This note presents a new supplement for Euripides, Heracles 767.

This article combines allegorical, symbolic and metaphorical readings with modern theoretical approaches (primarily, affect theory) to explore the representations of objects and bodies within Peristephanon 9. In Prudentius’ poem, the tortured body of Cassian overlaps with the tormented soul of the poet; the written text is both a co-actor in Cassian’s death and a vehicle for the perpetuation of his extra-textual memory. Figurative language provides words and concepts with new meanings so that a pen can transform into a sword, writing into torture. Through a process of materialization and resemantization, the physical objects become agents in the narrative construction.

This study investigated the differences in the expression of numerical motion metaphors in English and Spanish. We evaluated 1472 English-to-Spanish translations in which a manner of motion verb (e.g., skyrocket, plummet) was used to metaphorically express numerical change (e.g., unemployment is skyrocketing). For each of the translations, we annotated (1) the type of metaphor used in Spanish, (2) whether the manner of motion and path information was present in Spanish, and (3) whether the path and manner information in Spanish were conflated in a single word or indicated via adjuncts. There were three main findings. First, Spanish translations shifted from the motion domain to a quantity domain in almost half of the translations (e.g., skyrocket translated as aumentar, Eng. increase). Second, Spanish translations omitted manner of motion in half of the cases (e.g., prices surging translated as alza de los precios, Eng. rise in prices). Third, the path of motion was always present in the Spanish translations. This translation analysis provides evidence that the typological differences reported for the encoding of literal motion are also observed in the expression of numerical, metaphorical motion and that the choice of metaphorical mappings depends on language typology.

Previous research has found that metaphor comprehension is often more challenging in L2 than in L1 because of the prioritization of literal meanings, but the effect of cross-cultural conceptual differences and the role of inhibitory control during L2 metaphor processing remain uninvestigated. We explored these through a metaphor-induced lexical forgetting paradigm (Experiment 1), a metaphor interpretation task (Experiment 2), and an eye-tracking reading task (Experiment 3) to evaluate competing theories. Inhibitory control did not play a significant role during reading culturally congruent metaphors as it did for culturally incongruent ones. However, interpreting both kinds of L2 metaphors involved more inhibitory control than literals, even after explicit explanatory contexts. Although literal meanings (and culturally incongruent L1 metaphorical meanings) of L2 metaphors may always be activated, inhibition involvement depends on both task requirements and metaphor properties. These can be explained by the extended graded salience view and the predictive processing framework.

This paper aims to examine Wolfhart Pannenberg's theology of divine action using the conceptual framework of cognitive linguistics. Central to this exploration is Pannenberg's use of the scientific concept of force field in an analogical/metaphorical way, enabling him to present a trinitarian-pneumatological understanding of divine action through divine omniscience and omnipresence. This paper argues that, despite justified criticisms of Pannenberg's reliance on Faraday's outdated concept of a universal force field, recent developments in cognitive linguistics affirm the legitimacy of Pannenberg's panentheistic metaphorical approach to the theology of divine action while calling for revisions.

Semantic equivalence in the affective domain is always a matter of degree, even for the words that may seem uncontroversial. For example, a word may be quoted in dictionaries as the semantic equivalent of another word and be used in practice as its most frequent translation equivalent, and yet those two words may significantly differ in meaning. This study focuses on one such case – that of the English term frustration and its cognates in Spanish (frustración), French (frustration) and German (Frustration). Using data from corpora and self-report, we find that, while frustration terms in Spanish, French and German reflect a cross-culturally stable type of low-power anger, or can denote affective experiences other than anger, English frustration refers to a prototypical anger experience characterized by high power. Converging evidence is presented from two psycholinguistic and two linguistic studies employing elicited and observational data. We offer a possible explanation for the observed semantic differences based on psychological appraisal theory and cross-cultural psychology. The novelties and limitations of our findings are discussed, along with their implications for researchers in the affective sciences.

Japanese patients often describe their pain with ideophones (sound-symbolic, imitative words), such as biribiri ‘having a continuous electric shock’. However, some manuals for healthcare workers recommend avoiding using these words in their interactions with patients, assuming that they are too subjective. We examined how reliable pain ideophones are in comparison with pain metaphors, such as denki-ga hashiru-yoona itami ‘pain like an electric current running through one’s body’. In Experiment 1, Japanese speakers rated visually presented pain ideophones and metaphors on 15 semantic-differential scales (e.g., strong–weak, momentary–continuous). It was found that the ratings of ideophones and metaphors equally varied between participants. In Experiment 2, Japanese speakers did the same rating task for a selected set of pain ideophones and metaphors presented auditorily in sentence frames. The results show that ideophones were rated more consistently than metaphors across participants, and this was true for various prosodic/morphological variants of ideophones (e.g., biriiit-to ‘having a sudden, great electric shock’, biribirit-to ‘having a momentary repetitive electric shock’). These findings indicate that ideophones can be more reliable than metaphors in health communication, especially when placed in proper context.

This study investigates claims that metaphor acquisition is rooted in the words’ concrete meanings: to be able to use metaphors and other non-literal languages, the child needs to ‘go beyond’ meanings that are conventional and so presumably concrete (e.g., Falkum, 2022: 97). To test if metaphor-related words emerge via their concrete senses and how this reflects child-directed speech, I examined 594 hours of interactional data for three English-speaking toddlers from urban middle-class England, whose speech was densely sampled between the ages of 2;00 and 3;01. The data show that 75%–82% conventional metaphors were acquired via their concrete senses and that the order of acquisition of concrete and abstract senses corresponded with their input frequencies. Overall, when hearing conventional metaphors, 81%–89% of the time children were exposed to their concrete meanings. Contrary to the generic argument that children’s pragmatic reasoning with non-literal uses is impeded by meaning conventionality (Falkum, 2022), my preliminary data suggest that it is influenced by the frequency of exposure to the concrete meanings of conventional metaphors, which leads to a generalised prediction that the most probable interpretation of any new metaphor is concrete (literal). Qualitative analyses further reveal that abstract meanings, when acquired first, were learned in highly emotive contexts.