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Review of Cognitive Linguistics: Online-First ArticlesMetaphor as a key tool in personal development discourse
An extended conceptual metaphor theory approach to the study of Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The new psychology of success
In recent years, personal development has driven increasing interest, and the study of metaphor has expanded to
various discourse types. This study aims to explore the metaphors in personal development discourse and determine their
schematicity hierarchies, using Carol Dweck’s (2016) book Mindset: The New
Psychology of Success as a case study. Metaphor Identification Procedure VU (Steen et al., 2010) is used to identify metaphors in the book and Zoltan
Kövecses’s (2020) Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory is used to establish the relationship between the metaphors
identified and primary metaphors. The findings show that topics such as mindset, growth mindset, fixed mindset, success, and
failure instantiate correlation and resemblance metaphors. In addition, all the correlation-based metaphors identified in the
corpus possess full schematic hierarchies. It entails that they all consist of image schema, domain, frame and mental space
levels. Moreover, the findings reveal that in different metaphorical expressions, the same image schema-level metaphor is likely
to activate different domain, frame and mental space-level metaphors. Finally, some image schema-level metaphors share the same
domain-level metaphor in different schematicity hierarchies, whereas others activate different domain-level metaphors in different
schematicity hierarchies.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor, Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory, personal development discourse, schematicity hierarchy, mindset
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Metaphors in psychological discourse
- 1.2Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (ECMT)
- 2.Methods
- 3.Findings
- Mindset metaphors
- Growth-mindset metaphors
- Fixed-mindset metaphors
- Success metaphors
- Failure metaphor
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
-
References
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