Researching Metaphors : Towards a Comprehensive Account

This collection advocates for a more holistic picture of metaphor, extending the field’s focus beyond the cognitive paradigm and conventional metaphorical concepts to illustrate the possibilities afforded by the study of living metaphors.

The volume brings together a diverse range of researchers in the discipline towards critically examining the presuppositions of the cognitive approach. The book shines a light on living metaphors – creative interpretations of conflictual meaning specific to a text or communicative act with their own unique functions – to throw into relief long-held tenets in existing metaphor research. Chapters reflect on the notion that creative metaphors spring from independent sources, not merely from metaphorical concepts, and the subsequent implications for our understanding of the relationship between linguistic forms and conceptual structures and the role of creative metaphors in organizing thought and action. Taken together, the book offers a complementary vision of languages and figures which integrates disparate lines of study within the cognitive paradigm with alternative perspectives for a more comprehensive portrait of metaphors.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in the study of metaphor, including such disciplines as theoretical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, semantics, literary studies, and philosophy of language.

Michele Prandi was professor of Linguistics at the Universities of Geneva, Pavia, Bologna, and Genoa. He is Doctor Honoris Causa at the University of Uppsala. His main research fields are semantics of complex expressions, conditions of significance, natural ontology and conceptual analysis, and metaphor and figurative language in their grammatical and conceptual aspects.

Micaela Rossi is professor of French Language and Translation at the University of Genoa. Her research interests focus on the formation of new metaphorical terminologies in technical and scientific vocabularies, as well as on the textual and discursive dynamics that determine their fixation within socio-professional communities of use.