Topic metaphors in European languages

Abstract

This paper deals with the semantic notion “topic”, understood broadly as the notion of ‘aboutness’ as in “to talk about stars,” and describes its various forms of expression across ten European languages. The aim is to explore and characterise how topic is construed, that is, which underlying conceptualisations are involved in the metaphorical expressions used to refer to this notion. The description is based on ten parallel versions of A. St. Exupéry’s famous novel Le Petit Prince. The analysis highlights the most salient metaphors that are found in European languages and points at some differences in the topic markers used across languages. The most revealing conceptualisation of topic involves what I have called the revolving metaphor, in which the topic is seen as the centre around which our discussion or thoughts revolve, as in my thoughts revolved around her. The paper ends with a tentative discussion of to what degree the different topic metaphors can be considered dead or alive.

Transitivity System and a Translation of Lexical Metaphors: The Case of the Emirates Airline Website

“…Apart from the definition given by Tavernier (2004) mentioned earlier, lexical metaphor has been defined by numerous linguistic scholars such as Newmark (1988, 104) who defines metaphor as "any figurative expression: the transferred sense of a physical word; the personification of an abstraction; the application of a word or collocation to what it does not literally denote, i.e., to describe one thing in terms of another." In Newmark's terms, metaphor includes all polysemous words and most English phrasal verbs and metaphors may be single, i.e., one word or extended, i.e., a collocation, an idiom, a sentence, a proverb, an allegory, and a complete imaginative text (Newmark 1988, 104).…”