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“That’s not what he meant”

The debate over religion-related metaphors

ORCiD logo with link | University of Siedlce, Poland
Published online: 24 November 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00141.abd
Abstract
Taking the notion of the “hearer’s meaning” as distinct from the speaker’s communicative intention, and shifting from the dichotomy speaker/hearer(s) to a system of participant-roles of which speaker and hearer(s) are only two kinds, this article focuses on how religion-related metaphors such as “[[Human 1]] worship [[Human 2]]” may become the subject of controversy and discursive struggle on social media, or be fraught with scope for conflicting readings. It argues (a) that one man’s metaphor or secondary norm is another’s literal meaning, (b) that interfaith debaters or those who generally try to discuss religion may twist or reverse so-called “conceptual mappings”, conjecture hypotheses, and indulge in deductive and inductive reasoning in order to win an argument or to spark hostility, and (c) that the general public may reject metaphors (and metonymies) that are too threatening to their religious beliefs. These are documented as cases of failed framing effects. A sociocognitive approach to metaphor, or to the classical tropes in general, one that is in the spirit of Teun van Dijk, succeeds in yielding an adequate account of the phenomena. The article discusses several important implications both for metaphor theories and for religious and cultural linguistic studies.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metaphor from speaker’s to hearer’s meaning
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1From Omar Sharif to Safaa Sultan
    • 4.2Debates and interfaith dialogues
      • 4.2.1Reversing the intended “mapping”
      • 4.2.2A false scientific metaphor?
  • 5.Conclusion and further directions
  • Note
  • References
References (80)
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