Metaphor and Metonymy: A Diachronic Approach

The way in which we understand the concept of intelligence is rooted in metaphor and metonymy; for example, it is common to describe people as ‘bright’ or ‘thick’. This book explores the motivation for some of the lexemes in this semantic field across the history of the English language, considering the range of cognitive mechanisms and cultural factors that can inform metaphorical and metonymical mappings.