In language revitalisation movements the main impetus and passion is often provided by adults who, as second language speakers, have gained fluency in their heritage language. As parents and teachers these adults often have vital roles in the ongoing transmission of the heritage language. This study is based on interviews with thirty-two Māori adults who have each made a strong commitment to becoming a fluent speaker of Māori. The study posited that the informants would have a strongly-held worldview which enabled them to engage with and maintain a relationship with the Māori language. This worldview is expressed through a range of metaphors, the four most frequent being: LANGUAGE IS A PATH, LANGUAGE IS A CANOE, LANGUAGE IS FOOD, LANGUAGE LEARNER IS A PLANT. The worldview articulated by these metaphors has a quasi-religious nature and draws on elements of New Age humanism, a connection with Māori culture and ancestors as well as kaupapa Māori (Māori-orientated and controlled initiatives). The source domains for these metaphors are traced through a study of various Māori sources from the 19th century through to the present day. This study shows how exploitation of these metaphors has changed throughout this time period leading to their current exploitation by the newly-fluent informants. The metaphors preferred by the informants were contrasted with the prominent metaphor LANGUAGE IS A TREASURE, the entailments of which were found to be more relevant to the experience of native speakers. The informants' experience also contrasts with the focus of language planners in that the informants are more focussed on how the Māori language is important for them personally than how they contribute to the revitalisation of the Māori language. These findings have implications for the revitalisation of the Māori language and have relevance for other endangered languages.

This study exemplifies, analyses and discusses the conceptual metaphors refugees are water and refugees are animals in British media discourse. In order to do this, examples of linguistic tokens of the metaphors were collected from four of the biggest newspapers in Britain; Daily Mail, The Sun, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. Linguistic tokens of the metaphors were found in all of the newspapers. The tokens of refugees are animals often appeared within quotation marks, whereas the refugees are water tokens appeared mostly unmarked, implying that refugees are water is more conventionalized than refugees are animals. The analysis of the tokens showed how different aspects of refugees are either highlighted or hidden when it is conceptualized in terms of water or animals. In the process of highlighting/hiding certain aspects of refugees, the refugees are dehumanized.

[pt] Esta dissertação reflete sobre a identidade da metáfora literária. Toma como base a teoria geral da metáfora inaugurada por George Lakoff e Mark Jonhson na década de 1980 - o que equivale a conceber a metáfora como um princípio cognitivo básico, como um mecanismo estruturador do conhecimento e da experiência que em muito ultrapassa os domínios da literatura. Reconhecendo com Lakoff e Johnson a onipresença do fenômeno metafórico em nossas vidas, interessou-nos refletir sobre o que poderia distinguir a sua manifestação no campo específico da literatura. Tivemos por objetivo central aqui contribuir para o teste de hipóteses cognitivistas levantadas por George Lakoff e Mark Turner, em uma obra especificamente voltada para a manifestação literária da metáfora, a saber, More than cool reason (1989). Analisamos com o aparato teórico e descritivo ali oferecido um conjunto de metáforas presentes em um texto literário específico - o Romance d`A Pedra do Reino e o Príncipe do Sangue do Vai- e- Volta, de Ariano Suassuna. A análise empreendida fala em favor das hipóteses de Lakoff e Turner, para quem a maioria das metáforas literárias resulta de explorações criativas e inusitadas de mapeamentos metafóricos bastante arraigados em nossos sistemas conceptuais - extensões, combinações ou elaborações das metáforas ontológicas, estruturais e orientacionais que governam, em um nível básico e de forma geral, a nossa linguagem, pensamento e ação. / [en] This dissertation analyses the identity of the literary metaphor. It is based in the general Conceptual Theory of Metaphors started by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in the 80`s decade - they set the metaphor as a basic cognitive principle, as a mechanism that structures the knowledge and the experience which goes beyond the literature field. Recognizing along with Lakoff and Johnson the presence of the metaphorical phenomena in our lives, this study interested us to think about what could distinguish the presence of the metaphor specifically in literature. Our central objective here was to contribute to test the cognitive hypothesis showed by George Lakoff and Mark Turner, in a specific book which studies the literary metaphor, More than cool reason (1989). We analyzed a set of metaphors in the Romance d`A Pedra do Reino e o Príncipe do Sangue do Vai-e- Volta, by Ariano Suassuna. This analysis shows that Lakoff and Turner hypothesis, which the generalizations governing poetic metaphorical expressions are not in language, but in thought: they are general mappings across conceptual domains; they are creative extensions of these mappings. As the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another. The literary metaphors are extensions, combinations or elaborations of the ontological, structural and orientational metaphors that lead, in a basic level and in a general way, our language, thought and actions.

De plus en plus d’études s’accordent à reconnaître dans la métaphore un instrument de la pensée, plutôt qu’une figure de style. En particulier, les métaphores les plus communes et les plus répétées, celles qui font partie du langage quotidien, structurent l’appréhension du monde des membres des communautés linguistiques qui les utilisent. Bien que nous n’ayons pas accès au langage quotidien des anciens Grecs, les textes contiennent un corpus de métaphores récurrentes, extrêmement répandues, qui utilisent la terminologie botanique pour parler des êtres humains. Cette thèse vise à montrer en quoi ces métaphores végétales ont constitué une manière, culturellement déterminée, d’appréhender plusieurs facettes de la vie humaine : le corps et le fonctionnement de humeurs en son sein ; la forme visible de la personne, la manifestation des émotions et celle de la χάρις ; l’innéité ; les rapports de parenté et notamment celui de filiation ; l’identité citoyenne. Centré sur les textes poétiques composés en Grèce entre le VIIIe et le Ve siècle avant notre ère, ce travail convoque tour à tour les écrits médicaux et philosophiques, les représentations religieuses et les mythes de métamorphose, afin d’inscrire les métaphores botaniques étudiées dans des réseaux conceptuels faisant partie du savoir partagé. / As anthropologists, philosophers and linguists have nowadays largely recognized, metaphors are not simply rhetorical embellishments, but a basic mechanism of human thought. Focusing on botanical metaphors occurring in Greek poetry composed between the 8th and the 5th centuries BCE, this dissertation aims to show how knowledge relative to the world of plants was used to understand, conceptualize and represent different aspects of human life. Botanical metaphors are pervasive in archaic and classical poetry. My work locates them against a wider background, comprising other kinds of texts (mainly, philosophy and medicine), myths, and, to a lesser degree, religious representations and practices. Therefore, botanical metaphors appear to be integral to a widespread network of cognitive schemata, sanctioned and transmitted by linguistic practice, and used by Greek speakers to construct their understanding of (some aspect of) human life. As this thesis demonstrates, plants offered convenient models to reason about the functioning of the body and its internal humors as well as the ways in which physical appearance may reveal moral or divine qualities. Botanical knowledge was also used to understand human passions, inborn qualities, kinship ties and civic identities. The overall aim of my dissertation is to offer an “emic” depiction of those domains: that is, a description grounded in Greek speakers’ own conceptual schemata

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English speakers use the concept of "darkness" in a number of metaphors to portray a wide variety of experiences from evil to fear to ignorance. These metaphorical connections or entailments are so natural that we can see an image of a dark-clad person in a film or book and usually be correct in assuming that they are at best questionably moral and at worst a villain. The Old Testament (OT) also employs dark images and dark imagery to various effects. From Job's description of the underworld in Job 3 to Isaiah 's description of the coming light that will dispel the darkness in Isa 8- 9, to the dark paths the wicked trod in Eccl 2:14, the OT uses a number of metaphors of darkness. For most of these examples, it would be easy to assume that the ancient Hebrew writers of the OT were working with the same concepts of darkness that we do today and thus interpret these passages along the same lines as our own modem English metaphors. But such assumptions can and have led to a number of misunderstandings and conflicting interpretations of passages that employ dark images. These miscommunications are most apparent in passages where God's presence is indicated by darkness like at the Sinai and Temple theophanies (Exod 20:19-20 and 1 Kgs 8:12, respectively) as well as later poetry about God (Ps 97:2). By combining the theoretical framework of Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT), and the methodology of Conceptual Blending (CB), this study will work toward a clearer understanding of how the writers of the OT understood darkness and how that shaped their use of it in their images and imagery of death, captivity, the unknowable, and God. It will be shown that the ancient Hebrew conception and use of darkness centres around three key recurring metaphors - Death is Darkness, Captivity is Darkness, and the Unknown is Darkness - while the metaphor Evil is Darkness is foreign to the OT. These findings serve to provide greater clarity in interpreting those OT passages that portray God as having a penchant for darkness.