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Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language
Edited by Annalisa Baicchi
[Figurative Thought and Language 9] 2020
► pp. 209–222

Metaphorical interplay of words and gestures in the Catholic liturgy

| University of Silesia

This chapter analyzes selected Catholic liturgical rituals as motivated by verbal and gestural metaphors. Lakoff and Johnson (2003/1980) claim that the conceptual systems of religions are of metaphorical nature. The Catholic liturgy contains a number of gestures and movements used in worship, for instance, kneeling, bowing, raising hands, standing up, joining hands together, prostrating, beating oneself in the chest, or washing the hands. These gestures are often accompanied by specific spoken formulas, which express humiliation before God, regret for one’s sins, submission to God, readiness to listen to God’s word, or response to His will. The aim of this Chapter is to show that in line with the claim that metaphor is a multimodal phenomenon (Forceville, 2009), it is possible to interpret the interplay of words and certain liturgical gestures as metaphorical.

Keywords: Catholic liturgy, conceptual metaphor, monomodal metaphor, multimodal metaphor
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Monomodal and multimodal conceptual metaphors
  • 3.Linguistic studies on the Catholic liturgy
  • 4.Gestures in the Catholic liturgy
  • 5.The god is up metaphor in the Catholic liturgy
  • 6.Personifications of god in the Catholic liturgy
  • 7.Metaphors of sin in the Catholic liturgy
  • 8.Metaphors of the christian life in the Catholic liturgy
  • 9.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.9.09kuc
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Kuczok, Marcin
2020. The Interplay of Metaphor and Metonymy in Christian Symbols. Metaphor and Symbol 35:4 ► pp. 236 ff. DOI logo

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