Chapter 5 delves into metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor exists as a collection of mappings between source and target conceptual domains, and the relationships established by these mappings are licensed by systematic similarities between entities in the conceptual domains. When we say, “he needs to blow off some steam” or “she made my blood boil,” we use our physical experience of boiling water to express the abstract emotion of anger (Lakoff, 1987). Metonymy functions within a single conceptual domain and establishes a mapping between two parts of that domain on the basis of physical or functional adjacency. For example, metonymy enables the use of the term White House to refer to the executive branch of the US government, and the name of the national capital Beijing to refer to China. This chapter compares patterns of metaphor and metonymy available in English and Chinese, illustrates how metonymy functions as a basis for character formation in Chinese, and suggests how metaphor and metonymy can be incorporated into L2 Chinese classrooms.

In chapter 12 we examine the groupishness of religion. Sexual conflict theory suggests that ancient feamle dispersal patterns meant that women found themselves in low trust environments while men remained among genetic relatives. Males therefore formed task-oriented groups and religious consciousness while females tended to form and generate moralizing and punihsing ideologies.

Expands on metaphor, which has long been a key issue for scholars of religious language and discourse, given its prevalence across traditions and religions in religious text and talk relating to the ineffable. The chapter unpacks theories of metaphor that understand it both as a cognitive function and as emerging in the dynamic interaction of individuals.

Metaphor involves the perception of similarities or correspondences between unlike entities and processes, so that one can experience, think and communicate about one thing in terms of another – lives as journeys, minds as machines, emotions as external forces, and so on. A consistent thread in the history of the study of metaphor concerns the potential of different metaphor choices to reflect and facilitate different ways of viewing topics or phenomena – a function of metaphor that is itself metaphorically captured by the notion of “framing.” The related phenomenon of metonymy, although less well studied in these terms, also facilitates framing in discourse. In this chapter, we review research on the framing power of metaphor and metonymy, with a particular focus on studies that are relevant to or directly concerned with the use of metaphor in discourse, broadly conceived. We begin with an overview of rhetorical approaches to metaphor as a tool for persuasion and of cognitive approaches to metaphor as a tool for thinking, including both theoretical and empirical studies. We review a variety of studies that have investigated the framing function of metaphor, and, to a lesser extent, metonymy, in authentic language use from a range of sources (e.g. politics, science and education) and using different qualitative and/or quantitative methods. Focusing on metaphor, where the evidence is most robust, we critically examine the relationship between, broadly speaking, cognitive and discourse-based approaches to metaphor. We go on to provide a concrete example of the framing function of metaphor in healthcare discourse, and show how cognitive and discourse perspectives can be usefully combined into a multilevel analytical framework that can, among other things, be used to make recommendations for professional practice and training.

In the Introduction, the author goes through conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory, illustrating how conceptual metaphors arise from the embodied and cultural situation of human actors. He then argues that such approaches are productive when it comes to Homer, allowing us to understand entire domains of experience in coherent ways. He also argues that the Homeric corpus is important for the modern theory in general, since Homer represents the earliest sustained text in the unbroken western tradition in which time, speech, and thought are described.