Figurative Language

Download or read book Figurative Language written by Barbara Dancygier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. Comprehensive and practical, the book includes analyses of figurative uses of both word meanings and linguistic constructions. • Provides definitions of major concepts • Offers in-depth analyses of examples, exploring multiple levels of complexity • Surveys figurative structures in different discourse genres • Helps students to connect figurative usage with the conceptual underpinnings of language • Goes beyond English to explore cross-linguistic and cross-modal data