The present paper is concerned with metaphors used by architects as illustrated in the genre of the building review. The analysis is done on a corpus of 95 texts drawn from six architectural design magazines, and focuses on (a) the grammatical instantiation of the metaphors, (b) the locus of occurrence within the genre's rhetorical structure, and (c) the purposes they fulfil in the genre. The conclusion is that architects make active use of both conceptual and image metaphors in order to fulfil the two defining purposes of the review genre, namely, describe and evaluate. In this sense, metaphor is regarded not only as a constitutive part of architects' jargon, but also as an important rhetorical device at the service of the goals of that specific discourse interaction (covering issues of writer–reader relationship and textual coherence and cohesion). Finally, the discussion also addresses the knotty issue of metaphor classification and proposes a combination of cognitive and discourse procedures in order to approach the differences between metaphor types.

Metaphor in cognitive linguistics is understood as a mapping where properties from one domain - the source - are transferred onto another domain: the target. The conceptual associations between source and target have usually been considered universal, unidirectional, and usage-based. One of the issues generally taken for granted, yet often underexplored, is the critical role of the notion of culture when characterizing conceptual metaphor. In this paper, we revisit and problematize the concepts of universality, unidirectionality, and usage-basedness and argue in favour of a broader-scoped approach to metaphor that brings in the notion of culture as key to metaphor research. By ‘culture’, we mean two, related things: (a) shared beliefs, knowledge, and world view(s) characterizing national, ethnic, and speech communities; and (b) the discourse communities using metaphor: i.e., those subcultures within broader cultural frames that are characterized by specific knowledge schemas, needs, and interests. To do so, we look into metaphors used by non-Western cultures and the architectural community when expressing the ways they perceive and think about their worlds.

The present paper describes the role of metaphor in the commentary generated after Wimbledon's 2008 final and articulated in two genres within tennis discourse: post-match reports and the online forums opened after them. The starting assumption is that metaphor is sensitive to the discourse context(s) where it is used, and should be approached accordingly. In this regard, genre provides a good vantage point to gain insight into how metaphors are used and, more interestingly, enriched, re-elaborated, and, presumably, entrenched within a given community through repeated use. By focusing on the role of metaphor in discussing such engaging topics as a tennis match and the players in it, the paper attempts to shed some light into the empathetic and evaluative potential of metaphor as a discourse strategy as well as the importance of communicative interaction and language in the elaboration, expansion, and entrenchment of certain metaphors in discourse communities such as the one built around tennis.

This chapter is concerned with the figurative language used by wine experts in the genre of the Tasting Note. Our main objectives are to draw attention to the complexities found in the figurative language used in this genre, and discuss some of the methodological issues researchers need to overcome when dealing with specific discourses, and in particular questions concerning the identification, classification and interpretation of figurative data in textual contexts. The analysis is done on a corpus of 12,000 tasting notes drawn from specialized wine publications, and follows the main guidelines in both cognitive and linguistic approaches to metaphor.

This chapter provides an overview of metaphorical language used to communicate sensory experiences in the context of wine discourse, particularly in the tasting note genre where metaphor provides wine critics with the means to describe what wines feel like in the nose and mouth. Using data from a corpus of tasting notes written in English (2,053 texts and 100,674 words), it examines the language used in the description of wines’ aromas, flavours and mouthfeel in order to better understand the contribution of metaphor in the transfer of the olfactory, gustatory and tactile experiences to readers. The main concern is to explore expressions that cut across sensory modalities, i.e., instantiate synaesthetic metaphor, and point to the possibility of the synaesthetic motivation of a good amount of the language presumably informed by metaphors of the conceptual type.