Purpose of Study: This study was conducted within the scope of a qualitative and quantitative study pattern in order to determine nursing students’ perceptions of the Internet through metaphors and the variables affecting such metaphors. Method: The study sampling included all undergraduate students (575 individuals) attending a nursing school during the 2009-2010 spring semester. The entire po...

Recent research in cognitive linguistics has shown that idiomatic phrases are decomposable and analyzable and that the individual words in idiomatic phrases systematically contribute to the overall figurative interpretations. This cognitive linguistic view suggests that enhancing awareness of conceptual metaphors embedded in the individual words may help second language students to learn idioms...

Metaphors are generally accepted as essential to the design of effective human computer interfaces. However, “The generally assumed theoretical benefits of user interface metaphor are supported by surprisingly little empirical evidence.” (Blackwell, 1998) This paper discusses the concept of “concrete metaphor” and the problems that it presents in interface and interaction design. Concrete metap...

Some Internet genres, in particular Weblogs and discussion fora, have a dubious reputation for giving voice to strongly polemical discourses or hate-speech. This paper investigates the use of dehumanizing metaphors, specifically parasite metaphors, in British debates about immigration. It compares the range of metaphors used in Blogs with that used in online fora and in mainstream newspaper cov...

This research questions the frequently repeated, taken-for-granted aphorism that “there is nothing more practical than a good theory.” It seeks to demonstrate that there is no reason to believe that theory is more practical than good paradigms, frameworks, models, metaphors or good versions of other conceptual artifacts. It identifies different types of conceptual artifacts along with nine crit...

In previous work by Ahrens et al. (2003) and Chung et al. (2003a, 2003b), the extraction of conceptual metaphors was carried out based on prototypicality. Based on this view, the most prototypical mappings of source to target domains in the corpora help determining the Mapping Principle of the conceptual metaphors (Ahrens 2002). However, this approach is limited in the aspect that the identific...

Conceptual metaphor theory proposes that the conceptual structure of emotions emerges through metaphorization from concrete concepts such spatial orientation and physical containment. Primary metaphors for emotions have been described in a wide range of languages. Here we show the results of a corpus analysis revealing that certain metaphors such as EMOTIONS ARE FLUIDS IN CONTAINERS and EMOTION...

An implemented AI reasoning system called ATT-Meta is sketched. It addresses not only AI issues but also ones that are salient in psychology, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, discourse pragmatics and other disciplines. These issues include the Simulation-Theory/Theory-Theory debate and Fauconnier and Turner’s notion of conceptual blending. The system performs metaphor-based reasoning and reas...

A corpus analysis of the standard Java documentation revealed the range of conceptual metaphors shared by library authors and users of packages such as java.util and java.bean. These metaphors included the expected mental models of internal program behaviour, but also consistent references to a spatial image-world with material properties and flows. More surprisingly, program components are met...