I am falling in love, Ouch!: Ontological metaphors at work

• Main Author: Ni Gusti Ayu Roselani (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: Bina Nusantara University, 2020-07-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.
• Notes: 1978-8118; 2460-710X; 10.21512/lc.v14i1.6343
• Keywords: in- preposition; conceptual metaphor; ontological function; spatial preposition; Language and Literature; P; Education; L
• Source: Lingua Cultura, Vol 14, Iss 1, Pp 87-96 (2020)

The research aimed to track the distribution of in metaphors and explore their ontological function in the abstracts of English research articles in the sub-disciplines of theoretical linguistics and pragmatics. The lack of empirical evidence on the subject had become the inspiration to base the research on a corpus. The corpus consisted of 40 research article abstracts; 20 from Journal of Linguistics and another 20 from Journal of Pragmatics. By using a quantitative method, the results show that theoretical linguistics abstracts are more densely populated with 'in' metaphors. However, in terms of in-preposition phrase topic complement variations, they are less varied. Qualitatively, the results confirm a notion proposed by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) that 'in' metaphors function cognitively by providing ontological status to abstract objects. Their existence proves to play an important role in academic texts.