Metaphors and Similes: the construction of argumentation in the top-tier essays of the Fuvest 2013
Keywords:
argumentation, argumentative essay, metaphor, cognitive linguisticsAbstract
In Brazil, among the admission tests of access to the higher ranking public Universities there is an argumentative essay, whose grade has had more and more value on the sum of the candidate’s fi nal grade. The corpus of this article is composed of texts available on FUVEST’s website as examples of the best essays of the admission test for the undergraduate courses at USP (Universidade de São Paulo) in the year of 2013. The majority of these texts contain metaphors and similes. Based on the theories of Conceptual Metaphor and Image Schema, we intend to analyze the texts according to what has been proposed by Cognitive Linguistics and to understand how these uses contributed to the texts being evaluated as top-tier, i.e., to recognize the role of metaphors and similes in the best essays of this renown admission test.
Downloads
References
ABREU, A. S. Linguística Cognitiva: uma visão geral e aplicada. São Paulo: Ateliê, 2010.
EVANS, V.; GREEN, M. Cognitive Linguistics: an introduction. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers London, 2006.
FAUCONNIER, G.; TURNER, M. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
GIBBS Jr., R. W.; STEEN, G. J. Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1999.
GRADY, J. Foundations of meaning: primary metaphors and primary scenes. Tese (Doutorado em Linguística) – University of California, Berkeley, 1997.
HOFSTADTER, D.; SANDER, E. Surfaces and essences. Analogy as fuel and fi re of thinking. New York: Basic Books, 2013.
KOCH, I. G. V. Ler e compreender: os sentidos do texto. Ingedore Villaça Koch e Vanda Maria Elias. São Paulo: Contexto, 2006.
KÖVECSES, Z. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
JOHNSON, M. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
LAKOFF, G.; JOHNSON, M. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.
LAKOFF, G.; JOHNSON, M. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
TURNER, M. The literary mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
TURNER, M. Conceptual integration. In: GEERAERTS, D.; CUYCKENS, H. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
TURNER, M. The origin of ideas: blending, creativity and the human spark, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
WILSON, R.A.; KEIL, F. C. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. MIT Press: Massachusetts, 1999.
