Conceptual metaphors and the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association:Construction of knowledge, discourse communities and internationalization

摘要

This article discusses the socio-cultural constitution of reality and metaphors in general and the case of the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association (JCLA) as well as its international relations in particular. It aims at contributing to cognitive linguistics and metaphor research by presenting and analyzing the JCLA and its metaphor discourse from 2001 to 2010. After a short introduction to cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphors this article therefore mainly investigates the following research questions: How is the JCLA integrated into the international context? Which are the thematic key issues in the JCLA’s metaphor discourse and are there specialized sub-discourses? How is knowledge (and thus reality) constructed, via which methods? Who are the main actors, who is at the center of the discourse, who has discursive power, and how is the discourse community organized? The main results of the discourse analysis of 58 selected JCLA conference articles include a typology of six specialized discourses and principal argumentation patterns such as data, exemplum and authority topos, corresponding to the six sub-discourses. Regarding discursive power, almost all of the analyzed discourse texts refer to Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, emphasizing the international influence on the JCLA metaphor research. However, concerning the sub-discourses, one finds smaller specialized discourse communities of Japanese scholars.