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This article makes an empirical and a methodological contribution to the comparative study of action. The empirical contribution is a comparative study of three distinct types of action regularly accomplished with the turn format du meinst x (“you mean/think x”) in German: candidate understandings, formulations of the other’s mind, and requests for a judgment. These empirical materials are the basis for a methodological exploration of different levels of researcher abstraction in the comparative study of action. Two levels are examined: the (coarser) level of conditionally relevant responses (what a response speaker must do to align with the action of the prior turn) and the (finer) level of “full alignment” (what a response speaker can do to align with the action of a prior turn). Both levels of abstraction provide empirically viable and analytically interesting descriptive concepts for the comparative study of action. Data are in German.
Sometimes in interaction, a speaker articulates an overt interpretation of prior talk. Such moments have been studied as involving the repair of a problem with the other’s talk or as formulating an understanding of the matter at hand. Stepping back from the established notions of formulations and repair, we examine the variety of actions speakers do with the practice of offering an interpretation, and the order within this domain. Results show half a dozen usage types of interpretations in mundane interaction. These form a largely continuous territory of action, with recognizably distinct usage types as well as cases falling between these (proto)typical uses. We locate order in the domain of interpretations using the method of semantic maps and show that, contrary to earlier assumptions in the literature, interpretations that formulate an understanding of the matter at hand are actually quite pervasive in ordinary talk. These findings contribute to research on action formation and advance our understanding of understanding in interaction. Data are video- and audio-recordings of mundane social interaction in the German language from a variety of settings.
In this article we examine moments in which parents or other caregivers overtly invoke rules during episodes in which they take issue with, intervene against, and try to change a child’s ongoing behavior or action(s). Drawing on interactional data from four different languages (English, Finnish, German, Polish) and using Conversation Analytic methods, we first illustrate the variety of ways in which parents may use such overt rule invocations as part of their behavior modification attempts, showing them to be functionally versatile interactional objects. Their interactional flexibility notwithstanding, we find that parents typically invoke rules when, in the course of the intervention episode, they encounter trouble with achieving an acceptable compliant outcome. To get at the distinct import of rule formulations in this context, we then compare them to two sequential alternatives: parental expressions of an experienced negative affective state, and parental threats. While the former emphasize aspects of social solidarity, the latter seek to enforce compliance by foregrounding a power asymmetry between the parent and the child. Rule formulations, by contrast, are designedly impersonal and appear to be directed at what the parents construe as shortcomings in common-sense practical reasoning on the child’s part. Reflexively, the child is thereby cast as not having properly applied common-sense ‘practical reason’ when engaging in what is treated as the problematic behavior or action. Overt rule invocations can, therefore, be understood as indexical appeals to practical reason.
The present paper explores how rules are enforced and talked about in everyday life. Drawing on a corpus of board game recordings across European languages, we identify a sequential and praxeological context for rule talk. After a game rule is breached, a participant enforces proper play and then formulates a rule with an impersonal deontic statement (e.g. “It’s not allowed to do this”). Impersonal deontic statements express what may or may not be done without tying the obligation to a particular individual. Our analysis shows that such statements are used as part of multi-unit and multi-modal turns where rule talk is accomplished through both grammatical and embodied means. Impersonal deontic statements serve multiple interactional goals: they account for having changed another’s behavior in the moment and at the same time impart knowledge for the future. We refer to this complex action as an “instruction.” The results of this study advance our understanding of rules and rule-following in everyday life, and of how resources of language and the body are combined to enforce and formulate rules.
Directing, negotiating and planning: 'Aus Spiel' ('for play') in children's pretend joint play
(2021)
We are interested in how children organize joint pretend play. In this kind of play, children create an invented world by transforming matters of the real world into matters of a fictional world (e.g., pretending to be a 'giant' or treating a particular spatial area as a 'witch's kitchen'). Since there are no rules and no script, every next step in the game is an improvisation designed here and now. Children engaged in free play have equal rights to determine what should happen next. For that reason, they have to negotiate next steps. We are interested in a particular expression that children often use in joint play: aus Spaß/Spiel ('for fun' or 'for play', similar to 'let's pretend'). Based on a corpus of five hours of video recordings of two pairs of twins (the younger children are between 3 and 5 years old, the older ones are 8 years old), we show that children regularly use aus Spiel while playing as a method for shaping the activity. Inventing new events, children try to get their co-players to accept them and act accordingly. In that context, issues of (dis-)alignment and deontic rights become relevant. Here, we are interested in the interactional work that aus Spiel-('let's pretend')-turns do and how co-players respond.
This article makes an empirical and a methodological contribution to the comparative study of action. The empirical contribution is a comparative study of three distinct types of action regularly accomplished with the turn format du meinst x (“you mean/think x”) in German: candidate understandings, formulations of the other’s mind, and requests for a judgment. These empirical materials are the basis for a methodological exploration of different levels of researcher abstraction in the comparative study of action. Two levels are examined: the (coarser) level of conditionally relevant responses (what a response speaker must do to align with the action of the prior turn) and the (finer) level of “full alignment” (what a response speaker can do to align with the action of a prior turn). Both levels of abstraction provide empirically viable and analytically interesting descriptive concepts for the comparative study of action. Data are in German.
We examine moments in social interaction in which a person formulates what another thinks or believes. Such formulations of belief constitute a practice with specifiable contexts and consequences. Belief formulations treat aspects of the other person's prior conduct as accountable on the basis that it provided a new angle on a topic, or otherwise made a surprising contribution within an ongoing course of actions. The practice of belief formulations subjectivizes the content that the other articulated and thereby topicalizes it, mobilizing commitment to that position, an account, or further elaboration. We describe how the practice can be put to work in different activity contexts: sometimes it is designed to undermine the other's position as a subjective 'mere belief', at other times it serves to mobilize further topic talk. Throughout, belief formulations show themselves to be a method by which we get to know ourselves and each other as mental agents.
Linguistic relativists have traditionally asked 'how language influences thought', but conversation analysts and anthropological linguists have moved the focus from thought to social action. We argue that 'social action' should in this context not become simply a new dependent variable, because the formulation 'does language influence action' suggests that social action would already be meaningfully constituted prior to its local (verbal and multi-modal) accomplishment. We draw on work by the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker to show that close attention to action-in-a-situation helps us ground empirical work on cross-cultural diversity in an appreciation of the invariances that make culture-specific elements of practice meaningful.
The recognizability of a stretch of conduct as social action depends on details of turn construction as well as the turn’s context. We examine details of turn construction as they enter into actions offering interpretations of prior talk. Such actions either initiate repair or formulate a conclusion from prior talk. We focus on how interpretation markers (das heißt [“that means”] vs. du meinst [“you mean”]) and interpretation formats (phrasal vs. clausal turn completions) each make their invariant contribution to specific interpreting practices. Interpretation marker and turn format go hand in hand, which leads to distinct patterns of interpreting practices: Das heißt+clause is especially apt for formulations, du meinst+phrase for repair. The results suggest that details of turn construction can systematically enter into the constitution of social action. Data are in German with English translation.
Positioning analysis, a variant of discourse analysis, was used to explore the narratives of 40 psychiatric patients (11 females and 29 males; mean age = 40 years) who had manifest difficulties with engagement with statutory mental health services. Positioning analysis is a qualitative method that captures how people linguistically position the roles and identities of themselves and others in their day-to-day lives and narratives. The language of disengagement incorporated the passive positioning of self in relation to their lives and treatment through the use of metaphor, the passive voice and them and us attribution, while the discourse of engagement incorporated more active positioning of self, achieved through the use of the personal pronoun we and metaphoric references to balanced relationships. The findings corroborate previous thematic analysis that highlighted the importance of identity and agency in the ‘making or breaking’ of therapeutic relationships (Priebe et al. 2005). Implications are discussed in relation to how positioning analysis may help signal and emphasize important life and therapeutic experiences in spoken narratives as well as clinical consultations.
Most cultures have metaphors for time that involve movement, for example, ‘time passes’. Although time is objectively measured, it is subjectively understood, as we can perceive time as stationary, whereby we move towards future events, or we can perceive ourselves as stationary, with time moving past us and events moving towards us. This paper reports a series of studies that first examines whether people think about time in a metaphor-consistent manner (Study 1) and then explores the relationship between ‘time perspective’, level of perceived personal agency, and time representations (Study 2), the relationship between emotional experiences and time representation (Study 3), and whether this relationship is bidirectional by manipulating either emotional experiences (Study 4) or time representation (Study 5). Results provide bidirectional evidence for an ego-moving representation of time, with happiness eliciting more agentic control, and evidence for a time-moving passivity associated with emotional experiences of anxiety and depression. This bidirectional relationship suggests that our representation of time is malleable, and therefore, current emotional experiences may change through modification of time representations.
Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects—social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying ‘thank you’ as in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, service or support from another, comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents. We find that expressions of gratitude in these episodes are remarkably rare, suggesting that social reciprocity in everyday life relies on tacit understandings of rights and duties surrounding mutual assistance and collaboration. At the same time, we also find minor cross-cultural variation, with slightly higher rates in Western European languages English and Italian, showing that universal tendencies of social reciprocity should not be equated with more culturally variable practices of expressing gratitude. Our study complements previous experimental and culture-specific research on gratitude with a systematic comparison of audiovisual corpora of naturally occurring social interaction from different cultures from around the world.
Drawing on research from conversation analysis and developmental psychology, we point to the existence of “supporters” of morally responsible agency in everyday interaction: causes of our behavior that we are often unaware of, but that would make goodenough reasons for our actions, were we made aware of them.
Reformulating place
(2013)
This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in-interaction. Not surprisingly, place references are sometimes reformulated so as to indicate a misspeaking or in pursuit of recipient recognition. At other times, however, we show that place references can be reformulated to more adequately implement the action of a turn in prosecuting the course of action of which it is a part. In these cases repairing a place reference can target a source of trouble associated with implementing the action of a turn at talk, and thus reformulating place can serve as a practical resource for accomplishing a range of interactional tasks. We conclude with a more complex case in which two reformulations are deployed in responding to a so-called ‘double-barrelled’ initiating action.
Sentence and construction types generally have more than one pragmatic function. Impersonal deontic declaratives such as ‘it is necessary to X’ assert the existence of an obligation or necessity without tying it to any particular individual. This family of statements can accomplish a range of functions, including getting another person to act, explaining or justifying the speaker’s own behavior as he or she undertakes to do something, or even justifying the speaker’s behavior while simultaneously getting another person to help. How is an impersonal deontic declarative fit for these different functions? And how do people know which function it has in a given context? The authors address these questions using video recordings of everyday interactions among speakers of Italian and Polish.
The article discusses the possibilities and challenges of combining conversation analysis and ethnography in the study of everyday family life. We argue that such a combination requires the decision whether to prioritise interaction data or ethno-graphic (in particular, interview) data in the analysis. We present a conversation analytic case study of how household work is commonly brought up in the interactions of one couple and bring this to bear on a re-analysis of a possible conflict situation originally described in the ethnographic analysis by Klein, Izquierdo, and Bradbury (2007), published in this journal. While the findings of the two analyses converge, they inform us about different dimensions of couple interaction. The ethnographic analysis is focused on participants’ experiences, and the conversation analysis is focused on participants’ practices. We conclude that the methodological decision to prioritise interaction or interview data has consequences for the kind of questions we can ask.
This study investigated whether an analysis of narrative style (word use and cross-clausal syntax) of patients with symptoms of generalised anxiety and depression disorders can help predict the likelihood of successful participation in guided self-help. Texts by 97 people who had made contact with a primary care mental health service were analysed. Outcome measures were completion of the guided self-help programme, and change in symptoms assessed by a standardised scale (CORE-OM). Regression analyses indicated that some aspects of participants' syntax helped to predict completion of the programme, and that aspects of syntax and word use helped to predict improvement of symptoms. Participants using non-finite complement clauses with above-average frequency were four times more likely to complete the programme (95% confidence interval 1.4 to 11.7) than other participants. Among those who completed, the use of causation words and complex syntax (adverbial clauses) predicted improvement, accounting for 50% of the variation in well-being benefit. These results suggest that the analysis of narrative style can provide useful information for assessing the likelihood of success of individuals participating in a mental health guided self-help programme.
This paper introduces a method for computer-based analyses of metaphor in discourse, combining quantitative and qualitative elements. This method is illustrated with data from research on German newspaper discourse concerning the ongoing system transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Methodological aspects of the research procedure are discussed and it is argued that quantitative elements can enhance comparability in cross-cultural and cross-lingual research. Some basic findings of the research are presented. The peculiarities of the German Wende discourse - especially the salience of a passive perspective on the ongoing political and social changes - are outlined.
In their analysis of methods that participants use to manage the realization of practical courses of action, Kendrick and Drew (2016/this issue) focus on cases of assistance, where the need to be addressed is Self’s, and Other lends a helping hand. In our commentary, we point to other forms of cooperative engagement that are ubiquitously recruited in interaction. Imperative requests characteristically expect compliance on the grounds of Other’s already established commitment to a wider and shared course of actions. Established commitments can also provide the engine behind recruitment sequences that proceed nonverbally. And forms of cooperative engagement that are well glossed as assistance can nevertheless be demonstrably oriented to established commitments. In sum, we find commitment to shared courses of action to be an important element in the design and progression of certain recruitment sequences, where the involvement of Other is best defined as contribution. The commentary highlights the importance of interdependent orientations in the organization of cooperation. Data are in German, Italian, and Polish.
When formulating a request for an object, speakers can choose among different grammatical resources that would all serve the overall purpose. This paper examines the social contexts indexed and created by the choice of the turn format can I have x to request a shared good (the pepper grinder, a tissue from a box on the table, etc.) in British English informal interaction. The analysis is based on a video corpus of approximately 25 h of everyday interaction among family and friends. In its home environment, a request in the format can I have x treats the other as being in control over the relevant material object, a control that is the contingent outcome of ongoing courses of action. This contingent control over a shared good produces an obligation to make it available. This analysis is supported by an examination of similarly formatted request turns in other languages, of can I have x in another interactional environment (after a relevant offer has been made) in British English, and of deviant cases. The results highlight the intimate connection of request format selection to the present engagements of (prospective) request recipients.
W artykule przedstawiono analizç struktury metaforycznej polskich dyskursów na temat konca komunizmu panst wowego. Analizç przeprowadzono w oparciu o bazç danych, zawierajqcq 1008 metafor pochodzqcych z tekstów prasowych z 1999 roku, upamiçtniajqcych wazne wydarzenia z 1989 roku. Jak siç okazuje, struktury metaforyczne róznych dyskursów wyrazajq i utrwalajq ideologjcznie uksztaltowane interpretacje historii. Szczegolowiej badano interpretacje metaforyczne dwóch zjawisk: zachowania siç przedstawicieli wladzy i opozycji przy Okrqglym Stole oraz pytania o ciqglosc historii. Te dwa zjawiska — których konceptualizacja gra waznq rolç w okreáleniu autostereotypu Polaka w III RP — sq interpretowane za pomocq róznego rodzaju metafor. Metaforyczne rozumienie ciqglosci historii da siç analizowac za pomocq tak zwanej „konceptualnej teorii metafory" LakofFa i Johnsona. Natomiast zachowania komunistów i opozycjonistów sq. interpretowane za pomoc^ metafor intertekstualnych. Sq one skonstruowane nie na podstawie doswiadczenia cielesnego, lecz doswiadczenia specyficznego dia danej kultury. Wydaje siç zatem, ze ksztaltowanie róznego rodzaju pojçc w dyskursie aktywizuje rózne strefy bazy doswiadczeniowej.
Badania etnolingwistyczne zdobyly w ciqgu ostatnich dwu dekad znaozna populamosc. Najwazniejsz^ formuh\ nietaforycznn okreslajqcii glowny przedmiot tych badaií jest .jçzykowy obraz swiata”. W zwiqzku z tym. iz powstaj^ obecnie projekty studiów komparatyslycznych na duzíi skalç, warto byt moze rozwazyc, czego takie ujçcie etnolingwistyki nie uwzglçdnia. Wizualna metafora obrazów implikuje, ze mówincy si\ w slanie wyjsc ix>za swiat i patrzec nan (oraz nazywac go) z zewmprz. Artykul oinawia dwie kcinsekwencje tej inetafory, które mog^ przysporzyc problemów. Po pierwsze, wyizolowanie jçzyka ze swiata ludzkich dzialan, którego jyzyk wszak jest czçsci^. prowadzi do przyjçcia kognitywistycznego modeln znaczenia jako oddzielnego stmmienia komunikaeji. Taki model nie pasuje do eodziennego doswiadezenia przezroczystosci jyzyka. Po drugie, wyizolowanie jçzyka z zycia sprzyja stosowaniu metod „bezczasowych” oraz studiom nad stowami wyalKtrahowanymi z sytuaeji, w której zostaly one uzyte (jesli nie wyjçtymi z kontekstu). Przyjmuj^c takie metafory i inetody, inozetny stracic z oczu znaczn^ czçsc tego, co jest istotne dla jyzyka poUx;znego — przedmiotu badan etnonauki.
W artykule tym przyglfjdam si. zasadniczej dia j.zykowego obrazu swiata opozycji mi.dzy swotm i obcym w przykladowych tckstach przynaleznych do polskiego i niemieckiego dyskursu Ideologieznego (politycznego). Za van Dijkicin przyjmuj., ze charakterystyczne dla dyskursu ideologicznego jest ustalenie i reprodukeja rozr.zmenia mi.dzy grupa wlasn^ a innymi grupami. Funkcjq dyskursu ideologicznego jest legitymizaeja dzialan i przekonan grupy wlasnej oraz delegitymizacja dzialan i przekonan innych grup. W populamych czasopismach polskich i niemieckich, traktuj^cych o tematach politycznych ( Wprost i Spiegel) takie pojmowanie swojego i obeego wydaje si. byc akeeptowane. Konkretyzacja absttakcyjnych poj.c. sw.j i obey przy tym nie jest stala, a raczej funkcjonalnie zmienna, zaleznie od tego, kto ma byc postrzegany jako rialeziycy do grupy wlasnej, a kto ma byc z niej wylijczony.
How to propose an action as an objective necessity. The case of Polish trzeba x (‘one needs to x’)
(2011)
The present study demonstrates that language-specific grammatical resources can afford speakers language-specific ways of organizing cooperative practical action. On the basis of video recordings of Polish families in their homes, we describe action affordances of the Polish impersonal modal declarative construction trzeba x (“one needs to x”) in the accomplishment of everyday domestic activities, such as cutting bread, bringing recalcitrant children back to the dinner table, or making phone calls. Trzeba-x turns in first position are regularly chosen by speakers to point to a possible action as an evident necessity for the furthering of some broader ongoing activity. Such turns in first position provide an environment in which recipients can enact shared responsibility by actively involving themselves in the relevant action. Treating the necessity as not restricted to any particular subject, aligning responsive actions are oriented to when the relevant action will be done, not whether it will be done. We show that such sequences are absent from English interactions by analyzing (a) grammatically similar turn formats in English interaction (“we need to x,” “the x needs to y”), and (b) similar interactive environments in English interactions. We discuss the potential of this research to point to a new avenue for researchers interested in the relationship between language diversity and diversity in human action and cognition.
The authors compare the use of two formats for requesting an object in informal everyday interaction: imperatives, common in our Polish data, and second-person polar questions, common in our English data. Imperatives and polar questions are selected in the same interactional “home environments” across the languages, in which they enact two social actions: drawing on shared responsibility and enlisting assistance, respectively. Speakers across the languages differ in their choice of request format in “mixed” interactional environments that support either. The finding shed light on the orderly ways in which cultural diversity is grounded in invariants of action formation.
‘Linguistic relativity’ has become a major keyword in debates on the psychological significance of language diversity. In this context, the term ‘relativity’ was originally taken on loan from Einstein’s then-recent theories by Edward Sapir (1924) and Benjamin L. Whorf (1940). The present paper assesses how far the idea of linguistic relativity does analogically build on relevant insights in modern physics, and fails to find any substantial analogies. The term was used rhetorically by Sapir and Whorf, and has since been incorporated into a cognitivist research programme that seeks to answer whether ‘language influences thought’. Contemporary research on ‘linguistic relativity’ has developed into a distinct way of studying language diversity, which shares a lot with the universalistic cognitivist framework it opposes, but little with relational approaches in science.
In diesem Artikel werden Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede in der anfänglichen Schematisierung der Stammzellenforschung im öffentlichen Diskurs Polens und Frankreichs untersucht. Zwei Zeitungskorpora (Le Monde und Gazeta Wyborcza) aus den Jahren 1998-2000 wurden im Hinblick auf die Frage analysiert, inwiefern beide Zeitungen ähnliche oder kulturspezifische Metaphernnetzwerke in der Bildung von ‚Stammzellrealitäten’ aufbauen. Der Artikel basiert auf der Annahme, dass Metaphern im Diskurs eine wichtige Funktion bei der Bildung interpretativer Bezugssysteme für die Diskussion sozialer und philosophischer Implikationen der Stammzelltechnologie zukommt. Der Ausgangspunkt bestand in der Überlegung, dass sich die beiden wichtigsten Zeitungen der beiden Länder in der anfänglichen Schematisierung der Stammzellenforschung unterscheiden würden (besonders bezüglich kultureller und religiöser Werte in den jeweiligen öffentlichen Debatten). Im Verlauf der Untersuchung stellte sich jedoch heraus, dass beide Zeitungen sehr ähnliche Metaphern in der Berichterstattung zur Stammzellenforschung gebrauchen. Kulturelle Unterschiede in der Interpretation von Stammzellenforschung existieren möglicherweise eher auf der Ebene ideologischer Gruppen als auf der nationaler Kulturen.
This article discusses possibilities for an elaboration of cognitive linguistic metaphor theory that takes into account the sociocultural situatedness of language and cognition. The approach of the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin, linking anthropological with cognitive perspectives on language, is introduced. The objectives of the article are i) to introduce this line of research, well-known in linguistics in Eastern Europe, but little known in the “Western”, English speaking scientific discourse; ii) to illustrate the usefulness of particular ideas within this approach for metaphor analysis in a corpus study of the metaphorical understanding of system transformation in German public discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and iii) to discuss diverging elaborations of the notion of experience in cognitive linguistics, contrasting the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin with Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
Psychological research has emphasized the importance of narrative for a person’s sense of self. Building a coherent narrative of past events is one objective of psychotherapy. However, in guided self-help therapy the patient has to develop this narrative autonomously. Identifying patients’ narrative skills in relation to psychological distress could provide useful information about their suitability for self-help. The aim of this study was to explore whether the syntactic integration of clauses into narrative in texts written by prospective psychotherapy patients was related to mild to moderate psychological distress. Cross-clausal syntax of texts by 97 people who had contacted a primary care mental health service was analyzed. Severity of symptoms associated with mental health difficulties was assessed by a standardized scale (Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation outcome measure). Cross-clausal syntactic integration was negatively correlated with the severity of symptoms. A multiple regression analysis confirmed that the use of simple sentences, finite complement clauses, and coordinated clauses was associated with symptoms (R2 = .26). The results suggest that the analysis of cross-clausal syntax can provide information on patients’ narrative skills in relation to distressing events and can therefore provide additional information to support treatment decisions.
When time is not space
(2011)
It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib)language and culture of Amazonia. Using both observational data and structured field linguistic tasks, we show that linguistic space-time mapping at theconstructional level is not a feature of the Amondawa language, and is not employed by Amondawa speakers (when speaking Amondawa). Amondawa does not recruit its extensive inventory of terms and constructions for spatial motion and location to express temporal relations. Amondawa also lacks a numerically based calendric system. To account for these data, and in opposition to a Universal Space-Time Mapping Hypothesis, we propose a Mediated Mapping Hypothesis, which accords causal importance to the numerical and artefact-based construction of time-based (as opposed to event-based) time interval systems.
Cognitive linguists have long been interested in analogies people habitually use in thinking and speaking, but little is known about the nature of the relationship between verbal behaviour and such analogical schemas. This article proposes that discourse metaphors are an important link between the two. Discourse metaphors are verbal expressions containing a construction that evokes an analogy negotiated in the discourse community. Results of an analysis of metaphors in a corpus of newspaper texts support the prediction that regular analogies are form-specific, i.e., bound to particular lexical items. Implications of these results for assumptions about the generality of habitual analogies are discussed.
This article explores the role that metaphors play in the ideological interpretation of events. Research in cognitive linguistics has brought rich evidence of the enormous influence that body experience has on (metaphorical) conceptualization. However, the role of the cultural net in which an individual is embedded has mostly been neglected. As a step towards the integration of cultural experience into the experientialist framework in cognitive metaphor research I propose to differentiate two ideal types of motivation for metaphor: correlation and intertextuality. Evidence for the important role that intertextual metaphors play in ideological discourse comes from an analysis of Polish newspaper discourse on the tenth anniversary of the end of communism.