Early research on the first language acquisition of figurative language indicated that figurative language comprehension and production skills develop relatively late, while recent studies contest this view. This study explores early production of metaphorical (e.g., shark meaning a rapacious crafty person) and metonymic (e.g., house meaning an organisation) meanings in English polysemous nouns and verbs by using the Braunwald corpus, which tracks a single child’s speech from the age of 1 year, 5 months to 7 years. We explore the initial production of these meanings, with respect to the age, order of acquisition and part of speech (noun vs. verb). Our study shows that children start using figurative meanings at a much earlier age than previously thought. In this early stage, metonymic meanings emerge earlier, while metaphorical meanings come a few months later. These findings challenge prior beliefs that children only develop figurative language skills at 3 years of age and show that it is not only the pre-figurative skills that develop early but also the production of very conventional types of figurative meaning, which might not necessarily require the completed development of the complex set of cognitive skills necessary for cross-domain comparison.

This study aims to explore the target concepts of metonymical and metaphorical uses of ‘head’ in Jordanian Arabic (JA) compared to those used in Tunisian Arabic (TA). Extended conceptual metaphor theory (ECMT) as envisaged by Kövecses (2020, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 18, 112–-130) is adopted as the theoretical framework. Data analysis reveals that through metonymic metaphors, the head in JA is used to profile character traits, mental faculty, cultural values and emotions. The head in JA is also capitalized upon to provide explanations of several daily life experiences. The primacy of head in JA was clear in the informants’ comprehension of the means by which embodiment provides the grounding for cognition, perception and language, which supports Gibbs’ (2014, The Bloomsbury companion to cognitive linguistics, pp. 167–184) ‘embodied metaphorical imagination’. Similarities in the cultural model of head between the two dialects were found, yet differences were also detected. In contrast to TA, the head is more productive in JA in profiling character traits and emotions. These differences were attributed to the existence of a cultural filter that has the ability to function between two cultures that belong to one matrix Arab culture and differences in experiential focus between the two examined speech communities.

In the present article, we describe what we call Intransparent-Gap Relatives (IGRs) in Japanese. In IGRs, a gap is located within the relative clause, and the head noun appears outside the relative clause. Unlike the standard head-external relatives, the gap in IGRs is not transparently associated with the head noun, but they are mediated through a metonymic relation. We propose a formal account of IGRs in terms of incremental parsing in Dynamic Syntax: an IGR string is processed in a left-to-right manner, and a semantic structure is progressively built up. This account unifies the standard head-external relatives and IGRs, relegating their differences to the ways in which the head noun is parsed and construed against the relative clause structure. Confirmation of this analysis comes from cross-constructional and cross-linguistic considerations. First, the analysis predicts that a metonymic reading is available in relatives but not in other rightward-displacement constructions, such as clefts and postposing. Second, the analysis suggests that IGRs are possible in languages such as Japanese and Korean, where the relative clause is processed before the head noun, but not in languages such as English and French, where the head noun is processed before the relative clause.

Words with complex semantic types such as book are characterised by a multiplicity of interpretations that are not mutually exclusive (e.g., as a physical object and/or informational content). Their status with respect to lexical ambiguity is notoriously unclear, and it is debatable whether complex types are a particular form of polysemy (closely related to metonymy) or whether they belong to monosemy. In this study, we investigate the nature of complex types by conducting two experiments on ambiguous nouns in French. The first experiment collects speakers’ judgements about the sameness of meaning between different uses of complex-type, metonymic and monosemous words. The second experiment uses a priming paradigm and a sensicality task to investigate the online processing of complex-type words, as opposed to metonymic and monosemous words. Overall results indicate that, on a continuum of lexical ambiguity, complex types are closer to monosemy than to metonymy. The different interpretations of complex-type words are highly connected and fall under the same meaning, arguably in relation to a unique reference. These results suggest that complex types are associated with single underspecified entries in the mental lexicon. Moreover, they highlight the need for a model of lexical representations of ambiguous words that can account for the difference between complex types and metonymy.

This study aims at investigating the Turkish emotion concept heyecan (i.e., thrill, excitement, and nervousness), which can be used with different semantic contents depending on the context. The conceptual metaphor theory frames this analysis to reveal the metaphorical and metonymical conceptualizations of heyecan. For this purpose, the lemma heyecan is searched in the Turkish National Corpus, and 700 concordance lines gathered from the corpus are examined through the metaphor identification procedure to identify the source domains and interpret the conceptual coding. The findings reveal a folk model of heyecan in which several metaphors and metonymies characterize different dimensions of it: arousal–existence–disappearance, intensity–passivity, control, cause–effect, and individual–social. Qualitative and quantitative findings embody various linguistic metaphors that can be grouped under several source domain categories including substance in a container, location, and object as the most frequent ones, whereas physiological effect is the most frequent metonymy. The metaphors and metonymies are discussed with their examples in this study. The concordance lines show several emotion terms that heyecan is collocated with, among which the emotion families of ‘fear’ and ‘happiness’ outnumber the rest. This study demonstrates how corpus data are helpful in pinpointing the conceptual content of an emotion term in a coherent way.

This article explores the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of volatility and their implications for cultural analysis in a range of fields. From quantitative finance, it takes the notion of ‘delta-hedging’, the suspension or neutralization of directionality to get access to volatility, and applies this to qualitative areas such as surfing, dance, cinema, and language.

This study analyzes 30 cartoons depicting the Deal of the Century as envisaged by two Jordanian cartoonists. Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner [2008, Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, Cambridge University Press, 53–66]) and Multimodal Metaphor Theory (Forceville, 2008) are adopted as theoretical frameworks. The results reveal that the target domain the Deal of the Century was conceptualized mainly through layered metaphors that have metonymic basis and event metaphors/allegories. Five groups were identified: object or a situation involving objects, situations involving humans/hybrids of humans and objects, an animal or situation involving animal, hybrids of weapons and humans, and event metaphors used to build a story/allegory. The results demonstrate that the most widely used configuration to construe the metaphors was cross-modal of the type pictorial source–verbal target in line with Lan and Zuo (2016, Metaphor and the Social World 6, 20–51). This was probably due to the greater conceptual density and concreteness of visual representation as the target is better captured verbally because of its abstractness. In contrast, the source domains were mainly concrete and thus perceivable pictorially rather than verbally. The study mainly demonstrates the effect that metaphor and metonymy found in political cartoons can have on the perception of the target domain by the audience and by extension their attitude toward it.

Children’s processing and comprehension of metonymy have received little attention in the developmental literature, which has mainly focused on children’s acquisition of metaphor abilities. However, it has been found that metonymy production and comprehension precede metaphor production and comprehension (Falkum et al., 2017; Nerlich et al., 1999; Pérez-Hernández & Duvignau, 2016; Runblad & Annaz, 2010). Nerlich et al. (1999) suggest that metonymic relations are exploited in overextensions produced by children up to age 2;5 and call these “compelled metonymic overextensions”. At this very early age, a child’s vocabulary is still relatively small, and this compels them to extend already known words to cope with their increasing communicative needs. These overextensions are, however, in most cases not random, as some type of associative relation (e.g., cause–effect, object–act, container–content, etc.) between the concepts referred to can be identified. This study focuses on the metonymic relations exploited by 18 Afrikaans-speaking infants and toddlers (between the ages of 0;6 and 2;0) in their early overextensions. The metonymic relations as described by Norrick (1981) as well as Radden and Kövecses (1999) are employed in the analysis. A total of 207 out of 1371 one-word utterances were identified as compelled metonymic overextensions and 11 types of metonymic relations could be identified as underlying these utterances. This study illustrates that the metonymic relations identified in such young children’s early language provide insight and understanding into how they categorise and associate various concepts with each other.

Drawing on the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and evolutionary biology, this contribution revisits the meaning of the Homeric formula ὑπόδρα ἰδών, literally ‘looking from below’, which is generally acknowledged as an indication of anger in epic poetry. A detailed examination of the phrase suggests that the facial expression it refers to was originally an inclination of the head while maintaining a fixed gaze ahead, resulting in a view from beneath lowered brows. It is argued that this position of the head serves as a functional preparation for a physical conflict, and consequently that the epic phrase ὑπόδρα ἰδών is not merely a metonym for anger but also a signal of the willingness to resort to violence if the conflict is not resolved by other means. This is also borne out by the contexts in which the formula occurs, since in most cases the speeches introduced with a ‘look from below’ are either followed by violent actions or cause their addressee to retract the offence.