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Metaphor abounds in both sign and spoken languages. However, in sign languages, languages in the visual-manual modality, metaphors work a bit differently than they do in spoken languages. In this paper we explore some of the ways in which metaphors in sign languages differ from metaphors in spoken languages. We address three differences: (a) Some m...
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Citations
... Other times, a word or sign takes on a new meaning without a change to the form of the word. For example, Meir and Cohen (2018) describe some differences in the metaphorical extension of words and compounds to reference new meanings across signed and spoken languages. Many body-part terms take on new meanings in spoken languages, such as the "foot" of the mountain, or the "heart" of the problem. ...
... In spoken languages, metaphor and metonymy generate polysemy (cf. Carston 2021 and the literature cited therein), while in sign languages in some instances the emergence of metaphorical senses, regularly present in spoken languages, can be blocked by the absence of iconic mappings (Meir 2010;Meir and Cohen 2018). Yet, in other instances metaphorical extensions of meaning, with iconic mappings between form and meaning possibly backgrounded or absent, are well documented (Wilcox and Wilcox 2009;Kimmelman et al. 2017). ...
The paper examines whether the authors of the very first Polish Sign Language dictionary, Słownik mimiczny dla głuchoniemych i osób z nimi styczność mających ‘A gestural dictionary for deaf and dumb and persons who have contact with them’, published in 1879, may have been influenced by any of the spoken Polish monolingual dictionaries available at that time. As there is no historical documentation about the circumstances in which Słownik mimiczny was compiled, the inquiry necessarily relies exclusively on internal evidence: comparison of headword spelling, alphabetical ordering, direction of cross-references and the content of sample entries. The results indicate that such influence, if any, was only minor, and that the lexicographic strategies applied in Słownik mimiczny most likely resulted from the authors’ knowledge of Polish Sign Language and teaching practice.
... As an example, one question contained the metaphor of friendship for the relation to the divine. As discussed in literature, [66] metaphors are processed and understood differently in sign languages than in spoken languages. This is only one example of the difficulty regarding the adequate transfer of abstract concepts into sign language accessible for deaf people with ID and histories of language deprivation in childhood [42]. ...
Purpose
While positive contributions of religion and spirituality (R/S) to quality of life (QOL) are confirmed by a growing body of evidence, only limited research has involved people with intellectual disabilities and so far, no studies included prelingually deaf individuals with intellectual disabilities. This study explores the role of R/S in people with intellectual disabilities and deafness living in three therapeutic living communities specifically adapted to their needs.
Methods
Forty-one individuals (mean age: 46.93 years, 43.9% female) with prelingual deafness and mild to moderate intellectual disability participated in structured sign language interviews adapted to their cognitive–developmental level, regarding their QOL, individual spirituality and participation in spiritual practices in the community. Participants’ QOL was assessed with an established short measure for QOL (EUROHIS–QOL) adapted to easy-to-understand sign language. With 21 participants, qualitative interviews were conducted. In addition, proxy ratings from caregivers were obtained.
Results
The participants’ ratings of their individual spirituality (r = 0.334; p = 0.03) and spiritual practices-in-community (r = 0.514; p = 0.00) correlated positively with their self-reported QOL. Qualitative findings illustrate the importance of R/S and give insights into R/S concepts and practices.
Conclusions
Personal spirituality and participating in spiritual practices are positively related to self-reported quality of life in deaf individuals with intellectual disability (ID). As a consequence, access to spiritual and religious services should be included in comprehensive programs and society at large.
... After observing how the sign UNDERSTAND is formed in nine different sign languages, Wilcox (2001) claims that the metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING is not prevalent in sign languages unlike spoken languages where the same metaphor is prevalently used as observed in I cannot grasp the idea. Wilcox's claim is supported by the double mapping constraint of Meir (2010) and Meir and Cohan (2018). The double mapping constraint prohibits signs from extending their meanings metaphorically, in case they do not have corresponding iconic mappings. ...
... Double double mapping model,Meir (2010) 2 andMeir and Cohan (2018) explain why some metaphors are not available in sign languages. They claim that metaphorical extensions in sign languages are restricted due to the iconicity of sign languages. ...
examining the sign UNDERSTAND in nine different sign languages, Wilcox (2001) concludes that, unlike in spoken languages, the UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING metaphor is not prevalent in sign languages. The examination reveals that UNDERSTAND signs in those languages do not use grasping handshapes. However, this paper argues that if we do not restrict the observation of the metaphor to the word level, but extend it to the sentential level, the metaphor can be observed frequently. Therefore, this paper investigates the metaphor at the sentential level in Korean Sign Language. The results show that even though the sign UNDERSTAND in Korean Sign Language does not utilize the metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING as in American Sign Language, the GRASP sign is very prevalently used in sentences in order to designate the meanings 'to know', 'to recognize', and 'to notice'. The results support the claim that the UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING metaphor is a primary metaphor (Grady 1997) and that primary metaphors are, at least potentially, universal since they closely correlate with experiences shared by all human beings.
... Sign languages use metaphors differently than spoken languages. In this study, we compared sign and spoken metaphors (Meir and Cohen, 2018). When dealing with metaphorical expressions, they may activate their metaphorical knowledge system, facilitating their comprehension and production (Chen and Lai, 2015). ...
Background
For a long time, the traditional view regarded metaphor as merely a rhetorical device that served to enrich linguistic expression. With the continuous development of cognitive linguistics, foreign language educators began to realize the vital role of metaphor in foreign language education.
Objectives
This study looked at how well pedagogical interventions improve metaphorical competence by looking at how well teachers teach metaphors.
Methods
After a rigorous literature search and selection process from the Chinese and English databases, 13 Chinese and 7 international studies with 51 effect sizes were included in this meta-analysis. With the help of the meta-analysis 3.0 software, the literature and heterogeneity tests were performed to ensure that the meta-analysis results were as accurate and valid as possible.
Results
The effect size tests revealed that the metaphorical instructional intervention was significantly effective in general and produced a large effect size (d = 0.888) on improving learners' metaphorical abilities. Meta-regression analyses were also conducted to examine how other factors might change the effects of the interventions.
Findings
Research has shown that instructional interventions that combine prolonged input of metaphorical concepts with reinforcement of metaphorical practice can help second language learners develop metaphorical competence. Teaching puts more pressure on teachers and the learning environment, and the results of this study could help teachers teach metaphors in the future.
... This is the case of the Idioms Online dictionary which is one of the dictionaries employed in this study. The gestural mode includes sign languages, but we have not included a sign language online dictionary because metaphors work in a different way for languages in the visual-manual modality [23], and they would need a different analysis to that of the non-signed languages. Comparing the same expression in signed and non-signed languages, however, could in some cases support metaphor understanding (see for instance the entry for "keep an eye on someone" in the Multimodal Dictionary for Sing Languages "Spreadthesign" https://www.spreadthesign.com/es.es/search/by-category/40/verbos/?q=&p=7). ...
Metaphors are an intrinsic part of thought and language that allow us to construe a cognitive domain in terms of another domain. Metaphors are especially relevant to the study of idioms, inasmuch as idioms are commonly underlain by metaphorical patterns of conceptualization. As figurativeness is a common phenomenon in everyday language, tackling metaphors and idioms effectively in the EFL classroom can enhance students’ metaphoric competence and, consequently, increase their level of linguistic proficiency. This article explores the potential of online dictionaries and the multimodal affordances they bring to the teaching of metaphor and idiom in the language classroom. Dictionary skill descriptors are used to relate task types with idiom and metaphor content in online dictionaries and how it may be used to promote students’ learning of both dictionary skills and metaphoric language understanding. Five dictionary skills descriptors are proposed and illustrated with specific metaphor related tasks that show online dictionary affordances present in six selected online dictionaries. On the whole, this article envisions online dictionaries and their multimodal affordances as a powerful learning tool for steering EFL students through the intricacies of metaphoric language.
... Drugi kierunek badań, zapoczątkowany i kontynuowany przez Irit Meir, skupia się na innego typu relacjach między ikonicznością a metaforycznością i dotyczy nie niezależnych znaków, motywowanych bądź ikonicznie, bądź przez połączenie metaforyczności i ikoniczności, lecz tego, czy w znakach języków migowych może zachodzić polisemia między znaczeniem konkretnym i przenośnym, tak jak to ma miejsce w językach fonicznych [Meir 2010;Meir, Cohen 2018]. Zdaniem tej autorki w językach migowych zjawisko to jest ograniczone ikonicznością. ...
This is the fi rst in a planned series of papers dedicated to Polish Sign Language (PJM) signs denoting speech. It presents an analysis of twenty different signs attested in the Polish Sign Language Corpus (KPJM) in terms of iconicity as well as metonymies and metaphors used in their formation. The conducted analysis showed that two classes of signs can be distinguished in the examined material: iconic signs making use of metonymy and signs motivated by a conceptual metaphor. The former refer exclusively to the production of speech as opposed to signing: the vehicle is the phonetic act (mouth movement or air movement). Metaphoric signs, in turn, consistently rely on the conduit metaphor, refer to both spoken and signed utterances, and focus on transmission of a semantic content.
... Just thinking of forms referring to nouns, for instance, a sign could be iconically related to the shape of a thing, a characteristic or salient feature of the thing, how it is handled, how it moves, or some combination of these, and why specific referents map onto the kind of representation they do is not straightforward (but see Padden et al. 2013;Tkachman and Hudson Kam, 2016). Signs can also be metaphorical in their iconicity, for instance, a gesture near the heart for love, or gestures towards one's back to indicate past time (Meir, 2010;Meir and Cohen, 2018). Given some context both of these metaphorical examples are quite interpretable to members of western cultures, but without the context, or to people of different cultures, they are opaque in their meaning. ...
The iconic potential of sign languages suggests that the establishment of a convention-alized set of form-meaning pairings should be relatively easy. However, even an iconic form has to be interpreted correctly for it to conventionalize. In sign languages, spatial modulations are used to indicate real spatial relationships (locative) and grammatical relations. The former is a more-or-less direct representation of how things are situated with respect to each other. Grammatical space, in contrast, is more abstract. As such, the former would seem to be more interpretable than the latter, and so on the face of it, should be more likely to conventionalize in a new sign language. But in at least one emerging sign language the grammatical use of space is conventionalizing first. We argue that this is due to the grammatical use of space being easier to understand correctly, using data from four experiments investigating hearing non-signers interpretation of spatially modulated gestures.
... Within this paradigm, embodied conceptual metaphors can become a useful tool for dealing with the problem of instrumental music translation into sign language. These kinds of metaphors are commonly used in sign language for the arts (poetry, theatre) and have been studied thoroughly (Meir & Cohen, 2018;Moriyón et al., 2010;Nilsson, 2016;Taub, 2007;Wilcox, 2005;Wilcox, Wilcox, & Jarque, 2003). Embodied cognitive metaphors are ways of conceptualization that use a known domain in order to understand a more abstract one . ...
Iconicity has been defined in three majors ways in the sign language literature. Some authors describe iconicity as a similarity mapping between a signifier (the mental representation of the form side of a linguistic sign) and its referent, while others state that iconicity is to be understood as a similarity mapping between a signifier and its meaning. Other scholars have defined iconicity as a similarity mapping between a signifier and some other mental representation. The goal of this paper is to give an overview of the consequences entailed by defining iconicity as a mapping between a signifier and its referent, a signifier and its meaning, or a signifier and some mental concept. These consequences will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives. It will be argued that definitions viewing iconicity as a mapping between a signifier and some associated mental concept work best, while definitions based on reference and meaning run into several theoretical problems or are, at least, rather theory-specific.
