The culture-induced creativity of metaphors. A comparative corpus-based study

Abstract

Conceptual metaphors vary along two major dimensions: intercultural (cross-cultural) and intracultural (within-culture). Taking John Henry Newman’s (1801-1890) vision of university education, formulated almost two centuries ago in his The Idea of a University (1858), the paper aims at establishing which of Newman’s metaphors conceptualizing university are still “valid” today to refer to contemporary university education. Besides the time divergence, the research checks whether the same metaphors occur in completely two different countries, namely in Newman’s Ireland and in contemporary Poland. The results obtained in the Corpus-based study indicate that some of Newman’s metaphors seem to be valid in a different culture-specific context, in Poland.