Preface and acknowledgements

By presenting the most important projects featuring metaphor and metonymy repositories around the world, this volume aims to explain where metaphors and metonymies can be found (in thought, in language, and in communication), and how they can be harvested and classified. The volume is a result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between cognitive linguists, psychologists, and computational scientists employing and presenting a variety of methods which rely mostly on linguistic and, in one case, pictorial data. They all share the same passion for metaphors and metonymies, as well as the main assumptions of the cognitive linguistic approach to figurative language, which is based on the proposition that metaphor and metonymy underlie the human conceptual system and play a central role in human cognition, and that they are deeply entrenched in recurring patterns of bodily experience.

Earlier versions of these chapters were presented at the conference and round-table forum Building Figurative Language Repositories: Methods, Risks, and Challenges, held in Zagreb on 27 and 28 May 2016, organized by Kristina Despot. This conference was the first international meeting exclusively devoted to the trending topic of building electronic repositories of figurative language. The conference was generously co-funded by the Croatian Science Foundation as part of the project Croatian Metaphor Repository, led by K. Despot, and the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, whose financial contributions are gratefully acknowledged. We are particularly grateful to Željko Jozić, the director of the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, who wholeheartidly supported the project MetaNet.HR, the conference, and this book.

For their help in organizing the event, we are indebted to the scientific and organizing committee, and especially to the conference secretaries Ivana Brač and Ivan Pandžić. We are grateful to the keynote speakers, George Lakoff and Eve Sweetser, to the invited speakers – Antonio Barcelona, Marianna Bolognesi, Mario Brdar, Rita Brdar-Szabó, Zoltan Kövecses, Klaus-Uwe Panther, Günter Radden, Linda Thornburg, and Tony Veale, and to Simon Devylder, who was, based on the quality of his abstract, chosen by the Scientific Committtee to give his presentation within the invited talks session. We are especially grateful to the participants at the round table, and of course to all the participants of the conference. In preparing this book, we benefited greatly both from the valuable and interesting contributions to this conference and from the vivid discussions those talks stimulated during the round table.

Tony Veale went beyond the call of collegiality in giving us inspiring and witty feedback on the content of the book, and especially in suggesting such a captivating title for its introduction during a joyful train ride from Dublin to Cork. He gave us the metaphor, we did the mappings, and it seemed like a perfect match for this book.

We would especially like to express our gratitude for the privilege of working in the inspiring and supportive academic communities of Metaphor Lab Amsterdam (University of Amsterdam), the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, and the University of Osijek, but especially for the privilege of being inspired by and gaining knowledge at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the International Computer Science Institute.

We owe a special debt to Eve Sweetser, George Lakoff, Gerard Steen, Milena Žic Fuchs, and Tony Veale, whose work has been inspirational for us and has transformed our thinking.

We are indebted to two anonymous reviewers who gave us invaluable feedback and improved this book in many aspects.

Finally, we extend our deepest thanks to Gerard Steen and Christian Burgers, the editors of the Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication series, for accepting this volume to be published within the series, and for actively assisting us both in editorial matters and by providing invaluable advice and suggestions on the structure, content, and form of this book.