A Cross-Linguistic, Cross-Cultural Analysis of Metaphors

A Crosslinguistic, Cross-cultural Analysis of Metaphors in Two Italian Sign Language (LIS) Registers
Russo, Tommaso, 1948Sign Language Studies, Volume 5, Number 3, Spring 2005, pp. 333-359 (Article)
Published by Gallaudet University Press DOI: 10.1353/sls.2005.0009

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sls/summary/v005/5.3russo.html Access Provided by University of Queensland at 08/03/10 11:57AM GMT

TOMMASO RUSSO

A Crosslinguistic, Crosscultural Analysis of Metaphors in Two Italian Sign Language (LIS) Registers
A          of metaphors is that they make it possible to talk about a particular topic with terms usually related to a very different subject. For example, if someone says, ‘‘Jerry’s mental wheels are oiled,’’ we understand that the person is talking about the mind of someone in terms that are usually used for talking about machines.1 Researchers in the contemporary theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson ; Fauconnier and Turner ) explain this phenomenon as the result of a cross-domain mapping between two different conceptual domains. To process the metaphor ‘‘Jerry’s mental wheels are oiled,’’ we need an understanding of some of the key properties of the mind’s domain (the target of the metaphor) that our experience of the machine’s domain (the source of the metaphor) can provide. In recent theoretical accounts of metaphors (Ortony ; Keysar and Glucksberg ; Turner and Fauconnier ), much effort has been devoted to determining which constraints limit and govern metaphorical cross-domain mappings (i.e., not every domain can be mapped onto every other, and some cross-domain mappings are perceived as meaningless).
Tommaso Russo is currently a research fellow in Philosophy of Language and Sign Language Linguistics at the University of Calabria at Cosenza.

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S  L    S   

Context, cultural

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