In the present study we look into Serbian seven-year-olds’ understanding of literally translated English idioms in order to determine whether inherent visuo-spatial information facilitates the interpretation process. Drawing on our previous research involving adult respondents (Antović and Stamenković 2012), the present report tests the degree to which the existence of lexicalized visual and spatial configurations in unknown idiomatic expressions aids their understanding with seven-year-olds. We have presented 125 Serbian children with 6 literally translated English idioms containing lexicalized visual and spatial configurations (e.g. ‘put the cat among the pigeons’) and 6 literally translated English idioms with no visual or spatial component (e.g. ‘have a sweet tooth’). For each idiom, the children respondents had the task of circling a letter beside one of the four given drawings which they thought best described the meaning of the idiom in question. The idioms were randomly selected among high-frequency expressions with no direct equivalents in Serbian, available in Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Idioms (1995), Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (1998) and Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (1999). The preliminary result suggests a considerably better understanding of idioms with visual and spatial configurations (59%), as compared with those having no visual or spatial component (38%). Along with our previous results with adults, this might provide some more support to theoretical claims presented by authors such as Jean Mandler - that there is a spatial foundation of the conceptual system.

The study tries to evaluate two approaches to conceptualisation by testing how Serbian respondents interpret literally translated English idioms. The development of concepts is a pressing issue in cognitive science and the importance of visuo-spatial relations on the one hand and embodiment on the other in this process is particularly stressed, depending on the approach. We have presented 90 undergraduate Serbian students with no formal training in English with literally translated English idiomatic expressions and asked them to guess their meanings. The goal was to investigate whether the expressions would be properly interpreted and whether there would be differences in the degree of correct interpretation between the groups of idioms offered. The idioms had no direct equivalents in Serbian and were classified into three groups: (1) visuo-spatial bodily idioms; (2) bodily only idioms; (3) random non-bodily idioms. The results suggest that there is a clear difference between the understanding of the three groups of idioms: those with the visuo-spatial component are understood best, followed by idioms referring to the body only and random idioms respectively. This result could provide some support to the idea that embodiment, especially when coupled with visual cognition, is a primary source of conceptualisation.

We tested three theses on the construction of extramusical meaning in program music: (1) that some excerpts contain an “inherent” musical structure that facilitates the interpretation aligned with the composer’s intentions; (2) that “onomatopoeia” — musical imitation of natural sounds — is a frequent subclass of this “inherence”; and (3) that providing the title of the piece further facilitates the “proper” interpretation of intended meaning. Two hundred and one students were given six musical stimuli (three based on “inherent” and three on “arbitrary” association) and asked to write a one-sentence description of extramusical meaning associated with the examples. In the first trial, all participants provided descriptions without a suggestion. In the second, they were randomly assigned to three groups, receiving suggestions that were neutral, aligned with the composer’s program, or deliberately worded to contradict this program. Three raters then coded the responses on the basis of conformity with the composer’s intentions and presence of onomatopoeia. The result was (a) no difference in the numbers of conformant descriptions to “inherent” as opposed to “arbitrary” examples; (b) a negligible number of onomatopoeic descriptions; (c) a strong influence of “false” — but not “true” — suggestions. We discuss some implications for further studies of extramusical meaning.

We review psychological research bearing on major theories of metaphor comprehension. A broad survey of behavioral studies is coupled with findings from recent meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies of metaphor processing. We identify three broad theoretical positions that have been the foci of research efforts: analogy, categorization, and conceptual mapping. The first two of these emphasize relatively well-specified information-processing models; the third links metaphor comprehension to embodied cognition. Our review evaluates the evidence that has been taken as support for each view, and then critically examines studies that bear on competing hypotheses derived from opposing theories. Finally, we discuss issues that future research on metaphor should address. In particular, we call for greater consideration of the pragmatic functions of metaphor in context, of its emotional impact, and of its links to literary interpretation. We suggest ways in which mechanisms based on analogy and conceptual combination might be integrated to create a richer conception of metaphor understanding.

Despite the exceptional performance of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks involving natural language processing and reasoning, there has been sharp disagreement as to whether their abilities extend to more creative human abilities. A core example is the interpretation of novel metaphors. Given the enormous and non-curated text corpora used to train LLMs, a serious obstacle to designing tests is the need to obtain novel yet high-quality metaphors that are unlikely to have been included in the training data. Here we assessed the ability of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art large language model, to provide natural-language interpretations of novel literary metaphors drawn from Serbian poetry and translated into English. Human judges—blind to the fact that an AI model was involved—rated metaphor interpretations generated by GPT-4 as superior to those provided by a group of college students. In interpreting reversed metaphors, GPT-4, as well as humans, exhibited signs of sensitivity to the Gricean cooperative principle. These results indicate that LLMs such as GPT-4 have acquired an emergent ability to interpret literary metaphors.

Older adults may experience certain forms of cognitive decline, but some forms of semantic memory remain intact in older age. To address how metaphor comprehension changes with age and whether metaphor comprehension relies more heavily on analogical reasoning (supported by fluid intelligence) or on conceptual combination (supported by crystalized intelligence), we compared performance of younger and older adults. In two experiments, healthy older adults (54-88 years) scored lower on a measure of fluid intelligence (Ravens Progressive Matrices) but higher on a measure of crystalized intelligence (Mill Hill Vocabulary Test) relative to younger adults (18-34 years). Groups were equally successful in comprehending relatively easy metaphors (Study 1), but older adults showed a striking advantage over younger adults for novel literary metaphors (Study 2). Mixed-effects modeling showed that measures of fluid and crystalized intelligence each made separable contributions to metaphor comprehension for both groups, but older adults relied more on crystalized intelligence than did younger adults. These age-related dissociations clarify cognitive effects of aging and highlight the importance of crystalized intelligence for metaphor comprehension in both younger and older adults. 

The English-Serbian Contrastive Lexicology is primarily aimed at philology students, English and Serbian linguists and other scholars, translators, proofreaders and all those interested in contrastive linguistics. The authors’ aim was to take a fresh perspective on the English and Serbian lexicon and the related aspects of the two languages. The book provides the basics of contrastive linguistics from a lexicological viewpoint, information on dictionaries and lexicological companions of English and Serbian, overviews of synonymy, antonymy, homonymy and hyponymy, as well as contrastive approaches to polysemy, dictionary meanings, modal verbs and numerous tenets related to their translation from English into Serbian. Furthermore, the book also encompasses chapters contrasting colour terms, motion verbs, verbs of visual perceptions. The remaining chapters describe Anglicisms and Anglo-Serbian words, false friends, slang and jargon words, as well as phraseological units in English and Serbian. Each chapter includes a set of study questions, which can stir interest for the future approaches to the topics tackled within this book.

Starting from various theoretical positions in regard to discourse analysis, language and gender, the paper attempts to examine two samples of all-female and all-male conversation between friends extracted from the TV series Coupling. It represents a small scale study which aims at comparing male and female conversational styles against different criteria proposed by various authors – deficiency, dominance, powerful or powerless language, power and solidarity, competitiveness, cooperativeness, etc. The analysis leads us towards concluding that it is almost impossible to draw a clear-cut border between male and female talk, as far as our corpus is concerned and this is due to the fact that conversation features characteristic of either of the genders seem to overlap.

Given that the use and comprehension of figurative language is one of the most intriguing abilities of the mind, this study extends the line of research related to the process of understanding figurative language to individual differences. The starting assumption is that individual differences affect our ability to understand figurative language, focusing on fluid and crystallized intelligence. These types of intelligence were measured in relation to the ability t1o understand metaphors, and their influence was investigated indirectly, through tests that reliably examine both types of intelligence. The research investigates non-literary metaphors in the Serbian language, normed according to the following dimensions: metaphoricity, aptness, and familiarity. This study seeks to show whether and to what extent fluid and/or crystallized intelligence influence the process of understanding non-literary metaphors normed according to different features. Through selected verbal and non-verbal tests, Raven’s progressive matrices (Raven, 1938), semantic similarities test (Stamenković, Ichien, & Holyoak, 2019a), as well as a non-literary metaphor comprehension test, it is determined in which way fluid and crystallized intelligence play roles in the process of metaphor comprehension, as well as which possible cognitive mechanism allows us to process metaphors. The results show that the comprehension of non-literary metaphors mostly relies on crystallized intelligence, while fluid intelligence seems to be employed in individual cases, only with some groups of metaphors.

The main aim of this study is to examine the dictionary meanings of terms related to the primary colours (red, blue and yellow) in Serbian and English, and to determine whether there are relations of equivalence or correspondence between them, as well as their extent. The study is based on the corpus consisting of two comprehensive dictionaries of Serbian and English. Depending on the semantic field that lexemes are related to, the study offers an overview of five meaning categories in both languages: (1) flora, fauna and biological aspects, (2) physical characteristics, (3) emotional states and behaviour, (4) politics, organisations and groups and (5) оther. With the exception of certain specificities, we find a degree of meaning overlap in the compared languages.

The paper endeavors to investigate the conceptual metaphor awareness via a psycholinguistic experiment done by Serbian grammar school and EFL students. The analysis is carried to determine the extent to which the students are aware of the differences between metaphor identification processes in the two languages and whether, in an attempt to offer satisfactory solutions, they resort to applying the mother tongue knowledge in case of not being able to interpret foreign language metaphors. The psycholinguistic experiment conducted in this research is composed of 28 metaphorical and non-metaphorical sentences in Serbian and English taken from the available corpora. The experiment was conducted by presenting the participants with equal stimuli,, where they were supposed to determine whether there is metaphorical content present in the sentences or not. In the final section of the research the results of the two analyses are compared to reveal that the assumptions we set off with were mostly correct. The obtained results suggested that language proficiency, the amount of exposure to L2 and direct formal instruction in various aspects of L2 are significant factors for fast and successful metaphor identification.

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of translating literary metaphors from Serbian to English on metaphor quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity. The research involved 55 Serbian metaphors translated into English using the A is B form, which were then evaluated by 252 participants in two separate studies. Study 1 served as an extension of a previous norming study. In it, a group of participants assessed 55 translated literary metaphorical expressions, and their evaluations were compared to those of the original Serbian versions. In Study 2, a group of participants, divided into two subgroups, rated a collection of both the original metaphorical expressions and their translated counterparts. The results indicate that the translated metaphors generally scored higher in terms of aptness, familiarity, quality, and partially in metaphoricity. These findings suggest that translating the metaphors into English had a positive impact on their perceived effectiveness and familiarity. Several factors are considered to explain these outcomes, including the nature of the English language itself, the participants’ exposure to English, and the translation process. Overall, this study highlights the influence of translation on the perception of literary metaphors and provides insights into metaphor interpretation.

We examined the relationship between metaphor comprehension and verbal analogical reasoning in young adults who were either typically developing (TD) or diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The ASD sample was highly educated and high in verbal ability, and closely matched to a subset of TD participants on age, gender, educational background, and verbal ability. Additional TD participants with a broader range of abilities were also tested. Each participant solved sets of verbal analogies and metaphors in verification formats, allowing measurement of both accuracy and reaction times. Measures of individual differences in vocabulary, verbal working memory, and autistic traits were also obtained. Accuracy for both the verbal analogy and the metaphor task was very similar across the ASD and matched TD groups. However, reaction times on both tasks were longer for the ASD group. Additionally, stronger correlations between verbal analogical reasoning and working memory capacity in the ASD group indicated that processing verbal analogies was more effortful for them. In the case of both groups, accuracy on the metaphor and analogy tasks was correlated. A mediation analysis revealed that after controlling for working memory capacity, the inter-task correlation could be accounted for by the mediating variable of vocabulary knowledge, suggesting that the primary common mechanisms linking the two tasks involve language skills.

Figurative language processing impairments in autism have been widely demonstrated, and have been considered a defining feature of autism. Studies in this area often consider different types of figurative language together, and less attention has been paid to identifying the factors that might contribute to difficulties in processing specific types of figurative language. Here we present a preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis of studies assessing the comprehension of idioms and proverbs in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as compared to typically developing (TD) individuals. Idioms are widely used multi-word figurative expressions, which are understood by using contextual information. Proverbs are a related type of fixed, figurative, formulaic expression in a sentential form, typically linked with wisdom. Idioms and proverbs represent forms of figurative language which are more conventionalized and frequently opaquer than metaphors, pointing to a unique way that they are processed in conversational contexts. Our analysis encompassed a total of 11 studies from 10 papers (involving 235 autistic and 224 TD individuals), which met our inclusion criteria (the ASD and TD groups were matched on both chronological age and intelligence). The analysis of accuracy data revealed a group difference favouring the TD over the ASD group, with a medium effect size, and no indication of a publication bias. Participants’ age was unrelated to the magnitude of group differences, but there was a trend for smaller group differences in the case of participants with higher (verbal) intelligence. We discuss these findings with reference to theories related to the nature of figurative language impairments in autism.

This chapter provides a brief overview of analogical reasoning, first in the typically developing population and then in the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) population. Many studies of analogical reasoning have used variations of a mapping task, which requires the participant to identify correspondences between specific objects in the source and target. Instructions sometimes specify that a relational match is to be sought, but may instead leave the match criterion relatively vague. The chapter presents a systematic review of empirical investigations of analogical reasoning in autism, including studies that assessed performance on J. C. Raven’s matrices. The spared analogical abilities observed in ASD also suggest refinements in models of autistic functioning. On the face of it, solving problems of the type exemplified by Raven’s matrices requires attention to visuospatial relations between geometrical forms and also requires integration of constraints provided by multiple relations.

Impairments related to figurative language understanding have been considered to be one of the diagnostic and defining features of autism. Metaphor comprehension and production in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as compared to typically developing (TD) individuals have been investigated for around thirty years, generally showing an overall advantage for TD groups. We present a preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis including a total of 15 studies that fulfilled our set of inclusion criteria (notably, ASD and TD groups matched in chronological age and verbal- or full-scale IQ). Along with accuracy, we also analyzed group differences in reaction time in the studies that reported them. The results revealed a medium-to-large group difference favoring TD over ASD groups based on accuracy measures, as well as a similar overall advantage for TD groups based on reaction times. There was reliable heterogeneity in effect sizes for group differences in accuracy, which was mostly explained by the effect of verbal intelligence, with differences in metaphor processing being smaller for participants with better verbal skills. Some of the variation in effect sizes may also be attributed to differences in types of metaphor processing tasks. We also evaluated the quality of the studies included in the meta-analysis, and the evidence relating to the potential presence of publication bias.

Following Fairclough’s (1995) observation that texts in contemporary society are multi-semiotic and Lemke’s (2005) call for extending the scope of critical discourse analysis to new communications media, including websites, blogs, discussion groups, and video games, the present study aims at contributing to the incorporation of video games as multi-semiotic phenomena into discourse studies. The main purpose of our study is to select several aspects of Bogost’s views on video games’ persuasiveness (2007) and combine them with Fairclough’s (1995, 2003) theoretical positions. Our attempt to create links between two different, but seemingly related theoretical frameworks was prompted by Bogost’s (2007: 3) claim that computational processes themselves can be persuasive. In the course of connecting the two, we are paying attention to the concepts of the rule-based discourse, genre-embedded rules, remediation and invisibilization. We hope that such approach might initiate further links between the two frameworks, both of which might benefit from such cooperation

The main goal of this paper is to attempt to apply some of the key constructs of cognitive semantics to the analysis of conventionalized English animal similes. It will combine Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the Theory of Conceptual Blending (BT) in the analysis of 48 examples (similes or groups of similes) from English, belonging to the corpus compiled from the major dictionaries of idioms. The examples will be divided into three main groups, based on their sources, motivation and the level of objectivity and the analysis will try to prove that the understanding of each of these groups will employ a different set-up of cognitive mechanisms.

This book presents a cognitive semantic analysis of the lexical meaning of verbs of human motion in English and Serbian, and the process of their translation from English to Serbian with three main aims: (1) the first aim of the study is to provide an overview of the existing analyses of verbs of motion in English and Serbo-Croatian literature, offer a detailed linguistic description of prototype theory and other cognitive semantic models, and analyse the existing approaches to verbs from the perspective of prototype theory; (2) the second aim of the study is to compare the ways of conceptualizing and categorizing verbs of human motion in English and Serbian from the perspective of cognitive semantic theories, which included an attempt to apply prototype theory to the categorization of verbs of motion and a section trying to apply other cognitive semantic theories to their description; (3) the third aim is to seek for translation correspondents when translating from English into Serbian by means of respondents (with no context) and using a corpus (within a context) and checking these results against the list of possible prototypicality, having in mind the need to retain both literal and metaphorical meaning when translating.

This paper analyses the errors which emerge in the process of interpreting literally translated English idioms. The idioms interpreted are of the visuo-spatial kind and all of them refer to a body part. Although the idioms were literally translated into Serbian, the level of understanding that the subjects showed when interpreting their meaning was rather high. In case they misinterpreted them, quite frequently there was still a valid background for their shifted interpretation, be it visual, spatial, bodily, cultural or related to the subjects’ mother tongue. These misinterpretations and changed meanings within them will be the focus of this paper. The shifted meanings in most cases reveal the actual steps that led the subjects towards their conclusions. These steps include various visuo-spatial configurations, common beliefs linked to body parts, metonymy, pronoun usage, etc. In turn, this might reveal some facets of the conceptualization of visuo-spatial metaphorical expressions, regardless of the language they originate from.

The paper is a contrastive study that tries to explore various metaphoric and extended uses of the verbs that are considered to be hyponyms of the generic vision verbs gledati in Serbian and look in English. These verbs, being classified as verbs of basic bodily perception, are a very likely source domain in the process of metaphorization and other forms of extended usage. The main goal of the paper is to compare the ways in which verbs denoting various kinds of visual perception shift or have shifted their primary meanings, as well as the ways in which they get joined by other, 'non-visual' meanings in Serbian and English. It will also explore a number of typically non-visual verbs which attain visual meaning in the process of metaphorization. The verbs are divided into semantic groups and analysed one by one. Finally, the paper also tries to provide solutions to the problems which may emerge in the process of translating various meanings of these verbs from Serbian into English.

The main purpose of the paper is to show the influence of various philosophical ideas on the development of prototype theory, an integral part of experiential realism and one of the key strongpoints of modern cognitive linguistics. After providing an overview of the main tenets of experiential realism, the paper deals with the position of prototypes within the basic approaches to categorization in thought and language, which is followed by a summary of a number of ideas of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a special emphasis on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and the Blue and Brown Books, i.e. on his explorations of the problem of categorization, language games and family resemblances. The paper proves that the philosophical thread which brings us to the modern ideas of cognitive linguistics began with Kant’s views on knowledge and the nature of categorization, Husserl’s concept of categorical intuition and, finally, Wittgenstein’s treatment of categories based on the complex network of family resemblances.

The main goal of this paper is to test possible translation equivalents in the process of translating past progressive from English into Serbian. The main grounding of the comparison in this analysis is in the semantic features present in verbs (primarily stativity, duration, telicity and homogeneity) and in the possibilities of preserving these features while translating past progressive into Serbian. By recognizing the difference between aspect and Aktionsart, this paper will to avoid linking this comparison to the traditional tense analysis and to various time-related issues. This may allow us to find more general points of comparison and thus bring us closer towards seeing clearer differences between the two language systems, at least when their aspectual sub-systems are in question. 

The main aim of the study is to investigate various procedures in translating the verb to go from English into Serbian, stressing those aspects of meaning which could be analysed from the perspective of two cognitive semantic theories – the theory of image schemata and conceptual metaphor theory. By means of analysing the dictionary meanings of the verb to go and a parallel translation corpus containing 320 pairs of sentences, the paper overviews the literal and the metaphorical meanings of the verb to go, and connects them to the conceptual metaphors which could be expressed using the verb to go. Besides this, a number of image schemata are employed in the process of clarifying certain meanings of the analysed verb and their translation into Serbian. finally, the paper “measures” the degree of efficiency of translating the verb to go into Serbian, provides some evidence for the conceptual nature of metaphors, as well as a number of conclusions related to the way in which native speakers of English and Serbian conceptualize motion.

The main aim of this article is to overview a number of recent psycholinguistic studies related to the usage of spatial elements and relations for the purpose of describing time. This predominantly includes those empirical papers that marked the controver- sial debate on the role of native language in the process of spatial conceptualization of time-related phenomena and the attempt of put the spatio-temporal relations into a Neo-Whorfian context. The paper gives a theoretical overview related to the impor- tance of studying spatio-temporal links, which is followed by an outline of several articles which were part of the mentioned debate. The first one will be Boroditsky’s 2001 paper, in which she tried to prove that one’s native language largely determines the way in which one conceptualizes time, which gets very close to the ideas stemming from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is followed by the description of three studies (Chen 2007; January and Kako 2007; Tse and Altarriba 2008) which failed to replicate Boroditsky’s experimental procedures, and opposed the interpretation of the results in several different ways. Finally, after summing up and comparing the results, the paper offers a set of ideas that could possibly improve some future endeavours in the field.

This paper is an attempt to use Conceptual Metaphor Theory to interpret social and cultural issues coming from a comparative literary and cultural study named "Provincialism, Gothic, Grotesque: Davies's 'Fifth Business' and McCullers's 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’" The subject novels of the study have a set of common issues that can be connected by the fact that they are "products" of the two southern communities presented in these novels, one belonging to Southern Ontario and the other to the Southern States of the USA. Therefore, a cognitive semantic analysis of the concept of SOUTH contributes to the understanding of the problematic issues we meet in the novels. The paper begins with a general introduction and the discussion of the term SOUTH. After this, a semantic approach is proposed and SOUTH is connected to the concept of DOWN, which allows it to be subjected to further analysis. What follows is a set of illustrations coming from the previous analysis of the two novels – they illustrate links between DOWN and other concepts as proposed by Lakoff and Johnson in "Metaphors We Live By."

The paper attempts to evaluate the importance of visuo-spatial elements in the process of conceptual blending by investigating the effects of animated visual stimuli on riddle solving. Our respondents (90 first and second year students enrolled in the English Department, Faculty of Philosophy in Niš) had the task of solving “The Riddle of the Buddhist Monk”, a well-known example in the world of conceptual blending. Our results indicate that animated visual stimuli speed up the course of riddle solving, as the respondents who had visual stimuli were roughly 1.85 times quicker when providing the answer. At the same time, the presence of an animation accompanying the riddle, particularly the one which involved the meeting point, seemed to facilitate the correct outcome in the process of riddle solving. We can thus conclude that visuo-spatial stimuli do have an impact on how well or how quickly we mentally run the blend present in the tested riddle.

This study contributes to the field of video game stylistics by investigating the stylistic development of the Football Manager video game series. It explores changes in game design and video game affordances in a diachronic manner, and, in order to do so, it identifies and analyzes the main changes in the style of several document-like screens from three game instances, showing how the screens have combined textual and pictorial elements during the previous two decades. The results indicate several changes in the visual style of the game: (i) The percentage of text-only elements is decreasing, (ii) pictorial and multimodal elements are becoming more dominant, and (iii) there is a growing diversity in subcanvas types. The amount of text varied but did not decrease as severely as the number of text-only elements did. With such results, we can expect further diversification of the communication screens and reductions in the text-only components in the future.

This paper investigates some of the possibilities of applying Prototype Theory to the categorization of English verbs. Throughout its development, Prototype Theory has been mainly focused on nouns, adjectives and prepositions with very few excursions into the realms of the other parts of speech. The paper will include a short summary of the existing attempts to approach verbs from a prototypical perspective. Using verb frequency tests, it will try to find those semantic features of verbs that might be relevant to the process of categorization. This will be done by means of analysing two classes of verbs and finding their appropriate semantic features. The result of this analysis will be presented in two columns and graphs, showing how the verbs in question are graded within their categories.

In the light of a combined historical-semantic and cognitive approach to language, this paper overviews the meanings of the basic auditory perception verbs in English – hear, listen and obey (in its historical sense) – and explores the forms of their semantic change. In order to get a broader picture, these verbs are firstly compared to their Serbian translation equivalents, with regard to their current and obsolete meanings. This comparison leads to the conclusion that the main vehicle of the semantic change of these verbs is metaphorization and this process is then approached in several ways. Panchronically speaking, this kind of metaphorization has a firm cognitive grounding, which stems from the very nature of the human mind. In turn, this fact broadens the possibilities of seeing this process as universal.

The present paper investigates whether lexicalized visuo-spatial configurations and/or an explicit reference to a human body part can facilitate the interpretation of unknown idioms by comparing the levels of correct interpretation of unknown English and Serbian idiomatic expressions. Two groups of respondents, American and Serbian engineering students, had the task to interpret literally translated idiomatic expressions from a target language they were not familiar with (Serbian or English). The idioms were divided into three groups: (1) visuo-spatial bodily idioms, (2) bodily idioms only, and (3) non-bodily idioms. The goal was to test whether references to visuo-spatial information and/or parts of the body would help respondents interpret the expressions correctly. Our results, compiled from both groups of respondents, suggest that there are significant differences for the three scores, with the combined visuo-spatial and bodily components taking the lead, the bodily component only coming second, and the non-bodily idioms falling strikingly far behind. This could provide support to the well-known assumptions of cognitive linguistics that visuo-spatial configurations and embodiment play a major role in the construction of abstract concepts.

This article intends to provide insight into how speakers of English, Mandarin, and Serbian perceive spatio-temporal relations expressed by specific pairs of adverbials. In two studies participants were presented with simple sentences describing the metaphorical movement of events on the timeline (e.g., "The meeting was moved from the morning to the afternoon.") and were asked to decide whether the event had been moved along the sagittal, vertical or transverse axis (forward/backward, up/down, left/right). The main aim of the first study, which was conducted with 104 native speakers of Serbian, was to explore the effects of axis-orientation and individual time units on participants' preferences and response times. The target time units used were dates, hours, months, days of the week, and years. The results showed significant differences in response times between the transverse and sagittal axis conditions on the one hand (with shorter reaction times), and the vertical axis condition on the other. Moreover, the distribution of answers showed a high degree of inconsistency when it came to moving events to a previous point in time. The main aim of the second study was to identify potential differences in responses and response times to different orientations and time units between four experimental groups: native speakers of English with no second language, native speakers of English with knowledge of a second language, native speakers of Mandarin (with English as a second language), and native speakers of Serbian (also with English as a second language). The study was conducted with 126 participants. The design of the second study was largely parallel to that of the first, but it involved three trials and different time units (parts of the day, days of the week and months). The Mandarin speakers gave the quickest responses in the first two trials when deciding on the vertical axis. Moreover, reaction times were significantly shorter in the parts-of-the-day condition (e.g., "morning", "afternoon"), across the three trials. In addition, Mandarin speakers showed an inverted trend in responses on the sagittal axis compared to the remaining three groups. While some of our results corroborate previous research on the topic, the study also provides novel empirical evidence on how Serbian speakers conceptualize time using spatial terms.

The nature of the mental processes involved in metaphor comprehension has been the focus of debate. Research related to this debate has mainly examined the comprehension of simple nominal metaphors. Here we take an individual-differences approach to examine the comprehension of slightly more complex metaphors, some taken from literary sources, using two types of comprehension tests (selecting an overall interpretation or else selecting a completion). In a series of metaphorcomprehension experiments with college students, we measured both fluid intelligence (using the non-verbal Raven’s Progressive Matrices test) and crystalized verbal intelligence (using a new Semantic Similarities Test). Each measure had a dissociable predictive relationship to metaphor comprehension, at least for those of the more complex literary variety. The pattern of individual differences suggests that metaphor comprehension broadly depends on both crystalized and fluid intelligence, with the latter less important for relatively simple metaphors.

We report a study examining the role of linguistic context in modulating the influences of individual differences in fluid and crystalized intelligence on comprehension of literary metaphors. Three conditions were compared: no context, metaphor-congruent context, and literal-congruent context. Relative to the baseline no-context condition, the metaphor-congruent context facilitated comprehension of the metaphorical meaning whereas the literal-congruent context impaired it. Measures of fluid and crystalized intelligence both made separable contributions to predicting metaphor comprehension. The metaphor-congruent context selectively increased the contribution of crystalized verbal intelligence. These findings support the hypothesis that a supportive linguistic context encourages use of semantic integration in interpreting metaphors.

The nature of the mental processes involved in metaphor comprehension has been the focus of debate, with controversy focusing on the relative role of general analogical reasoning versus language-specific conceptual combination. In the present set of studies, we take an individual-differences approach to examine the comprehension of a variety of metaphors, some taken from literary sources, using several types of comprehension tests. In a series of metaphor-comprehension studies with college students, we measured both fluid intelligence (using the nonverbal Raven’s Progressive Matrices test) and crystalized verbal intelligence (using a new Semantic Similarities Test as well as the Vocabulary subscale of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale). Previous work has shown that measures of fluid intelligence are closely linked to individual differences in analogical reasoning, whereas measures of crystalized verbal intelligence are linked to language-specific abilities. We found that each measure had a dissociable predictive relationship to metaphor comprehension. The pattern of individual differences indicated that crystalized intelligence influences metaphor comprehension across a broad range of metaphor types, whereas individual differences in fluid intelligence mainly impact comprehension of more cognitively complex metaphors, such as those that arise in literary sources.

Multimodal characteristics of first-aid instructional materials have been extensively investigated in several previous studies (e.g., Van der Sluis, Vergeer, & Redeker, 2018; Van der Sluis et al., 2022; Wildfeuer et al., 2023). Starting from these studies, in our investigation, we narrow the focus to the portrayal of help givers in pictorial instructions, aiming to uncover the attributes associated with these representations across various formats and ways of depicting (for instance, as drawings or photographs, in colour or monochrome, simple or detailed, having different sets of characters, etc.). Drawing from a corpus of 40 selected images collected within the PAT project (see Van der Sluis & Redeker, 2019), participants evaluated these depictions using contrasting adjectival traits, presented in pairs, as outlined by Peabody (1987). Our empirical findings yield several relevant insights, indicating that favourable perceptions are often correlated with specific visual features, including colouration, perspective, and the portrayed gender of the depicted help giver. We believe that these results could have significant implications for the design of future first-aid instructional materials, advocating for more deliberate and effective representations, which could enrich learning experiences and user engagement in health education. This could, in turn, improve design-related decisions and allow them to communicate crucial health information more efficiently and optimize situation comprehension within health-educational frameworks.

This article (1) analyzes the computer game Braid with regard to the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor and the multimodal approach, (2) links the possibilities of such a study to the existing studies of temporality in video games, and (3) explores the link between the game’s narrative and its gameplay mechanics based on the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor. The theoretical section briefly overviews conceptual metaphor theory, the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor, multimodality, CMT in video games, time in video games, and several studies related to the game. The main section investigates Braid so as to evaluate the ways in which the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor operates within each of the game worlds and how this affects the narrative and the gameplay. The complex, unconventional relations existing among time, space, motion, and causality result in a unique coupling between the narrative and the use of the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor.

With the purpose of showing that video game studies should become part of the emerging discipline of multimodality, the present chapter introduces the basics of the study of gameworlds and uses the multimodal document approach to analyze document-like screens coming from two video games: Football Manager 2018 and Europa Universalis IV. These document-like screens are analyzed using the tools coming from the GeM model, which treats these pages as multi-layered semiotic artifacts. Within this approach, all four layers are covered: the base layer, the layout layer, the rhetorical layer, and the navigation layer. Our analysis proposal tries to pinpoint the semiotic specificities of the different layers and test whether the GeM model needs to be adapted for the purpose of approaching these screens. At the same time, the gameworld environment is viewed as an important mediator between the player and the digital game system. We hope that such integrated approach can be beneficial to both multimodality and video game studies and expand the directions of future research endeavors.

The paper is aimed at proving the hypothesis that multimodal construction in video games can follow specific discursive aims in the process of persuading game players. In order to prove this, we have performed a multifaceted analysis which elaborated the ways in which different modalities in a representative video game combine so as to convince the player to act, play, and perhaps think accordingly. The multimodal approach employed in the paper combines the notion of discourse aims and the rhetorical and argumentative structure of Metal Gear Solid (Kojima, 1998), and analyses different narrative strategies and verbal cues, as well as the overall interface, control, and gameplay. The results suggest that verbal and textual cues combine with audio-visual elements and highly specific gameplay strategies in order to refrain the player from killing enemies. This might indicate that video games are likely to possess a great persuasive power, as they are both multimodal and highly interactive.

The paper is an attempt to offer a reading of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire in light of literary onomastics with a special emphasis on characters’ names and naming. The theoretical framework is based on various subdisciplines of onomastics, its chronology and, especially, the development of literary onomastics and its insights. As this is a rather novel academic area of interest, this is an attempt of integrating this framework of analysis into the reading of a well-known novel. The paper analyzes the names of four major characters in the novel and their mythological, semiotic, symbolical and ironic components and possible interpretations. One of the key hypotheses is that the meanings of both the novel and individual characters and their names is construed in the interaction of various symbolical meanings and implications, i.e., through an interplay of poetic truth and fiction. It can be concluded that Nabokov’s major strength as a writer lies in his use of meanings and symbolism of names which make the structure of the novel as complex as a relationship between truth and fiction both in the world of the novel and its various interpretations and in the material world around us.

Metaphor research approaches exhibit a certain degree of inconsistency, as they involve different techniques, tasks, instruments, and stimuli. The aim of the present study is to establish a normed corpus of metaphors in Serbian that could be of use to researchers in the future psycholinguistic endeavours. A total of 55 literary and 55 nonliterary metaphors in the A is B form were normed with regards to their features, and these include metaphoricity, quality/goodness, aptness, familiarity, comprehensibility, source-target similarity and number of interpretations. Along with establishing the normed corpus, the analyses have shown that each dimension scale was reliable, and that the correlations among the dimensions were significant. 

Using poetic metaphors in the Serbian language, we identified systematic variations in the impact of fluid and crystalized intelligence on comprehension of metaphors that varied in rated aptness and familiarity. Overall, comprehension scores were higher for metaphors that were high rather than low in aptness, and high rather than low in familiarity. A measure of crystalized intelligence was a robust predictor of comprehension across the full range of metaphors, but especially for those that were either relatively unfamiliar or more apt. In contrast, individual differences associated with fluid intelligence were clearly found only for metaphors that were low in aptness. Superior verbal knowledge appears to be particularly important when trying to find meaning in novel metaphorical expressions, and also when exploring the rich interpretive potential of apt metaphors. The broad role of crystalized intelligence in metaphor comprehension is consistent with the view that metaphors are largely understood using semantic integration processes continuous with those that operate in understanding literal language.

The main goal of the present paper is to explore the possibilities of applying the tenets of discourse analysis to the medium of comics, starting from the main findings of the two existing analyses of comics discourse. The first of them is Eric Stainbrook’s (2003) doctoral dissertation, Reading Comics: A Theoretical Analysis of Textuality and Discourse in the Comics Medium, which is based on Kinneavy’s (1971) approach to discourse analysis. Stainbrook attempts to use discourse analysis for the purpose of tackling several issues: (1) the relation between the textual and the visual strand in comics, (2) the modes of discourse as applied to comics (e.g. narration, description, classification, evaluation, etc.) and, finally, (3) the aims of discourse which can be achieved through the medium of comics. Our study provides authentic material from various comics to support Stainbrook’s approach to these three aspects of discourse. On the other hand, Mario Saraceni, in his doctoral dissertation titled Language Beyond Language: Comics as Verbo-Visual Texts, deals with discourse analysis from another perspective and tries to establish an approach which would address issues such as cohesion in verbal texts and in wordless comics, their semiotic relatedness, the relation between the writer and the reader, narratology, as well as potential pedagogical applications related to the analysis of comics. By providing appropriate illustrations, the paper reveals various facets of communicating messages via comics and supports the idea that discourse analysis can be applied to visual languages in almost the same way it is applied to other language modalities. Besides this, its very application to the medium of comics seems to be something discourse analysis can benefit from.

The main goal of this paper is to check whether Prototype Theory can be applied to the analysis of the English verbs of motion. More precisely, the paper attempts to apply various elements of S.G. Pulman’s (1983) model of prototype effect testing to a semantic analysis of the English motion verbs (as defined and selected in Miller 1972 and Levin 1993). The methods of analysis include prototypicality rating tests previously used by psychologists (Rosch 1975a, b, Rosch and Lloyd 1978, inter alia), frequency tests and corpus data analysis. The results show that a semantic analysis of verbs based on Prototype Theory is possible, though it has certain constraints. On the whole, there is a steady semantic pattern related to the obtained category structure of motion verbs: the more generic verbs seem to be closer to the centre and, as we move towards the periphery, the verbs tend to be more specific.

Starting from the basic tenets of comics studies (Eisner 1985/2008; McCloud 1993/2004) and the research into the relations between time and space (Clark 1973; Alverson 1994; Casasanto & Boroditsky 2008; Oliveri, Koch & Caltagirone 2009), the paper presents the manners in which various elements of the passage of time are expressed in the domain of comics, a typically static graphic medium. Within comics, time and space are necessarily directly connected, thus it is only possible to represent time using the dimension of space. The methods employed by the comics authors in the attempt to express the temporal dimension are diverse, which can be seen in the fact that the time distance between two panels can range from a millisecond to a million years, as well as in possibility of varying the amount of time found within a single panel. Drawing on certain significant recent studies which deal, among other things, with the issue of time in comics (Groensteen 2007, 2013; Saraceni 2003), the paper further discusses the subjective aspect of interpreting the flow of time, along with the specific rhythm which characterizes the graphic narration. The different types in which time is represented in comics are illustrated in the paper with appropriate examples from contemporary comics.

The aim of our paper is to present the ways in which cognitive linguistics has contributed to various developments in the domain of comics studies. After providing introductory remarks, the paper describes the main views found within the works of authors considered to be the precursors of contemporary comics studies, Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, with the intention of providing the basics that will facilitate the reader’s understanding of the present issues. The main section of the paper contains the basic tenets of cognitive semantics, including the ideas traced in the works of the authors who have observed various types of comics from the cognitivist viewpoint. This section of the paper presents the research conducted thus far by a number of scientists who have engaged in drawing parallels between cognitivist theories and comics studies, including work on visual and multimodal metaphor and metonymy and the visual language of comics. This is followed by concluding remarks that end the paper.

Drawing on the classifications of Anglicisms given in the book English in Serbian [Engleski u srpskom] (Prćić 2019), this study examines the perception of the justification of using these language features with or without context. By means of two questionnaires (one in which Anglicisms are given in a specific context and the other in which there is no context at all) and two populations (English students and engineering management students), the paper attempts to provide an answer to the question concerning whether context can somehow influence the justification of using this group of loanwords compared to what is given as the assessment of such justification of use in the referenced literature. The study aims to examine the influence of context in judging the justification of using various types of Anglicisms, as well as to determine whether there are any differences between the two populations regarding this task. The results show that context diminishes the justification of using Anglicisms, but only for certain word groups, especially in the population of future English language specialists. The other conclusions worth mentioning are a greater general capacity of English students to recognize this justification of use, as well as different empirical factors that further substantiate the classifications found in the literature.

In "Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels" (2006), Scott McCloud proposes that the use of specific drawing techniques will enable viewers to reliably deduce different degrees of intensity of the six basic emotions from facial expressions in comics. Furthermore, he suggests that an accomplished comics artist can combine the components of facial expressions conveying the basic emotions to produce complex expressions, many of which are supposedly distinct and recognizable enough to be named. This article presents an empirical investigation and assessment of the validity of these claims, based on the results obtained from three questionnaires. Each of the questionnaires deals with one of the aspects of McCloud’s proposal: face expression intensity, labelling and compositionality. The data show that the tasks at hand were much more difficult than would have been expected on the basis of McCloud’s proposal, with the intensity matching task being the most successful of the three.

The paper aims to investigate whether prototypicality effects (e.g., Rosch 1973a, b; Lakoff 1987) correlate with selecting Serbian translation equivalents of English motion verbs in cases in which we have no context determined (one-word translation). By applying three empirical stages, we have generated a potential prototypicality list for English motion verbs. We have then tested 60 translators in another procedure, so as to check whether there were statistically valid links between a verb’s typicality and the choice of a translation equivalent. The results indicate that a higher degree of prototypicality positively correlates with a more consistent choice of a translation equivalent. At the same time, there is a negative correlation between the determined prototypicality and the diversity of translation equivalents offered for the verb in question. These results may reveal certain psychological aspects of translation, while simultaneously corroborating the tenets of prototype theory.

The main aim of the paper is to show some of the difficulties in translating highly polysemous words, using the example of the English verb to run and its translation into Serbian. The given theoretical framework includes different studies which focus on the importance of context and the problems which emerge from polysemy in the process of translation, as well as on different peculiarities related to the verb to run itself. The paper then provides an overview of the verb’s dictionary meanings collected from relevant dictionaries of English. This is followed by an overview of the parallel translation corpus compiled from two novels in English and their versions translated into Serbian. In the main part of the paper, the authors provide a detailed corpus analysis which gives us an insight into complexities which translators face in translating polysemous words, whereas the paper’s final section contains the discussion and conclusions, which relate this study to some previous studies.