Figurative Language

"This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. Comprehensive and practical, the book includes analyses of figurative uses of both word meanings and linguistic constructions. [bullet] Provides definitions of major concepts [bullet] Offers in-depth analyses of examples, exploring multiple levels of complexity [bullet]Surveys figurative structures in different discourse genres [bullet] Helps students to connect figurative usage with the conceptual underpinnings of language [bullet] Goes beyond English to explore cross-linguistic and cross-modal data"--

List of contents

1. Introduction; 2. The basics of metaphor; 3. Metaphoric structure: levels and relations; 4. Mental spaces and blending; 5. Metonymy; 6. Grammatical constructions and figurative meaning; 7. The cross-linguistic study of metaphor; 8. Figurative language in discourse; 9. Concluding remarks.

About the author

Barbara Dancygier is Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia.Eve Sweetser is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Product details

• Authors: Barbara Dancygier, Barbara (University of British Columbia Dancygier, Barbara Sweetser Dancygier, Dancygier Barbara, Eve Sweetser, Sweetser Eve
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 06.03.2014
• EAN: 9781107005952
• ISBN: 978-1-107-00595-2
• No. of pages: 260
• Series: Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics; Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Other languages / Other literatures; Linguistics, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General, Cognition & cognitive psychology, Psycholinguistics