Tropical Truth(s)


Book Description

Tropes are not only rhetorical means, which are used as a creative and / or persuasive linguistic means in poetry and public speech. They are also a cognitive tool which helps people to understand the world and to express their world. As they are the basis on which our worldview and even our everyday speech is founded, the question must be posed as to whether utterances containing tropes can be said to be true. This has been an epistemological problem since Nietzsche expressed his doubts about the possibility that figurative language could give access to truth. However, since then research has paid little attention to this question. ‐18 papers by linguists, philosophers, psychologists and literary scholars have been collected in this volume. Their 21 authors use various approaches or paradigms in order to define metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole and find an answer to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.




Tropical Truth


Book Description

Often described inadequately as the John Lennon or Bob Dylan of Brazil, Caetano Veloso is unquestionably one of the most influential and beloved of Brazilian artists and has developed a world-wide following. Now, in his long awaited memoir, he tells the heroic story of how, in the late 60s, he and a group of friends from the north-eastern state of Bahia created tropicalismo, the movement that shook Brazilian culture and civic order and pushed a nation then on the margins of world politics and economics into the pop avant-garde. Tropical Truth recounts the story of a country, its most subversive generation, and the odyssey of a brilliant constellation of artists. By turns erudite and playful, dreamlike and confessional, Tropical Truth is a revelation of Brazil's most famous artist, one of the greatest popular composers of the past century.




Conceptual Metonymy


Book Description

The volume addresses a number of closely connected methodological, descriptive, and theoretical issues in the study of metonymy, and includes a series of case studies broadening our knowledge of the functioning of metonymy. As regards the methodological and descriptive issues, the book exhibits a unique feature in metonymy literature: the discussion of the structure of a detailed, web-based metonymy database (especially its entry model), and the descriptive criteria to be applied in its completion. The theoretical discussion contributes important challenging insights on several metonymy-related topics such as contingency, source prominence, “complex target”, source-target contrast / asymmetry, conceptual integration, hierarchies, triggers, de-personalization and de-roling, and many others. The case studies deal with the role of metonymy in morphology, monoclausal if only constructions, emotional categories, and iconicity in English and other languages, including one sign language. Beside cognitive linguists, especially metonymy researchers, the book should appeal to researchers in A.I., sign language, rhetoric, lexicography, and communication.




The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, Morphosyntax, and Semantics


Book Description

This handbook provides innovative and comprehensive coverage of research on the second language acquisition (SLA) of morphosyntax, semantics, and the interface between the two. Organized by grammatical topic, the chapters are written by experts from formal and functional perspectives in the SLA of morphosyntax and semantics, providing in-depth yet accessible coverage of these areas. All chapters highlight the theoretical underpinnings of much work in SLA and their links to theoretical syntax and semantics; making comparisons to other populations, including child language acquirers, bilinguals, and heritage speakers (links to first language acquisition and bilingualism); dedicating a portion of each chapter to the research methods used to investigate the linguistic phenomenon in question (links to psycholinguistics and experimental linguistics); and, where relevant, including intervention studies on the phenomenon in question (links to applied linguistics). The volume will be indispensable to SLA researchers and students who work on any aspect of the SLA of morphosyntax or semantics. With its coverage of a variety of methodologies and comparisons to other populations (such as child language acquirers, early bilinguals, heritage speakers, and monolingual adults), the handbook is expected to also be of much interest to linguists who work in psycholinguistics, first language acquisition, and bilingualism.




Metaphor and Communication


Book Description

This collection of papers presents different views on metaphor in communication. The overall aim is to show that the communicative dimension of metaphor cannot be reduced to its conceptual and/or linguistic dimension. The volume addresses two main questions: does the communicative dimension of metaphor have specific features that differentiate it from its linguistic and cognitive dimensions? And how could these specific properties of communication change our understanding of the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of metaphor? The authors of the papers collected in this volume offer answers to these questions that raise new interests in metaphor and communication.




Veteran and Military Mental Health


Book Description

This book addresses mental health treatment for veterans and active military personnel. In addition to examining foundational practices in the sub-field, it contains specifically tailored content concerning the recent collapse of the United States (US) installed Afghanistan government. The book is conscious of the myriad of complex emotions that veterans who fought for the past twenty years may be experiencing. Organized into four parts, the book begins with the foundations of veteran and military mental health culture as patients transition from active duty to veteran status, understand the present stigma and barriers to care and reflect on their deployment experience. Part two delves into the specifics of the healthcare system in which military personnel find themselves at various points in their career, including deployment and returning home. Following this, chapters examine the critically unique conditions found in patients, such as sleep disorders, traumatic brain injury, homelessness, substance abuse, and sexual trauma. The book closes with discussions on veterans and their families that focus on the effects of deployment on a military person’s loved ones and their mental state upon returning home. Timely, socially conscious, and comprehensive, the Clinical Manual on Veteran and Military Mental Health is an invaluable resource for mental health professionals receiving new military personnel patients and who have seen a significant shift in their patients due to recent events.




The Diversity of Irony


Book Description

Although the figure of irony has enjoyed extensive attention through important contributions to the diverse literatures addressing figurative thought and language, it still remains relatively in the background compared to other figures such as metaphor and metonymy. The present volume, together with a 2017 collection by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston, aims to the further exploration of verbal and situational irony, its gestural accompaniments, its comprehension and interpretation, its constructional diversity and its cooperation with other figures such as metaphor and hyperbole. The present volume is a highly interesting collection of chapters dealing with both theoretical investigations and descriptive applications of a central figure pervading human thought and language. Its aim is to draw more attention to irony’s diversity and its concomitant connections to other aspects of figurativeness.




Sex in Language


Book Description

Metaphor has long provided a rich way to speak about the unspeakable, to refer to delicate issues. Sex is one such area. This book follows a cognitive-linguistic and relevance-theoretic approach to the language of sex, considering metaphor as a bridge that brings together mind and language. It does this through the analysis of the antithetical mechanisms of verbal mitigation and offence. These two mechanisms are (more commonly know as) euphemism and (its lesser known companion term) dysphemism. The volume reflects on the social and communicative functions that sexual metaphors perform in a sample of almost two hundred postings taken from internet forums. How do people think about sex? How do people avoid talking about sex? How do people paraphrase sexual topics? It offers an account of how real language users understand sexual taboo in present-day English and also a great grounding in manual corpus work on a qualitative level.




Mixing Metaphor


Book Description

Mixing metaphors in speech, writing, and even gesture, is traditionally viewed as a sign of inconsistency in thought and language. Despite the prominence of mixed metaphors, there have been surprisingly few attempts to comprehensively explain why people mix their metaphors so frequently and in the particular ways they do. This volume brings together a distinguished group of linguists, psychologists and computer scientists, who tackle the issue of how and why mixed metaphors arise and what communicative purposes they may serve. These scholars, almost unanimously, argue that mixing metaphors is a natural consequence of common metaphorical thought processes, highlighting important complexities of the metaphorical mind. Mixing Metaphor, for the first time, offers new, critical empirical and theoretical insights on a topic that has long been ignored within interdisciplinary metaphor studies.




Figuring out Figuration


Book Description

This book combines explanatory breadth with analytical delicacy. It offers a comprehensive study of a broad array of traditional figures of speech by systematizing linguistic evidence of the cognitive processes underlying them. Such processes are explicitly linked to different communicative consequences, thus bringing together pragmatics and cognition. This type of study has allowed the authors to provide new definitions for all the figures while making their dependency relations fully explicit. For example, hypallage, antonomasia, anthimeria, and merism are studied as variants of metonymy, and analogy, paragon, and allegory as variants of metaphor. An important feature of the book is its special emphasis on the combinations of figures of speech into conceptually more complex configurations. Finally, the book accounts for the principles that regulate the felicity of figurative expressions. The result is a broad integrative framework for the analysis of figurative language grounded in the relationship between pragmatics and cognition.