The aim of the paper is to analyze instances of vegetalization, which is the X IS A PLANT metaphor, in John Henry Newman’s collection of sermons, published as Sermons on Subjects of the Day (1843). One group of metaphors are ontological metaphors, whose source domain is an entity (Lakoff, Johnson 2003[1980]). They can be classified as reifications, vegetalizations, animalizations, personifications, and deifications, which corresponds to the hierarchy of the so-called Great Chain of Being. As claimed by Krzeszowski (1997), these metaphors play an important role in expressing the axiological dimension of language, since they can express specific values of their target domains. In Christian discourse, vegetalizations contribute to the conceptualization of such notions from the religious sphere as God, grace, the Kingdom of God, the Christian life, the Church, or evil.

According to the Bible, a disrespectful use of God’s name may be perceived as blasphemous or at least profane. In order to avoid the risk of violating that religious and linguistic taboo, sensitive language users representing the Judeo-Christian world have developed various euphemistic ways of referring to God. On the other hand, however, jokes that include God’s name and laugh at him are not uncommon in Western culture. Assuming a linguistic-semantic perspective, the present paper examines a group of “God jokes”, which are jokes that contain God’s name and were tagged with the word god in the collection entitled “The best god jokes”, published on the website unijokes.com. The aim of the study is to identify the place and role of God’s name in the semantic script of “God jokes”, or in other words, to check “how much” God there really is in the text of jokes that are supposed to laugh at God, potentially violating the religious taboo. Following the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Raskin and Attardo 1991; Attardo 2001), the use of God’s name is analyzed in the knowledge resources of the semantic script of a joke: the target, the script opposition, the situation, the narration, and the language.

The present article aims at identifying four types of metonymic mappings: formal, referential, propositional and illocutionary, as described by Bierwiaczonek (2013), in English X-phemisms. The use of X-phemisms in language is strictly connected with the rules of politeness functioning in communication. X-phemisms encompass euphemisms and orthophemisms that are used by language users to avoid dispreferred tabooed words, as well as dysphemisms which assume a deliberate use of a tabooed expression in order to offend, show disapproval or express negative feelings. Although linguists have listed a number of various mechanisms used in the creation of X-phemisms, often including metonymy as one of the rhetorical tools, it will be claimed that metonymy, understood as a conceptual process, may be also identifi ed in other linguistic means applied by English speakers to X-phemism creation.

The aim of the paper is to compare and contrast the metonymic mappings which motivate the construction of meaning behind denominal verbs in English and Polish. The word-formation processes that create denominal verbs involve affixation, conversion and back-formation in English and paradigmatic derivation in Polish. The conceptual metonymies underlying the meaning of denominal verbs are treated as instances of the EVENT-schema metonymies in which concepts that belong to a particular EVENT schema are used to access other concepts within the same EVENT schema. The analysis has shown that the same set of metonymies can motivate meanings of denominal verbs in various ways, giving rise to different kinds of verbs that express the same meaning in English and Polish.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the metaphorical and metonymical conceptual representations of God in The New Testament. The notion of God causes various problems since God is understood as One in Three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The idea of the Holy Trinity escapes human logic and natural reasoning. The metaphors and metonymies used for the conceiving of God in The New Testament form a complex system of schemata, mediating between the indescribable reality and language. Because of the transcendent nature of God, classifying some of the schemata as metaphor or metonymy is problematic.

The present paper aims at analyzing the conceptual metaphors for sin identifi ed in the English version of the Bible. The experience of moral evil belongs to basic human experiences and in theological interpretation, its existence is the reason for the salvation brought to people by Christ. However, from the semantic point of view, the concept of sin itself is highly abstract and diffi cult to defi ne. In order to conceptualize that notion, people frequently employ conceptual metaphors which enable them to refer to the abstract through the use of the concrete. This study is based on the English translation of Scripture published as the New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (2007[1989]). That version of Scripture is a revised edition of the famous King James Bible (1611) and it is widely used among Christians representing various denominations. The identifi ed sin metaphors are based on either sensorimotor or cultural experience. There are conceptualizations of sin that are motivated by preconceptual image schemas, ontological metaphors, and metaphors that combine cultural scripts and image schemas.

The present paper compares the statistical data concerning the use of conceptual metaphors for death and dying in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego (NKJP). Since death belongs to taboo topics, people often resort to euphemisms in order to cope with this diffi cult issue. Among linguistic devices used to create death euphemisms a special role is played by metaphor. Linguists interested in the language of death and dying provide lists of metaphors used by English and Polish speakers to conceptualize death, compiled on the basis of dictionaries, literature, press obituaries, headstone inscriptions, and even a TV series. In line with Kövecses’s observations (2005) that patterns of metaphorical conceptualization are not completely universal among cultures and languages, it is assumed that the metaphors for death and dying also differ between American Polish and English. The analysis of lexical correlates of death metaphors in the two language corpora allows us to identify the most common and the least common metaphors in both languages.