Frames and constructions in metaphoric language shows how linguistic metaphor piggybacks on certain patterns of constructional meaning that have already been identified and studied in non-metaphoric language. Recognition of these shared semantic structures, and comparison of their roles in… read more
Australia’s initial success in shutting out the novel coronavirus was facilitated by low rates of international visitors, due to the unprecedented bushfire season called the Black Summer. The 2019–2020 bushfires did more than keep travelers away, however. These fires also influenced the… read more
Recent studies have shown that semantic framing can reveal bias and racism. The current study introduces a novel method for locating frames in texts, and employs this method to find frames for Muslims, Europeans and Australians in a range of texts by anti-Muslim and non-anti-Muslim authors. The… read more
What causes metaphors to be similar or different across languages? It can be tempting to associate differences with culture and similarities with embodiment, since human cultures are diverse and human bodies are comparable. However, we argue that the death of a loved one is such a widespread… read more
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) aims to represent the conceptual structure of metaphors rather than the structure of metaphoric language. The theory does not explain which aspects of metaphoric language evoke which conceptual structures, for example. However, other theories within cognitive… read more
Spanish suave is sometimes translated as English smooth or soft. In cluster analyses of data from the British National Corpus and the Corpus del Español, senses of suave are found to align in some ways with smooth, in other respects with soft, and sometimes with neither adjective. For instance,… read more
Artworks can be said to metaphorically “speak” to their viewers (Sullivan 2006, 2009) in a form of fictive interaction (Pascual 2002). The current study examines the fictive speech of different types of artworks in a corpus of 1,105 examples extracted from DeviantART, the world’s largest online… read more
This study compares antonymous relations between lemmata (such as soft/softer/softest and hard/harder/hardest), words (soft and hard) and word senses (for example, the sense of soft indicating a yielding surface and that of hard describing an unyielding surface). In agglomerative cluster analyses… read more
We suggest that the impact of metaphoric language does not depend entirely on the conceptual metaphor that is evoked, nor on the form the metaphoric language takes, but also on the steps involved in evoking a given metaphor. This is especially apparent in minimalist poetry. Readers are given… read more
The current study documents and analyzes the previously unrecognized English if and when construction. This construction coordinates a conditional and a temporal conjunction, as in if and when P Q; Q until and unless P; and a wide range of other micro-constructions. The current study documents the… read more
