Figurative Language

This lively, comprehensive and practical book offers a new, integrated and linguistically sound understanding of what figurative language is.

Barbara Dancygier (Author), Eve Sweetser (Author)

9780521184731, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 6 March 2014

256 pages, 6 b/w illus. 8 tables
24.7 x 17.4 x 1.5 cm, 0.47 kg

'… clearly has educational value for students, but the book's powerful explanatory framework also will be of interest to scholars in linguistics, cognition, and literature … thought provoking and insightful.' PsycCRITIQUES

This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. Comprehensive and practical, the book includes analyses of figurative uses of both word meanings and linguistic constructions. • Provides definitions of major concepts • Offers in-depth analyses of examples, exploring multiple levels of complexity • Surveys figurative structures in different discourse genres • Helps students to connect figurative usage with the conceptual underpinnings of language • Goes beyond English to explore cross-linguistic and cross-modal data

1. Introduction
2. The basics of metaphor
3. Metaphoric structure: levels and relations
4. Mental spaces and blending
5. Metonymy
6. Grammatical constructions and figurative meaning
7. The cross-linguistic study of metaphor
8. Figurative language in discourse
9. Concluding remarks.

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Psycholinguistics [CFD], Linguistics [CF]