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Introduction to the July and October special issues of IJLS on Metaphor in Contemporary Communication: Linguistic, Semiotic and Translational Perspectives

Metaphorical concepts do not arise from pre-stored mappings in the conventional conceptual system, as is often assumed in the cognitive linguistic literature on metaphor, but result from the priming effect of contextual factors in real situations of discourse. My major goal in this paper is to characterize some of the contextual factors that are involved in this process. My focus will be on the interaction between context, metaphorical concepts, and the discourse situation in which metaphorical conceptualization takes place.

Living metaphors are interpretations of inconsistent complex meanings, which are typically open to more than one interpretative option. The green woods laugh, which attributes a human behaviour to woods, opens up four options. Besides (1) a literal one, it depicts a fictive world; it allows for three figurative interpretations: two metaphors—namely, (2) some sounds in woods are seen as laughs, and (3) laughing woods are seen as human beings—and (4) a metonymy—people walking in the woods laugh. The hypothesis is that the manifold relation between conflictual meanings and figures is not a form of ambiguity but is justified by the inconsistency of the input meaning, whose specific inner conceptual structure justifies the access to one, two or three figures. The analysis also underlines the specificity of figurative interpretation as distinct from pragmatic interpretation.

The paper focuses on the interpretation of living metaphors, through the analysis of data collected within the framework of a wider project concerning reading and pragmatic abilities in neurotypical adults. In particular, the items considered for this paper (selected from a standardized battery in Italian, APACS) aim at investigating the ability to understand and explain the meaning of figurative expressions, which are presented out of (or with a minimum) context to elicit generalized verbal explanations. The testing procedure was completed with a repetition of the same items inserted in a textual context, which was supposed to facilitate the task. The results show that, differently from idioms and proverbs (which were also included in the test), living metaphors are more easily explained in the presence of a context, although the qualitative analysis of answers reveals that the linguistic nature of the elements of each metaphor influences the reaction of the respondents.

US presidential inaugural addresses (IAs) are rhetorically sophisticated speeches, rich in evocative language, including metaphors. Many of such metaphors are drawn from a ‘repository’ of source domains that have stratified, thus becoming typical of the genre, and entailing an extent of intertextuality which risks being missed by an international audience. Metaphors can be powerful means for establishing agreement with the audience, and can be used to intensify selected perceptions and connections. The paper thus explores the functions of metaphors in relation to the IA institutional purpose of fostering a sense of national unity around core values and identity traits. Attention is given in particular to conventional metaphors and their reactivation, discussing both canonic and deviating uses.

In Translation Studies research, and more in general in reflections on translation and translating, metaphors have attracted relatively limited attention as something problematic requiring specific consideration and well-thought-out strategies. In relatively recent times proposals to integrate prevalently linguistic approaches with Conceptual Metaphor Theory have opened up new perspectives in this domain. In simultaneous interpreting the problems addressed by translators in the rendering of metaphors are made harder by the distinctive characteristic of this activity, i.e., immediacy, which imposes conditions of severe time restraints. Bringing together insights from research on metaphor translation, on TV interpreting, and on the interpretation of political speeches, this article analyses the televised simultaneous interpreting into Italian of three US presidents’ inaugural addresses, and specifically Clinton’s, Obama’s and Trump’s, in order to evaluate the solutions adopted by simultaneous interpreters for metaphors and their impact on the potential reception of such speeches, also considering the powerful framing effect produced by metaphors.

Although studies in the field of discourse analysis have revealed the presence of animal and violent metaphors in Sino-phobic discourses about China (Carrico, 2018; Lee, 2021), there are still no systematic studies focusing on metaphor and Sinophobia. This study aims at providing a further contribution to the studies of Sino-phobic discourses by focusing specifically on animal metaphors used to frame China during the COVID-19 pandemic in two corpora of American and Australian newspapers. The analysis combines methodologies of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. First, a semantic domain analyses was carried out with WMatrix 5 (Rayson, 2008), then, metaphors in the semantic field of living creatures were identified and analysed adopting cognitive and discursive approaches. The results showed how predatory and threatening animals are often associated with Chinese institutions in the newspapers analysed and this negative metaphorical representation is juxtaposed to that of Australian institutions which are framed as harmless pets.