Metaphor and Metonymy: A Diachronic Approach

by Kathryn Allan

The way in which we understand the concept of intelligence is rooted in metaphor and metonymy; for example, it is common to describe people as ‘bright’ or ‘thick’. This book explores the motivation for some of the lexemes in this semantic field across the history of the English language, considering the range of cognitive mechanisms and cultural factors that can inform metaphorical and metonymical mappings.

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I referred to this book while trying to find a good topic for a term project. I didn't end up using it exclusively, but I still really enjoyed it. Allan uses corpus methodology to explore how metaphors have changed over time, how they are used, and how they begin in the first place (among other topics, of course). I was fascinated to learn about the early convergence of sense metaphors (e.g., seeing = understanding) both by users of languages and just as a linguistic phenomenon that seems to go back indefinitely. And the chapter on animal metaphors was just plain cool. I hope she is able to do more cross-linguistic studies in the future.