Metaphor Papers

Taking MIPVU Further Around the World—And Through the Ages

2024-05-06T10:13:41+00:00

MIPVU (Metaphor Identification Procedure VU Amsterdam) is a method for identifying linguistic metaphors in contemporary English, developed on the basis of newspaper and academic texts, oral conversations, and fiction. Subsequently, it has been successfully used to assess the frequency of metaphoric usage in non-English texts. Depending on the language in question and its characteristics, some of the MIPVU guidelines (especially those concerning lexical units and grammatical categories) have to be adapted to produce more reliable results. The present contribution summarizes the main steps of the procedure and reflects on its applicability to religious and religion-related texts (both historical and contemporary) analysed within the CRC 1475 “Metaphors of Religion.” The examples include texts in Biblical Hebrew, Literary Sinitic of Korean provenance, Old and Middle High German, and English online-forum posts on religious topics. The authors discuss the challenges and benefits arising from applying MIPVU to their corpora and the possible ways of adjusting the MIPVU guidelines to their research goals.

Two Is a Company, Three Is a Crowd?

2024-03-06T14:18:21+00:00

The paper examines two mythical narratives from the ancient Near East and traces developments with regard to religious metaphors between their Sumerian and Akkadian versions. Based on these observations, as a modification of the CRC 1475 annotation scheme, a three-level scheme is proposed in which an immanent and a transcendent religious target domain are juxtaposed with the non-religious source domain.

Nektar und Stachel

2024-03-05T10:20:47+00:00

The notion of the bee may, at first sight, not seem to be an obvious candidate for a religious metaphor nor would we expect it to provide an important contribution to religious discourse. In sixteenth century Wittenberg, however, in the works of Philipp Melanchthon and his humanist colleagues and students, the metaphor of the bee as well as the related images of honey and sting reach a remarkable popularity. The present article explores the emergence of the bee metaphor in Melanchthon’s writings and traces its career in the contributions of his colleagues and pupils. The bee imagery is, however, not an invention of Melanchthon and the proponents of the Wittenberg Reformation. Rather, it proves to be a borrowed metaphor which has its roots in literary, philosophical, and theological traditions. Apart from biblical and exegetic references the bee metaphors developed by Melanchthon and the Wittenberg circle, in accord with the humanist project, draw strongly upon sources from classical antiquity where the bee, since Pindar, emerges as a prominent image of divine and poetic inspiration. As a complement to the textual tradition, we can further observe a remarkable appearance of the bee motif in the visual arts of the period, namely in the paintings of Lucas Cranach and his workshop: Cranach and his collaborators created a series of paintings showing Cupid, holding a honeycomb surrounded by bees, and complaining to his mother Venus that he has been stung by a bee. This mythological theme is taken from a Hellenistic poem, The Honey thief, often (wrongly) attributed to Theocritus. It is probably not mere chance that the same poem was also closely studied by Melanchthon and his friend Joachim Camerarius who both prepared Latin translations of the poem. Considering Cranach’s close connections with the Reformation, his personal affiliations with Luther and Melanchthon, it is not unlikely that Cranach had been acquainted with the subject of The Honey thief by Melanchthon. He may have read the poem in Camerarius’ or Melanchthon’s translation, and from there taken his cue for the conception of the Cupid-Venus painting. In any case, in the context of the Wittenberg Reformation, we can observe a remarkable spread of the bee metaphor which circulates through various channels of communication—literature, visual art, lectures and sermons—and thus contributes to the semantic elaboration and diffusion of the Reformation project.

Do You Speak Mahāmudrā?

2023-01-20T12:51:09+00:00

Mahāmudrā is a Buddhist practice system that originated in India and was transmitted in various forms and through various channels to Tibet. The transmission discussed in this paper teaches the direct observation of the mind, which is a paradox: Apart from being “like space,” the mind has no characteristics; thus, nothing can really be looked at. Ultimately, the mind is considered to be “seen” when all “seeing” is completely exhausted by a practice that looks at the mind in the manner of looking into boundless und unveiled space. Tilopa’s basic text of the Gangama teaches the stopping of all thought-like mental activities as the principal method. The Third Karmapa’s commentary introduces a second method, where the thought-like activities are not stopped but watched while investigating where thoughts come from, where they stay, and where they disappear to. As a result, the practitioner understands that thoughts are not different from the space-like mind like waves are not different from the ocean, and with this realization, all thoughts disappear. Because of their high density of metaphors, the texts of Tilopa and the Karmapa lend themselves to investigating how language in religious use emerges from metaphors. The primary metaphors can be summarized as space and movement, including being fettered, loosening, and becoming free. Another essential metaphor is clarity as a sub-category of space, in the sense of unobstructed or unveiled, as well as clear, empty, and naked. An important observation is that the metaphors are often initially apophatic—often negations—whereas the derived ones tend to be neutral or positive. The meaning that emerges then often takes on an abstract cataphatic form (space, free, nature). We can also observe that the two different approaches, stopping thoughts or using thoughts for the practice, seem to prefer different metaphors, e.g., with the connotation of a static “openness” and “expansiveness” (space, sky) or with a dynamic “inclusiveness” (waves and water). Analyzing metaphors enables us to decipher the complex meaning of a whole doctrinal system. We can develop a perspective on a religious system of meaning by analyzing the types of metaphors that are used—dynamic/static, negative/positive, apophatic/cataphatic, etc.—and the developments and derivations that can be observed in them—e.g., from dynamic to static or from negative to positive.

Rezension zu "Metapherntheorie und Konstruktionsgrammatik. Ein vierdimensionaler Ansatz zur Analyse von Metaphern und metaphorischen Konstruktionen" von Bin Zhang (2023)

2023-10-06T11:47:03+00:00

This contribution offers a review of:

Bin Zhang. 2023. Metapherntheorie und Konstruktionsgrammatik: ein vierdimensionaler Ansatz zur Analyse von Metaphern und metaphorischen Konstruktionen. Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 587. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.

Metaphors of Religion

2023-09-19T08:26:29+00:00

The following is a marginally edited version of the conceptual considerations presented in the proposal for the establishment of Collaborative Research Center (CRC) “Metaphors of Religion: Religious Meaning-Making in Language Use”. The CRC has been established by the German Research Foundation in 2022 at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). To start our working paper series Metaphor Papers, we wish to present the CRC’s conceptual framework to a broader scholarly community.

Our CRC starts from the assumption that religious meaning-making occurs in and through metaphors. In metaphors, meaning is transferred from one semantic domain to another. Religion, which can never put its ultimate subject (the transcendent) directly into words, is especially dependent on this procedure. Religious meaning-making thus occurs as religion draws from its semantic environment and transfers meaning to its own domain. The CRC seeks to more thoroughly understand this process theoretically and grasp it methodologically to be able to research its semantic forms empirically and comparatively. In this way, the shapes religion takes as a socio-cultural phenomenon can be better understood and central developments within specific religious traditions become much more tangible. The CRC thus contributes to the historiography of religions, on the one hand, and to answering systematic questions in the comparative study of religions, on the other.

While extensive research on metaphors in religious texts exists, the CRC’s novel approach lies in its systematic focus on metaphoricity as the central principle of religious meaning-making. This is based on a shared understanding of religion as communication and metaphor as a fundamental principle of language. We understand religion to be the form of communication that has the function of coping with ultimate contingency by means of the transcendence/immanence-distinction. In this paradoxical process, the metaphor with its simultaneousness of ‘is like’ and ‘is not’ is used to infer the unknown (target domain) from known means (source domain) and in this way creates religious meaning.

Die Wege der Sprache

2023-09-19T07:26:20+00:00

The author who is under discussion here named himself Virgilius Maro. He belongs to the so-called hiberno-latin grammarians and wrote his works under the name of the famous Roman poet P. Vergilius (spelled Virgilius in medieval times) Maro (70–19 BC), who was the most important authority for ancient grammarians in teaching correct classical Latin. The actual name of ‘Virgilius the grammarian’ is unknown; linguistic peculiarities and external evidence point to a scholarly milieu in seventh-century Ireland. Virgilius, in a number of letters (Epistulae) and so-called extracts (Epitomae) from grammatical literature, discusses specialised problems of grammar in a way that is quite unusual in school tradition: the rather dry stuff of grammar is embellished by a lot of anecdotes, fictitious sources, and self-designed Latin. The outcome is a characteristic mix of serious linguistic investigations and comic, sometimes even absurd, interludes. Therefore, a general characterization of Virgilius’ grammar is not easy to provide. Scholarly judgments vary, reaching from ‘charlatanism’ to ‘parody’ or even ‘hidden wisdom.’ In this article, it is put forward that a central issue of Virgilius is to demonstrate and analyse the ‘metaphoricity’ of language. This way, the early medieval author aims to point out the multiple ‚ways of language.’

Materialität und Metapher

2023-09-19T18:01:40+00:00

This paper summarizes the current state of discussion in the explorative working group “Materiality and Metaphor” in the CRC 1475 “Metaphors of Religion” and focuses on conceptual and methodological questions, illustrated by an example analysis. It is a working paper that addresses some open questions without providing complete answers. Instead, it aims to identify the conceptual and methodological challenges in order to facilitate further discussion. The core argument is that even non-textual communication can contain metaphors that can be identified and investigated in a methodologically controlled procedure.

On Aggressive and Self-Aggressive Metaphors in Religious Language

2023-09-19T08:20:35+00:00

Religious language is not all hymns and prayers. This paper intends to indicate challenges concerning the examination of the role of metaphors in religious language, i.e., the ways metaphors generate religious meaning. The case of aggressive metaphors, as exemplified in the works of Martin Luther and Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus), shows that metaphors change the domains they are employed in. In Luther, the use of aggressive and offensive metaphors is part of the theological agenda and profoundly changes religious language. In Cusanus, self-aggressive metaphors are employed to cataphorically change religious language to reach the divine asymptotically.