Cover not available

In:Metaphor, Nation and Discourse
Edited by Ljiljana Šarić and Mateusz-Milan Stanojević
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 82] 2019
► pp. 227–258

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Chapter 9
The role of metonymy and metaphor in the conceptualization of the nation

An emergent ontological analysis of syntactic-semantic constructions

 | University of Rijeka
Published online: 20 May 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.82.10per
Abstract
This corpus-based study presents an emergent ontological analysis of syntactic-semantic constructions of the concept nation. Using large Croatian corpora, I analysed the ontological congruence of the collocations of the lexeme nacija ‘nation’ in five types of syntactic-semantic constructions. This approach enabled a formal hierarchical description of the metaphorical conceptualization of the nation and the cognitive mechanism of eliciting reification, personification and social appraisal of the nation. Metaphorical mappings are seen as a powerful instrument for conceptualizing the institutional status of the nation, reinforcing the interaction between members, and the creation of collective identity that influences a person’s self-appraisal, and vice versa.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and approaches
  • 2.What kind of entity is the nation?
    • 2.1The emergent constructivist approach to the ontology of the nation
    • 2.2Emergent ontological description as an iterative function of meronomy and classification
    • 2.3Cultural models of the nation
    • 2.4The diachronic aspect of the componential analysis
    • 2.5Language as a tool of conceptual construal
  • 3.Analysis of syntactic-semantic constructions
    • 3.1 Syntactic-semantic constructions and construal of meaning
    • 3.2Noun collocates of the coordinated construction
    • 3.3Adjective collocates of the adjective modifier construction
    • 3.4Noun collocates of the dependent genitive construction
    • 3.5Verb collocates of the thematic object construction
    • 3.6Verb collocates of the agentive subject construction
  • 4.Ontological congruence analysis of categorization, metonymy, and metaphor
    • 4.1Cognitive profiling of meronomic relations in syntactic-semantic constructions
      • 4.1.1Meronymy in the adjective modifier construction
      • 4.1.2Meronymy in the genitive construction
      • 4.1.3Meronymy in the thematic object construction
      • 4.1.4Meronymy in the agentive subject construction
    • 4.2Metaphor as incongruent profiling of extended meronomic relations
    • 4.3Pragmatic relevance of metaphors in discourse
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
References (51)
References
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barcelona, Antonio. 2000. “On the Plausibility of Claiming a Metonymic Motivation for Conceptual Metaphor.” In Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective, ed. by Antonio Barcelona, 93–108. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2007. “Grounded Cognition.” Annual Review of Psychology 59: 617–645. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bennardo, Giovanni, and Victor C. De Munck. 2014. Cultural Models: Genesis, Typology and Experiences. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Borghi, Anna M., and Ferdinand Binkofski. 2014. Words as Social Tools: An Embodied View on Abstract Concepts. New York: Springer Science & Business Media. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brdar, Mario. 2007. Metonymy in Grammar: Towards Motivating Extensions of Grammatical Categories and Constructions. Osijek: Faculty of Philosophy.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brin, Sergey and Lawrence Page. 1998. “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 30(1–7): 107–117. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Buccino, Giovanni, Ivan Colagè, Nicola Gobbi, and Giorgio Bonaccorso. 2016. “Grounding Meaning in Experience: A Broad Perspective on Embodied Language.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 69: 69–78. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Capra, Fritjof. 1997. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Capra, Fritjof, and Piero Luisi. 2014. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2013. Analysing Political Speeches: Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor. Palgrave: Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chiao, Joan Y., and Katherine D. Blizinsky. 2016. “Cultural Neuroscience: Bridging Cultural and Biological Sciences.” In Social Neuroscience: Biological Approaches to Social Psychology, ed. by Eddie Harmon-Jones, and Michael Inzlicht, 247–275. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chow, Ho Ming, Raymond A. Mar, Yisheng Xu, Siyuan Liu, Suraji Wagage, and Allen R. Braun. 2014. “Embodied Comprehension of Stories: Interactions between Language Regions and Modality-specific Neural Systems.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 26 (2): 279–295. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
D’Andrade, Roy. 1987. “A Folk Model of the Mind.” In Cultural Models in Language and Thought, ed. by Dorothy Holland, and Naomi Quinn, 112–151. New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ellis, Nick C., and Diane Larsen-Freeman. 2009. Language as a Complex Adaptive System. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley–Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ellis, Nick C., Matthew Brook O’Donnell, and Ute Römer. 2015. “Usage-Based Language Learning.” In The Handbook of Language Emergence, ed. by Brian MacWhinney, and William O’Grady, 163–180. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley–Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Emmeche, Claus, Simo Køppe, and Frederik Stjernfelt. 1997. “Explaining Emergence: Towards an Ontology of Levels.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science 28 (1): 83–117. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fiske, Susan T., and Shelley E. Taylor. 2013. Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture. London: Sage Publications. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gibbs, W. Raymond. 2017. Metaphor Wars: Conceptual Metaphors in Human Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gildea, Daniel, and David Temperley. 2010. “Do Grammars Minimize Dependency Length?” Cognitive Science 34 (2): 286–310. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2009. Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
James, Paul. 1996. Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community. London: Sage Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kolstø, Pål. 2000. Political Construction Sites. Nation-Building in Russia and the Post-Soviet States. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. The Political Mind. New York: Viking.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980/2003. Metaphors We Live By, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ljubešić, Nikola, and Tomaž Erjavec. 2011. “hrWaC and slWac: Compiling Web Corpora for Croatian and Slovene.” In Text, Speech and Dialogue 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ed. by Ivan Habernal, and Václav Matoušek, 395–402. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Máiz, Ramón. 2003. “Framing the Nation: Three Rival Versions of Contemporary Nationalist Ideology.” Journal of Political Ideologies 8 (3): 251–267. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moussaïd, Mehdi, Juliane E. Kämmer, Pantelis P. Analytis, and Hansjörg Neth. 2013. “Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation.” PLoS ONE 8 (11): e78433. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mumenthaler, Christian, and David Sander. 2012. “Social Appraisal Influences Recognition of Emotions.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102 (6): 1118–1135. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2016. Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nardon, Luciara, and Richard M. Steers. 2009. “The Culture Theory Jungle: Divergence and Convergence in Models of National Culture.” In Cambridge Handbook of Culture, Organizations, and Work, ed. by Rabi S. Bhagat, and Richard M. Steers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pavlaković, Vjeran, and Benedikt Perak. 2017. “How Does this Monument Make You Feel?: Measuring Emotional Responses to War Memorials in Croatia.” In The Twentieth Century in European Memory: Transcultural Mediation and Reception, ed. by Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, and Tea Sindbak Andersen. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perak, Benedikt. 2017. “Pojmovne mreže leksema neugodnih i nepobuđenih emocija. Usporedba pojmova tuga, jad, žalost, depresija i sjeta u koordiniranoj konstrukciji [Conceptual Networks of Lexemes Referring to Hedonic Negative and Low Arousal Emotion Concepts: Comparison of the Croatian Lexemes Sadness, Depression, Sorrow, Grief and Melancholy in Coordinated Constructions].” In Jezik kao predmet proučavanja i jezik kao predmet poučavanja, ed. by Diana Stolac, and Anastazija Vlastelić, 297–317. Zagreb: Srednja Europa.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perak, Benedikt, and Sanja Puljar D’Alessio. 2013. “Kultura kao emergentno svojstvo otjelovljene spoznaje [Culture as an Emergent Property of Embodied Cognition].” In Avanture kulture: kulturalni studiji u lokalnom kontekstu, ed. by Nenad Fanuko, and Sanja Puljar D’Alessio, 77–108. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Radden, Günter. 2000. “How Metonymic are Metaphors?” In Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective, ed. by Antonio Barcelona, 93–108. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rokkan, Stein. 1975. “Dimensions of State Formation and Nation-Building. A Possible Paradigm for Research on Variations within Europe.” In The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. by Charles Tilly, 562–600. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rychlý, Pavel, and Adam Kilgarriff. 2007. “An Efficient Algorithm for Building a Distributional Thesaurus (and other Sketch Engine Developments).” In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the ACL on Interactive Poster and Demonstration Sessions, 41–44. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2010. “Does Frequency in Text Instantiate Entrenchment in the Cognitive System?” In Quantitative Methods in Cognitive Semantics: Corpus-Driven Approaches, ed. by Dylan Glynn, and Kerstin Fischer, 101–133. Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Searle, John. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Simon, Patrick, Victor Piché, and Amélie A. Gagnon. 2015. Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity: Cross-National Perspectives in Classifications and Identity Politics. New York: Springer International Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Eliot R., and Frederica R. Conrey. 2007. “Agent-Based Modeling: A New Approach for Theory Building in Social Psychology.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 11 (1): 87–104. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew. 2013. Lexical Relatedness. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol, and Susanne Flach. 2016. “The Corpus-Based Perspective on Entrenchment.” In Entrenchment and the Psychology of Language Learning: How We Reorganize and Adapt Linguistic Knowledge, ed. by Hans-Jörg Schmid, 101–128. Washington, DC: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Storey, Veda C. 1991. “Meronymic relationships.” Journal of Database Management (JDM) 2 (3): 22–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tomasello, Michael. 2000. “First Steps toward a Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition.” Cognitive Linguistics 11 (1–2): 61–82.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. “The Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language, ed. by Edith L. Bavin, 69–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Winston, Morton E., Roger Chaffin, and Douglas Hermann. 1987. “A Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations.” Cognitive Science 11 (4): 417–444. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Wang, Yongqi & Yujie Xie
2025. How country names legitimize economic nationalism: a critical discourse analysis. Discover Global Society 3:1 DOI logo
Perak, Benedikt & Tajana Ban Kirigin
2023. Construction Grammar Conceptual Network: Coordination-based graph method for semantic association analysis. Natural Language Engineering 29:3 ► pp. 584 ff. DOI logo
Ban Kirigin, Tajana & Benedikt Perak
2020. There’s No Time, The Problem of Conceptualising Time. In Logic, Language, and Security [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 12300], ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Salamurović, Aleksandra
2020. Metonymy and the conceptualisation of nation in political discourse. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 8:1 ► pp. 181 ff. DOI logo
Salamurović, Aleksandra
2023. The Metonymy EUrope as a Means of Legitimizing Nations in the Western Balkans. In Konzepte der NATION im europäischen Kontext im 21. Jahrhundert [Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 219 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue