Boat-based metaphors, which portray individual societies or even humanity as a whole as cast adrift on a sea of challenges, have resonated within political theory since the time of Plato, and they continue to frame how we understand and respond to key political choices. However, unless handled very carefully, they can facilitate mis-framings of our contemporary predicament. To date, these metaphors have often done a poor job of capturing the ecological challenges we face. They also risk downplaying the messy pluralism that enduringly characterises political life. If this is true, we should be suspicious of the conclusions their authors seek to draw about our collective future. Lifeboat metaphors, I will suggest, are prone to the same general problems but also add some distinctively their own. As a consequence they should be deployed with especial caution.

Two experiments investigated the nature of the emotional differences between figurative language and literal counterparts. The semantic differential method was used with principal component analysis as a data-driven implicit method for distinguishing emotional variables. The first experiment found that metaphoric stories were reliably different in emotionality than their literal counterparts along three different data-defined dimensions. The second experiment extended the conclusions to the evaluation of individual words used figuratively (including simile and metaphor). In both studies, principal component analysis revealed three distinct underlying sources of variance implicit in the ratings of experimental items including the dimensions of dynamism and depth, as well as an evaluation scale in each case. Notably, all three implicit scales, though orthogonal to each other, were found to correlate with explicit judgments of emotional valence of the stories in Experiment 1. Data-derived implicit measures are an effective way of discriminating among affective dimensions in figurative linguistic stimuli.

The USCCB statement resourcing lay ecclesial ministry relies on two biblical images; a mixed metaphor pairing an historical reality of the Pauline ecclesial co-worker and a Matthean parabolic narrative of day laborers. Examining this combined metaphor discloses how their tensions mirror the statement’s theological and pastoral divergences on the scope and authority of lay ministry leadership. The metaphor’s meaning and the statement’s text reinforce one another’s ambiguities enough that they can both highlight the vital ecclesial importance of lay ministry, or allow it to be interpreted in a clericalized way which undermines lay ministers’ value. This analysis is contextualized by pandemic-era stresses on lay ministers, even as there are new recognitions of their importance and value by Pope Francis and the synodal process. The status of these important ministers as true co-workers in the Pauline sense remains largely unrealized, highlighting the need for renewed theological and pastoral efforts to encourage their proper agency in the life of the Church.

This study investigated the differences in the expression of numerical motion metaphors in English and Spanish. We evaluated 1472 English-to-Spanish translations in which a manner of motion verb (e.g., skyrocket, plummet) was used to metaphorically express numerical change (e.g., unemployment is skyrocketing). For each of the translations, we annotated (1) the type of metaphor used in Spanish, (2) whether the manner of motion and path information was present in Spanish, and (3) whether the path and manner information in Spanish were conflated in a single word or indicated via adjuncts. There were three main findings. First, Spanish translations shifted from the motion domain to a quantity domain in almost half of the translations (e.g., skyrocket translated as aumentar, Eng. increase). Second, Spanish translations omitted manner of motion in half of the cases (e.g., prices surging translated as alza de los precios, Eng. rise in prices). Third, the path of motion was always present in the Spanish translations. This translation analysis provides evidence that the typological differences reported for the encoding of literal motion are also observed in the expression of numerical, metaphorical motion and that the choice of metaphorical mappings depends on language typology.

Previous research has found that metaphor comprehension is often more challenging in L2 than in L1 because of the prioritization of literal meanings, but the effect of cross-cultural conceptual differences and the role of inhibitory control during L2 metaphor processing remain uninvestigated. We explored these through a metaphor-induced lexical forgetting paradigm (Experiment 1), a metaphor interpretation task (Experiment 2), and an eye-tracking reading task (Experiment 3) to evaluate competing theories. Inhibitory control did not play a significant role during reading culturally congruent metaphors as it did for culturally incongruent ones. However, interpreting both kinds of L2 metaphors involved more inhibitory control than literals, even after explicit explanatory contexts. Although literal meanings (and culturally incongruent L1 metaphorical meanings) of L2 metaphors may always be activated, inhibition involvement depends on both task requirements and metaphor properties. These can be explained by the extended graded salience view and the predictive processing framework.

This paper aims to examine Wolfhart Pannenberg’s theology of divine action using the conceptual framework of cognitive linguistics. Central to this exploration is Pannenberg’s use of the scientific concept of force field in an analogical/metaphorical way, enabling him to present a trinitarian-pneumatological understanding of divine action through divine omniscience and omnipresence. This paper argues that, despite justified criticisms of Pannenberg’s reliance on Faraday’s outdated concept of a universal force field, recent developments in cognitive linguistics affirm the legitimacy of Pannenberg’s panentheistic metaphorical approach to the theology of divine action while calling for revisions.

Semantic equivalence in the affective domain is always a matter of degree, even for the words that may seem uncontroversial. For example, a word may be quoted in dictionaries as the semantic equivalent of another word and be used in practice as its most frequent translation equivalent, and yet those two words may significantly differ in meaning. This study focuses on one such case – that of the English term frustration and its cognates in Spanish (frustración), French (frustration) and German (Frustration). Using data from corpora and self-report, we find that, while frustration terms in Spanish, French and German reflect a cross-culturally stable type of low-power anger, or can denote affective experiences other than anger, English frustration refers to a prototypical anger experience characterized by high power. Converging evidence is presented from two psycholinguistic and two linguistic studies employing elicited and observational data. We offer a possible explanation for the observed semantic differences based on psychological appraisal theory and cross-cultural psychology. The novelties and limitations of our findings are discussed, along with their implications for researchers in the affective sciences.