The use of metaphors is prevalent when talking about music in everyday life as well as in more professional contexts. As such, the role of metaphors in describing and understanding music has been a topic for philosophical discussions and more recently also for empirical research. While most of the focus has traditionally been on the meaning of music, in this article we consider metaphors as related to the personal meaningfulness of music. More specifically, we investigate metaphoric expressions in personal narratives of fond game music memories, aiming to understand what the metaphors tell about the relationship between music and the listener. Following the theory of conceptual metaphor, we treat metaphors not as merely rhetorical figures of speech but as a pervasive feature of human meaning-making, that is, as related to the way we understand abstract things by conceptually mapping our understanding of concrete things.
Our data is a set of 183 Finnish stories about personally meaningful memories with game music. We analysed the data in several steps, starting with the identification of metaphoric expressions and their source domains, followed by reducing them to their image schematic structures. Finally, we used the image schematic structures to organise the metaphors into 8 wider categories: Agency, Force, Spatial relations, Transfer, Mediator, Linkage, Tangible thing/object and Sensation. Besides presenting these categories as outlining different aspects of how the listeners’ conceptualise the personal meaningfulness of game music, we discuss the theory of conceptual metaphor as a viable approach for understanding musical experiences more generally.
This article explicates the eighteenth-century English concept of “chastity” through analyzing the noun chastity, the adjective chaste and the adverb chastely in the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts 3.1. Nine prominent characteristics of “chastity” are examined to arrive at an explication of “sexual chastity”. Firstly, chastity was considered (1) a virtue. Secondly, it often meant (2) virginity or complete abstinence from sex. However, it also referred to (3) marital love. Eighteenth-century authors were more prone to discuss (4) women’s than men’s chastity. Metaphorically, chastity was considered a (5) valuable commodity, and it was discussed in terms of (6) attack and defence, and of (7) purity. Chastity was supposed to characterize a person’s (8) acts, behaviour, and comportment. The understanding of these characteristics had (9) religious underpinnings.
This chapter discusses the knowledge that we gain about emotions through data on language. Language provides us with a framework in which to understand emotions, and emotions are also indirectly present in our linguistic behaviour even though we do not discuss them directly. This chapter deals with what causes emotions and how people react to them, and how words and expressions for emotions feature in linguistic change. Linguistic change tends to be driven by general mechanisms such as metonymy, but linguistic expressions may also play a role. Most of the data represents written language because many examples come from historical data, which shows how language change factors in how we use words and expressions for emotions. Words for emotions often originate in words for matters that we associate with emotions. In turn, expressions of emotion often begin to be used for politeness and lose some of their original content. Our knowledge about our own and other people’s emotions can turn into fixed phrases that begin to live their own lives. This chapter was inspired by historical semantic research into English words for emotions, but it also discusses Present-day English. Those findings are then also compared with some research on other languages.
Review of: Annalisa Baicchi (ed.) Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2020
Review of: Jessica S. Robles & Ann Weatherall (eds.), How Emotions Are Made in Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2021
This is a review I wrote for Linguist List of Dagmar Divjak's book "Frequency in Language: Memory, Attention and Learning". I reviewed the paperback edition published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. The book was originally published in 2019.
Review of: Marianna Bolognesi, Where Words Get their Meaning: Cognitive processing and distributional modelling of word meaning in first and second language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2020
This paper presents an exploratory research on music-based attachment to video games, studied through personally valued game music memories. It focuses on people's engagement with game music and game technologies, expanding previous research on the role of game music in people's lives. We gathered 183 written game music memories and analyzed their contents and language. We focused on expressions of affect and sentiment, which we assumed would indicate affective involvement. However, we also explored the constitution of attachment by investigating how expressions of affect and sentiment were associated with other aspects in the stories that reflect personal valuation, focusing specifically on factors of autobiographical remembrance, conceptualizations of game music, and gaming technology related to memories. These investigations employed a mixed-methods approach that combined qualitative and statistical analyses. A major finding was that especially personal remembrances that involved an awareness of the self or related to the game music experience significantly predicted the use of expressions of affect and sentiment in the stories. In sum, the study outlines a framework for investigating people's long-term engagement with technology as being intimately related to the context of everyday life and the constitution of self-understanding.
This paper presents an overview of and a brief critical reflection on game music’s impact on players both within and beyond the context of gameplay. The analysis is based both on the current literature as well as on preliminary (work-in-progress) observations of our research project Game Music Everyday Memories. We consider how the functions and uses of game music potentially extend to people’s everyday life, thus constituting a personally and culturally meaningful relationship with music that is not immediately connected to gameplay. On the other hand, we consider the ways game music and a person’s attachment to the music are involved in gameplay motivation and potential game retention. As a conceptual thematization, four approaches for identifying the broader musical impact of games are suggested and discussed. To substantiate the discussion, we combine some preliminary observations from two different datasets gathered within the ongoing project: (D1) personal narratives of fond game music memories (N = 183), and (D2) survey-data on favourite game music (N = 785).
In this paper we explore connections between players’ preferences in gameplay and their desire to listen to game music. Music always takes place in cultural contexts and the activity of music listening is likewise entangled with versatile cultural practices. This is arguably evident in the case of game music since the primary context of encountering it is the active and participatory experience of gameplay. By analyzing survey data (N = 403) collected from the UK, we investigate how contextual preferences in gameplay activities predict fondness for game music. It was found that player preference for Aggression and Exploration are two precedents for liking game music. These findings indicate that a better understanding of the extra-musical qualities of game music is crucial for making sense of its overall attractiveness and meaningfulness.
It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners (TECCL). Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly, well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.