The magical realism of metaphor: cross-cultural comparisons in use of metaphor in cognition

Three experiments explore the hypothesis that due to linguistic and cultural factors, metaphor usage – or thinking in terms of what something is like – differs across cultures. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task supported the hypothesis that perception of what something is like tends to be faster and more automatic in Latino participants than in Anglo participants. In Experiment 2, Anglo participants were less able to solve a problem framed metaphorically than Latino participants were. To ensure that a preference for metaphor is not applicable to all bilingual populations, we included bilingual Asian participants in Experiment 3. In this study, Latino participants rated arguments presented with metaphors as more persuasive than arguments that did not have metaphors, while the opposite pattern was found in Anglo and Asian participants. The findings from these three studies provide support for the hypothesis that the Latino preference for metaphor is real and pervasive. Implications in the domains of education and public health interventions are briefly noted.

The effect of borders on the linguistic production and perception of regional identity in Louisville, Kentucky

A great deal of scholarly research has addressed the issue of dialect mapping in the United States. These studies, usually based on phonetic or lexical items, aim to present an overall picture of the dialect landscape. But what is often missing in these types of projects is an attention to the borders of a dialect region and to what kinds of identity alignments can be found in such areas. This lack of attention to regional and dialect border identities is surprising, given the salience of such borders for many Americans. This salience is also ignored among dialectologists, as nonlinguists‟ perceptions and attitudes have been generally assumed to be secondary to the analysis of “real” data, such as the phonetic and lexical variables used in traditional dialectology. Louisville, Kentucky is considered as a case study for examining how dialect and regional borders in the United States impact speakers‟ linguistic acts of identity, especially the production and perception of such identities. According to Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), Louisville is one of the northernmost cities to be classified as part of the South. Its location on the Ohio River, on the political and geographic border between Kentucky and Indiana, places Louisville on the isogloss between Southern and Midland dialects. Through an examination of language attitude surveys, mental maps, focus group interviews, and production data, I show that identity alignments in borderlands are neither simple nor straightforward. Identity at the border is fluid, complex, and dynamic; speakers constantly negotiate and contest their identities. The analysis shows the ways in which Louisvillians shift between Southern and non-Southern identities, in the active and agentive expression of their amplified awareness of belonging brought about by their position on the border.