J. Blake Couey, in “Isaiah as Poetry,” begins with the basic fact that nearly all of the book is written as poetry and encourages readers to approach it as such. He surveys its erudite vocabulary, its creative use of sound, and its parallelism and larger strophic structures. He closes with an extended appreciation of the “imaginative worlds” evoked in the book through the use of imagery and metaphors. He observes of its poetic vision that “its scope is nearly boundless.”

Hanne Løland Levinson’s “Gendered Imagery in Isaiah” looks at one of the most significant and striking features of Isaiah: its repeated use of feminine imagery for God. She begins with an advanced yet accessible discussion of how metaphors work, then goes on to analyze how the use of imagery comparing God to a pregnant woman, a midwife, and a breastfeeding mother—alongside more widespread masculine imagery—combine to challenge and transform the ways in which readers perceive God. In conclusion, she points out the importance of female god-language in a world in which gender continues to be a basis for inequality and exclusion.

This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

A bitch, as most people already know, is a female dog. As a trendy word we hear (and say) all the time, it might be tempting to guess that it isn’t very old. But if we look up its etymology, that is, the origins of the word, we discover that bitch meaning “a female dog” has a far longer pedigree that goes back over one thousand years. Over the course of a millennium, bitch became stigmatized by its association with social taboos such as prostitution, promiscuity, “bad” women, and “unmanly” men. This led to its offensive senses pushing out the inoffensive one. Bitch – which was once just the literal word for a female dog – eventually became what it is today, arguably one of the most insulting words in the English language. But on the other hand, bitch has developed positive uses in slang and has even been reclaimed in some ways.

Most intelligence models include an array of processes and mechanisms that enable experts to generalize their knowledge and processes during career transitions and produce flexibility in cognitive structures that enable individuals to overcome limitations in applying expert knowledge and processes across domains and functional areas. These processes have been described variously as insightful thinking, induction, eduction, elaborating and mapping, novelty and metaphorical capacity, inductive inference, divergent production abilities, analogy, flexibility of use, and closure. They are discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

The final chapter draws together the themes of the book. It uses the work of Derrida, Levi, Camus, and Judith Butler to delineate the way in which carnivorism operates as an ideology of violence; it argues that much harm against the human results from the way in which we misunderstand and misconceptualise the animal. It also suggests the limitations of metaphorical thinking with regards the human–animal relationship, and suggests that a metonymical conception, based on association and contiguity, may serve both human and animal better.

The chapter opens with an overview of basic categories within the field of study of lexical semantics. It next presents fundamental concepts related to the lexicon, especially the lexeme as the basic unit of lexicology. It also analyzes the concept of lexical meaning and provides a brief overview of some of the approaches adopted in the study of denotation and connotation. The central part of the chapter describes polysemy and its basic mechanisms – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche. The examples feature Serbian and other Slavic lexemes exhibiting the richest polysemy. The next section tackles syntagmatic lexical relations, the notion of collocation and the role of context in the study of lexical meaning. Paradigmatic lexical relations are also observed, especially synonymy and antonymy, both true and contextual or quasi-.

The introductory chapter is framed by the story of Ergoteles, a major Panhellenic victor and the only athlete whose epinikian ode and epigram have survived to the present day. The differences and similarities in the characterization of Ergoteles in each medium prompt the book’s main question: how does place, performance mode, and genre affect the representation of athletic identity? The bulk of the introduction outlines the angelia, the proclamation of victory by a herald at an athletic event. By stressing our – and ancient audiences – inability to access the actual speech-act, the chapter reinterprets the angelia as it persists in epinikian and epigram as an allusive representation, the modification and manipulation of which lies at the core of the verse celebration of athletic victory.

While the figure of herald and the actual angelia at the athletic site sit at the beginning of athletic praise, these real figures and actual proclamations are not the only heralds and messages that find their way into epinikian song and inscribed epigram. Rather, explicit and implicit references to the figure of the herald and the angelia are frequent in both genres. This chapter examines implicit and explicit heralds and messages across epinikian song and inscribed epigram. It focuses on the figure of the herald and the message and their ability to authenticate what are, in fact, secondary and elaborated speech-acts. By attaching themselves to the voice of the herald at the Games, epinikian songs and epigrams demand that audiences take their praise seriously, as if it were the voice of herald itself in the sacred landscape of a Panhellenic sanctuary.

This chapter focuses on elaborations from the categories of the angelia - the herald’s proclamation of victory - that are so productive for epinikian verse. The angelia’s utility for epinikian song goes beyond simply reinforcing authority or justifying praise. While the epinikian singer was undoubtedly provided the “facts of identity," they do not dryly report these facts; moreover, in some cases they do not report the specific “facts” of the angelia at all. “Identity,” in epinikian song’s modification of the angelia, is a subjective category, and the “facts” that relate to the victor – name, father’s name, polis, festival, and event – are not set in stone but rather creatively reworked, sometimes reimagined, and sometimes made extremely complex, in the context of song and its performance. By replacing fathers and integrating family, spinning myths derived from the victor’s polis or the festival site, and using the details of athletic practice itself as a mode of praising, the epinikian singer uses the angelia to structure his song and praise his patron (or patrons).

This chapter examines a series of athletic dedications to trace both the evolution of the epigrammatic representation of the angelia - the herald’s proclamation of victory at an athletic festival - and to define the particular characteristics of the epigram as an athletic dedication. While a continuity exists between modes of athletic verse, epigrams – as inscriptions – and epinikian songs – as choral performances – function differently and interact with different audiences. Epigrams do not, for example, use large-scale mythic narratives to bestow glory on their patrons, but they do circumscribe the movements and voices of their audiences and use the religiously and culturally important sites of their dedication to add to their meaning.

This chapter explores images of plant life in philosophy and literature with particular focus on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. It pursues the question of what we can learn about the nature of the human being and its place in the world from plants and the way they are rooted in earth. Over the past half-century, many voices identify our disconnection from the earth with the centrality of technological progress, capitalist production, industrialization, and globalization that are essential to our modern self-understanding and way of life. What was supposed to be the root of human distinction has ended up uprooting us. Is this because we have a distorted view of what it means to be rooted in the first place, and our dependency on the rootedness of plant life? This chapter interrogates the metaphor of the root in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous novel Nausea. Whereas Sartre considers the earth as an inert background in relation to human purposes: always there, meaningless, the earth is the static backdrop of our human drama, Nietzsche’s vegetal imaginary puts forward an idea of human life as deeply embedded in both earthly and planetary life.

This chapter gives an overview of the relation between indexicality, deixis, and space in gesture from a semiotic and a linguistic point of view. Directive pointing gestures are not the only type of cospeech gestures that contributes to deixis. Iconic gestures that form part of the multimodal utterance may instantiate the targets to be pointed at and function as the deictic object of the deictic relation. In turn they may be interpreted as signs that stand for something else. A Peircean approach combined with a Bühlerian one, as suggested in this chapter, not only allows for a tertium comparationis with respect to the modality of the deictic and indexical signs under investigation. It also provides us with tools for representing semiotic processes like complex sign concatenation (e.g. deixis at signs vs. deixis at non-signs; deixis at metonymies or metaphors) as well as the collaborative creation of deictic space (sphere-like, map-like, screen-like; separated or shared) in multimodal interaction. The proposed schema of four semiotic subfields of space substantiates the view that space has to be thought of as a dynamic process of semiosis, not as a static entity.

Darwin’s theory, in its uniformitarianism, its materialism, and its elimination of all metaphysical explanations and any element of intelligent agency from the world’s biological phenomena has been taken as an important influence in the growth of the idea that all living creatures are automata – more or less “conscious machines.” Darwin himself, in a least four different aspects of his writing, belies this inference from his theories: the metaphorical work done by his dominant idea – natural selection; his anthropomorphism; his views on instinct; and his theory of sexual selection.

The Introduction presents the main questions and aims of the book. I argue that Roman thinkers used the metaphor of the body politic to articulate competing visions of the res publica between the Catilinarian Conspiracy and Year of the Four Emperors. I frame my discussion in relation to the Cambridge School of intellectual history, which has catalyzed the revival of interest in classical republicanism. In contrast to its focus on questions of liberty and popular sovereignty, my book turns towards problems of statesmanship and constitutional transformation. It asks how a foundational metaphor of civic organization evolved in response to the establishment of autocracy. It foregrounds the importance of metaphor as an avenue of political thought.

Chapter 5 delves into metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor exists as a collection of mappings between source and target conceptual domains, and the relationships established by these mappings are licensed by systematic similarities between entities in the conceptual domains. When we say, “he needs to blow off some steam” or “she made my blood boil,” we use our physical experience of boiling water to express the abstract emotion of anger (Lakoff, 1987). Metonymy functions within a single conceptual domain and establishes a mapping between two parts of that domain on the basis of physical or functional adjacency. For example, metonymy enables the use of the term White House to refer to the executive branch of the US government, and the name of the national capital Beijing to refer to China. This chapter compares patterns of metaphor and metonymy available in English and Chinese, illustrates how metonymy functions as a basis for character formation in Chinese, and suggests how metaphor and metonymy can be incorporated into L2 Chinese classrooms.