Languages and language varieties around the globe have been diminishing at an astonishing rate. Despite great efforts at language documentation, scholarship on metaphors and figurative units – often particularly fragile parts of language – has been largely neglected until recently. This book, like… read more
When the last speaker of a language dies, s/he takes to oblivion the memories, associations and the rich imagery this language community has once lived by. The cultural heritage encoded in conventional linguistic metaphors, handed down through generations, will be lost forever. This volume consists… read more
This article aims to shed light on the impact of an extended social context on the motivation for the figurative content of conventional metaphors. The article therefore compares conventional linguistic metaphors found in Inari Saami with conventional linguistic metaphors that are widespread among… read more
This paper examines metaphors that are handed down in idioms of an old Low Saxon basic dialect. About 30 years ago it was still possible to collect a comprehensive inventory of idioms with the help of the last generation of old-established dialect speakers who had knowledge of their native language… read more
This chapter seeks to outline the main trends in research on cultural aspects of conventional figurative language (phraseology in particular) and to describe the connection between figurative units (such as idioms, proverbs, etc.) and culture as it becomes manifest in phraseological data from… read more
Widespread idioms (WIs) are idioms that have the same lexical structure (or at least very similar structures) and the same figurative core meaning in various languages, including genetically unrelated and geographically distant languages. The project Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond to be… read more
