[Figurative Thought and Language 17] 2022
► pp. 43–61

Looking for metaphor in the natural world

ORCID logo | Independent Cognitive Scientist

Metaphor in thought, language, and other expressive actions, emerges not just from the body (or culture) alone, but from humans acting in the natural world. Numerous natural world phenomena serve as source domains in many areas of metaphorical thinking and language use. This is not surprising given people’s intimate relations with the natural word, yet this fact has not been sufficiently acknowledged in contemporary theories of metaphor. My aim in this chapter is to outline some of the methodological strategies that scholars may adopt to detect how people’s interactions with the natural world may give rise to very different metaphorical experiences. These strategies focus on several ways that scholars can seek evidence of the impact of the natural world on metaphorical thinking: from linguistic analyses, experimental studies, ethnographic investigations, and hypothesis-driven examinations of human actions in a variety of contexts. Collectively, these methods for finding metaphor in the natural world highlight the importance of an ecological perspective on metaphor (e.g., what the world affords for meaning) and provide new insights into theoretical models of metaphorical thought and meaning-making.

Keywords: conceptual metaphor, natural world, human ecology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Great writers’ observations about nature
  • 3.Natural world events as models for human thinking
  • 4.Look to corpora for figures of speech related to nature
  • 5.Political debates about nature
  • 6.Looking for metaphor in multimedia advertisements
  • 7.Finding natural world metaphors in teaching and learning
  • 8.Purposefully seeking out metaphors in the natural world
  • 9.Conclusion
  • References
  • Internet sources
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.17.02gib
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Tincheva, Nelly
2023. ‘Narrative structure’, ‘rhetorical structure’, ‘text structure’. English Text Construction 16:1 ► pp. 30 ff. DOI logo
Xiao, Deming
2024. Review of Tay (2022): Navigating the realities of metaphor and psychotherapy research. Metaphor and the Social World DOI logo

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