ABSTRACT Suicide is a major public health concern worldwide that has been tackled from different disciplines, but it is a topic still practically unexplored by cognitive linguistics. The aim of this paper is to analyze the main conceptual metaphors used in the press to talk about suicide and its causes and prevention, and thereby increase the understanding of this topic and how the mass media treats it. The research uses a corpus linguistics methodology and focuses on the Spanish press, analyzing a corpus of 243 news items on suicide published in three of the leading daily newspapers in Spain during the period 2020–2023. The work offers both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the main source domains to metaphorically conceptualize suicide, analyzing their uses and functions. The results show that the current Spanish press not only discusses suicide openly, but also uses metaphorical language favoring the visibility and destigmatizing of suicide, inasmuch the most frequent conceptual metaphors of suicide are used to talk about the taboo surrounding this form of sudden traumatic death. However, the research also detected some metaphors that could have a negative impact and a potential stigmatizing effect, which should therefore be used with caution.

ABSTRACT Recent studies in metaphor and multimodality have begun exploring how people resist figurative meanings to challenge messages they find disagreeable or harmful. While most research has focused on metaphor and verbal communication, rapidly evolving technologies, including image editing software and generative AI, are radically expanding the possibilities for manipulating visual material. This article proposes a new framework for exploring how visual and verbal resources are used to creatively subvert figurative meanings in multimodal texts. We develop a model of “figurative subversion” inductively via a systematic analysis of a sample of 100 subverted logos designed by activists for Greenpeace’s 2010 “Behind the Logo” competition. Our typology comprises four core figurative subversion strategies: figurative extension, figurative layering, figurative replacement, and verbal reframing. These strategies can be implemented using various tropes, including but not limited to metaphor, and visual semiotic features such as color, shape, and layout. They can be employed individually or in combination to achieve the desired rhetorical effect.

ABSTRACT This article presents a systematic approach to characterizing dramatic irony using features drawn from the literature in conjunction with the analytical framework provided by Possible Worlds Theory (PWT). Checklists concerning the relative knowledge of participants, discourse levels and participant roles, the generation of tension, and resulting dramatic irony effects were formulated and applied to examples of dramatic irony from two episodes of the British sit-com Fawlty Towers. A PWT analysis of dramatic irony draws attention to points of conflict among participants’ private worlds, such as their K-world (knowledge) and W-world (wishes), and the Text Actual World, thereby enabling an account of its central characteristics, including the knowledge, motivations, desires, and obligations of individual participants. Moreover, use of PWT points up discrepancies and similarities among different dramatic ironies in terms of knowledge deficit, dramatic irony effect, and tension, and strengthens the case for recasting “dramatic irony,” addressing the unhelpful blurring with the figure of irony by drawing attention to differences in their characteristics, including the role of context and speaker intention. Recommendations for further research on the distinctive features of dramatic irony are suggested, including the types of knowledge gap that characterize comic and tragic dramatic irony, and their concomitant effects.

ABSTRACT The use of metaphor and metonymy in social awareness campaigns has been shown as an effective strategy to evoke emotional reactions in the audience and influence behavior change. Using authentic campaign discourse, this study investigated how two multimodal, figurative representations of plastic pollution (plastic pollution is war on nature and plastic pollution is usurpation of marine life) influenced participants’ responses to solutions-oriented and emotions-oriented measures. The data were gathered from two online surveys: Experiment 1 used Likert-scales and free-text responses; these were analyzed using statistical techniques and semantic frame analysis. Experiment 2 was a shorter follow-up study which used Likert-scales. The results suggest that the war frame inspired more negative emotional reactions overall, whereas the usurpation frame inspired more positive emotions. We also find that political orientation significantly moderates people’s sense of empowerment to tackle plastic pollution. The results have implications for future experimental studies seeking to explore the interaction of positive and negative affective states in the context of ecological issues, and for designers of campaigns who seek to use metaphor and metonymy to evoke the desired emotional and behavioral responses.

ABSTRACT This study investigates how COVID-19 advice is creatively delivered in a one-minute video produced by the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control in February 2022. It examines metaphors in verbal, visual, and multimodal modes, and illustrates how such metaphors interact with multimodal narrativity. Drawing on the insights of studies on multimodal metaphors, this paper seeks to identify which are the most pervasive metaphors or what dominant metaphor, if any, is used in the video. It finds that the metaphorical mappings between coping with the covid pandemic and handling olympic weightlifting are represented across modes and that the creative delivery of COVID-19 advice is woven from a warp of metaphors in various modes and a weft of narrativity across modes. Such metaphorical creativity is underpinned by the semiotic flow that features four interconnected configurations: moving between metaphorization, literalization, and re-metaphorization; somehow blurring the source-target boundary; expanding the range of functions that the multimodal representation can serve; and initiating a metaphorical thought from one or more contextual factors.

ABSTRACT This article describes the Metaphorical Source Domain Identification Procedure (MSDIP), which can be used to code source domains in metaphor identification. In the first part of the article, we describe the complexity of source-domain coding in corpus analysis. We argue that, in many cases, discourse is underspecified and multiple source-domain candidates may be relevant for a specific metaphorical expression. For instance, if a word like “fight” or “target” is used metaphorically, it could refer to either the source domain of war or sports. To make these issues explicit for analysts, we developed MSDIP, which builds on and extends the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU). In the second part of the article, we explain the coding steps of MSDIP and subsequently report on a reliability analysis, demonstrating the reproducibility of the procedure. We end with a number of detailed sample analyses, demonstrating the role of co-text and context in selecting the likeliest source-domain candidate through MSDIP. These analyses show that MSDIP is both reliable and flexible in dealing with the complexities of real-life discourse during source-domain coding.

ABSTRACT A scoping review was conducted to explore the metaphors and related expressions older adults use to describe extremely stressful events that may lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Complex PTSD (CPTSD), Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD), or Adjustment Disorder (AjD). Relevant databases from psychology, gerontology, and related fields were searched. In addition, relevant references found in included papers were considered. Inclusion criteria were: qualitative study, sample of older adults (age 65+), and focus on maladaptive rather than adaptive psychological aspects. Eleven studies focusing on PTSD, 5 on CPTSD, 13 on PGD, and 10 on AjD were included. Metaphors and other expressions related to extremely stressful events were then extracted and analyzed. Multiple linguistic expressions to describe extremely stressful events and stress-related symptoms were identified. Metaphors and related expressions often referred to the body and the theme of moving on with one’s life.

ABSTRACT Would metaphors used in the context of psychotherapy by people who experience various forms of anxiety disorders differ from those used by people who experience stress? We investigated this question with the help of the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM), a theory of meaning-making developed within the synthetic new discipline of cognitive semiotics. The analysis of a sample of ten transcripts of psychotherapy sessions concerning the topic of anxiety, and a comparable sample concerning stress, showed a significantly stronger proportion of conventionalized metaphors in the stress sample, and a marginally significant difference in the number of innovative metaphors in the anxiety sample. These results suggest that lived experience of an anxiety disorder or another form of maladaptive anxiety affects metaphorical meaning-making, and manifests itself in spontaneous metaphor use. Furthermore, as a result of the conceptual and the empirical investigations of the topic, we propose novel theoretical and operational definitions of the notion of metaphoricity.

ABSTRACT The need to provide novel but meaningful ways to reason and talk about an unprecedented crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a surge of creative metaphoric expressions in a variety of communicative settings. In order to investigate novel ways of conceptualizing the pandemic, we consider the metaphors included in the #ReframeCovid collection, a crowdsourced dataset of metaphors for the pandemic that rely on non-war frames. Its heterogeneous makeup of multilingual and multimodal examples (to date, over 550 examples – monomodal and multimodal in 30 languages) offers a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which metaphors have been used creatively to describe different aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. The patterns of metaphor creativity discussed in this paper include: creative realizations (verbal and visual) of wide-scope mappings, the use of one-off source domains, shifts in the valence of the source domain evoked, and the exploitation of source domains that are specific to particular discourse communities. The analysis of multimodal examples contributes to our understanding of the role of metaphor in sense-making and communication at a time of an extraordinary global crisis and will also provide new insights into metaphor creativity as a multidimensional phenomenon that integrates conceptual, discursive and cultural factors.