Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

 

Disembodied Entities: Linguistic Factors Determining Semantic Role Assignment of Target Domain Referents in Metaphoric Duals Public Deposited

https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/4t64gn49r
Abstract
  • Though there exists a profound, and constantly evolving literature exploring the nature of English speakers’ alternations of temporal metaphors (Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky 2002; McGlone & Harding 1998; Matlock, Ramscar, & Boroditsky 2005 as a selection), strikingly little work has been done on extending the research in temporal reasoning to other examples of metaphoric duals (as defined in Lakoff 1993)—alternations in which the target domain referent is either construed as moving object in space, such as in “His sadness is catching up to him”, or as a location to which other entities are oriented to, as in “He fell into a deep sadness”—in other domains. Additionally, to date there has been very little exploration of the factors and motivations that might influence speakers to select one metaphoric dual over another. In the current paper, I look at dualism, constrained to two metaphoric target domains—EMOTION and THOUGHT—in order to analyze both the effects of emotional valence on duals outside of the target domain of TIME, as well as to compare between target domains in order to look at finer-grained differences in dualism—do duals in the domain of EMOTION behave in a similar fashion to those in the domain of THOUGHT? To the best of my knowledge, this question has yet to be explored in the current literature. My results indicate that while emotional valence may not be a significant factor when deciding on the semantic role assignment of target domain referents outside of the domain of TIME, the full story is intriguingly far more complicated, and incorporates the interaction of additional cognitive phenomenon, such as interactions between target domain behavior, verb frequency, and emotional valence, in tandem.
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  • 2018
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  • 2019-11-17
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