Metaphor Studies: Theories, Methods, Approaches, and Future Perspectives

Book excerpt: Metaphor has been studied as a linguistic, conceptual, and communicative phenomenon in a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, education, political science, media studies, communication science, psychology, and neurosciences. While the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor has dominated the field since the “cognitive turn” in the 1980s, alternatives have been proposed, including the Neural Theory of Metaphor, the Relevance Theory Approach, the Complex Systems Approach, and the Dynamic Systems Approach. Though studies are still often text-based, there is a growing body of research on visual metaphor, multimodal metaphor, and gestural metaphor, as well as experimental research ranging from studies on metaphor processing and comprehension to studies in NLP and machine learning. Metaphor Studies is thus a highly interdisciplinary field that encompasses a myriad of theories, approaches, and methods. In current metaphor research, each of these strands is facing new challenges and offering new venues of cutting-edge research using state-of-the-art technologies. Researchers tend to focus on their own research areas and provide in-depth views within the scope of their own disciplines. Metaphor Studies do not seem to escape this phenomenon, in spite of the large number of disciplines they draw on, ranging from linguistics to psychology to the theory of science. Hence, there seem to be little cooperation and communication across different fields, methods, and approaches, having metaphors and figurative language as their main object of investigation. This Research Topic aims to promote cross-fertilization among the many research areas involved in Metaphor Studies, thus bringing together different methods and perspectives, and offering a comprehensive overview of the possible research scenarios