Publications
Publication details [#3452]
Chilton, Paul. 2009. Reading Sonnet 30: Discourse, metaphor and blending. In Musolff, Andreas and Jörg Zinken. Metaphor and Discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 40–58. 19 pp. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
London: Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract
This chapter introduces three levels of discourse and, using Blending Theory, shows how cross-domain conceptual relationships of various kinds are linked to the three levels.
We will observe a small text, Shakespeare's sonnet 30, in which concentrated cognitive effects are stimulated, but which is simultaneously dependent on the cultural environment of discourses.1 This means that the methodology focuses on the complexity of a single discourse event. In the history of science, intense investigation of single so-called 'golden events' (Galison 1997) has been contrasted with the large-scale search for generalization, a distinction that Coulson and Oakely (2000) have compared to the different approaches to linguistic and associated cognitive phenomena. While this chapter focuses on a 'golden event', no linguistic event can be separated from its context. This means that the starting point will be certain theoretical notions about discourse, and the aim will be to describe how metaphorical effects are related to discourse. By metaphorical 'effects' here, I mean the emergence in the course of discourse processing of relationships of various kinds across conceptual domains. Because this chapter is concerned with discourse processing, conceptual emergence and coherence, it is methodologically natural to couch the analysis in terms of Blending Theory (BT) which is explicitly a theory of processing, as well as in terms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
(Paul Chilton)