A Corpus-Based Study of Rhetoric in English and Japanese

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The purpose of this project is to explore the meaning of rhetorical expressions in English and Japanese from the cognitive-linguistic point of view. The investigator considers the relationships between poetical expressions and human cognition or conceptualization of the external world. Her material is far-ranging, including machine-readable texts of English and Japanese poems, the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, and dictionaries.In this project she provides a wide perspective, covering theoretical, and applied researches. As a theoretical research, she investigated the cognitive mechanism for comprehension of human mind based on the concepts of "the four elements," i.e. the four substances from which people used to believe that all material bodies are compounded. In the course of her study she advocated several conceptual metaphors hitherto unpropsed in previous researches in cognitive linguistics. She also examined the cognitive processes concerning various patterns of rhetoric like … More metonymy, synecdoche oxymoron, and transferred epithet, devoting special attention to emotive aspects of the rhetorical expressions.Her applied researches were mainly on discourse and education. First, she took note on the forms of traditional Japanese poetry, such as waka, haiku, and renku (linked verse). In Japan, poetic works were often composed by a group of poets, who alternate in making stanzas, exchanging rhetoric and holding poetic discourse with each other. She investigated the authors' cognitive processes involving metaphor and metonymy that play important roles in composing poems in collaboration. Second, she explored an efficient method of education for communication skills in English. Based on the result of a case study of an English class aimed at undergraduate students, she proposed to utilize Macmillan English Dictionary (2002) in order to present information to students on conceptual metaphors which furnish useful hints for free English composition.The results of her study in the term of four years are embodied in thirteen papers and one book. The book titled Communicative Theory of Cognition-(Ninchi Komyunikeishon Ron) whereof the investigator is a coauthor (with Toshio Ohori et al.) has just been published (February 2004) by Taishukan Shoten. Less