Although the Afrikaans word beker carries strong religious and other connotations, among them references to the Eucharist cup, the contribution of this article is to highlight, within a cognitive semantics framework, the role that cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and metonymy played in the creation of this symbol. The article aims to illustrate the following: that the two signs of the Christian Eucharist, the bread and the wine, are grounded in conceptual metaphors of eating and drinking; that two conceptual drink (...) metaphors are present when the symbol of the cup is analysed; that a related concept, that of metonymy, acts as a cognitive trigger, thus enabling the realisation of the symbol; and that other factors such as culture and religious symbolism played a significant role in the whole process. A corpus linguistics methodology is used to identify expressions containing the word beker. In analysing the expressions, Conceptual Metaphor Theory is used as a theoretical framework. It is found that conceptual metaphors such as nourishment is drinking and suffering is drinking underlie metaphoric expressions with beker. The metonymy container [the cup] for contained [the wine or blood] plays an important role in enabling the metaphors. In the images of the Eucharist cup and the broken bread, powerful metaphors arising from our bodily experience, denoting suffering and death on the one hand, and joy, nourishment and life on the other hand, are united to form the symbol. (shrink)

The garden, the fire, and Islamic origins -- Visions of the afterworld -- Material culture and an Islamic ethic -- Other worldly landscapes and earthly realities -- Humanity, servants, and companions -- Individualized gardens and expanding fires -- Legacy of gardens -- Epilogue.

The abundant and systematic presence of metaphor in language has in particular been explored by departing from the embodied nature of many metaphors. In the current research we investigate the manner in which the concept EATING in two nonrelated languages, namely Afrikaans (a Germanic language) and Northern Sotho (a Bantu language) gives rise to metaphorical expressions in these two languages. The two notions of cultural model and metaphor form the cornerstones of our research. The basic question guiding our research is (...) whether the metaphorical mappings originating from the same source domain (EATING) onto various target domains are the same in the two languages and secondly, whether there is any evidence that differences—if any—are culturally motivated.Our study is corpus-based. Lexical items belonging to the source domain of eating were used as search nodes in our corpus search. Our analysis indicates that the metaphorical source-domain–target-domain mappings in the two languages show a large amount of overlap. As far as the metaphors that we identified are concerned, remarkable similarities and very few—and these not significant—differences were found. (shrink)

Despite the advances made in understanding the effects of humiliation, no univocal position regarding its meaning exists. Indeed, so indiscreet is its meaning, the emotion is commonly conflated with other related emotions such as shame, embarrassment, and anger. Employing a scoping review design, this review aimed to scope the empirical literature concerning the meaning of humiliation from the perspective of two definitional parameters: i) status, subsuming the values descriptive and prescriptive, and ii) format, subsuming the values intension and extension. CINAHL, (...) EMBASE, EMCare, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and PubMed were searched for eligible studies. In total, twelve studies were synthesized in this review. Vis-à-vis status, seven studies were found to define humiliation prescriptively, and five, descriptively. Vis-à-vis format, seven studies defined humiliation intensionally, and five, extensionally. Accordingly, the meaning of humiliation varies in the literature. If further progress is to be made in humiliation studies, it is vital for researchers to be cognizant of the different meanings ascribed to humiliation. (shrink)