The book takes as its point of departure the notion that similarity and contiguity are fundamental to meaning. It shows how they manifest in oral, literate, print, and internet cultures, in language acquisition, pragmatics, dialogism, classification, the semantics of grammar, literature, and, most centrally, metaphor and metonymy.

The book situates these reflections on similarity and contiguity in the interplay of language, cognition, culture, and ideology, and within broader debates around such issues as capitalism, biodiversity, and human control over nature. Positing that while similarity-focused systems can be reductive, and have therefore been contested in social science, philosophy, and poetry, and contiguity-based ones might disregard useful statistical and scientific evidence, Andrew Goatly argues for the need for humans to entertain diverse metaphors, models, and languages as ways of understanding and acting on our world. The volume also considers the cognitive connections between the similarity-contiguity duality and the noun-verb distinction.

This innovative volume will appeal to scholars involved in wider debates on meaning, within the fields of cognitive semantics, pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy theory, critical discourse analysis, and the philosophy of language. Equally, the motivated and intelligent general reader, interested in language, philosophy, culture, and ecology, should find the later chapters of the book fascinating, and the earlier technical chapters accessible.

Andrew Goatly has had a long academic career in the UK, Rwanda, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong, where he remains an Honorary Professor at Lingnan University. His books include The Language of Metaphors (Routledge 1997, 2011), Critical Reading and Writing in the Digital Age (Routledge 2000, 2016), Washing the Brain (Benjamins 2007), Explorations in Stylistics (Equinox 2008), and Meaning and Humour (CUP 2012). He is now semi-retired in Canterbury, Kent, UK, an active member of the Green Party, and a keen amateur singer.

CONTENTS

0 Introduction: the similarity/contiguity distinction and an outline of the book.

0.1. Two dimensions of meaning

0.2. Jakobson: similarity and contiguity and two types of aphasia

0.3. Wider applications of the contiguity and similarity dimensions

0.3.1. Purposes of this book

0.3.2. A detailed outline of the book

0.4. To readers of this book

1 The two dimensions: similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

1.1. Using similarity and contiguity to define metaphor and metonymy

1.2. Onomasiological and semasiological unconventionality

1.3. What do we mean by contiguity

1.3.3. Frame-schema contiguity.

1.3.4. Intra-schema and inter-schema contiguity

1.3.6. Metonymy, metaphor and domains

1.3.7. Football commentary as a restricted script/genre and contiguity types in metonymies

1.3.8. Textual contiguity and textual metonymy

1.3.9. Macroscopic perspectives and global contiguity

1.4. Similarity

1.4.1. Literal and metaphorical similarity

1.4.2. Varieties of similarity in semantic relations

1.4.3. Characteristics of entities as similarities or contiguities?

1.5. Summary

2 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay

2.1. The importance and prevalence of metaphor and metonymy

2.1.1. Metaphors

2.1.2. Metonymies

2.1.3. Metonymy, metaphor and word-formation

2.2. The interplay between metonymy and metaphor

2.2.1. The metonymic basis of metaphor themes

2.2.2. Situational triggering

2.2. 3. Metaphors exploiting syntagmatic contiguity

2.2. 4. The role of metonymy in similarity, and analogy

2.2.5. Metaphor and metonymy working together

2.2.6. Substitution, combination and the poetic function

2.3. Summary

3 The Development of Language in two Dimensions of Meaning.

3.1. Language development in the species and in the child

3.1.1. Metonymy and metaphor in primate and human species communication

3.1.2. Language development in the child

3.1.3. Genre, shared collaborative activities and culture

3.1.4. Acquisition of metonymic and metaphoric competence

3.1.5. Education: learning to write and grammatical metaphor

3.2. Oral and literate cultures

3.2.1. Oral cultures' embeddedness in practical experience

3.2.2. Oral cultures' indifference to classification, definition and standardisation

3.2.3. The aggregative languaging of the preliterate child and oral cultures

3.3. Summary

4 Corpus linguistics, collocation and lexical priming

4.1. Collocation, corpus-linguistics and the new lexicography

4.2. The theory of lexical priming

4.3. Jokes and the overriding of lexical priming: some examples

4.3.2. Semantic set associations

4.3.3. Pragmatic function

4.3.4. Colligational or grammatical function and semantic set

4.3.5. Grammatical role

4.3.6. Textual semantic association

4.4. Some caveats about lexical priming

4.4.1. The orthographic word as the primary unit

4.4.2. The relation of text to the world

4.4.3. Generic priming

4.5. Priming, formulae, metonymy (and metaphor)

4.6. Summary

5 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative.

5.1. The semantics of clausal grammar as a means of theorising metonymies.

5.1.1. Interpreting metonymy according to the semantic elements of the clause

5.1.2. Interpreting compounds according to the semantic elements of the clause

5.1. 3. The semantics of phrase grammar and metonymies

5.2. Clause complexes as a framework for analysing inter-schema schema metonymies.

5.3. Written genres, literature, contiguity and realism

5.3.1. Narrative, recount, written genres and abstraction

5.3.2. Literature and abstraction

5.4. Summary

6 Nouns and noun phrases: the similarity dimension, classification, quantification and commodification.

6.1. The conceptual status of verbs contrasted with nouns

6.2. From nouns to noun phrases: generalisation versus definite specific reference

6.3. Early literate cultures, quantification, accounting and control

6. 4. Quantification, money and commodification

6.4.1. Commodification of humanity

6.4.2. The commodification of nature

6.4.3. GDP and human well-being

6.5. Summary

7 Nouns and the similarity mode: classification, taxonomies, paradigms and measurement in science and mathematics.

7.1. Classification

7.1.1. Vague, fuzzy concepts and prototypes

7.1.2. Radial categories and family resemblances

7.1.3. Metaphor, elegant variation and alternative classification

7.2. Nouns and abstraction

7. 3. Abstraction in science, technology and mathematics: classification, quantification and theory development

7.3.1. Categorisation in the natural sciences

7.3.2. Scientific theory: abstraction and paradigms

7.3.4. Technology, manufacture, time and standardisation

7.3.5. Quantification and the hegemony of mathematics

7.4. Summary

8 Resisting noun-based…