《weather-as-source-for-expression》.pdf

Avant. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard Volume II, Number 1/2011 .pl Weather as the source domain for metaphorical expressions Izabela Żołnowska The statement of the thesis The aim of the study is to demonstrate the pervasiveness of concepts related to WEATHER that indicate the presence or absence of problems in human mind. The linguistic material that is the subject of the analysis is the language used in everyday communication. An additional claim is that the directionality of metaphorical transfer is uniform and proceeds from concrete to abstract concepts. Furthermore, I will try to show that talking about the presence or absence of problems in terms related to WEATHER is systematic and forms a coherent network of metaphorical expressions whose structuring is partial. The final claim I would like to make is that the expres - sions that reflect the concept have a common experiential basis, and it is only be- cause of its presence that the metaphor can be comprehended. The Methodology of Research The main source that was used throughout the study is the British National Corpus (BNC). While studying the examples found on the corpus website, I realised that it is very common to talk about the presence or absence of problems in terms of WEATH- ER. I have noticed that different parts of speech connected with WEATHER are used to construct metaphorical expressions which indicate the presence or absence of problems. In this group are adjectives, for instance cloudy, rainy, foggy, sunny, etc., nouns like fog, rain, sunshine, sun, cloud, and verbs, for example thunder, rain, etc. Having found numerous examples, I divided them into two groups, one describing good weather and the other describing bad weather, in order to prove that there is a certain systematicity in talking about problems