Metaphor from the Ground Up (Paperback)

Paperback. Metaphor from the Ground Up introduces Conceptual Filtering Theory, a theory of mental processing that describes figurative language communication in terms of conceptual domain projection and contextual disambiguation. In an attempt to match theoretical observations from cognitive semantics and pragmatics with related knowledge about mental processes from cognitive neuroscience, CFT first examines the distributed nature of conceptualization and then uses this background information to explain metonymic binding and metaphoric mapping. Once the perceptual origins of metonymy and metaphor have been demonstrated, CFT offers a detailed account of how salient aspects of conceptualization differentially combine to achieve predictable inferencing results in linguistic communication. In addition, CFT characterizes the role of contextual effects in pruning salient inferencing options and demonstrates how situational frames can be manipulated to guide semantic outcomes. The book as a whole will assert that figurative language processing cannot be characterized in terms of a generically constituted base system that receives inputs and spits out predictable results according to logical probability in a situational vacuum. Rather, it is a dynamic, context-sensitive process that continually reweights the underlying system so as to rapidly select situation-relevant lines of inferencing from among a variety of salient inferencing options. Cross-referencing neurobiological knowledge with the invariance hypothesis, relevance theory, and frame semantics, Metaphor from the Ground Up: Understanding Figurative Language in Context unifies metaphor theory, fundamentally rethinks context, and moves linguistics into the twenty-first century. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…