There is no greater work of literature, perhaps, than the Bible. The Bible has shaped and influenced more literature, art, and culture than any other work in our time. The effects of the Bible’s words are still woven into modern literature today, illustrating that the Bible’s themes, allegories, parables, fables, metaphors, and characters are things that we humans are unable to depart far from even many decades later. One of the very first stories in the Bible, found at the beginning in Genesis, tells of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve’s depiction as the first kind of our species and the story of their creation to their Fall is one transformative story that humans seem destined to repeat. This cycle of falling is rampant in American literature, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, appearing in works by prominent authors such as R. W. B. Lewis, Leo Marx, and John Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden wrestles heavily with both biblical themes and metaphors and acts as a biblical framework for the Fall narrative and the book of Genesis. This thesis seeks to examine the Fall as a conceptual metaphor for American literature and thinking through John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and attempts to explain why literature, and humans, keep endlessly returning to the Fall.

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The thesis deals with a metaphor and its place in philosophy. It engages in a concept of metaphor as a transference with a help of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Ricoeur, and others, and explores consequences which follow from such a concept in the perspective of truth conditions. Firstly, it focuses on an exploration of a nature of the metaphor with a relation to an earlier philosophical tradition. Secondly, it examines categories of similarity, reference and imagination as fundamental constituents of metaphorical utterances. Furthermore, it also re-evaluates the distinction between literal and figurative meaning and living and dead metaphors to uncover the metaphor as a creative principle of language, which is characteristic by its actualizing and approaching power.

According to recent cognitive science, our perceptive senses help develop human cognition, and the process of organizing our inner representations of the world around us. As a result, conceptual metaphors are deemed to be essential to our understanding of abstract entities; how we perceive an organization depends for instance on what metaphor is used to describe it. Thus, conceptual metaphor theory has been given a lot of attention in the past thirty years. The Metasaga philosophy was established on the Shetland Islands in 2008. The idea is for participants to explore the environment and create reflective questions involving metaphors which can be used for reflective purposes in connection to work, school, businesses or other organizations. In this paper, linguistic metaphors involving organizations in 228 reflective questions were studied. The linguistic metaphors were sorted according to which organization conceptual metaphor they appeared to belong to. A broad category called Organization Is Physical Structure was set up, and the name was taken from Joseph Grady’s list of primary metaphors in Lakoff and Johnson (1999 pp. 50-55) Four sub-categories of organization metaphors were subsequently established: Organization Is An Artificial Structure, Organizational Help Is Support, Organization Is A Plant and Organization Is A Living Creature. Almost 55 % of the reflective questions involving organization shared the common theme of a description of an organization as some kind of artificial structure. Thus, it seems likely that we often think of organizational arrangement as some kind of concrete structure and also that we use different metaphors depending on how the organization is structured.

The translation of metaphors has been analyzed and discussed for several decades, but there are not many multilingual studies that examine how metaphors are translated. The present study takes a cognitive approach to metaphor and investigates how translators at the European Commission handle metaphorical expressions and the underlying conceptual metaphors in political discourse. The source text is the English language version of the policy document A European Agenda on Migration, and the Swedish and Spanish language versions of it are included as target texts. The study identifies the conceptual metaphors that conceptualize migration and other topics that are closely related to the European migrant and refugee crisis of 2015 and the translation procedures that are used. A total of six translation procedures were found in the target texts, and the most used procedure in the Spanish target text was to retain both the conceptual metaphor and the metaphorical expression, whereas the most used procedure in the Swedish target text was to replace the metaphorical expression with a completely different one and thereby using a different conceptual metaphor. The parallel analysis of all three language versions also revealed that non-metaphorical expressions in the source text were occasionally replaced with metaphorical expressions in the target texts, which proves that adding a conceptual metaphor is one of many translation procedures. The most frequently used source domains in the source text, i.e. water, enemy and applied force, were transferred to both target texts. Some source domains were eventually lost, but a couple of new ones, such as disease and weight, were added instead.

The aim of this study is to examine what kind of ingroup conversion prototypes the authors of Luke-Acts and the Gospel of John express through conversion narratives and conceptual metaphors. By analysing the works of the authors I find a range of expressions conceptualising the act or process of conversion to faith in Jesus. These expressions contribute to forming an comprehensive conversion narrative, which has part in forming and setting boundaries for the ingroup of believers towards the outgroup(s) of non-believers. The ingroup conversion prototype for Luke-Acts shows norms of outgroup love, merciful and generous actions as well as good works and inclusion led by the Holy Spirit. The ingroup conversion prototype in John sets up norms of transformation through baptism, ingroup love and a breaking with the darkness of the world. The aim is further on to examine how these prototypes correspond to the models of conversion presented by Lewis R. Rambo. The results show that Luke-Acts view of conversion corresponds both to the model of traditional transition and intensification. The Gospel of John, on the other hand, fits only in the model of traditional transition.

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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.

Diploma thesis Figurativeness of denominations in a partnership based on a questionnare survey deals with a discourse of figurative denominations in partnerhips. Firstly, the position of partnership denominations within the field of onomastics is defined and a general language characteristics of these denomations is presented. Further on, the main ideas from cognitive linguistics are presented, especially the conceptual metaphor theory which has been the basis for an analysis and interpretation of partnership denominations. These have been divided into several semantical groups in the context of which the partnership denominations are being analysed.