In our daily life, we often use temperature terms to convey not only literal meanings which show physical temperature but also figurative meanings as an important way of communication. Among the temperature terms, this paper focuses on ‘cool’ and aims to investigate its usage and meanings in depth through a corpus of American newspapers. First, ‘cool’ is dealt with statistically in terms of grammatical functions and semantic aspects as a quantitative analysis. Second, this paper analyzes the meanings of ‘cool’ found in the corpus of newspapers and explores how its literal meanings are metaphorically extended in detail as a qualitative analysis. In this way, this study explains that the meanings of ‘cool’ are derived from our conceptualization and this conceptualization is primarily based on human physical and cultural experience.

A color conveys a lot of meanings through language in our daily life. Such connotation of the color term arises from meaning extension of it, and the meaning extension of it is realized through our cognitive process. For this reason, this paper aims to analyze the connotation of the color term ‘red’ in various contexts and figure out the cognitive process of its meaning extension by elaborating how our cognitive mechanisms are combined and work in depth. In addition, this paper provides the characteristics of the meaning extension of the color term ‘red’ and verifies that it is not arbitrary but motivated by primarily human physical experience, along with social and cultural experience.

This paper introduces structural metaphor which is a type of conceptual metaphor and proposes another type of conceptual metaphor corresponding to the structural metaphor. It is called reverse structural metaphor since it has externally the same structure as structural metaphor but the property of the target and source domain is reversed. The purpose of this paper is to study and compare these two types of metaphor – structural metaphor and reverse structural metaphor - with specific metaphorical linguistic expressions found in political speeches based on conceptual metaphor theory. Especially, this paper shows that the metaphorical linguistic expressions which have not been explained by the existing structural metaphor and therefore ignored are settled by virtue of reverse structural metaphor. In the process, the characteristics of the reverse structural metaphor to be dealt with as an independent type of conceptual metaphor will be provided.