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Metonymy has traditionally been studied as a cognitive and linguistic phenomenon closely linked to metaphor. Nevertheless, the connection between metaphor and metonymy requires further exploration. This special issue examines the embodied, social, and creative dimensions of metonymy, emphasizing its role in authentic language use and multimodal contexts. The contributions provide different scholarly and empirical perspectives drawing on naturalistic data from diverse genres and modalities, including spoken interaction, fiction, advertising, and corpus data. By focusing on metonymy and how it is used across different types of naturalistic data, we aim to facilitate a discussion about the various dimensions relevant to comprehending the full complexity of metonymy and its relationship to metaphor. Together, these articles demonstrate that metonymy is not merely a referential tool, but rather a flexible, embodied, and socially grounded mechanism for meaning making across various contexts, providing shortcuts to shared encyclopedic knowledge and social meaning, and as such deserving more attention in studies of figurative language. 

Cognitive linguists have long argued that our comprehension of abstract concepts is primarily based on metaphorical or metonymic mappings from more concrete or familiar experiences (Lakoff & Johnson 1980/2008, 1999). Accordingly, metaphor identification commonly involves contrasting concrete senses of words with their contextual meanings. However, examples like a huge log spinning down into nothingness and Max opened a door into nothingness are reminders that, through metonymy, even highly familiar source concepts such as spatial areas can be targets grounded in abstract concepts. Both these instances evoke scenes in which the abstract notion of ‘nothingness’ is a space that physical entities move into.

This study highlights the complexity of figurative language and underscores the need for further exploration into how abstract concepts can ground our understanding of more concrete experiences. It also serves to bridge the gap between current metaphor identification practices and the directionality of metonymy. Focusing mainly on mappings in one direction can pose challenges for metaphor researchers, as they might mistakenly categorize such cases as metaphorical rather than as expressions of spatial relations. This is particularly relevant in contemporary metaphor research, which often relies on establishing the basic meanings of individual words to identify metaphorical relationships. 

Spatiotemporal metaphors strongly affect our language about time. Time can be construed as an object that moves through space (time flies) or as a landscape through which we move (we are heading towards the weekend). Evidence of how speakers construe time can be found by observing their gestures. This study explores spatial constructions of time in co-speech gestures during programming lectures in Swedish upper-secondary classrooms. Data were collected from teachers' co-speech gestures while lecturing on programming, a context rich in temporal and sequential references. The results show that the teachers gesture in three directions, each with a specific function. Gestures along the vertical axis are used to talk about writing code as events on a vertical timeline. The programming convention where code lines are ordered top-down, indicating events in a particular order, is suggested as an explanation. Gestures along the sagittal axis are used when the teachers take an internal perspective. Gestures along the lateral axis are used when discussing events. This is a first exploration of how time concepts are construed in Swedish programming classrooms. The research provides a foundation for more extensive studies on the role of co-speech gestures in conceptualising time, particularly in educational settings involving technological interfaces.

This paper presents a digital tool for teaching and learning the usage patterns of English prepositions using an embodied scenes approach. Building on corpus linguistic investigations and insights from Cognitive Linguistics, we present the usage patterns of prepositional constructions in line with how spatial relations are typically used to construe meaning. The tool is intended to empower students of English to increase confidence in their L2 skills through usage-based examples. In two studies, we test a set of sample lessons targeting the preposition into. Data were collected from ESL classes at Swedish High Schools. Students were randomly assigned to a control group exposed to traditional preposition materials or an experimental group exposed to the new lessons. Students then completed a pre-test, learning sessions, a post-test, and a delayed post-test. Results show that the embodied scenes approach led to proficiency in using into and this was maintained over time.

Metaphor theories have traditionally focused on the level of language, or on the level of thought. However, more recently it is commonly argued that multiple interacting constraints shape metaphorical meaning (Gibbs and Santa Cruz, 2012; Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Pérez Hérnandez, 2011). Accordingly, my psychological and corpus linguistic surveys suggest that linguistic metaphors are neither merely lexical, nor merely a reflection of more schematic metaphorical mappings between cognitive domains. They are conceptual mappings that involve speakers’ embodied experiences of the specific concepts represented by the lexical items that they use. They are “lexico-encyclopedic conceptual (LEC) metaphors”  (Johansson Falck, 2018). By investigating patterns at the level of LEC metaphors, we may gain insights into how speakers’ embodied understandings of the world around them, through affordances (Gibson, 2015), help them structure, re-experience, and fine-tune the system of more schematic metaphorical mappings (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980/2008, 1999). 

Categorization plays a crucial role in organizing experiences, allowing us to make sense of the world. This process is reflected in the labels speakers use for geographical areas. This study investigates the categorization of geographical areas reflected in phrases including nouns for the three Swedish regions of Norrland, Svealand, or Götaland, and the conjunction och (‘and’). Using data from the Swedish Korp corpus (Borin et al. 2012), we examine how these regions and areas within them are represented in governmental, news, and social media texts. Results show that Svealand and Götaland are more commonly used with nouns for regions than Norrland. Norrland is used with phrases for more specific locations within the other regions (e.g. their towns and provinces) but also considerably larger areas (e.g. countries and continents) more commonly than the other regions, revealing asymmetry in how geographical areas in Sweden are categorized.

Speakers regularly use their experiences of spatial relations to construe linguistic meaning in metaphorical and non-metaphorical ways. Still, we have yet to identify the meaning-bearing functions that different spatial relations commonly serve. This paper focuses on into relations. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, we apply an Embodied Scenes approach to identify the categories of concepts that are regularly construed with ‘into relations’ and the actions that are commonly involved. More generally, we aim to show how spatial metaphors can be systematically studied by investigating the collocates of prepositions and prepositional constructions. 

The Procedure for Identifying Metaphorical Scenes (PIMS) (Johansson Falck & Okonski, accepted) was developed to identify metaphorical meaning that extends over phrases or longer stretches of text, but it can also be used to identify metaphorically understood concepts coded by individual words. It focuses on scenes evoked by linguistic expressions to distinguish metaphorical, non-metaphorical, and ambiguous cases. In this paper, we pay particular attention to the relationships evoked by prepositional constructions and the elements that are part of these relationships. Our main aims are to show how PIMS can be used to identify metaphors in language that includes prepositions and to test the reliability of the procedure. We first describe the tricky nature of prepositions and why PIMS is needed in this particular context. Then we introduce the procedure and present two studies that test its reliability. In Study 1, PIMS was applied to a large corpus of sentences containing the preposition into (n = 8,500 instances). In Study 2, we analyze a mixed-preposition text that was previously used in a MIPVU study (Nacey, Dorst, Krennmayr, & Reijnierse, 2019a) in order to directly compare the reliability of PIMS to previous procedures for analyzing prepositions.

This paper addresses the challenges of exploring metaphor use in a naturalistic environment. We employed an integrative approach to the analysis of metaphor in video-recorded classroom observations of a teacher lecturing on computer programming. The approach involved applying the Procedure for Identifying Metaphorical Scenes (PIMS) and the Metaphor Identification Guidelines for Gesture (MIG-G) both individually and jointly. Our analysis of the data shows that the teacher primarily uses metaphors that evoke experiences of manipulating physical objects while using his hands to add spatiality to these ‘objects’. Furthermore, it indicates that specific gestures may serve as ’anchoring-points’ for larger scenes, enabling the speaker to form a scene in which to place smaller concepts. Throughout the analysis, our integrative approach to metaphor analysis provided opportunities to both support and refute results from each of the procedures employed. Moreover, the PIMS procedure has both served as an efficient tool for identifying central concepts of a scene and a way to validate the results of the gesture analysis. We suggest that this integrative approach to metaphor may be used to provide clues about the embodied motivation of a metaphor at an individual level.