Lakoff (1974) brought to the attention of the linguistic community a construction that seems to have triggered surprisingly little interest in the subsequent literature. The construction at issue exhibits constituents with the superficial appearance of root sentences in positions that are normally filled by DPs, APs or PPs (functioning as arguments, adjuncts, or predicates), and presumably for ...

There has been growing interest in the study of the human conceptual system across several disciplines and sub-disciplines in the last two decades. Cognitive scientists have been involved in modeling the architecture of the human conceptual system. For instance, a fairly recent paradigm in cognitive science called "connectionism" models the human conceptual system as a network composed of a lar...

This paper demonstrates how the conceptual metaphor “life is a journey” pervades the Qur’an and how within the same scope we can find some related metaphors, such as “the Straight Way”, “the way of Hell” and “Companions of the Fire”, among others. The metaphor “life is a journey” takes as a source domain the concept “journey” and as a target domain the concept “life”. The other related metaphor...

Metaphor research in the contemporary world has its foot mainly in two disciplines: cognitive science and linguistic science. In the field of cognitive psychology alone, there are a number of theoretical frameworks, among which are salience imbalance theory (Ortony, 1979), domains-interaction theory (Tourangeau & Sternberg, 1981), structure-mapping theory (Gentner, 1989), and conceptual metapho...

Reseña de texto: Lakoff, George (2017). “No pienses en un elefante: Lenguaje y debate Político”. Bogota: Península

The general question that forms the background to this paper is one that has interested many scholars over the years, including linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and others. This question concerns the role of our experiences in motivating features of language. A number of influential studies have proposed that certain categories of experiences—or their cognitive representations—are partic...

In this paper I review some of the theoretical issues surrounding metaphor, and trace them through the context of the cognitive neuroscience debate. Metaphor, like all figurative language, has been usually explained as a secondary linguistic process which takes place as a function taking place on literal language. However this explanation does not fit well with some of the recent work on right ...

Language is a dynamic landscape in which words are not fixed landmarks, but fickle signposts that switch their directions as archaic senses are lost and new, more topical senses, are gained. Frequently, entirely new lexical signposts are added as newly minted word-forms enter the language. Some of these new forms are cut from whole cloth and have their origins in creative writing, movies or gam...