Leviathan In Metaphors we live by, Lakoff and Johnson cite Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) as the chief proponents of a philosophical trend through which " the suspicion of poetry and rhetoric became dominant in Western thought " and " metaphor and other figurative devices [became] objects of scorn " (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 190). In his overview over " Metaphor in the Phi...

Drawing from a large corpus (17,000+ articles) of financial news, we perform a Bayesian sparse model analysis of the argument-distributions of the UP and DOWN-verbs, used to describe movements in indices, stocks and shares. Previous work, by Gerow and Keane (2011a, 2011b, 2011c), has shown, using measures of overlap and k-means clustering, that metaphor hierarchies and antonymic relations can b...

In the intellectual marketplace, different theories of language compete among themselves vying for their niche. One effective way of achieving such a goal is by offering some distinctive feature that makes them stand out from the rest. Such a ’difference’ can rest on several grounds: for example, a specific methodology specially suited to the study of a particular linguistic level (e.g. morphol...

A recent trend in ubiquitous computing is the development of new forms of interfaces, which rely on embodied interaction. We focus on the definition of embodiment that refers to the ways in which abstract concepts rely on metaphorical extensions of embodied schemata shaped by processes below the level of conscious awareness as explored by Lakoff and Johnson [Lakoff, G., Johnson, M., 1980. Metap...

concepts with increasingly concrete ones: Once a domain of knowledge becomes well known, it can itself serve as a source domain (basis) for understanding more novel concepts (Feldman, 2006, p. 209). After you have learned to think of light as a kind of water (that flows, pours in, fills the room, etc.), you can then learn to think about hope or reason as a kind of light. Ultimately, your knowle...