Verbal metaphor: The crossroad of cognition, culture, and form

Scope and method of study. This dissertation adopts a cognitive view of metaphor and discusses the cognitive, formal, and cultural aspects of verbal metaphor (i.e., conceptual metaphor carried by a verb) in English and Romanian naturally-occurring discourse. The dissertation relies on the methodologies of linguistic analysis, i.e., analysis of the meanings expressed by particular linguistic instantiations, analysis of the relationship between these meanings and the forms carrying them. The cultural analysis relies on the comparison of different linguistic expressions of one and the same metaphor in diverse linguistic situations with the view to identifying the cultural models that generate specific linguistic realizations. The data used in this dissertation were extracted from written discourse in English and Romanian (short stories and newspaper articles).; Findings and conclusions. My findings relative to the cognitive aspects of conceptual verbal metaphors have generally supported the current theory of conceptual metaphor. However, my findings also seem to suggest that some aspects of the theory need further study---e.g., the relationship between the specificity of primary metaphor and cultural models. The analysis of form carried out in this dissertation helped in validating some points made by the cognitive analysis of conceptual metaphor from a perspective focused on form. My findings show that the typology of the language also affects the association of forms, which generates the metaphoric meaning of motion verbs.