metaphor wars The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Yet metaphors may not only be special communicative devices, but a fundamental part of everyday cognition in the form of “conceptual metaphors.” An enormous body of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics and related disciplines has emerged detailing how conceptual metaphors underlie significant aspects of language, thought, cultural, and expressive action. Despite its influence and popularity, there have been major criticisms of conceptual metaphor. This book offers an evaluation of the arguments and empirical evidence for and against conceptual metaphors, much of which scholars on both sides of the wars fail to properly acknowledge. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests focus on embodied cognition, pragmatics, and figurative language. He is the author of several books, including The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding, Intentions in the Experience of Meaning, Embodiment and Cognitive Science, and with Herbert Colston, Interpreting Figurative Meaning. He is also editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, and editor of the journal Metaphor and Symbol.
Metaphor Wars conceptual metaphors in human life
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. University of California
University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107071148 doi: 10.1017/9781107762350 © Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Gibbs, Jr., Raymond W., author. title: Metaphor wars : conceptual metaphors in human life / Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2016035535 | isbn 9781107071148 (Hardback) subjects: LCSH: Metaphor. | Concepts. | Thought and thinking. | Communication. | Cognitive grammar. classification: lcc p301.5.m48 g53 2017 | ddc 808/.032–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035535 isbn 978-1-107-07114-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
I dedicate this book to my dear friends and colleagues in the former research collective known as the “Pragglejaz Group.” The members of “Pragglejaz” included the following: Peter Crisp Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. Alice Deignan Graham Low Gerard Steen Lynne Cameron Elena Semino Joe Grady Alan Cienki Zoltán Kövecses Pragglejaz met each year for a decade to discuss our mutual interests in metaphor. We created “MIP,” a “metaphor identification procedure,” which provides a reliable method for determining the metaphorically used words in discourse.1 The other members of this group are brilliant, passionate scholars whose research and writings have had a profound influence within the multidisciplinary world of metaphor studies. My times with Pragglejaz were some of the most intellectually and socially stimulating moments in my entire life. I am incredibly grateful to all these people for their support, arguments, and friendship as we explored the complexities, and celebrated the beauties, of metaphor in human life. I adore each of my Pragglejaz colleagues and view them as ideal examples of why some of the very best people on earth study metaphor.
Contents
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page ix List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
1 What Are Metaphor Wars? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 Conceptual Metaphor Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 3 Identifying Metaphors in Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4 Inferring Conceptual Metaphors from Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 5 Psychology of Conceptual Metaphors in Verbal Metaphor Use . . . . 168 6 Conceptual Metaphors in Multimodal Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 7 Conclusion and the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
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Figures
5.1 Sequential activation of conceptual metaphors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 219 5.2 Interacting subsystem of constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
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2.1 Ontological Correspondences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 25 2.2 Epistemic Correspondences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 2.3 Complex Systems Are Buildings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
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1 What Are Metaphor Wars?
Lovers of language adore metaphor. There is nothing more thrilling for metaphor enthusiasts than to stumble across a phrase or passage that beautifully and concisely captures a metaphoric understanding of some idea or event. Classic metaphors, such as William Shakespeare’s “Juliet is the sun,” or Robert Burns’s “My love is like a red, red rose,” express sentiments about people and experiences that are almost impossible to state using language other than metaphor. Both metaphors assert something new about their topics (i.e., “Juliet” and “My love”) in terms of concepts from very different aspects of life (i.e., “the sun” and “a red, red rose”). We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Many metaphors have special linguistic, aesthetic, and possibly cognitive, functions deserving our close attention and persistent admiration. Metaphor scholars are often fanatical in their pursuit of metaphoricity in language and life. They closely study language and other human actions/ artifacts for clues on people’s metaphoric conceptions about their lives and experiences of the world around them. Consider one example of metaphor in action by reading a brief narrative that was delivered by Chris Matthews on his American TV political discussion program “Hardball” (Sept 28, 2012).1 Matthews was commenting on the upcoming TV debate between President Barack Obama and his opponent, Mitt Romney, in the 2012 Presidential contest. Read the passage and note instances where words and phrases possibly convey metaphorical meanings. Let me finish tonight with next week’s first debate in Denver. I’ll be out there to watch the two of them go at it. I have no real idea what to expect. I think Romney will take some hard shots; he may spend 1
2
What Are Metaphor Wars? the whole 90 minutes blasting away at the President, serving him with one indictment after another, hoping that something will stick. I think Obama will play with him, parry the assaults, block the blows, try to keep his head clear so he can avoid getting hurt. I think it will start slow with both men trying to be cautious, neither able to land a punch, not hard enough to register with the tens of millions watching. Then it will happen: Romney will deliver what is clearly a pre-rehearsed moment, a sound byte. It will be something about Obama not delivering on a promise, something about the economy he said he’d do but hasn’t. He will expect the President to defend himself. When he does, pointing to what he inherited from Bush, Romney will pounce. He’ll say that Obama’s not running against Bush. This will be the Romney strategy: get Obama to pass the buck on the tough economic recovery and then land his Sunday punch. I suppose President Obama knows this is all coming and is preparing to deal with it. The good news is this: a month ago, all his rival had to do was say that Obama’s done his best – he got his stimulus, got his healthcare program . . . and here we are. I think that might have nailed it – a month ago. Something’s changed. It could have been something as definite as Bill Clinton’s speech but people don’t feel stuck like they did, don’t think all we need is some other president – and that’s Romney’s problem, and it’s a big one.
Matthews’s commentary depicted the upcoming Presidential debate as a sporting event or, more specifically, a boxing match. Many words and phrases give evidence of the POLITICAL DEBATES ARE BOXING MATCHES metaphor, including “Romney will take some hard shots,” and will be “blasting away at the President,” but Romney will “expect the President to defend himself,” and that “Obama will play with him, parry the assaults, block the blows, try to keep his head clear so he can avoid getting hurt,” even if both men may not be “able to land a punch,” although eventually Romney “will pounce” and be able to “land his Sunday punch.” Why did Matthews design his commentary about the Presidential debate around the metaphoric concept of POLITICAL DEBATES ARE BOXING MATCHES? A traditional assumption is that people use metaphor for specific rhetorical purposes, namely to express ideas that are difficult to convey using literal language, to state something in a compact
What Are Metaphor Wars?
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manner, to memorably capture the vividness of our phenomenological experience, and, at times, to be polite.2 Matthews’s commentary appears to be motivated by several of these communicative goals. His choice of boxing metaphors conveys vivid, memorable images of the forthcoming Presidential debate that would be challenging to describe using nonmetaphoric discourse. But what if metaphors were not just special rhetorical devices? What if metaphors were fundamental tools that structure how people ordinarily think about abstract ideas and events? One possibility is that people’s understanding of many aspects of everyday reality is constituted by enduring metaphorical schemes of thought. Metaphor does not signify an unworldly transcendence from ordinary language, thought, or reality. Instead, what is most clichéd and conventional about reality are those aspects of experience that are primarily constituted by metaphorical thought!3 The proposal that metaphor is as much a part of ordinary thought as it is a special feature of language has been voiced by a few rhetoricians, philosophers, and others for hundreds of years. Yet this “metaphor in thought” thesis gained its greatest attention from the 1980s on with the rise of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) within the field of cognitive linguistics, most notably starting with the publication in 1980 of the widely read book Metaphors We Live By, co-authored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Unlike earlier scholars who speculated on the metaphorical basis of thought, Lakoff and Johnson provided systematic linguistic evidence to support the claim that there are metaphors in mind or “conceptual metaphors.” Although some linguistic metaphors clearly present novel conceptualizations of different objects and ideas (e.g., “My love is like a red, red rose”), many conventional linguistic statements reflect the existence of enduring conceptual metaphors. For example, consider the following list of verbal expressions, originally discussed in Metaphors We Live By: “Your claims are indefensible.” “He attacked every weak point in my argument.” “His criticisms were right on target.” “I demolished his argument.” “I’ve never won an argument with him.” “You disagree? Okay, shoot!” “If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.” “He shot down all my arguments.”
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What Are Metaphor Wars?
Each of these linguistic statements gives concrete realization to different aspects of the metaphoric concept in which we conceive of arguments as wars. The ARGUMENTS ARE WARS conceptual metaphor has as its primary function the cognitive role of understanding one concept (arguments) in terms of a different, often more familiar, concept (wars). Conceptual metaphors arise whenever we try to understand difficult, complex, abstract, or less delineated concepts, such as arguments, in terms of familiar ideas, such as wars. As Lakoff and Johnson wrote, “It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his decisions and defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies . . . Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war.”4 Chris Matthews’s commentary reflected a more specific instantiation of the ARGUMENTS ARE WARS conceptual metaphor by suggesting how political arguments may be a particular kind of competition, namely a boxing match. Lakoff and Johnson forged a new path for the “metaphor in thought” thesis by providing extensive, systematic linguistic evidence showing that metaphors were both ubiquitous in language and had a major role in the creation and continued structuring of abstract concepts. Since 1980, an enormous body of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics, and related disciplines, has emerged detailing how conceptual metaphors underlie significant aspects of language, and are evident in many nonlinguistic facets of life, including categorization and social judgments, bodily gestures, mathematics, music, art, dance, and material culture. The range of fields that have conducted conceptual metaphor analyses is large and diverse, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, computer science/AI, anthropology, education, neuroscience, communications, literature/literary studies, political science, mathematics, business/organizational studies/marketing, sociology, economics, law/legal studies, classics, architecture, nursing science, geography, history, theater arts, music, art/art history, dance, biology, physics, chemistry, religious studies, film and media studies, and Egyptology. Conceptual metaphor analyses have uncovered root systems of metaphors underlying theory and research in each of these academic fields, and have proven to be an invaluable tool for scholars with applied interests in first- and second-language learning, pedagogical practices, cross-cultural communication, advertising and marketing, doctor–patient interactions, psychotherapy, translation studies, and politics, to name just a few topics.
The Broader Impact of Conceptual Metaphor Theory
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In many people’s view, CMT is the most dominant theory within the large, diverse multidisciplinary world of metaphor research. The literary theorist and critic Wayne Booth wrote back in 1978, somewhat tongue in cheek, that the increasing interest in metaphor, even back at that time, suggests that by the year 2039, there will be more students of metaphor than people.5 Although it is unclear if Booth’s prophecy will come true, CMT is primarily responsible for the incredible popularity of metaphor within many academic fields and among certain lay audiences. A visit to any large metaphor conference, such as Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM), or a closer look at the pages of scholarly journals, such as Metaphor and Symbol, Metaphor and the Social World, Metaphorik.de, and Cognitive Linguistics will find most scholars working within the general framework of CMT, even if some people also have criticisms of the theory. Skeptics of CMT, including those who reject most of its assumptions and conclusions, still often acknowledge the tremendous influence that the “metaphor in thought” thesis has had on metaphor scholarship, as well as in larger debates about the nature of mind, meaning, and embodiment.
the broader impact of conceptual metaphor theory Empirical research on conceptual metaphors has had major impact on four broad concerns in the humanities and cognitive sciences. First, CMT has been a significant part of cognitive linguistics’ program to offer a new way of thinking about linguistic structure and behavior. Abandoning the traditional generative approach to linguistics, one that embraces the autonomy of language from mind, cognitive linguistics explicitly seeks out connections between language and cognition, and more deeply, language and experiential action. This new vision of linguistics stresses the importance of incorporating empirical findings from a wide variety of cognitive and biological disciplines to create a theoretical description of language. CMT has been specifically important in uncovering the detailed contents of linguistic meaning and the relevance of embodied experience in structuring abstract concepts and symbols. Consequently, CMT provides a major alternative to classic modular views of language that see thought and language as separate architectural systems of the mind, with the body and mind occupying different realms of human experience. CMT shows how the study of metaphor offers insights into the overall unity of human conceptual structures, bodily experience, and the communicative, even aesthetic, functions of language.
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What Are Metaphor Wars?
Second, CMT offers a theoretical framework, and certain empirical evidence, for understanding the pervasiveness of metaphorical language and thought across a wide range of cognitive domains and cultural/linguistic environments. The traditional view of metaphors asserts that these figures express only temporary, “one-shot,” construals of objects and ideas, as in “My lawyer is a shark,” which do not necessarily impact the fundamental, literal contents of human thought and language. Under this perspective, metaphors may be extraordinarily useful in momentarily thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in a vivid manner, although human knowledge is primarily constituted in disembodied, literal terms. Yet CMT demonstrates that metaphor is neither a rare, linguistic phenomenon nor merely a pragmatic aspect of language use. Instead, work originating within cognitive linguistics, and extending to many other fields, has revealed how metaphor should, at the very least, be recognized as a fundamental scheme of thought serving many cognitive, communicative, and cultural/ ideological functions. Third, the claim that significant parts of abstract thinking are partly motivated by metaphorical mappings between diverse knowledge domains has altered our scholarly conception of the relationship between thought and language. Prior to Lakoff and Johnson’s first book, most discussions of language and thought dependencies were narrowly focused on questions related to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, particularly within the domain of color. Research in the cognitive sciences during the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated an increasing interest in semantic memory, and showed how conceptual knowledge was both necessary for language understanding and could be analyzed in various representational formats. But this work gave primary emphasis to the architecture of conceptual knowledge (e.g., the organization of semantic memory), and far less to the actual contents of what people know. Most notably, there were few attempts to explicitly model highly abstract knowledge domains (e.g., politics, scientific knowledge, ideas about the self, emotion concepts). CMT provides one way of thinking about how abstract concepts were established and influenced different domains of human thought, as well as ordinary language use and understanding. Finally, CMT has been a leading force in what some refer to as the “second revolution” in cognitive science, namely the interest in the study of embodied cognition.6 Cognitive linguistic analyses of language and gesture and psycholinguistics research, in particular, have played a prominent role in showing the significant degree to which metaphorical concepts are rooted within recurring patterns of bodily activity that serve as
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source domains for people’s metaphorical understandings of many abstract concepts. The great irony here is that metaphor, rather than emerging from rare, transcendent imaginative thought, provides evidence on the embodied foundation of abstract thinking and action. CMT significantly advances our understanding of the dynamic links between bodily experiences, and ubiquitous thought patterns about abstract topics, linguistic structure and behavior, and culture.
attacking conceptual metaphor theory Despite its influence and popularity, there have been major criticisms of CMT beginning with the publication of Metaphors We Live By, and continuing to this day. These negative reactions to the “metaphor in thought” thesis have led to a series of battles among metaphor scholars, both within and across academic disciplines, which together constitute the metaphor wars that are the subject of this book. Metaphor wars are fought by participants with many different motivations and goals. Some researchers wish to explore how metaphors reflect individual creativity, artistic traditions, and cultural motifs. Different scholars want to understand what metaphors reveal about people’s communicative abilities in changing social circumstances. Other metaphor enthusiasts focus on the effects that metaphors have on people’s thoughts, emotions, and interpersonal relationship. Still other researchers study the ways people interpret metaphorical meanings as a window into the nature of meaning, as well as conscious and unconscious human cognition. Some of these varying interests stem from longstanding disciplinary concerns leading scholars to battle over whether CMT offers a satisfactory theory of meaning (for philosophers), insights into creativity and poetic practice (for literary scholars), an online account of people’s immediate comprehension of verbal metaphor (for psycholinguists), or cultural models (for anthropologists). Yet metaphor wars do not easily group into disciplinary categories (e.g., linguistics vs. philosophy vs. psychology vs. literature) or into a simple distinction between scientists and humanists. Individual scholars are often attracted to the topic of metaphor precisely because of what it reveals about multiple facets of human experience. Speaking personally, studying metaphor is endlessly fascinating for its lessons about the interactions of embodiment, language, and thought, and its relevance to everything from culture and history to neurons and unconscious cognition. CMT has offered me a
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way of understanding the emergence of meaning in both everyday life and spectacular realizations of the human spirit in art. This complexity in how scholars approach the topic of metaphor may, however, accurately reflect the multitude of ways metaphor manifests itself in human experience. For this reason, there may never be a clear winner in the wars over conceptual metaphor. Such a conclusion should not sway us from trying to adjudicate some of the many disputes which continue to churn within the interdisciplinary world of metaphor scholarship. But resolving the debates about conceptual metaphor requires a comprehensive understanding of the vast empirical literature specifically designed to study CMT, and a sensitive analysis of why some scholars, nonetheless, react so negatively to the very idea of conceptual metaphors. Consider again Chris Matthews’s political commentary and his different boxing metaphors for the Obama vs. Romney debate. Did Matthews’s choice of many conventional expressions necessarily indicate that he was thinking of the Presidential debate in a specific metaphorical manner? CMT scholars would argue that Matthews’s speech, especially his systematic use of boxing metaphors, provides empirical evidence on the power of conceptual metaphors, such as POLITICAL DEBATES ARE BOXING MATCHES, in structuring people’s thinking about abstract topics. But skeptics would likely respond that Matthews merely spit out a series of clichéd phrases which have littered the English language for some time. Politics just happens to be talked about in certain conventional ways, some of which originated in metaphorical thinking. Still, the fact that a contemporary speaker, such as Matthews, used particular words or phrases does not imply that he was cognitively drawing cross-domain comparisons between political debates and boxing matches. The major argument in metaphor wars concerns the legitimacy of drawing inferences about human thought and experience from the analysis of what people say and write. How do we really know if a speaker’s metaphorical talk necessarily indicates active metaphorical thought? Some scholars voice skepticism about the conclusions of CMT because of its reliance on pure intuition in their systematic analysis of conventional expressions, novel metaphors, and polysemy. They seek more scientific evidence, testing falsifiable hypotheses, to prove that so-called conceptual metaphors are “psychologically real,” and not the mere fictions of cognitive linguistic analyses.7 Critics also typically do not believe that conventional phrases, such as “Romney will take some hard shots,” count as legitimate metaphors because these are so common or clichéd.8 Traditional metaphor
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scholarship in many fields focuses on resemblance, or “A is B,” metaphors, such as “Juliet is the sun,” “Man is wolf,” and “My surgeon is a butcher.”9 Certain cognitive linguistic analyses have been proposed for how people may interpret “A is B” metaphors, especially within conceptual “blending theory.”10 But the fact remains that most of the evidence in favor of CMT comes from an examination of metaphorical words and phrases that do not fit the traditional “A is B” form. For some, CMT appears to be too reductive, and spoils the cherished idea that metaphors, like “Juliet is the sun,” are special, creative linguistic forms and aesthetically appealing precisely because of their active, poetic qualities.11 CMT is also faulted for its failure to offer reliable guidelines for determining how different linguistic expressions are necessarily motivated by particular conceptual metaphors.12 What are the criteria for specifying how some linguistic statements, such as those listed above from Metaphors We Live By, directly point to the existence of one kind of conceptual metaphor (e.g., ARGUMENTS ARE WARS) as opposed to some other (e.g., DISPUTES ARE SHOOTING CONTESTS), or even no conceptual metaphor at all. Some linguists, especially those working in applied areas (e.g., educational linguistics, literary analysis, corpus linguistics), voice concern about the difficulty of reliably identifying conceptual metaphors underlying naturalistic conversation and texts. The complexities of real-life discourse make it far more difficult to perform conceptual metaphor analyses compared to working with isolated, constructed linguistic examples frequently studied by cognitive linguists. Without explicit criteria for conceptual metaphor identification, critics see no reason to posit the existence of conceptual metaphors as either generalization about the language system or critical parts of the human cognitive unconscious. Anthropologists and linguists similarly contend that CMT fails to properly acknowledge the cultural forces that shape metaphorical thinking and language.13 The attempt to locate the cognitive and embodied, including neural, bases for metaphorical language, in many people’s view, ignores the larger social and communicative goals that speakers and writers have when using metaphor, as well as the historical customs and ideological beliefs that may motivate some metaphoric discourses. Mathews’s commentary, for instance, did not simply sprout from his private conceptual system, but emerged within a complex network of cultural understandings about Presidential campaigns and political debates. Efforts to ground linguistic metaphors in cognitive and, perhaps neural, structures miss the vital social nature of metaphorical speech acts.
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What Are Metaphor Wars?
In a different context, although much research from experimental psycholinguistics supports certain claims of CMT,14 several psychological studies report evidence contrary to the idea that conceptual metaphors are automatically accessed when people use and interpret verbal metaphors.15 These empirical results are consistent with arguments that many conventional expressions are not really motivated by underlying conceptual metaphors and, again, raise questions about the linguistic research in favor of CMT. More recent claims by cognitive linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists on the embodied nature of conceptual metaphors are also hotly debated within cognitive science.16 For example, Matthews’s boxing metaphors undoubtedly relate to people’s bodily experiences when physically fighting, and many conceptual metaphors may be similarly grounded in recurring patterns of bodily sensation and action (e.g., LEADING A LIFE IS TAKING A PHYSICAL JOURNEY, UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING, and CAUSES ARE PHYSICAL FORCES). Both psycholinguistic and cognitive neuroscience research offers empirical support that people experience bodily actions when using and interpreting many, but perhaps not all, verbal metaphors. Yet critics of embodied cognition, both within cognitive science and interdisciplinary metaphor studies, deplore the reduction of linguistic metaphor to bodily and brain processes.17 A brief look at a selection of statements critics have made about CMT illustrates some of the furor that has long fueled metaphor wars. These quotes are lifted from longer passages in which authors have gone to great lengths to articulate their complaints about specific features of CMT, what the theory ignores or trivializes, and how CMT often fails to address competing accounts of metaphorical language use and thought. An early review of Metaphors We Live By, published by the linguist Anna Wierzbicka in 1986 raised several arguments in regard to Lakoff and Johnson’s positioning of conceptual metaphor as a new, experientialist theory of meaning. Wierzbicka’s main criticism focused on the book’s glib dismissal of traditional perspectives on language and meaning. For example, she noted: “But what I find most disturbing about this book is the eagerness with which it seeks to cut itself off from the Western cultural heritage in general, and from Western traditions in the study of meaning, in particular.” Later on, Wierzbicka argued that Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor specifically downplayed the importance of traditional semantic analyses to determine what words, including metaphoric ones, really mean:
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I deplore the new fashion in writings about meaning which makes the writers enthuse about the alleged indeterminacy of human thought, which allows them to condemn the search for prevision and accuracy in semantic analysis in the name of “fuzziness” or “experiential gestalts” (and so frees them from the obligation to pursue any such search), and which makes them hail a relaxation of standards as a sign of progress and increased wisdom.18
One debate on the merits of CMT arose in the pages of Cognitive Linguistics in 2002 between Marina Rakova and Mark Johnson on one side, and George Lakoff on the other. Rakova’s essay critiqued Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of experientialism as it related to conceptual metaphor, and other topics, where she claimed that their approach was “philosophically inconsistent” and “contradicted by empirical evidence.” In their reply, Lakoff and Johnson accused Rakova of “systematic misreading” and ignoring “mountains of evidence” in support of CMT.19 In her 2003 book, The Extent of the Literal, Rakova offered one reflection on her debate with Johnson and Lakoff. There is another comment that I cannot help making. Johnson and Lakoff (2002) accuse me of not understanding their theory and say that in my critique they “can spot a good deal of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. . . as well as some flashes of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant.” Since this is a book about metaphor I hope I may be allowed a metaphorical comparison. If I was a composer and somebody said to me in an accusatory tone that they could spot in my work flashes of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninov, and that I failed to include country music I would say that this would have left me totally unimpressed.20
I confess to laughing aloud when reading this excerpt in Rakova’s book, which is technically called a “rebuttal analogy,” although I believe that she vastly underestimates the poetic pleasures of country music, including the wealth of juicy metaphors that can be found in many country western songs. (E.g., consider the metaphors in a single line of a Tim McGraw song titled She’s My Kind of Rain: “She’s the sunset’s shadow, she’s like Rembrandt’s light, she’s the history that’s made at night, she’s my lost companion, she’s my dreamin’ tree, together in this brief eternity.”21) Still, Rakova’s writings are a good example of the angst that CMT has evoked among many metaphor scholars. Critics have long asked whether conceptual metaphors are really necessary to explain metaphorical meaning. Cognitive linguist Vyv Evan wrote
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in 2003: “The problem with the level of generalization at which metaphor scholars have assumed cross-domain mappings can be studied is that it may simply constitute a post-hoc analysis due to the analyst.”22 Linguist Joerg Zinken voiced a similar concern in 2007 when he suggested that superordinate conceptual metaphors were “post-hoc artefact[s] of sorting utterances on the part of researcher[s].”23 Literary scholar Patrick Colm Hogan also argued in 2002: “We do not need to posit profound or pervasive metaphorical thought in order to account for local metaphor, for the poetic development of metaphor, or for patterns of metaphor within a given language.”24 Certain philosophers assert that CMT is inadequate as a theory of meaning, because, as Verna Haser suggested in 2005: “Merely positing metaphorical concepts brings us next to nothing.”25 Philosopher Gillan Parker, who embraced a “romantic” view of metaphor, noted in regard to CMT claims: “Of course, underlying many verbal poetic metaphors are determinable patterns of inference referring back to basic stock knowledge (part of which may be called ‘metaphorical’): the truth of this is almost trivial. But this is probably the least interesting aspect of poetic metaphor, for that a poetic metaphor is poetic hereby becomes of secondary importance.”26 Michiel Leezenberg argued that CMT ignores several aspects of metaphor, including its rejection of classical truth theories of meaning, and complained in 2002 that CMT implies: “a complete reduction of linguistic metaphor to purely cognitive processes,”27 and that, a cognitive semantic view of metaphor, “comes nowhere near making good its grandiose claims.”28 Psychologist Steven Pinker is equally dismissive of critical parts of CMT, especially in regard to whether conceptual metaphors really form a basic level of mental representation and, therefore, overturn the need to worry about truth and objectivity in a theory of human mind and language. After reviewing various CMT claims, he offered a summary judgment: The messiah has not come. Though metaphors are omnipresent in language, many of them are effectively dead in the minds’ of today’s speakers and the living ones could never be learned, understood, or used as reasoning tools unless they were built out of more abstract concepts that capture the similarities and differences between the symbol and symbolized. For this reason, conceptual metaphors do not render truth and objectivity obsolete. . .29
Many other scholars complain that positing the existence of conceptual metaphors may not depict how people ordinarily use metaphorical language.
Attacking Conceptual Metaphor Theory
13
Literary critic Peter Crisp summarized the problem CMT faces: “It is one thing to invent something for the purpose of illustrating hypothesized conceptual metaphors, such as ARGUMENT IS WAR or LIFE IS A JOURNEY. It is quite another thing to decide what exactly may be going on in the mind of the producer or receiver of a spontaneously occurring text containing one or more linguistic metaphors.”30 Along similar lines, psychologist Mathew McGlone summarized his critique of CMT in 2007 by noting: “Its atmospheric influence notwithstanding, the CM view has not fared well theoretically or empirically. . .”31 In 2011 McGlone later observed about CMT, in response to a paper of mine: “I have watched it curdle into a cult of confirmation biases. . .” “Until there is a substantial body of empirical evidence demonstrating conceptual metaphoric mediation of figurative language comprehension, claims about the theory’s foundational status are little more than hyperbole. . .”32 Similar debates about the value of CMT within cognitive science were evident in 2006 when one psychologist wrote on an Internet blog: The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that people simply aren’t performing the conceptual mappings that the Lakoff and Johnson conceptual metaphor theory requires. Fortunately, outside of the cognitive linguistics circle, this is how Lakoff and Johnson’s theory is already viewed.33
Many have also written about the failure of CMT to address the social nature of verbal metaphor. Linguist Lynne Cameron stated her problem with the rigidity of CMT in the following way: My basic objection to this claim of fixedness and invariance is that it leads to an impoverished, asocial view of metaphor that denies important realities of human noticing, reasoning and languaging, and that I find inadequate for describing and explaining what people do with metaphor and thus what metaphor “is.” Furthermore, the scientific method of reduction(ism) that seems to underpin a cognitive linguistic drive to peel back, abstract away, and purify concepts in order to theorise, can be inappropriate for studying human phenomena; at some point in the peeling back, the flesh is damaged, the object of study changes nature and construct validity disintegrates. It is crucial to stop abstracting and generalising processes carried out in the name of theory-building before this point is reached.34
A related criticism, from the literary scholar Jim Swan, argued: “Explaining metaphor as the activities of unconscious, basic-led schema
14
What Are Metaphor Wars?
makes it difficult to account for the activity of a cultural subject acting as an ethical, intuitive agent capable of judgment.”35 Finally, anthropologists argue that CMT ignores culture in a theory of metaphor. For example, Naomi Quinn presented a lengthy criticism of CMT in 1992, noting the following problems: “. . . the case of metaphor illustrates a uniform tendency for linguists and other cognitive scientists outside of anthropology to neglect altogether the organizing role of culture in human thought. . .” Quinn also suggested an alternative role for metaphor in cultural models: “. . .metaphors, far from constituting understanding, are ordinarily selected to fit a preexisting and culturally shared model. . .”36 These comments are indicative of the intense negativity that CMT has provoked, despite its simultaneous appeal within the metaphor community and elsewhere. As these critical observations make clear, the stakes are high in the wars over conceptual metaphor.
my fights in these wars No matter what one may believe about the value of CMT, it is clearly appropriate to acknowledge that CMT has brought metaphor center stage to the highest level of theoretical discussions about mind and language within cognitive science and the humanities. But the time is ripe for a comprehensive reassessment of CMT, especially given the vast research related to conceptual metaphor from many disciplines within the cognitive sciences. I approach this task with a long personal history of involvement in the metaphor wars. When I first became interested in metaphor, and all things figurative, most scholars treated metaphor as if, in T.S. Eliot’s words, it were “like a patient etherized upon a table.” Like pathologists hovering over a corpse, metaphor researchers would poke at “Man is wolf” or “kick the bucket” wondering if these were dead or alive, sometimes turning the body over to see if it conveyed a different meaning from the other side (e.g., does “Man is wolf” mean something different than “Wolf is man”?). But there was little concern with where metaphors came from, or what metaphor actually does when bouncing around the real world of human speakers in interaction. Even as I, and others, began to conduct experimental studies in the late 1970s looking at the effect of context on figurative language interpretation, the emphasis was really on how short discourse contexts facilitated processing of some phrases, such as “Regardless of danger, the troops marched on,” as having metaphorical as opposed to literal meaning. What metaphors actually communicated in real-life
My Fights in These Wars
15
situations, the roles that metaphor had in structuring certain domains of thought, and how metaphors shaped and reflected culture, were not topics that attracted much attention. But the revolution in metaphor studies brought about by CMT changed all that in significant ways. Metaphor was now viewed as more pervasive in everyday life and part of ordinary cognition, and not just a special, ornamental linguistic device. A good deal of my experimental research in psycholinguistics has, among other things, supported some of the proposal offered by CMT, work that has advanced the suggestion that conceptual metaphors are psychologically real. Much of my recent work has been devoted to understanding the embodied roots of metaphorical language use and thinking, an idea that is also directly relevant to some of the newest developments in CMT.37 My involvement with CMT has taught me important lessons about the interactions of embodiment, language, and thought, and the relevance of conceptual metaphors in everything from culture and history to neurons and unconscious cognition. Most generally, CMT has offered me a way of understanding the emergence of meaning in both everyday life and spectacular realizations of the human spirit in art. At the same time, I have long criticized CMT for its one-dimensional conception of linguistic understanding, its lack of methodological rigor by relying too much on the intuitions of individual analysts, its lack of attention to alternative proposals, and its failure to acknowledge the complexities in people’s ongoing metaphorical experience. As my view of human cognition has developed over the years, I now believe that determining the role that conceptual metaphors play in human life should not result in either a “Yes, it does” or “No, it does not” conclusion. Instead, conceptual metaphors may be emergent products of multiple, nested factors (i.e., biological, historical, cultural, social, cognitive, and linguistic), and may interact with many knowledge sources and experiences to create context-sensitive, task-specific metaphorical behaviors. Conceptual metaphor may be an essential ingredient in a comprehensive theory of metaphor, yet it clearly is not the only part of that story. I will later argue that conceptual metaphors’ effect on language use, reasoning, imagination, and different human actions really depends on the specifics of who the people are, what their motivations and goals are, the specific language and linguistic devices they use, the cognitive and social tasks they accomplish, and how we as scholars assess metaphorical performance in different real-life situations. Overall, though, some of the complaints about CMT being too reductive really miss how conceptual
16
What Are Metaphor Wars?
metaphors express a deeply felt aesthetics of meaning that emerges from people’s experiences of their bodies and minds in social, cultural contexts. My plea in this book is for a fair hearing of all the cognitive science data as we continue to debate the merits of CMT. Only through a complete analysis of the extant empirical research will we ever come to broader theoretical agreements about the complexities of metaphor use and understanding. This call for a comprehensive analysis of the empirical evidence is really directed to critics of CMT, who often simply do not know of the abundant research on conceptual metaphors, as well as advocates of CMT who sometimes blindly march forward as if it alone is the one and only true metaphor theory. Right now, there simply remains too much separation between different research enterprises on metaphor, with scholars from different theoretical perspectives pursuing their own research agendas without consideration of alternative ideas and results out there in the literature. My primary focus here will be on CMT and I will not always go into great detail about the pros and cons of alternative theoretical perspectives. Nonetheless, I strive to acknowledge other factors or variables that may be critical to a theory of metaphor, now underemphasized by CMT, which critics of conceptual metaphor have taken pains to explore in their own research and writings. Describing the debates on metaphor as “wars” seems apt given the heated, sometimes vitriolic, nature of these academic discussions, and because of the significant theoretical implications that these arguments have for our vision of human thought, language, and action. Simply put, to maintain that metaphors are constitutive of the way people think offers a radical departure from long-standing beliefs in the literal, purely computational, highly disembodied ways people understand themselves and the world around them. More dramatically, empirical research showing that metaphor is an embodied, cognitive process, which clearly manifests as different linguistic and cultural tools, highlights the “poetics of mind,” a view of experience that is far removed from the standard impression of our lives as clichéd and non-poetic. The paradox of metaphor is that it can be creative, novel, and culturally sensitive, allowing us to transcend the mundane, while also being rooted in bodily experiences and unconscious thought patterns common to all people. Metaphor wars are the result of our continued struggle with this paradox. Yet in the metaphor wars, it may be ultimately wiser to accept the multiple functions that metaphors have in human life than to proclaim victory for one side, and defeat for the other.
2 Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
Lakoff and Johnson’s original argument for conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) was based on the systematic analysis of the ways people talk about their life experiences. This chapter describes some of the classic cognitive linguistics research illustrating how conceptual metaphors may be inferred from the examination of language. Critics of CMT rarely acknowledge the diversity of empirical findings on conceptual metaphor from cognitive linguistics. I will postpone critical discussions of this work until later chapters. For now, my argument is that the linguistic evidence must be accounted for in any debates on the significance of conceptual metaphors in human life.
systematicity of conventional expressions English speakers talk about their lives in a variety of ways that express metaphorical meaning. Consider the following short list of expressions: “Greta is making good progress toward her Ph.D. degree.” “John has already reached several career goals.” “David ran into a rough patch trying to solve the difficult math problem.” “Sandra was completely stuck figuring out what to do after her divorce.” This collection of linguistic expressions may appear to be relatively cliché, unrelated to one another, and, to some, not particularly metaphorical. Lakoff and Johnson emphasized, however, that these expressions are conventional manifestations of an underlying metaphor in thought, namely the LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor. People understand parts of their lives in terms of their experiences of taking journeys. Conceptual metaphors, such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, differ from linguistic metaphorical expressions, such as “Greta is making good progress toward 17
18
Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
her Ph.D. degree.” The schematic phrase LIFE IS A JOURNEY represents only a convenient summary description of the rich set of mental mappings that characterize the complex relationship between target (LIFE) and source (JOURNEY) domain knowledge. For instance, Zoltán Kövecses, who has written extensively about the basic features of conceptual metaphor, suggests that the LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor gives rise to a diverse set of mappings, which include, at the very least, the following source-to-target domain correspondences.1 travelers ! people leading a life motion along the way ! leading a life destination(s) ! purpose(s) of life different paths to one’s destination(s) ! different means of achieving one’s purpose(s) distance covered along the way ! progress made in life locations along the way ! stages in life guides along the way ! helpers or counselors in life These correspondences are not simply a list of the features in common between LIFE and JOURNEY, precisely because conceptual metaphors help establish a more structured conceptualization of the target domain, which people then speak of using mostly conventional words and phrases. For instance, experiences of LIFE and JOURNEYS do not share the same exact features regarding travelers, paths, destinations, and so on. Instead, the mapping of JOURNEY experiences onto the idea of LIFE creates the specific inferences that people leading a life are travelers, problems in life are physical obstacles along a path, and purposes in life are destinations. Moreover, the mapping of information from a source to a target domain in a conceptual metaphor is generally, but not always, unidirectional. We can understand LIFE in terms of JOURNEYS, but the mapping of LIFE onto JOURNEYS makes less sense. Conventional metaphorical statements are concrete, linguistic manifestations of these different inferences. Indeed, analyses of systematic relations of different conventional expressions referring to abstract concepts reflect the presence of conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphors provide a primary basis for understanding a wide range of abstract concepts. Analyses of systematic relations of different conventional expressions reflect the presence of numerous conceptual metaphors referring to many abstract topics, including the following target domains, and specific linguistic manifestations of these metaphors:2
Systematicity of Conventional Expressions
Emotion “She was bursting with joy.” “He unleashed his anger.” Desire “She is hungry for knowledge.” “He is burning to go.” Morality “He is a straight shooter.” “She resisted the temptation.” Thought “She’s grinding out new ideas.” “I see your point.” Society/Nation “A friendly nation.” “The ills of society.” Politics “They forced the opposition out of the house.” “The president plays hardball.” Economy “Germany built a strong economy.” “They pruned down the budget.” Human Relationships “To build a strong marriage.” “They worked on their relationship.” Communication “You’re putting many ideas into a single sentence.” “That’s a dense paragraph.” Time “Christmas is coming up soon.” “Time goes by fast.” Life/Death “His father passed away.” “The baby will arrive soon.”
19
20
Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
Religion “Jesus is the lamb of God.” “My lord is a shepherd.” Events/Actions “She turned thirty last month.” “She has reached her goals in life.” These target domains mostly refer to topics that are difficult to talk or think about without using metaphor, precisely because of their general abstract nature. For instance, it is almost impossible to speak of morality, thoughts, and relationships without metaphor rushing in to facilitate our understanding of these aspects of human life. Consider now some of the source domains that commonly enable people to think about abstract topics in more concrete ways.3 Human Body “The heart of the problem.” “To shoulder responsibility.” Health/Illness “A healthy society.” “A sick mind.” Animals “John is a real tiger.” “Bill is a dog.” “Susie is a fox.” “Harriet is a cow.” Plants “A budding relationship.” “To cultivate a new friendship with her.” Buildings “She constructed a coherent argument.” “He is in ruins financially.” “A towering genius.” Machines/Tools “The machine of democracy.” “She produced a book every year.”
Systematicity of Conventional Expressions
21
Games/Sports “He tried to checkmate her.” “He is a heavyweight politician.” Business “Spend your time wisely.” “She invested a lot in the relationship.” Cooking/Food “What’s your recipe for success?” “He cooked up a story that nobody believed.” Heat/Cold “In the heat of passion.” “An icy stare.” Light/Darkness “A dark mood.” “She brightened up.” Forces “She swept me off my feet.” “You’re driving me crazy.” Movement/Direction “Inflation is soaring.” “She solved the problem step-by-step.” The conventional expressions listed above also provide evidence for the important fact that conceptual metaphors highlight certain aspects of their respective target domains, yet hide others. Consider the statement “She solved the problem step-by-step,” which is related to the metaphorical idea that SOLVING A PROBLEM IS TAKING A JOURNEY TOWARD SOME DESTINATION. This conceptual metaphor emphasizes how problem solving may be seen as a process that extends over time as one moves toward a specific goal or solution, perhaps overcoming obstacles, or subproblems, along the way. But this conceptual metaphor hides aspects of our problem-solving experiences, such as the need to build creative solutions that sometimes have complex structures (e.g., SOLVING A PROBLEM IS CONSTRUCTING A COMPLEX BUILDING). An important discovery of CMT is that many abstract concepts can be structured by multiple conceptual metaphors. A love relationship, for
22
Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
example, can be understood as a natural force (e.g., LOVE IS A NATURAL FORCE) as exhibited by the following conventional expressions. “She swept me off my feet.” “Waves of passion overcame him.” “We were engulfed by love.” “She was deeply immersed in love.” Love may also be understood in terms of other source domains, such as magic (e.g., “She cast a spell over me,” and “I was entranced by her”), and unity (e.g., “We were made for each other,” “They are inseparable,” and “She is my better half”). The different metaphorical ways for thinking about love suggest that we do not have a single cognitive model for love. Each metaphorical model offers varying entailments appropriate for thinking and talking about different aspects of love experiences. For instance, the unpredictability of love may be better conceptualized by the LOVE IS A NATURAL FORCE metaphor, while the togetherness of love may be best understood in terms of the LOVE IS A UNITY conceptual metaphor.4 Some linguistic expressions actually reflect the motivating presence of two different conceptual metaphors for the same topic. Consider the following examples that mix together the ideas of ARGUMENTS ARE JOURNEYS and ARGUMENTS ARE CONTAINERS.5 “At this point our argument doesn’t have much content.” “In what we have done so far, we have provided the core of our argument.” “If we keep going the way we are going, we’ll fit all the facts in.” These mixed metaphor statements are sensible because two conceptual metaphors for arguments, JOURNEYS and CONTAINERS, share correspondences or entailments. The JOURNEY metaphor implies that the path corresponds to the form of the argument, while the ground covered refers to the argument’s content. On the other hand, the CONTAINERS metaphor implies that the more the inside surface of a container is covered, the more content the argument has. Even though the JOURNEY and CONTAINERS metaphors are different, and have some inconsistencies, the shared entailment allows them to fit together in certain contexts. As Lakoff and Johnson observed, “the reason we need two metaphors is because no one metaphor will do the job – there is no metaphor that will allow us to get a handle simultaneously on both the direction of the argument and the content of the argument.”6
Systematicity of Conventional Expressions
23
In general, metaphorical entailments are critical to linking together different aspects of a single metaphorical concept (e.g., ARGUMENTS ARE JOURNEYS), as well as two different metaphorical structurings of a single concept (e.g., ARGUMENTS ARE JOURNEYS and ARGUMENTS ARE CONTAINERS). A major finding of cognitive linguistic studies is that the source domains in conceptual metaphors are often tied to people’s bodily actions and experiences. Note how many of the earlier presented conventional expressions have source domains referring to bodily behaviors and experiences, such as body parts, the physical condition of the body, animals we physically interact with, physically growing things in nature, building things, game-playing activities, cooking, physical sensations, physical forces, and various bodily movements. CMT has more specifically argued that the source domains in conceptual metaphors are primarily image-schematic (e.g., based on recurring patterns of embodied experience).7 Image schemas can generally be defined as dynamic analog representations of spatial relations and movements in space. For instance, our BALANCE image schema emerges through our experiences of bodily equilibrium and disequilibrium. The BALANCE image schema supports the understanding of nonmetaphorical expressions such as “He balanced the weight on his shoulder” and is metaphorically elaborated upon in a large number of abstract domains of experience (e.g., psychological states, legal relationships, formal systems), as seen in statements such as “He was psychologically imbalanced” and “The balance of justice.”8 Image schemas have internal logic or structure that determines their roles in structuring various abstract concepts and in patterns of reasoning. People do not just arbitrarily happen to use the word “balance” and related terms when speaking of a large number of unrelated concepts (e.g., psychological, moral, legal, and mathematical domains). Instead, people use the same word for all these domains because these are structurally related by the same sort of underlying image schemas (e.g., BALANCE). In this way, many aspects of metaphorical meaning are extensions of basic image-schematic structures.9 One image schema that is frequently employed in metaphorical thought and language is CONTAINMENT. The CONTAINMENT image schema underlies many metaphorical concepts related to our understanding of linguistic action. For instance, our mouths, like our bodies, are experienced as containers, such that when the container is open, then linguistic action is possible, and when closed, there is only silence. To be “closed-lipped” reflects the silent, closed container, and when one “bites one’s lip,” the
24
Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
closing of the mouth and lips is done quickly with great force. When someone “lies through their teeth,” the container is perceived as a hiding place where true information resides, but the container is somewhat defective and we can see through the speaker’s shameless attempt to lie about something when the truth can partly be seen. Some metaphors talk of entering the mouth container, as when “one puts words in someone’s mouth” or “force/ram/thrust something down someone’s throat,” where the more forceful the entering into the container reflects a more intense speaker action. Embodied CONTAINMENT also refers to cases where objects, or information, are removed from the mouth or head of a speaker, as in “He took the words right out of my mouth” and “pick someone’s brains,” both of which imply that some persons possess valuable objects (i.e., information) worth stealing. Finally, another common image schema is SOURCE–PATH–GOAL, which emerges from a variety of bodily experiences, such as when a person starts moving from one point toward another along some path with the intention of reaching a specific destination. The SOURCE–PATH–GOAL schema is also embodied whenever we reach out to grab hold of an object (i.e., reaching from a starting point, moving along a path, reaching and grabbing the object) or when we move our eyes from focusing on one object in the world across to another (i.e., moving from a source or starting point along some path to reach a goal). Common linguistic expressions such as “John walked from home to the store” are understood as conveying a SOURCE–PATH–GOAL meaning. This image schema, like all others, can be metaphorically extended to create, in this case, journey metaphors related to expressions such as “His career was off-track” and “Their relationship hit a dead-end street.” More generally, the image-schematic nature of many metaphorical source domains is a very important discovery because it emphasizes the embodied grounding of metaphorical meaning.10 Furthermore, the imageschematic character of metaphorical source domains provides an essential constraint on what gets mapped in conceptual metaphorical reasoning. Many scholars generally agree that metaphorical statements express relational or emergent meanings where the source domain is projected onto the target domain in some incomplete manner. Not everything we know about a source domain is employed when understanding abstract targets in conceptual metaphors. Determining what gets mapped, and what is omitted, in metaphorical meanings has been a major challenge for metaphor theorists. However, the image-schematic nature of metaphorical source domains only offers a partial answer to the “what gets mapped” question. George
Systematicity of Conventional Expressions
25
Lakoff and Mark Turner originally proposed the “invariance hypothesis,” later dubbed the “invariance principle,” to describe an important constraint on metaphorical reasoning and meaning.11 The invariance principle states: Metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the image-schema structure) of the source domains, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domains.12
The invariance principle does not specify in advance which aspects of a source domain will necessarily be mapped onto the target domain, but suggests that the partial source-to-target domain mappings in conceptual metaphors generally preserve the image-schematic structure of the source domain. For example, certain conventional statements about life are motivated by the LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor in which JOURNEY is structured by the SOURCE–PATH–GOAL schema. This image schema is mapped onto the target domain LIFE such that, once again, we find the correspondences that people leading a life are travelers, leading a life is motion along the path, purposes in life are destinations, progress in life is distance covered along the path, and so on.13 In this manner, the target domain (e.g., LIFE) is more specifically conceptualized via the coherent image-schematic structure of the source domain (e.g., JOURNEY). Conceptual metaphors vary along a number of different dimensions. First, two types of correspondences arise from the mapping between source and target domains. Ontological correspondences hold between elements of one domain and elements of the other domain. For example, the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER has the set of correspondences shown in Table 2.1:14
Table 2.1 Ontological Correspondences Source: HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER
Target: ANGER
containers heated fluid heat scale pressure in container agitation of bodily fluid limits of container’s resistance explosion
body anger anger scale experienced pressure experienced agitation limits in one’s ability to suppress anger loss of control
26
Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
Table 2.2 Epistemic Correspondences When fluid in a container is heated beyond certain limit, pressure increases to a point at which the container explodes. An explosion is damaging to the container and dangerous to others. Explosion can be prevented by applying sufficient force and counterpressure. Controlled release of pressure may occur.
When anger increases beyond a certain limit, “pressure” increases to point at which a person loses control. Loss of control is damaging to person and dangerous to bystanders. Anger can be suppressed by force of will. Anger can be released in a controlled manner which reduces danger of explosion.
Epistemic correspondences, on the other hand, express relations holding between elements in one domain and elements in the other domain (Table 2.2). Both ontological and epistemic correspondences highlight the fact that conceptual metaphors can convey varied relations between source and target domains. These relations do not exist one-by-one, but are probably linked together as part of people’s ordinary conceptual systems. Once again, the identification of a conceptual metaphor using a phrase like ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER is a convenient summary description of a complex system of conceptual relations between diverse knowledge domains. These complex relations are not pre-existing conceptual elements, but arise precisely because of the metaphor. A single source domain may be used to structure many different target domains. Buildings, for example, can structure the target domains of theories, relationships, careers, economic systems, etc. These individual conceptual metaphors may reflect a more generic, overarching metaphor scheme COMPLEX SYSTEMS ARE BUILDINGS (Table 2.3), which includes, at the very least, the following source-to-target domain correspondences.15 The COMPLEX SYSTEMS ARE BUILDINGS generic-level metaphor provides the basic conceptual knowledge for people to think and talk about careers, governments, economic systems, relationships, and so on, all of which are stable, enduring, developing in the right manner, and in an appropriate condition. Another generic-level metaphor is the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor, which enables us to understand that states are locations, difficulties are impediments, causes are forces, action is self-propelled motion, means are paths, progress is a travel schedule, change is motion, and external events are large moving objects.16 Consider some examples of the more
Systematicity of Conventional Expressions
27
Table 2.3 Complex Systems Are Buildings foundation framework
! !
additional elements to support the framework design architect strength
! ! ! !
basis that supports the entire system overall structure of the elements that make up the system additional elements to support the structure of the system logical structure of the system maker/builder of the system lastingness/stability of the system
collapse
!
failure of the system
specific instantiations of the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor, as well as individual linguistic realizations of these mappings. Progress is Motion Forward “The Service will continue to stagger from crisis to crisis.” Action is Self-Propelled Motion “Scientists have taken a big step in understanding Alzheimer’s disease.” Means are Paths “Let’s hope he can keep the team on the road to success.” Changes are Movements “The province is quite close to sliding into civil war.” These specific instances of the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor do not occur in isolation from one another, but may be organized in hierarchical structures where lower mappings in the hierarchy inherit the structure of the higher mappings. One example of this hierarchy with three levels is the following.17 Level 1: The EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor Level 2: PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY Level 3: LOVE IS A JOURNEY; A CAREER IS A JOURNEY Overall, the metaphor A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY makes use of all the default organization of the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor such that events in life are conceptualized as subcases of events in general. In this way, the conceptual metaphor A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY inherits the event structure metaphor. Various conventional expressions illustrate these mappings, for example, “He’s without direction
28
Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
in his life,” “He’s at the crossroad in his life,” “I’ve gone through a lot in life,” “I’m where I want to be in life,” and “She got a head start in life.” Just as significant life events are special cases of events, so too are events in a love relationship special cases of life events. Thus, the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor inherits the structure of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. There are special aspects of the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, such as that there are two lovers who are travelers and that the love relationship is a vehicle. Still, the rest of the mappings are a consequence of inheritance, such that the lovers are in the same vehicle, they have the same destination, and that problems in the relationship are impediments to travel. The inheritance hierarchy noted above has the important generalization that lexical items that are central to the highest level (Level 1) can also be used metaphorically in talking about lower levels (Levels 2 and 3). For instance, the physical meaning of the word “crossroads” is in the domain of space. But “crossroads,” as in “He is at the crossroads in his life,” can be readily used in a metaphorical sense to talk of any extended activity, such as life or a love relationship. This kind of hierarchical organization is a very prominent feature of the metaphorical system in English. One possibility is that metaphors higher up in the hierarchy, such as the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor, may be universal and evident in the entire world’s languages, whereas metaphors for life and love may be culturally restricted and have different metaphorical realizations in various languages.18 The EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor provides a coherent understanding of fundamental abstract concepts, such as state, change, causation, purpose, and action. As Lakoff commented, “The fact that they are conceptualized metaphorically shows that metaphor is central to ordinary abstract thought.”19
primary metaphor theory One difficulty with the initial presentation of CMT was that some metaphorical mappings typically do not make sense. For instance, the conceptual metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS motivates many meaningful linguistic expressions such as “The theory needs to be buttressed” or “The foundation for your theory is shaky.” But some aspects of buildings are clearly not mapped onto the domain of theories, which is one reason why it sounds odd, in most contexts, to say “The theory has no windows.”20 A possible solution to this improbable mapping problem is that certain conceptual metaphors are more primary than others in human thought
Primary Metaphor Theory
29
and experience. Joe Grady argued that strong correlations in everyday embodied experiences lead to the creation of “primary” metaphors.21 Some prominent primary metaphors include: Intimacy is Closeness “We have a close relationship.” Difficulties are Burdens “She’s weighed down by responsibilities.” Affection is Warmth “They greeted me warmly.” Important is Big “Tomorrow is a big day.” More is Up “Prices are high.” Similarity is Closeness “Those colors aren’t the same, but they’re close.” Organization is Physical Structure “How do theories fit together?” Help is Support “Support your local charities.” Time is Motion “Time flies.” States are Locations “I’m close to being in a depression.” Change is Motion “My health has gone from bad to worse.” Purposes are Destinations “He’ll be successful, but isn’t there yet.” Causes are Physical Forces “They pushed the bill through Congress.” Knowing is Seeing “I see what you mean.” Understanding is Grasping “I’ve never been able to grasp complex math.”
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Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
These metaphorical correlations arise out of our embodied functioning in the world. In each case, the source domain of the metaphor comes from the body’s sensorimotor system. A primary metaphor is a metaphorical mapping for which there is an independent and direct experiential basis that can be expressed within language. Grady suggested that there may be on the order of several hundred such conceptual associations based on analogous instances of familiar correlations in experience. A “complex” metaphor, on the other hand, is a self-consistent metaphorical complex composed of more than one primary metaphor. Complex metaphors are created by blending primary metaphors and thereby fitting together small metaphorical pieces into larger metaphorical wholes.22 For instance, consider the following three primitive metaphors: PERSISTING IS REMAINING ERECT, STRUCTURE IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE, and INTERRELATED IS INTERWOVEN. These three primitives can be combined in different ways to give rise to complex metaphors that have traditionally been seen as simple conceptual metaphors. But the combination of these primitives allows for metaphorical concepts without gaps. Thus, combining PERSISTING IS REMAINING ERECT with STRUCTURE IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE provides for a conceptual metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS that nicely motivates the metaphorical inferences that theories need support and can collapse, etc., without any mappings such as that theories need windows. Similarly, the combination of STRUCTURE IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE and INTERRELATED IS INTERWOVEN gives rise to a different metaphorical compound for theories, namely, THEORIES ARE FABRICS. This compound metaphor gives rise to the reasonable inferences that theories can be woven together or unravel without generating less likely entailments such as that theories are colorful in the way that some fabrics have colors. In general, the theory of primary metaphor provides a critical constraint on the mapping of metaphorical relations. The work on primary metaphor does not explain all aspects of why certain words, and not others, get metaphorically mapped from source-to-target domains. Nonetheless, the theory does propose a crucial limit on why some metaphorical constructions are likely to occur, and others not.23
neural theory of metaphor The emergence of primary metaphor theory has led to a new, perhaps deeper, perspective on conceptual metaphors, known as the “neural theory of metaphor.”24 A general assumption of this work, based on
Neural Theory of Metaphor
31
emerging evidence from neuroscience, is that there are no specialized areas of the brain for language, and that in the case of metaphor, understanding is not confined to only a few select regions of the brain. The same neurons can function in many different neuronal groups or “nodes.” Computational modeling of cognitive and linguistic processes is done over networks of nodes, connections, degrees of synaptic strengths, and time lapses at synapses. These features provide the tools necessary to explain various aspects of enduring metaphorical thought and language use. Within the neural theory, metaphor is an extended consequence of topographic neural mappings. As with all topographic mappings, the structure of the source domains is preserved in the target domain because the neurons of the former stimulate the latter through reentrant signaling. How do these connections form? Consider the metaphor MORE IS UP. In this mapping, the abstract domain of quantity or value correlates with the relative changes along the vertical axis of the spatial domain, as in “my stocks skyrocketed” and “his productivity is way up.” These correlations emerge when the neural networks characterizing each of these domains are co-activated in everyday experience, such as when we pile more books on the desk and their height goes up or we add water to a container. If the mappings are connected by reentrant pathways, co-activation will strengthen the connections. Once those connections have formed, the relations in the source domain of verticality will be preserved by the mapping and, therefore, can form the basis of inferences in the target domain of quantity. If something shoots up, it is propelled quickly upward and in a very short time is much higher than before, which motivates expressions such as “Her fame skyrocketed,” referring to a sudden and substantial increase in celebrity. Now read the complex expression “I’ve fallen in love, but we seem to be going in different directions.”25 Several conceptual metaphors structure the neural, imaginative enactment that enable us to understand this statement, including LOSS OF CONTROL IS DOWN (e.g., “I’ve fallen”), STATES ARE LOCATIONS (e.g., “in love”), CHANGE IS MOTION (e.g., “fallen in love” is a change to a new state), and LOVE IS A JOURNEY (e.g., “going in different directions”). The particular metaphorical inferences derived from the above statements are carried out not from the simple projection of different source domain knowledge into the target domain of love and love relationships. Instead, the inferences arise from source domain enactments that are carried over to the target domain via neural links.
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This is a significant constraint on the type of metaphorical projections that are likely to occur. In cases of metaphorical expressions, such as “John finally grasped the concept of infinite numbers,” there is activation of neural circuitry associated with actual grasping (i.e., the source domain), which together with activation of the target domain from context (i.e., the abstract concept related to infinite numbers) creates a mapping circuit. Cognitive neuroscience has shown the existence of “mirror neurons” in the pre-motor cortex that are activated when people merely see specific actions, imagine doing those actions, and even hear language referring to those actions.26 For instance, mirror neurons associated with grasping become active when people see others grasping objects, when they imagine grasping objects, or when they hear the verb “grasp.” A significant feature of this account, then, is that the totality of a source domain does not need to be processed before target domain inferences are determined. This immediate creation of an integrated circuit, in which both the source and target domains are processed at once, is consistent with behavioral evidence that people can easily understand both metaphorical and non-metaphorical expressions, as well as with neuroscience evidence on the spread of activation in neural circuits. Research incorporating computational techniques from neural modeling has led to the development of complex systems in which “conceptual metaphors are computed neurally via neural maps – neural circuitry linking the sensorimotor system with higher cortical areas.”27 Metaphorical mappings are physical neural maps that bind sensorimotor information to more abstract ideas as part of the neural ensembles existing in different regions of the brain. Consider the following brief newspaper story about European economics: Britain was deep in recession while Germany was flourishing three years ago. France kept moving steadily long after Germany had fallen into recession. But now France is plunging deeper while the German economy continues to struggle. Britain has been taking small steps toward stimulating its economy by cutting interest rates, and has finally started to emerge from recession.28
Srini Narayanan’s model, called KARMA (knowledge-based action representations for metaphor and aspect), characterized how we may reason about events using embodied metaphors, including those related to moving steadily, falling, taking small steps, plunging deeper, struggling, and starting to emerge. These embodied metaphors function to project features of spatial
Neural Theory of Metaphor
33
motion and manipulation onto abstract plans and processes. Representational structures, called “x-schemas,” reflect low-level motor synergies producing complex motor sequences. These motor events, actions, and processes are invariantly projected onto more abstract domains to link physical and economic domains in the form of embodied conceptual metaphors, such as ACTION IS MOTION, A RECESSION IS A HOLE, and MORE IS UP.28 KARMA specifically used the physical language in the news story to activate a mental simulation of physical action, using control structures (with actual motor action assumed to be inhibited). Tests of this computational model revealed that the system drew the same inferences people do when reading a wide variety of newspaper stories about economics. For instance, the system drew inference related to goals (their accomplishment, modification, subsystem, concordance, or thwarting), aspect (temporal structure of events), frame-based inferences, perspectival inferences, and inferences about communicative intent. In general, Narayanan’s system shows how the same structured neural network used to control high-level motor schemas also operates during abstract reasoning about economic events. Many aspects of metaphorical thought are now understood as “metaphorical enactments” that occur in real-time as dynamic brain functions. The neural theory of metaphor offers additional motivation for why conceptual metaphors arise in the ways they do, endure in thought, and are widely evident in language. Metaphor is a natural development of the way that neural systems work with recurring mappings, predictable inference patterns, and emergent properties. A more recent development in the neural theory claims that certain neural pathways, called “cascades,” are critical to the creation and understanding of specific verbal metaphors.29 Cascades control activations across various regions of the brain which can be combined to create more complex neural networks, such as seen in motor control and decision-making. These neural pathways are the basis on which embodied metaphors may be combined with specific frame-based knowledge of specific situations to create very specific verbal metaphors. For example, a cascade containing primary metaphors such as KNOWING IS SEEING, IDEAS ARE ENTITIES, COMMUNICATION IS ENTITY TRANSFER, MULTIPLEX IS MASS, PURPOSES ARE DESTINATION, and DIFFICULTIES ARE OBSTRUCTIONS TO MOTION can connect with situational knowledge to produce metaphorical expressions such as “spill the beans,” and “let the cat out of the bag.” This theory aims to show how the creation and understanding of both novel and
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Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
conventional metaphors may be computationally grounded given our knowledge of neural mechanisms. Although the work on the neural theory primarily rests on “existence proofs” based on computational modeling, an increasing body of research from cognitive neuroscience shows how sensorimotor source domains are typically activated during metaphor use and comprehension (see Chapter 5). A recently completed book manuscript by Lakoff and Narayanan places the neural theory as the center piece of “Conceptual Science: The Embodiment of Thought and Language.” This approach is deeply rooted in decades of research from neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, structured neural computation, and experimental embodied cognition, some of which is also discussed in the chapters to follow. Most broadly, and importantly, the neural theory characterizes metaphor in language and thought as emerging from basic sensory-motor systems. The details of this work offer additional scientific evidence for the biological and psychological reality of embodied conceptual metaphors. Let me finally, and all too briefly, acknowledge one connectionist model of embodied conceptual metaphors that provides a different testable, mechanistic theory in support of a neutrally plausible approach to CMT.30 This model offers “an illustration of how conceptual metaphor naturally emerges within a system that learns the statistical structure of the environment through progressive differentiation and stores its representations as distributed and overlapping patterns of activation.”31
how many conceptual metaphors are there? How many conceptual metaphors are there in the human mind? This question has been raised by both advocates and critics of CMT. There is no definitive answer, not surprisingly, given that research is continually discovering new conceptual metaphors or offering suggestions on how best to express different conventional metaphorical mappings. Still, one example of the diversity of conceptual metaphors seen in cognitive linguistic research is the “Master Metaphor List,” a second edition of which was compiled back in 1991 by George Lakoff, Jane Espenson, and Alan Schwartz.32 The 211-page document contains what was estimated to be less than 20 percent of all the materials at UC Berkeley that were waiting to be examined back in the early 1990s. At the very least, the list offers a rough idea of the number and richness of conceptual metaphors, along with special cases of these metaphors, which may be an enduring part of the human conceptual system. The list is divided into four main
How Many Conceptual Metaphors Are There?
35
parts, including sections on EVENT STRUCTURE, MENTAL EVENTS, EMOTIONS, and other miscellaneous figures. Consider some examples from the section on MENTAL EVENTS. Creating is Making Visible “The current policy is making a lot of problems appear.” Time is Something Moving Toward You “Three o’clock is approaching.” “The witching hour is near.” The Mind is a Body (e.g., MENTAL FAILURE IS PHYSICAL FAILURE) “His mind is decaying.” “Her mind is strong and supple.” Mental Control is Physical Control “I can handle the situation.” “The idea just slipped through my fingers.” Difficult Subjects are Adversaries “She struggled with algebra.” “He wrestled with the subject until he came to understand it.” Ideas are Food “The class gave me food for thought.” “It took some time to digest that information.” Ideas are Objects “Sally traded ideas with Sam.” “Sally searched for an idea all day.” Beliefs are Possessions “I hold certain beliefs.” “He acquired most of his beliefs during childhood.” Theories are Beings With Life Cycles “That theory died out.” “The theory is in an early stage of development.” The Conduit Metaphor (e.g., THE CONTENT IS CONTAINED IN THE STIMULUS) “Your work seems rather hollow.”
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Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
“The poem is bursting with meaning.” (e.g. IDEAS ARE PROJECTILES WHICH THE SENDER CONVEYS IN SOME MANNER) “She threw questions of money at me.” “He heaved the whole issue on me.” Words are Weapons “She used sharp words.” “It was a barrage of insults.” Psychological Forces are Physical Forces (e.g., MANIPULATION IS PHYSICAL MANIPULATION) “He twisted everyone’s emotions.” “She could bend his will.” (e.g., PSYCHOLOGICAL BENEFIT IS PHYSCIAL BENEFIT) “His pleasant remarks picked me up.” “Thoughts of his beloved nourish his soul.” Coherence is Whole “He presented a unified theory.” “Something is missing in that argument.” The Mind is a Machine “He slipped a cog.” “He churned out ideas.” Intelligence is a Light Force “He is very bright.” “I always thought he was a little dim.” This list of conceptual metaphors, and some of their linguistic realizations, offers only a glimpse of the rich, comprehensive system of metaphors that shape people’s understanding of mental functioning.33 There has been no attempt to collect all the conceptual metaphors scholars have inferred from their systematic linguistic analyses.34 Kövecses discussed several hundred conceptual metaphors in his book Metaphor: A Practical Introduction.35 Of course, scholars sometimes disagree over how best to characterize particular conceptual metaphors, as well as over which metaphorical expressions necessarily relate to specific conceptual metaphors as opposed to others (see Chapter 4). Still, one may generally claim that there are hundreds of conventional conceptual metaphors which play a role in structuring people’s understanding and talk of abstract concepts and events.
Universality of Conceptual Metaphors
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universality of conceptual metaphors There is significant cross-linguistic work showing that many cultures share similar conceptual metaphors.36 For instance, diverse languages, such as English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho, all contain metaphorical expressions motivated by the TIME IS SPACE conceptual metaphor.37 Interviews with native informants suggest that the conceptual metaphor AN ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER is present in English, Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian, Wolof, Zulu, and Polish, which represent several different language families.38 The primary metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING, and the more general THE MIND IS THE BODY conceptual metaphor, have been found in a diverse group of Indo-European languages.39 There is actually an extensive subsystem of metaphors in English for the mind, centered on the idea that THE MIND IS THE BODY.40 Among the specific metaphors are THINKING IS MOVING (e.g., “My mind was racing”), THINKING IS PERCEIVING (e.g., “I am trying to see what you are saying”), and THINKING IS OBJECT MANIPULATION (e.g., “Let’s toss around some ideas”), to name just a few examples. These metaphors are not special to English speakers, because, as Ning Yu showed, the same metaphors are also found in Chinese, such as THINKING IS MOVING (e.g., “si-lu” -thinking route/path- “train of thought”), THINKING IS PERCEIVING/ SEEING (e.g., “kan-fa” -see-method- “a way of looking at things”), and THINKING IS OBJECT MANIPULATION (e.g., “sixiang jiaoliu” -exchange of thoughts/ideas- “exchange of ideas”).41 LIFE IS A JOURNEY is, as noted throughout this book, a prominent conceptual metaphor in English. Not surprisingly, there is different linguistic evidence to suggest that it is widely seen in other languages as well. One analysis of a contemporary Greek corpus of several hundred thousand words examined terms related to this conceptual metaphor, such as “road,” “journey,” and “to pass through,” in addition to specific Greek ideas related to “Charon” and “odyssey.”42 The results showed that significant aspects of Greek life were conceived of as journeys. Several autobiographical titles specifically mentioned “my journey,” where people referred to a starting point, a direction, different destinations, obstacles encountered, turns, and a final end, such as the common expression “I passed through a lot of sorrows” to describe a difficult emotional experience as if one was moving through a particular stage of the journey. Not reaching one’s ultimate goals was referred to as remaining on a road, as in “He said he would go to university, he started but stayed on the road.” The struggle to attain life
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Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
goals is described as having unexpected difficulty along the journey, as in “He completed his diploma limping and crookedly.” Difficult hardships in reaching life goals were frequently characterized in terms of bad weather conditions that hampers travel, as in “It is a storm and it will pass,” and when someone wishes bad luck upon another he or she will often say “May you have bad weather!” implying that experiencing adverse weather conditions will interfere with attaining one’s desires and life goals. Greek refers to an impasse in life as having no good choices available through the imagery of a dead-end, as in “Ahead there is a cliff and behind a stream.” The final end of one’s life travels, the end of the road, was referred to as “He is walking boldly toward his death,” where the end point is a place of rest and sleep, as in “He grew very tired, but finally he is resting.” The cognitive linguistic research on cross-cultural conceptual metaphors also shows that two languages may share a conceptual metaphor, but that specific linguistic manifestations of these metaphors can reveal subtle differences in the cultural-ideological background in which conceptual metaphors function.43 For example, Kövecses examined linguistic instantiations of the classic LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor in English and Hungarian.44 The American English examples translate easily into Hungarian. In most cases, where English has a metaphorical word or phrase with a particular physical meaning, Hungarian also has a word or phrase with the same or similar physical meaning. This suggests that the conceptual metaphor LOVE IS A JOURNEY is expressed linguistically in much the same way in the two languages. Nonetheless, there are subtle differences in the ways that English and Hungarian conceive of LOVE IS A JOURNEY, which may reflect larger cultural themes shaping metaphorical concepts and talk. For instance, the English example “Look how far we have come” uses the word “come,” while Hungarian employs “jut,” meaning “get to a place after experiencing difficulties.” The English expression “We’ll have to go our separate ways” uses “we” in the subject position, while Hungarian uses “our road that separates.” Decisions about relationships appear to be made by internal considerations of active agents in English, while relationships are more influenced by external considerations in Hungarian (e.g., the fork in the road is forcing the agents to go on their separate ways). These subtle differences reflect cultural-ideological traditions with American English adopting a more active stance in regard to relationships, and life more generally, while Hungarian embraces a more fatalistic attitude toward relationships and life events. In this case, different instantiations of a single
Idioms and Proverbs
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conceptual metaphor in two languages reflects, and constrains, the ways individuals in different cultures reason about an abstract target domain. Two cultures may sometimes have different conceptual metaphors for a particular target domain, leading to radically different concepts for that domain in two languages. For instance, Chinese language and culture typically conceive of the heart as the locus of mind (i.e., THE HEART IS THE LOCUS OF MIND), which yields metaphorical concepts such as THE HEART IS THE RULER OF THE BODY. More broadly, within the Chinese cosmological view, the heart is the “center” of the body, with the human body being the “heart” of the universe, implying that the heart is the focal point of the entire universe.45 This view of THE MIND IS THE HEART informs many aspects of Chinese reasoning, including that seen in art, music, literature, politics, and medicine. In English, however, as well as in many Western cultures, the brain is the locus of mind, leading to THE MIND IS THE BRAIN metaphor, with the heart being seen as the center of feelings and emotions. This metaphorical model of the mind leads to alternative reasoning about the causes of human thought and action, which is also evident in a wide range of cultural artifacts and beliefs. Most generally, variation in the Chinese and English metaphorical models of mind “symbolize[s] an important difference between two major civilizations of the world caught in our label as heart-centering holism versus heart-head dualism.”46 Overall, the analysis of metaphorical expressions across different languages supports the claim that many conceptual metaphors are largely universal, particularly in cases where the metaphors are based on recurring bodily experiences. It is not surprising that thinking is metaphorically conceptualized in similar embodied ways across cultures because of the prominence that moving, perceiving, manipulating objects, and eating have in people’s everyday lives. Differences in the ways cultures metaphorically talk of certain abstract topics reflect important variations in the ways cultures think about those domains of experience (see Chapter 4). Verbal metaphors may be similar across many cultures, indicating similar conceptual metaphors as motivating forces in why diverse people speak and write as they do. This demonstration, however, does not deny both cross- and within-cultural variations that arise from various diachronic, social, ethnic, geographic, and individual factors.
idioms and proverbs Conceptual metaphor analysis has been applied to characterize a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, many of which are naturally related to metaphor in one form or another. For example, the topic of idiomaticity
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Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
has always been of interest to metaphor scholars, but often for very different reasons. Traditional accounts of idiomatic phrases, such as “kick the bucket,” “spill the beans,” and “blow your stack,” assume that their figurative meanings arise from forgotten historical reasons such that these phrases now exist as static, frozen dead metaphors. However, cognitive linguistic and psycholinguistic research has shown that many idioms have specific figurative meanings that are partly motivated by people’s active metaphorical, as well as metonymical, knowledge.47 For example, the idiomatic expression “John spilled the beans” maps our knowledge of someone tipping over a container of beans to that of a person revealing some previously hidden secret. English speakers understand “spill the beans” to mean “reveal the secret” because there are underlying conceptual metaphors, such as THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE PHYSICAL ENTITIES, that structure their conceptions of minds, secrets, and disclosure.48 The existence of these conceptual metaphors does not predict that certain idioms or conventional expressions must necessarily appear in the language (e.g., that English must necessarily have the expression “spill the beans” as opposed to “spill the peas” when talking of revealing secrets). Still, these independent conceptual metaphors partially explain why specific phrases (e.g., “spill the beans”) are used to refer to particular, usually abstract, events (e.g., the revealing of secrets). The cognitive linguistic view of idioms also assumes that idioms are partially analyzable, with the figurative meanings of the parts making some contribution to the metaphorical meaning of an entire phrase.49 People readily infer, for instance, that the “spill” of “spill the beans” refers to revealing something, with “beans” referring quite specifically to some individuated idea or set of ideas. The analyzability of idioms allows some of these phrases to be lexically and syntactically productive to a varying degree, and experimental research also suggests that the more analyzable an idiom is the more likely it is motivated by widely held conceptual metaphors. Idioms that are less analyzable, such as “kick the bucket,” tend to express figurative meanings (e.g., to suddenly die) which reflect metonymic relationships that are no longer part of speakers’ contemporary understandings. Proverbs, like idioms, are traditionally viewed as clichéd expressions that no longer reflect active metaphorical thinking. Cognitive linguistic and psycholinguistic studies have shown these beliefs to be untrue.50 For example, Lakoff and Turner claimed that proverbs are often motivated by various generic-level metaphors. For example, the proverbial expression “It’s better to let sleeping dogs lie,” is a specific instantiation of the
Polysemy
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GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor that maps knowledge from specific domains (e.g., our experiences with dogs at rest) to very general events (e.g., any situation in which it is best to leave matters as they presently stand). The specific-level schemas are concrete, easily imaginable, memorable, and connected to our everyday experiences.51 The SPECIFIC-TOGENERIC schema mapping allows proverbs to express general characteristics, often associated with folk wisdom, that are nonetheless grounded in the richness of the special case. The metaphorical vitality of common proverbs is evident in the ways some expressions are employed in modern contexts, often in novel grammatical forms. Anita Naciscione presented one example of this phenomenon by noting how the expression “The apple does not fall far from the tree” was used in a modern country western song.52 In “Being Pretty Ain’t Pretty” by the group “Pistol Annies,” the singer describes how different she is from her mother because of her spending money on make-up and material goods: But I’d spend the house Claiming on new cowboy boots How the hell did the apple Fall so damn far from the tree.
We can understand this twist on the original expression because of our conceptual metaphorical knowledge about SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS to infer that an apple falling far from the tree is not close to the tree and is therefore not similar to the tree’s essential characteristics. CMT makes no claim that the theory explains everything about idiomatic and proverbial language. Many idioms are motivated by metonymy, often with historically opaque roots (e.g., “kick the bucket” meaning to “suddenly die”). Other expressions may be true instances of “dead metaphors” (e.g., “She was unaware of her family pedigree”). But the common assumption, which is still repeated within many academic fields, that idioms, and many proverbs, are all dead metaphors, is clearly refuted by CMT research. Many idioms and proverbs demonstrate the existence, and continued use, of vitally alive conceptual metaphors in human conceptual systems.53
polysemy Metaphor and polysemy are related because many words with multiple linked meanings include conventional metaphorical senses. For instance, the statement “I see the point of your argument” employs the word “see” in
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Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
a metaphorical way, which reflects the motivating presence of the KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor. One analysis of the preposition “out” in verb–particle constructions demonstrates the importance of conceptual metaphors in expressing their metaphoric meanings.54 Consider the following instances of the “take out” construction: (a) I took the ring out of the box. (b) We fished out the ring (from the bowl). (c) We handed out the brochures. (d) The linguist picked two examples out of the newspaper. The verbs in these examples differ in that the examples in (a) and (b) express literal source domains, while (b) and (d) are metaphorical. On the other hand, the particle “out” presumes some kind of a container, which may also be literal (a and b) or metaphorical (c and d). In (c), for example, the pile of brochures is seen as a container from which different items are taken and handed to other people. Most generally, though, people think about containers in different metaphorical ways that shapes people’s understandings of “out” in the various verb–particle constructions. Several conceptual metaphors constrain which verbs are therefore paired with “out.” SOURCES ARE CONTAINERS SETS ARE CONTAINERS BOUNDARIES ARE CONTAINERS INACCESSIBILITY IS A CONTAINER
cry out, sing out, beach out pick out roll out, fill out, lay out, line out make out, work out, figure out
Thus, to “figure out” something is to make a solution cognitively accessible by thinking, a process that involves the conceptual metaphors A PROBLEM IS A LOCKED CONTAINER, THINKING IS CALCULATING, as well as ACCESSIBLE IS OUT, and KNOWING IS SEEING. Cognitive linguists are generally more inclined toward a network account of polysemy.55 These networks structure the senses of polysemous words which are related to one another according to a variety of cognitive principles (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, and generalization) such that the meanings of polysemous words are, at least, partly motivated. A classic instance of this is seen in the work by Claudia Brugman and George Lakoff on the organization of the preposition “over.”56 They identified over 100 different senses of “over” ranging from uses such as “The wall fell over” to more metaphorical instances, including “The play is over” and “Do it over, but don’t overdo it.” These varying senses are not independent,
Metonymy
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and arbitrarily determined, but are motivated by a small number of principled relations, which include conceptual metaphors, that are recurrent through the lexicon. By a series of such linking relations, each one of the senses of “over” may be tied together into a network or radial structure. A large body of research within cognitive linguistics has explored the importance of conceptual metaphors in motivating various complex metaphorical meanings for polysemous words.57
metonymy Metonymy typically refers to linguistic statements in which one wellunderstood or easily perceived aspect of something is used to represent or stand for the thing as a whole. Lakoff and Johnson talked a good deal about the importance of metonymy in language and thought. Consider the following set of conventional statements: “Washington has started a new war in Iraq.” “The White House isn’t saying anything.” “Wall Street is in a panic.” “Hollywood is putting out terrible movies.” “Paris has dropped hemlines this year.” These examples are not isolated expressions, but reflect the general principle by which a place may stand for an institution located at that place. For instance, a place like “The White House” stands for an institution located at that place, namely the US presidency. Cognitive linguistic studies have suggested that various metonymic models in our conceptual system underlie the use of many kinds of figurative expressions (e.g., THE PLACE FOR THE INSTITUTION LOCATED AT THAT PLACE, OBJECT USED FOR USER, CONTROLLER FOR CONTROLLED, and THE PLACE FOR THE EVENT).58 Within cognitive linguistics, metonymy is often viewed as a kind of domain highlighting, while metaphor is characterized as a form of domain mapping. For instance, the domain matrix of “book” comprises the domains of physical objects, artifacts, authorship, reading, etc., and a speaker may highlight any one of these domains in the domain matrix (e.g., “Proust is a fat book,” “Proust is difficult to read,” “Proust is out of print”). Similarly, the domain matrix of “trumpet” comprises the domains of sound as in “We all heard the trumpet,” or the domain of the player as in “The trumpet could not come today.”
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Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
Metonymy is often seen as primarily having a referential function, but it also plays a major role in drawing pragmatic inferences within discourse. For instance, the indirect request “Can you pass the salt?” highlights one obstacle for addressees in complying with the speaker’s request, namely the person’s ability to do as asked. By noting an important part of the sequence in fulfilling a request, speakers lead listeners to infer the large pragmatic reason for stating the specific question.59 Furthermore, speakers can easily prompt listeners to infer a series of real-world actions, or a “script,” by merely mentioning one salient part of that sequence. Thus, when someone simply states “John walked into a restaurant,” people will typically access a “restaurant script” that specifies that John likely wishes to eat, will get a table, order food, eat the food, pay the bill, and exit. Metonymic inferences are a key part of how people produce and understand various speech acts and implicatures.60 Most generally, metonymy, like metaphor, is a pervasive part of both thought and language. There is much debate over the relation between metonymy and metaphor, and there is much discussion within cognitive linguistics of the complex ways that metaphor and metonymy interact.61 Some of these arguments over the differences between metaphor and metonymy are relevant to battles within the metaphor wars, especially in regard to verbal metaphor identification (see Chapter 3). Still, metonymy and metaphor are both figures of thoughts, as well as speech, and have different experiential motivations.
novel metaphors Much of the long history of metaphor scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the creation and interpretation of novel metaphors. One of the reasons why CMT has received a negative response from some literary critics is because of its main claim that conventional linguistic expressions reveal the fundamental nature of the metaphorical mind. These critics see novel metaphors as the true locus of metaphorical meaning and individual creativity. However, conceptual metaphor analysis has been profitably applied to exploring the workings of novel, sometimes very creative, verbal metaphors.62 For example, Lakoff and Turner argued in More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor that novel metaphors are not always entirely new creations, but often are crafted extensions or elaborations of conceptual metaphors. As they noted:
Novel Metaphors
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Poets can appeal to the ordinary metaphors we live by in order to take us beyond them, to make us more insightful than we would be if we thought only in the standard ways. Because they lead us to new ways of conceiving the world, poets are the artists of the mind.63
Cognitive linguistic research, as well as studies within the field of stylistics, has demonstrated various ways that speakers and writers embellish upon more mundane, conventional ways of thinking about the world and our different life experiences. Novel metaphors are specifically created via the processes of extending, elaborating, questioning, and composing.64 An extension of the common metaphor DEATH IS SLEEP is seen in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in which he comments: To sleep? Perchance to dream! Ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?
An elaboration of the conceptual metaphor DEATH IS DEPARTURE is Horace’s reference to death in the line “external exile of the raft,” in which he gives a specific instantiation of the vessel that takes one away from life. Questioning arises when someone raises a question, or doubt, about a common metaphorical concept. For instance, Catullus questions whether the metaphor A LIFETIME IS A DAY is adequate to explain our eventual death when he wrote: Suns can set and return again, but when our brief light goes out, there’s one perpetual night to be slept through.
Finally, novel metaphorical language also arises from the articulation of composite metaphors. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 provides an excellent example of metaphorical composing, which concludes with the following lines: In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset had fadeth in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.
Parts of several conceptual metaphors motivate this quatrain, including LIGHT IS A SUBSTANCE, EVENTS ARE ACTIONS, LIFE IS A PRECIOUS POSSESSION, A LIFETIME IS A DAY, and LIFE IS LIGHT. These poetic metaphors are, therefore, not entirely novel creations in the sense of introducing new cross-domain mappings, but are specific, and spectacular, instantiations of common metaphorical concepts.65
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Conceptual Metaphor Analysis
Lakoff and Turner also defined a category of “image metaphors” that express the mapping of mental images but not concepts.66 These “image metaphors” include expressions such as the opening line of the poem by Andre Breton titled “Free Union” in which he writes “My wife whose hair is brush fire.” We understand this metaphor by mapping our mental image of a brush fire onto the domain of Breton’s wife’s hair, which gives rise to various concrete images in regard to the color, texture, and shape of her hair.67 More recent cognitive linguistic analyses suggest, however, that many image metaphors may involve conceptual mappings and not just the mapping of static mental images.68 The recruitment of conceptual metaphors in the creation and understanding of novel metaphors is always governed by context. Kövecses has argued that novel metaphors sometimes arise from people’s understanding of the immediate discourse situation. Consider one newspaper interview with the great American musician Fats Domino in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 which destroyed much of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. The article stated, “The 2005 hurricane capsized Domino’s life although he is loath to confess any inconvenience or misery outside of missing his social circle.” We understand “capsized” as referring to the disruption that Katrina had on Domino’s life, which seems appropriate given that “capsized” typically refers to the overturning of a boat on the sea given bad weather. Thus, the physical situation at hand shaped the selection and novel instantiation of conceptual metaphors in discourse. We interpret “capsized” as more generally referring to the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, which in this specific context gives rise to the more specific instantiation LIFE IS A SEA JOURNEY. A different example of context-induced metaphorical creativity is seen in a story about the Japanese auto industry, which stated, “The Americanization of Japan’s car industry shifts into higher gear.” This metaphorical utterance is motivated by the primary metaphor PROGRESS IS FORWARD MOTION. However, in the context of talking about the Americanization of Japan’s car industry, the local metaphorical phrase “shift into higher gear” is a specific, apt instantiation of the primary metaphor. Once again, a novel metaphor was motivated by a particular contextualization of a common conceptual metaphor. Finally, consider several instances of target-induced metaphorical creativity in discourse, each of which relates to the politics of European unification.69
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“The common currency is the weight-bearing pillar of the European house.” “(The European house is) a building without fire escapes. No escape if it goes wrong.” “We are delighted that Germany’s unification takes place under the European roof.” These statements are all creative instantiations of the conceptual metaphor POLITICAL STRUCTURES ARE BUILDINGS. However, each expression reflects the development that once a source domain (e.g., BUILDINGS) becomes conventionally associated with a target (e.g., GEOGRAPHICAL AREAS or POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS), we can often use any part of it to refer to the target if it fits. If someone has a negative view about the target, in this case the European Union, then one can refer to aspects of the source domain that are also seen in a negative light, such as a building that lacks fire escapes. In this way, the metaphorical mapping is initiated from the target to the source.
metaphor in discourse Individual verbal metaphors may be motivated by various conceptual metaphors, but different linguistic metaphors in discourse are often tied to single conceptual metaphorical themes. Consider, for instance, the following brief narrative from a speech given by the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, in which she talks about her view of the emerging European Union: There is a fear that the European train will thunder forward, laden with its customary cargo of gravy, toward a destination neither wished for nor understood by electorates. But the train can be stopped.
Thatcher expressed her desire to keep the United Kingdom independent of the growing European political movement toward a unified economy. She made this argument by referring to the metaphorical idea that EUROPEAN INTEGRATION IS A TRAIN JOURNEY, one that Thatcher believed to be moving in a bad direction, and which was ultimately not wished for by many European citizens. Note that many of the phrases in Thatcher’s comment are directly tied to this underlying conceptual metaphor, which provides an example of “extended metaphor” (i.e., one conceptual metaphor that motivates several related linguistic expressions in the same stretch of discourse).
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A large body of linguistic work has demonstrated the ways that conceptual metaphors are manifested in different types of extended discourse. Speakers and writers often elaborate upon common metaphorical ideas (e.g., understanding political actions as a JOURNEY along some path to reach certain destinations or goals) using various interrelated verbal metaphors, as Thatcher did above. The existence of these coherent patterns of verbal metaphors in discourse is often viewed as significant empirical evidence in support of the claim that conceptual metaphors structure both thought and language. Consider just a few other instances of conceptual metaphors within extended discourse. Several scholars have advanced the idea that much of the Bible is motivated by the intersection of various conceptual metaphors.70 Many individual verbal metaphors are clearly motivated by the general conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, as seen in the following examples: “You must follow exactly the path that the Lord your God has commanded you. . ..” (Deuteronomy 5:33). “My foot has held fast to his steps; I have kept his way and have not turned aside” (Job 23:11). “I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice” (Genesis 18:19). The “path” being followed in each instance above is clearly metaphorical and characterizes the ethical conduct dictated by God. The conceptual metaphor here is LEADING A MORAL LIFE IS MAKING A JOURNEY ON GOD’S WAY. Deviations from this conceptual metaphor give rise to the metaphorical idea of sinning as deviation from God’s way, as manifested in the following expressions: “But when they [the Israelites] departed from the way, he [God] had prescribed for them, they were utterly defeated” (Judith 5:18). “[The Lord to Moses] Your people [. . .] have been quick to turn aside from the way that commanded them” (Exodus 32:8). The metaphor of the journey can be realized in two ways: either the traveler follows God’s way and becomes a moral person, or the traveler walks away from God, travels on evil ways, and becomes an immoral person. This choice gives rise to the conceptual metaphor that MORAL CHOICE IS CHOOSING A PATH, as found in the following statements:
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“I have chosen the way of faithfulness” (Psalms 119:30). “Happy are those who do not [. . .] take the path that sinners tread” (Psalms 1:1). Furthermore, the kind of path traveled metaphorically conveys specific meanings, such that God’s way is the straight path: “you averted our ruin, walking in the straight path before our God” (Judith 13:20). “To the faithful his ways are straight, but full of pitfalls for the wicked” (Sirach 39:24). By contrast, the evil way is crooked: “But those who turn aside to their own crooked way the Lord will lead away with evildoers” (Isaiah 35:8–9). Evil ways are also strewn with obstacles: “The way of the lazy is overgrown with thorns, but the path of the upright is a level highway” (Proverbs 16:25). In the New Testament, Jesus presented himself as the divine guide leading persons on the straight path toward God and righteousness. Hence Jesus metaphorically described himself as “the gate”: “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out to find pasture” (John 10:9). “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:4–6). Most important, these different religious metaphors are consistent in both their forms and functions with metaphors seen in ordinary discourse domains. One reason why religious metaphors are compelling as didactic instruments is precisely because they are rooted in metaphorical thought patterns that are quite familiar to ordinary readers. As shown above, different segments of the same large texts share a common conceptual base by being related to a widespread conceptual metaphor, in this case LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Religious texts also express broader allegorical messages. Allegory involves an extended metaphor in which the entire narrative introduces and elaborates upon a metaphorical source domain to evoke larger life themes – for example, the struggle in our lives as the aim to reach important goals. Within the Bible, one of the most famous allegories, often repeated at Christian services, is Psalm 23, which overtly describes the physical journey
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through Egypt but alludes to the larger symbolic issue of humans striving to attain communion with the Lord:71 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death (i.e., Egypt), I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. (Psalm 23)
Understanding allegory, such as that seen in Psalm 23, requires that one applies a metaphorical reading to some language or situation to obtain an overall allegorical meaning, even if no individual word or phrase is metaphorical.72 A major reason for this facility is the “allegorical impulse” that is fundamental to human cognition, in which we continually seek diverse connections between the immediate here and now and more abstract, enduring symbolic themes. For instance, reference to the Lord as a “shepherd” who “makes me lie down in green pastures . . . [and] leads me beside quiet waters” and, later on, “prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies” alludes to larger symbolic themes about how the Lord offers guidance and safety through worship of his teachings. The evocation of these symbolic themes creates diverse, rich networks of meaning that are metaphorical, deeply embodied, and evocative of multiple affective and aesthetic reactions. A different example of extended metaphor in discourse can be seen in the following narrative, originally published in The Economist, which speaks of political problems associated with the development of the European Union.73 The German question never dies. Instead, like a flu virus, it mutates. On the eve of unification, some European leaders worried that it would resume killer form. “We’ve beaten the Germans twice and now they’re back,” said Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister. Such fears now look comical, but even today’s mild strain causes aches and pains, which afflict different regions in different ways. America’s symptoms are mild. Central Europe seems to have acquired immunity. After unification, 85% of Poles looked upon Germany as a threat [. . .]. Now just a fifth do. It is among Germany’s long-standing west and south European partners that the German question feels debilitating, and where a dangerous flare-up still seems a possibility. Germany’s answer to the question matters not only to them. It will shape Europe, and therefore the world.
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Andreas Musolff claimed that this narrative is structured around the POLITICAL BODY metaphor, which in this case is manifested by various words and phrases related to illness and death (e.g., “flu virus,” “mild strain causes aches and pains,” “symptoms are mild,” “acquired immunity,” “dangerous flare-up,” and “killer form”). Much political discourse, along with various other expository genres, exemplifies the use of extended verbal metaphors that are all related, loosely or tightly, to specific conceptual metaphorical ideas.74 The extended use of conceptual metaphors in discourse is by no means limited to written language. Discourse analysts have discerned that verbal metaphors often cluster together in conversation, sometimes centered on specific metaphorical concepts. Consider the following example, which I have written about elsewhere of a discussion between a psychotherapist, Judy, and her client, Howard, about how he dealt with difficulties in life.75 judy: “When you have a problem, what do you do with it?” howard: “I usually let it be a problem. I don’t usually do anything much. . .” judy: “Does the problem go away if you don’t do anything about it?” howard: “No, it gets worse . . . or it just complicates things as you go further down the road.” judy: “Can you look at your own life. . . look down the road of that line and see what that’s gonna do . . . in your life?” howard: “Look down the road?” judy: “Yeah, kinda visualize what your own life will be like . . ..” howard: “It will just continue the way it is.” judy: “Kind of like a snowball effect.” howard: “No no not a snowball. Just kinda floating, floating down the river. . .” judy: “What’s it like to be floating down the river? Tell me more.” howard: “It’s comfortable. It’s safe.. Everything just keeps on an even keel, you know. . . You’re just kinda floating.” judy: “Kind of in a canoe? Going down the river or..” howard: “No, more like a great ole big barge.. on a great old big river.” judy: “Barge, very stable, kinda.” howard: “Yeah, plenty of room to spread out and sit in the sun. Yeah, and you don’t have to worry about falling off the edge.. And sun, you know, it’s kinda hazy. It’s not really clear sun. It’s kinda hazy. Kinda half asleep, that’s what it’s like.” judy: “What happens when you kind of come to the falls, the falls that are down there, about two miles down the river?” howard: “Get the hell off the river!”
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Conceptual Metaphor Analysis judy: “That’s certainly one way to handle it. Get out.” howard: “I feel a lot of discomfort. That’s what happened just last month. I hit those falls last month.” judy: “Last time there was um kind of an external situation that sort of forced you out of your boat.” howard: “It was uncomfortable, but I was, I was pretty, I was enjoying it too. And I didn’t want to go back into just floating. It was uncomfortable and I was out, I don’t, I’ve been floating a long time.” judy: “Mmm, well you’ve found what works for you, in a sense.” howard: “What works for me?” judy: “Floating.” howard: “Because I’m . . . stay comfortable and” judy: “In a sense, but it may now be. . . inappropriate. It may not be working as well as it did in the past.” howard: “Yeah, I need a little excitement now and then.” judy: “Some rapids.” howard: “Yeah, something I can keep in control of and not drown.”
This exchange is primarily focused on the ways Howard interprets his life as a specific kind of journey (e.g., with him floating down the river in a great old, big barge). Note that the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor is given a very specific instantiation, one that is negotiated between Howard and his therapist. Many conversations, like this one, illustrate how different instances of verbal metaphors arise from particular conceptual metaphors that help structure more abstract ideas, and yet also present contextsensitive meanings which unfold in various ways in different discourse circumstances. Finally, people mix their verbal metaphors quite frequently in both speech and writing. Consider one example from the column “Block that Metaphor!” in The New Yorker magazine, in which a reporter described the controversy that erupted in one online debate.76 The column produced more flames than an oil field in Abu Dhabi. “The hysterical tone of the column is astounding,” wrote cyberpundit Brock N. Meeks. “This sort of journalistic tripe is poison and yet, at the same time, grist for the mill among the twisted jackals who make up Congress and who, it seems, have no qualms about using the Internet as a personal whipping post whenever it suits their fancy.”
References to “journalistic tripe,” “grist for the mill,” “twisted jackals,” and “personal whipping post” are very different verbal metaphors, each with different conceptual metaphorical motivations (e.g., “journalistic
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tripe” emerges from BAD IDEAS ARE BAD FOOD). Various critics have argued that CMT is incapable of explaining mixed metaphors, because they appear to reveal inconsistency in metaphorical thought sequences. However, various linguistic and psycholinguistic analyses suggest that mixed metaphors in discourse do not indicate disorganization in thought and they are not necessarily difficult for listeners and readers to understand. In fact, the prominence of mixed metaphors in discourse highlights the flexibility of metaphorical thought given people’s ability to switch between different metaphorical concepts, sometimes referring to the same abstract topic.77
the scope of studies related to conceptual metaphors The rise of CMT within linguistics has been accompanied by a diverse set of research findings. It is simply impossible to properly capture the incredible variety of scholarly work on conceptual metaphor within even a large book like this one. There are many dozens of scholarly journals, individual books, edited book collections, and conference proceedings that contain thousands of studies examining different conceptual metaphorical phenomena. For now, however, consider a list of some of the topics studied related to conceptual metaphor as seen in the pages of just three scholarly journals Metaphor and Symbol, Cognitive Linguistics, and Review of Cognitive Linguistics.78 Conceptual metaphors in merger and acquisition discourse.79 Conflicting metaphors in educational reform proposals in Hong Kong.80 Chinese body metaphors for courage.81 Metaphors for immigrants in the United States.82 Metaphorical motion in English and Turkish.83 Arguments as a war or a game of chess.84 Metaphors for chess.85 Metaphors of musical motion.86 Metaphors in psychoanalysis.87 Cross-cultural variation in conceptual metaphor.88 Conceptual metaphors in hieroglyphic script.89 Metaphor in English speaking activity.90 Cross-cultural analysis of animal metaphors.91 Metaphoric expression and culture.92
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Embodied metaphor in Tunisian Arabic anger expressions.93 Metaphorical scenarios in public discourse.94 Horse metaphors in Spanish and English.95 Conceptual metaphors in Darwin’s theory of evolution.96 Political debates about the European Union.97 Metaphorical construals of time.98 Metaphors of emptiness in Buddhism’s Heart Sutra.99 Chess metaphors in English and Hungarian.100 Metaphors for the self in Chinese narratives of depression.101 Ancient Roman metaphors for communication.102 Conceptual metaphors in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”103 Conceptual metaphors for emotion in Korean.104 Conceptual metaphors in translation.105 Metaphors of joy and happiness in Greek.106 Metaphorical extensions of “path” and “road.”107 Metaphors of game playing in American life.108 Metaphors for mental functioning as physical functioning.109 Exploitation of strategic metaphors for the Persian Gulf War.110 Metaphors for democracy in Tocqueville.111 Conceptual metaphors in American political discourse.112 Metaphors for regional peace in Latin America.113 Holocaust metaphors in Israeli discourse.114 Metaphors in the language of rape.115 Metaphors in Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”116 Metaphors of happiness.117 Metaphors in metaphysics.118 Metaphors for anger and happiness in English and Chinese.119 Metaphors for the US war on drugs.120 Metaphors in legal reasoning.121 Metaphors for global warming.122 Conceptual metaphors in American proverbs.123 Metaphors on 20th-century art commentary.124 Metaphors in religious texts.125 Metaphors for teaching.126 Conceptual metaphors for money and finance in Spanish.127 Metaphors for geoengineering.128 Metaphors for self in Chinese autobiographical writings.129 Metaphors of love in German and Brazilian Portuguese.130 Metaphors of happy and unhappy life stories in Russian.131 Chat metaphors for self in Turkish and English.132
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Olfactory metaphors in print ads for perfume.133 Metaphors in press headlines of globalization.134 Metaphors of life and death in Turkish.135 Metaphors in Greek pain lexicalization.136 Conceptual metaphors in Chinese TV ads.137 Metaphors for American friendship.138 Space-to-time metaphors in temporal concepts.139 Metaphorical mappings in American Sign Language.140 Metaphorical extensions of “straight.”141 Conceptual metaphors in American idiomatic phrases.142 Metaphors in American Presidential debates.143 Chinese metaphors for thinking.144 Theories are building metaphors.145 Metaphors in Nigerian ideology.146 Metaphors for cloning in scientific and journalistic texts.147 Mental imagery in conceptual metaphors.148 Metaphorical extensions of “weight” in Swedish.149 Metaphors of dirt and cleanliness in moral and unmoral reasoning.150 Conceptual metaphors for Chinese verbal behavior.151 This selective list of studies from cognitive linguistics highlights both the depth and breadth of conceptual metaphors in diverse aspects of human life. These different studies are quite empirical in the degree to which they examine various discourse domains, across many languages and cultures. Simply put, the overwhelming conclusion to be drawn from this research is that people have a strong tendency to speak and write of their ideas and experiences using widely shared metaphorical concepts, many of which are grounded in embodied source domains.152
conclusion Conceptual analysis has provided an invaluable wealth of linguistic evidence on the metaphorical nature of human thought and action. Empirical studies within cognitive linguistics suggest the motivating presence of conceptual metaphors within conventional expressions, novel verbal metaphors, extended metaphors in discourse, polysemy, idioms, proverbs, and various kinds of inferential reasoning. Although conceptual metaphors do not account for all aspects of verbal metaphor use, they offer powerful constraints on why people talk and think in the particular ways they do. Even many critics of CMT employ the method of exploring systematicity
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within linguistic metaphors to infer different factors that shape patterns of metaphoricity in language. This fact alone has led to CMT being quite prominent in the interdisciplinary world of metaphor research. At the same time, cognitive linguistic studies uncovering the specific contents of abstract human thought, and its embodied, metaphorical foundations, have helped CMT become a major theory within cognitive science. My strong argument is that the linguistic evidence described in this chapter must be acknowledged, and deeply studied, as debates continue on the nature of metaphoricity in human experience. It is now time to take a closer look at some of the specific battles that have been fought in metaphor wars regarding different claims about conceptual metaphors, their psychological reality as enduring mental structures, and their power to shape human action and social realities.
3 Identifying Metaphors in Language
Understanding the relations between metaphorical language and thought requires some method for identifying metaphors in discourse. Creating a reliable scheme for metaphor identification, however, can be very difficult work. Consider the opening lines of a classical music review for Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring,” performed by the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas in June 2013.1 Michael Tilson Thomas recently described the San Francisco Symphony’s Stravinsky festival as a “connect the dots” event. Friday’s terrific program was just that. The raw materials for Stravinsky’s astonishing imagination – the keening, unvarnished vocal music of rural Russia – were laid out at the start of the night, and it flowed from there, winding toward “Le Sacre du printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”), performed with a clean wallop. . . It’s music that gets the blood rushing with its howling vocal lines, clangorous spirit and clashing, clustered harmonies. Eerie and celebratory, both, it imprinted itself upon the composer.
This prose is typical of the language in music reviews, as the writer employs various metaphorical messages to describe his experience listening to the symphony’s performance. But what words or phrases in this passage convey metaphorical meaning? Go back, re-read the narrative, and underline any words that you believe are metaphorical. If you complete this metaphor identification task, you may find some words that clearly express metaphoricity. For example, the words in the phrase “connect the dots” appear to have metaphorical meaning, as does the word “unvarnished” in the phrase “unvarnished vocal music.” When the writer suggests that the symphony was “performed with a clean wallop,” the words “clean wallop” are used to express meanings different from their standard physical uses. 57
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Still, some people have difficulty deciding whether or not other words convey metaphorical meaning. Are “keening” when speaking of “vocal music,” “laid out” when describing Stravinsky’s imagination, and “clangorous,” “harmonies,” clashing,” and “clustered” when talking of the vocal “lines” metaphorical? How do we really know whether any word or phrase necessarily conveys metaphorical meaning in context? Metaphor enthusiasts have long engaged in fierce debates over whether or not specific uses of words, phrases, and expressions in discourse should be recognized as having metaphorical meaning. These arguments have led to several attempts to create schemes for determining whether particular instances of speech or writing should count as metaphors. The struggle to identify metaphor in language has significant consequences for conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), as well as for many competing theories of metaphor. Simply put, if CMT claims that underlying conceptual metaphors motivate different conventional metaphorical expressions in language, then the theory must, as a first step, precisely identify what words or phrases actually express metaphorical meanings in discourse. CMT does not presently advance a specific procedure for identifying metaphor in language. Individual linguists, and others, simply assert that particular words or expressions convey metaphorical meaning, usually by noting the cross-domain mappings between a discourse topic and the source domain used to speak of that idea (e.g., speaking of life as different physical journeys). As Lakoff and Johnson once observed, “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another.”2 Critics of CMT, however, argue that many of the metaphor judgments made by cognitive linguists are suspect and biased in favor of the theory. For example, CMT scholars sometimes argue that a specific linguistic statement must be metaphorical simply because it appears to be motivated by a previously established conceptual metaphor. Thus, “My career is on the rocks” is metaphorical because it relates to the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. This style of argumentation appears, to some, to be circular and does not clearly articulate a reliable, bottom-up procedure for identifying metaphors. These difficulties in metaphor identification make it nearly impossible, so the critics claim, to properly test whether or not conceptual metaphors really exist and partly motivate why speakers talk about many abstract topics in the systematic ways they do. This chapter describes criticisms leveled against CMT for its habit of labeling certain linguistic expressions as metaphorical. I discuss some of the larger problems associated with attempts to identify words or phrases as having “literal” or “metaphorical” meaning and argue that people’s
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intuitions about these matters sometimes vary given a wide range of factors. Most importantly, our conscious beliefs about metaphorical language do not always accurately reflect the extent to which metaphor structures our unconscious thinking about different concepts and meanings. I then review several concrete methods for identifying metaphor in language, acknowledging both their successes and limitations. One of these proposals attempts to reshape metaphor scholarship by identifying “deliberate” metaphors, an idea that is advanced in opposition to CMT. Following this, I discuss the general relations between metaphorical language and thought by showing how metaphorical meanings can be displayed using both metaphorical and non-metaphorical language. These observations prevent us from drawing simple links between the number of metaphorically used words and phrases with the extent of metaphorical thinking. Finally, I present several applications of metaphor identification, which do not simply count up metaphorically used words or phrases, but explore the dynamical ways metaphorical ideas unfold both within individual conversations and across written texts. My summary characterizes the present state of research and thinking on metaphor identification, noting areas of support for CMT, and the need for an expanded search for metaphoricity in language use.
the goals of metaphor identification Why do we need methods for identifying metaphor? Isn’t the presence of metaphor obvious, even if we struggle to specify what metaphor is? Defining metaphor is reminiscent of the attempt in law to precisely define the concept of “pornography.” The US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once famously observed about pornography that “I know it when I see it,”3 even if he was unable to clearly define what pornography may be. We may be in a similar situation with metaphor in sometimes being able to state, even with confidence, “There is a metaphor!” without then being able to state what precisely defines the concept of metaphor. Still, many of the struggles over the validity of CMT are directly related to defining metaphor and how best to empirically identify it in discourse. A major problem in comparing theories of metaphor is that many scholars selectively choose isolated metaphors from speech and writing, such as Shakespeare’s famous “Juliet is the sun,” and explicate the defining properties of metaphor more generally from consideration of only these few examples.
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But just as lepidopterists would be remiss if they solely examined butterflies that were most notable or easiest to catch, metaphor researchers need to study the multiple forms of metaphor and how metaphorical words get used in the wilds of real discourse. Simply focusing only on apt, creative, or beautiful metaphors in isolation fails to capture the pervasiveness of metaphor in language and thought. One of CMT’s significant claims, once again, is that metaphor exists even in the most mundane aspects of speech, writing and many other communicative mediums. Verifying this idea demands that scholars come to some agreement on how best to identify metaphor, which may require a major expansion of what we think is metaphorical in language. A theory of metaphor identification should not be confused with a theory of how metaphors are understood. A common error in many traditional discussions of metaphor is the assumption that people must necessarily identify that some stretch of language belongs to the category of “metaphor” before that language can be properly understood. As the philosopher Ina Lowenberg noted back in 1975, “Any satisfactory formulation of the principle of metaphor requires the identifiability of metaphor since they cannot be understood or produced unless recognized as such.”4 Under this view, the recognition that some use of language does not convey “literal” meaning prompts the search for a specific meaning type (e.g., “This is metaphor!”), which then activates special psychological processes to interpret the contextual, metaphorical meanings. Much psychological research demonstrates, however, that people do not interpret metaphor by consciously, or even unconsciously, noting “there is metaphor and I will now proceed to understand its exact meaning.”5 There may be times when a word or phrase evokes the conscious impression “That is an interesting/apt/bizarre metaphor,” yet these occasions are rare given the relative frequency of our encounters with metaphor in language. We sometimes recognize something as “metaphor” after its meaning has already been, even if partially, understood. Still, metaphor recognition or identification does not necessarily precede our quick, or even more reflective, understanding of verbal metaphor. One of the fascinating, and perhaps paradoxical, aspects of metaphor is that we are often in its presence without knowing that this is the case. Metaphor may allow us to escape from clichéd reality, to paraphrase the poet Wallace Stevens’s famous aphorism, but it may also be a fundamental part of the reality from which there is no escape.6 The fact remains that identifying metaphor requires a sense that some words are doing something different in discourse. As philosopher Mark
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Johnson once observed, “Our identification of an utterance as metaphor does seem to involve some strain between the normal sense of the utterance and the total speech situation in which it occurs.”7 Even though people may rarely experience words or phrases in a conscious manner as “metaphors,” we still need some way of demarking what is metaphorical and then use this as the basis for drawing further conclusions about the nature of metaphorical thought and experience.
are some conventional expressions really metaphorical? Consider several expressions that are viewed by CMT as supporting the existence of two different conceptual metaphors. Life is a Journey Molly was off to a great start in her job. Jake got sidetracked as he was studying for his final exams. Ricky worked ever so slowly toward his Ph.D. Janet finally reached her goal of becoming a millionaire. Sadness is Down Chris was feeling really low. Peter was down in the dumps after his divorce. Carrie was terribly depressed. How do we know that any of these statements express metaphorical meaning? Cognitive linguists argue that each of these statements refer to topics that are conceptualized by knowledge from a different domain of experience (e.g., sadness is understood in terms of downward spatial relations). These conventional ways of talking about life and sadness are metaphorical precisely because of these cross-domain references. As Zoltán Kövecses commented, “What does it mean then to know a metaphor? It means to know the systematic mappings between a source and target. This happens in an unconscious manner.”8 Critics of CMT see many of the above conventional statements as expressing meaning that is “the normal sense of an utterance.” These conventional expressions may have once been interpreted as metaphorical, and perhaps came into the language because of metaphorical concepts, but are now seen by contemporary speakers as “literal” speech or “dead” metaphors. For example, the literary scholar Patrick Hogan considered the sentence “I will defend my views by clarifying my basic approach.”
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Although people may interpret this expression quite easily, Hogan claims that it is a “metaphorical mess.”9 He asks “How can an ‘approach’ be ‘basic’? How can an ‘approach’ be clarified? How can clarification be a defense?”10 The fact that some expression, such as the one Hogan considered, is a “metaphorical mess” should not imply that people necessarily interpret it without using entrenched metaphorical knowledge (i.e., conceptual metaphors). But Hogan’s specific argument was that our understanding of “I will defend my views by clarifying my basic approach” is entirely literal given that “the relevant meanings are lexicalized.”11 People do not infer that certain words in this expression (e.g., “defend,” “clarify”) must somehow be understood given underlying metaphorical concepts. He suggests that the systematicity among many conventional expressions, such as those listed above, is not due to the motivating presence of specific conceptual metaphors, but can be fully explained in terms of simple lexical priming processes. Lexical priming bunches certain ideas together and forms patterns that appear, in some cases, as if they all shared the same metaphorical structure. The presumed metaphorical structure, or conceptual metaphor, may just be apparent and not real. For instance, the word “depart” in “The dear departed Tom Jones” primes other entries for “depart,” one of which makes reference to journey.12 Conceptual metaphors, under this view, may primarily be generalizations that arise from lexical priming processes, but are not reflections of underlying human cognition. Moreover, many utterances seen as metaphorical, and arising from conceptual metaphors, may not express metaphorical meanings at all.13 Psychologist Mathew McGlone similarly suggested that many of the conventional expressions seen as metaphorical within CMT need not be understood as such. He argues that conventional expressions such as “I’m in trouble” do not convey metaphorical meaning (via the STATES ARE LOCATIONS metaphor), precisely because these statements do not have the semantic incongruity typically seen in metaphor. More generally, “By blurring the distinction between literal and metaphorical language, the theory [CMT] becomes incoherent, both as a theory of language comprehension and as a theory of conceptual representation.”14 This argument over whether a particular statement is understood literally or via conceptual metaphors, again, demands some way of identifying whether any word or phrase expresses metaphorical meaning. Defining what is metaphorical implicitly starts with the assumption that the literal
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meanings of words and sentences can be reliably determined. But specifying the literal meaning of any word or phrase can also be notoriously difficult to do. Experimental studies demonstrate that asking people to make judgments about the literal meanings of linguistic expressions gives highly variable results that always depend on the specific judgment task and the contexts in which these statements are presented.15 The inconsistency in people’s judgments of literal meaning is not limited to the intuitions of untutored undergraduate students, but infiltrates the scholarly literature on verbal metaphor understanding. For instance, individual psycholinguistic studies on metaphorical language processing often compare the time required to understand “metaphorical” and “literal” expressions. A closer inspection of the linguistic utterances supposedly conveying “metaphorical” and “literal” meanings reveals incredible differences, across studies, in regard to what constitutes both of these types of meaning.16 This variation in how metaphorical meaning is characterized and exemplified in psycholinguistic studies makes it difficult to draw general conclusions about people’s use and understanding of “metaphorical” language in comparison to other kinds of linguistic meaning. One immediate bias in traditional accounts is the belief that verbal metaphors are best defined as “A is B” or “A is like B” statements, such as “Man is wolf” or “My surgeon is like a butcher.” Each of these cases has target domains that are explicitly mentioned in the same linguistic statement as the source domain (e.g., “surgeon” is the target concept and “butcher” is the source concept). As noted in Chapter 2, most of the attention given to metaphor in the fields of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and literary studies focus on these specific kinds of “resemblance” metaphors, despite the fact that these are relatively infrequent uses of metaphor.17 The primary focus in the study of “A is B” metaphors and similes has been devoted to how these phrases express metaphorical meanings through the interaction of the A and B, or topic and vehicle, terms. Most everyone acknowledges that statements such as “Encyclopedias are like goldmines” are metaphorical, unlike the meaning of expressions such as “Encyclopedias are like dictionaries.” But scholars differ considerably over the linguistic and cognitive operations that lead people to infer the metaphoricity of certain “A is B” forms, and what exactly makes some of these metaphorical expressions creative or apt, and others not. Ideas about identifying metaphors within this domain of research have been traditionally centered around defining what makes a “good” or “apt” metaphor,
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and not how any instance of speech can be recognized as expressing metaphorical meaning.18 Many proposals have been advanced for explaining the production and interpretations of resemblance metaphors, yet there have been surprisingly fewer efforts made to relating these theories, and some of the accompanying empirical research, with the work on conceptual metaphor.19 Still, metaphorical language involves a variety of linguistic forms, including ones in which the target concept is implied or only evident from the discourse context. When a speaker says, “We’re at a crossroads” in the context of trying to negotiate a contract between two companies, the word “crossroads” is used to better understand the target domain of negotiating a business transaction. These “indirect” metaphors may not always be as creative or poetic as some of the classic forms of metaphor studied in the traditional literature (e.g., “Juliet is the sun”). People may, nonetheless, understand phrases like “We’re at a crossroads” as conveying metaphorical meaning. Chapter 5 reviews the large body of experimental research that supports this very conclusion. A related topic that continues to plague metaphor identification concerns the difference between conventional and novel instances of metaphorical language. Some critics of CMT argue that the conventional expressions often studied by cognitive linguists no longer retain their metaphoricity, while novel metaphors reflect active, cross-domain mappings that are the true signatures of metaphorical thinking. As mentioned earlier, conventional expressions, according to many critics, may be understood as conveying “literal meanings” and can be understood directly without any special type of metaphor processing.20 For example, according to some metaphor scholars, the single statement “He was depressed” may at one point have been motivated by the metaphor SADNESS IS DOWN, yet it now can be readily understood as referring to sadness without any access to this conceptual metaphor. Of course, some conventional expressions are motivated by other figurative schemes of thought, such as metonymy (e.g., the figurative meaning of “kick the bucket”), or they truly reflect metaphorical concepts that are no longer alive in contemporary speakers’ conceptual systems (e.g., “pedigree” was motivated by the iconic images of a goose foot). For this reason, it is mistaken to simply lump all instances of so-called conventional expressions together as part of one homogenous category of language. Different conventional expressions may have varying types of conceptual motivations for their typical meanings. Nonetheless, many conventional metaphors retain their original metaphorical roots and are
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understood as such by contemporary speakers (again, see Chapter 5 for experimental evidence in support of this conclusion). The claim that conventional expressions are often understood as conveying metaphorical meanings touches on a key debate within the metaphor wars. Critics sometimes argue that CMT does not properly distinguish between metaphor and polysemy.21 Consider the expression “John can’t stand working for the government.” A conceptual metaphor analysis would explain this statement’s meaning as being partly motivated by the primary metaphor PERSISTENT IS REMAINING ERECT, which implies that something being unable to stand is not able to persist or endure anymore (i.e., as John is struggling to endure his job with the government). However, one could argue that the word “stand” is more simply polysemous in having multiple, related senses, with the most frequent ones being directly encoded in the mental lexicon, including the sense specific to not being able to endure. There would be no need, under this alternative view, to assume that people must infer a metaphorical, cross-domain mapping, to understand the meaning of “stand” in the context of “John can’t stand working for the government,” precisely because its contextually appropriate interpretation can be directly accessed via a process of lexical disambiguation. For this reason, the conventional expression “John can’t stand working for the government” should not be identified as a “metaphor.” Should certain word meanings be recognized as instances of “metaphor”? Some scholars respond negatively to this question because, in their view, metaphors are creative instances of language that are distinct from conventionalized word uses. There may have been a moment when the word “stand” was first employed in a non-physical way (i.e., having little in context to do with physical standing). Understanding this metaphorical meaning may have required people to draw an active cross-domain mapping. Over time, however, the word’s non-physical meaning became so familiar and detached from its original physical source that people see it as just one of its many meanings. This view completely negates the often complex historical, cultural, and embodied reasons for words having the meanings they do. It assumes that contemporary speakers simply do not, even tacitly, find any motivated connection between the use of “stand,” for instance, in its different physical and non-physical interpretations. This perspective would also maintain that people’s continued bodily experiences of being able to stand when one is persisting or enduring has nothing to do with their understanding and use of the word “stand” as expressing a nonphysical meaning in discourse.
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My argument is that people tacitly recognize some of the motivations for why certain words express different kinds of meaning, including non-physical ones that are related via metaphor. These motivations enable people to use polysemous words in a variety of creative ways and may be part of the meaning inferences people engage in when using, understanding, and even identifying specific words as conveying non-literal meanings. Again, Chapter 5 presents psycholinguistic evidence in favor of this position. Most importantly, people may automatically retrieve the conceptual, embodied motivations for metaphorical meaning, perhaps in the form of a conceptual metaphor, without having to compute a cross-domain mapping. Conceptual metaphors may simply be part of people’s automatic understandings of conventional, metaphorical word meanings. Part of the difficulty in determining whether a word or phrase is metaphorical depends on the extent to which its metaphoricity is seen as being dead or alive. For the most part, linguists and psychologists explore the difference between dead and alive metaphors as a property of the language, as if the very words themselves underwent some process of dying or maintaining life. Although CMT assumes that metaphor vitality is connected to enduring conceptual knowledge, this approach typically sees vitality as a collective property of all people, and not of individuals. Cornelia Müller provided an important corrective to past attempts to think about metaphor vitality and death by suggesting, among other things, that metaphoricity is really a matter of cognitive activation for specific individuals in particular moments of speaking and listening.22 This dynamic view of metaphor claims that people may use so-called dead metaphors, but still give evidence of having vital metaphorical knowledge motivating a word or phrase’s use in context. For example, a speaker may use the term “depressed” to talk of another individual. Most analysts would claim that the connection between “depressed” and being very sad or having negative affect is quite opaque or even dead. But examination of this same speaker’s manual gestures during talk shows her hands moving in a slow, downward motion when saying “depressed,” which reflects her conceptual understanding of SAD IS DOWN even if her speech may be characterized, by some, as expressing, a dead metaphor. Determining the degree to which any metaphor is dead, sleeping, or alive depends on assessing a person’s communicative actions in the moment, involving the analysis of the individual’s entire repertoire of language, speech sounds, gestures, and other body movements. Judgments about whether some word or
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expression is living or dead, on some people’s view “literal,” cannot necessarily be made from the sole perspective of looking at the language on the page alone. This conclusion has important implications for the general effort to create reliable, even computational, methods for identifying metaphors, as will be discussed below. At the same time, novel metaphors do not constitute a homogenous category of language. Some novel metaphors have close ties to enduring conceptual metaphors and others do not. For example, the statement “Our marriage was a roller coaster ride through hell” is motivated by the enduring conceptual metaphor RELATIONSHIPS ARE JOURNEYS, while others exhibit completely new “one-shot” mappings (e.g., “The soul is a rope that ties heaven and earth”). Some novel expressions are “image metaphors,” such as the now classic example from poetry “My wife. . . whose waist is an hour glass,” which maps one detailed image (e.g., the shape of an hourglass) onto a target domain (e.g., the shape of the wife’s waist).23 Many psychologists and others still maintain that there must be a single theory for how all novel metaphors are identified and understood, yet the diversity of novel metaphors seen in language is significant enough to question this assumption. My general point is that there are no simple continuums between so-called conventional and novel metaphors, and between dead and alive metaphors, along which all instances of verbal metaphor neatly align. Metaphor scholars should not, therefore, assume that conventional metaphors are all understood directly, without accessing conceptual metaphorical knowledge, with novel metaphors all being interpreted through the process of creating entirely unique crossdomain mappings.24 This conclusion suggests that researchers should not assume that conventional metaphors are never understood to express metaphorical meanings and do not count as instances of metaphorical language. Our quick, intuitive judgments about whether some conventional expressions are metaphorical or not may be incorrect, precisely because we may fail to acknowledge the presence of unconscious conceptual metaphors which motivate our uses of different words and phrases. Corpus linguistic studies indicate that patterns of word use in discourse often differ from ordinary speakers’ intuitions about literal and metaphorical word meanings, and whether metaphorical instances are best viewed as being “conventional” or “novel.” For example, consider two texts from a series of psycholinguistic experiments looking at people’s understanding of conventional and novel metaphors.25
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1. As a scientist, Tina thinks of her theories as her children. She is a prolific researcher, conceiving an enormous number of new findings each year. Tina is currently weaning her latest child. 2. As a scientist, Tina thinks of her theories as her children. She is a fertile researcher, giving birth to an enormous number of new findings each year. Tina is currently weaning her latest child. The opening sentence of each story presumably established an explicit metaphorical mapping between theories and children, yet the second line in each story differs in that the first contains conventional phrases (e.g., “prolific” and “conceiving”), while the second contains novel metaphors (e.g., “fertile” and “giving birth”). The final sentence of each story presents the same novel metaphor (e.g., “weaning her latest child”). A rating study in which undergraduate students were asked to judge the conventionality of each phrase shown above supported these intuitions. However, a corpus analysis of the words in the above texts discovered something different from what experimental participants thought was the case.26 Consider the word “fertile” in the statement “She’s a fertile researcher giving birth to an enormous number of new findings each year.” A search of the “British National Corpus” (BNC) revealed that the majority of citations to “fertile” referring to people were metaphorical, such as “For me, the artist’s fertile imagination failed him.” These findings suggest that “fertile” is not a novel metaphor, contrary to the judgments of most undergraduate students. Similarly, the term “latest child” in the texts’ final sentence appears on the surface to be ambiguous between a literal and metaphorical reading. Yet a corpus analysis shows that a metaphorical interpretation is strongly favored, because the collocation “latest + child” almost never occurs (compared to words like “youngest,” which appears frequently with “child”). This result suggests that the collocation “latest child” expresses a novel meaning of “child,” because it reflects an atypical language pattern. This corpus analysis illustrates how people’s intuitions about whether some words or expressions have metaphorical meanings, and the extent of their metaphoricity being conventional or novel, may differ from how words are actually employed in real discourse. None of this should be terribly surprising to learn given the often-noted fallibility of even trained linguistic intuitions. Many psychological studies have shown that our intuitions about our own internal mental processes and judgments are often unreliable indications of exactly what occurs unconsciously when people solve problems or make judgments. Psycholinguistic studies are
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conducted precisely because people are unable to accurately introspect about the fast-acting, complex cognitive and linguistic processes that underlie their own sophisticated language understanding abilities. These studies speak directly to the debates about the metaphorical character of conventional expressions within CMT. Critics’ arguments that conventional expressions no longer convey metaphorical meanings fail to appreciate how tacit knowledge of conceptual metaphors structures their unconscious understandings of metaphorical language. Determining whether a person interprets a conventional expression using conceptual metaphors requires psychological studies that are capable of detecting fast-acting, unconscious processes involved in linguistic production and processing. Linguistic studies are still obviously essential to understanding the cognitive and experiential motivations for linguistic structure and behavior. Still, even expert judgments can be blind to the hidden forces that constrain our real-time linguistic actions. Simply saying that some expression is not metaphorical because of its conventionality illustrates one example of this very problem.
can we reliably identify metaphors? The armchair debates over how best to identify metaphoricity in language have led to several empirical attempts to create schemes by which metaphorically used language may be reliably identified. For example, the Pragglejaz Group’s “metaphor identification procedure” (MIP) provides a set of reliable criteria for metaphor identification that researchers can easily use in doing various kinds of empirical studies.27 MIP was created as a tool for metaphor analysts and was not intended as a theory of how ordinary speakers necessarily recognize certain words as conveying metaphorical meanings. The procedure states that an analyst may determine whether a word is metaphorically used in context by following a series of steps: 1. Read the entire text (i.e., written text or talk transcript) to establish a general understanding of the discourse. 2. Determine the lexical units in the text. 3. For each lexical unit in the text, check metaphorical use: Establish the meaning of the lexical unit in context (i.e., how it applies to an entity), and the relation in the situation evoked by the text (contextual meaning). You should take into account what words are before and after the lexical unit. Determine if the lexical unit has a more basic current/contemporary meaning in other contexts than the one
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in the given context. For our purposes, basic meanings tend to be: more concrete; what they evoke is easier to imagine, see, hear, feel, smell, and taste; related to bodily action; more precise (as opposed to vague); and historically older. Basic meanings are not necessarily the most frequent meaning of the lexical unit. 4. If the lexical unit has a more basic current/contemporary meaning in other contexts than the given context, decide whether the contextual meaning can be understood by comparison or contrast with the basic meaning. If yes, mark the lexical unit as metaphorical. Repeat steps 1–4 for each lexical unit. Consider how MIP was applied to analyze the first sentence of a newspaper story about the president of an Indian political party, Sonia Gandhi.28 The lexical units in the sentence are marked by slashes as in the following: /For/years/Sonia Gandhi/has/struggled/to/convince/Indians/that/she/is/ fit/to/wear/the/mantle/of/the/political/dynasty/into/which/she/ married/, let alone/to/become/premier/
Following this, each unit is analyzed for its possible metaphorical meaning. According to MIP, words such as “for,” “years,” “Sonia Gandhi,” and “has” are not metaphorical. However, “struggled” is deemed to be metaphorical because of its contextual meaning, indicating effort, difficulty, and lack of success in reaching a goal contrasts with its basic meaning referring to using one’s physical strength against someone or something (e.g., “She picked up the child, but he struggled and kicked”). More importantly, the contrast between the contextual and basic meanings of “struggled” is based on comparison, such that we understand abstract effort, difficulty, and opposition in terms of physical effort, difficulty, and conflict. Another word in the opening sentence with a possible metaphorical meaning is “wear.” Its contextual meaning, given by the idiomatic phrase “wear the mantle,” refers to some person who has a leading role in a family whose members have occupied high political positions. The basic meaning of “wear” is defined as “to have something on your body as clothing, decoration or protection,”29 which is also historically prior to other meanings of “wear.”30 The difference between the contextual and basic meanings is understood by comparison such that we interpret the process of following family members in political positions in terms of physically adorning the clothing that symbolizes that process.
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One final example of a metaphorical lexical unit is given with “into.” Its contextual meaning refers to the family group that Sonia Gandhi has joined through marriage. The basic meaning refers to entering a container or bounded area via physical movement (e.g., “She got into her car and drove away”). These two meanings differ by a contrast of comparison such that joining a social-kinship group is understood as the process of entering the physical space defining that family. The Pragglejaz Group determined that six of the twenty-seven lexical units in the first sentence of the Gandhi story were judged to be potentially conveying metaphorical meaning. We used the term “potential” in references to these judgments because MIP is unable to determine whether any individual speaker would necessarily interpret a specific word as being metaphorical in context. These decisions about the metaphorical uses of words clearly depend on how the contextual and basic meanings were defined, and the judgment that the possible differences between these meanings was due to comparison as opposed to some other relationship (e.g., contiguity, opposition).31 A variant of MIP, called MIPVU: VU stands for Vrije Universiteit, has been developed by Gerard Steen and colleagues and then applied to detect the metaphors in large segments of different texts from varying genres. These analyses have found some interesting results.32 First, across a diverse set of genres, prepositions were determined to be the most metaphorical (43%), followed by verbs (29%), and then adjectives (18%). Cognitive linguistic studies have long noted the complex metaphoricity of prepositions, with some proposals suggesting that the meanings of prepositions is best characterized in terms of family resemblances or as radical categories (see Chapter 2). Traditional studies of metaphor in most disciplines rarely refer to the metaphoricity of prepositions or see prepositions as examples of the pervasiveness of metaphor in language and thought. Second, MIPVU showed that academic discourse exhibits the most metaphorically used words (18%), followed by news stories (15%), fiction (11%), and finally conversation (7%). Many scholars typically suggest that fiction likely contains the most metaphorical language, but academic discourse expresses more metaphoricity given the frequent reference to abstract concepts in these writings.33 We are often explicitly taught to believe that metaphor is ill-suited for academic language, especially in the sciences, yet this is simply not the case at all.34 Not surprisingly, certain word uses are difficult to unambiguously identify as expressing metaphorical meaning. Steen and colleagues discuss
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“borderline” cases in their book on MIPVU and offer ideas on how to deal with these instances (e.g., how to deal with compound words, phrasal verbs, or cases where there is insufficient grounds to determine a word’s contextual meaning). One strategy that MIPVU explicitly adopts is “When In Doubt, Leave It In” (WIDLII), which recommends that it is better to mark a word as “metaphorical” whenever analysts are uncertain about that word’s metaphoricity in context. Only around 1% of all lexical units in the entire MIPVU corpus, and 9% of all units identified as “metaphor,” was classified as WIDLII. Both MIP and MIPVU are generally recognized to be empirically reliable, and possibly falsifiable, methods for metaphorical word identification.35 Psychologists may use MIP and MIPVU to ensure that their metaphor stimuli convey metaphorical meanings in context, which may be superior to simply asking naïve speakers to vote on whether some word or phrase is metaphorical or not. Discourse analysts and corpus linguists can also use MIP to determine the frequency and distributions of metaphorical word meanings in speech and writing. Finally, related metaphorical identification schemes are now being created and applied in the analysis of gestural metaphor, pictorial metaphor, and music metaphor (see Chapter 6). Specific applications of MIP and MIPVU reveal several problematic cases of metaphor identification. For example, Elena Semino considered the following expression in her analysis of metaphors in politics, in this case regarding discussions about trade among the G8 leaders: “And as for trade, even the prime minister conceded that he had failed to make progress.” The word “make” in this utterance appears to have a different contextual meaning from its basic meaning of “to create or produce something by working,” as defined by the Macmillan dictionary. However, this putative difference between the basic and contextual meanings depends entirely on what is implied by the terms “by working.” The verb “make” has long been noted to be delexicalized because over time it is now used to refer to any general, abstract sense of action. For this reason, it is unclear whether “make” in the above example reflects a difference, and comparison, between its basic and contextual meanings. Nonetheless, the use of “make” in “make progress” could be characterized as conveying the idea of achieving something, from which one can draw a comparison to achieving something in the abstract with physically creating an object. In this manner, “make” would be identified as potentially metaphorical. Similarly, the word “progress” in “make progress” could also been seen as a metaphor given the comparison between the contextual meaning
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referring to positive change and the basic meaning of “forward physical movement” (which is listed in Macmillan as a “mainly literary” use).36 Although both MIP and MIPVU are explicitly theory-neutral, Semino suggests that the third step of these procedures can also be characterized in terms of CMT. Thus, the particular contrast between the basic and contextual meanings of any word may reflect a classic cross-domain mapping, such as CHANGE IS MOTION and PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS regarding the meaning of “progress.” When using MIP, I personally have often had the experience of immediately recognizing the possible presence of a conceptual metaphor that motivates a contextual use of some word. This recognition reinforced my judgments that the relation between a basic and contextual meaning of some word in discourse may be driven by a comparison process. Still, this inference, on my part, suggests how some metaphor identifications are not purely “bottom-up” but are surely influenced by our past experience with language, and even our implicit, or explicit, knowledge of metaphorical patterns. In any event, the major attraction of procedures such as MIP and MIPVU is that they offer metaphor scholars a field guide for making judgments about what may potentially express metaphorical meaning in discourse. As Semino noted, “The use of an explicit procedure such as MIP can help analysts identify the main types of problematic cases, and deal with them consistently and systematically.”37 Of course, using MIP or MIPVU can be taxing, precisely because of the need to follow a pre-ordained set of steps, many of which require complex decisions (e.g., determining what are the “basic” and “contextual” meanings of a word). Using several dictionaries can be very helpful in dealing with difficult cases where it is unclear how to define the “basic” meaning of a word.38 Deciding whether the contextual and basic meanings are related by a comparison process can also, as already noted, be difficult. Furthermore, making repeated decisions as to whether each word in a text conveys metaphorical meaning may appear to involve isolated analytic judgments, yet this is surely not the case. Analysts’ decisions about the possible metaphoricity of one word always has some bearing on their past and even future metaphor identifications of other words in that same text. At the very least, though, methods like MIP and MIPVU provide some initial bases for identifying metaphor in language, which can serve as the first step in a procedure for inferring conceptual metaphors. Even if one does not pursue quantitative studies on metaphor in discourse, MIP and MIPVU offer excellent “intuition pumps” that scholars can use when making arguments about whether words in discourse convey metaphorical meanings or not.
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Reliable methods for identifying metaphor in language must also investigate the potential metaphoricity of entire linguistic expressions, including the conventional ones often studied by cognitive linguistics. At face value, both MIP and MIPVU would generally identify most of the words seen in the conventional expressions advanced by CMT as expressing metaphorical meanings, assuming that these examples are encountered in real-life discourse contexts. Consider the statement “Jake got sidetracked as he was studying for his final exams” spoken in a situation where two friends were talking about Jake’s academic problems. The phrase “got sidetracked” would surely be marked as metaphorical given that its contextual meaning may be understood through comparison to its basic, physical journey, interpretation. At the very least, empirical tests for identifying metaphorically used words can be applied to show that many of the conventional expressions studied by CMT potentially convey metaphorical meanings. But how many metaphorically used words need be identified for a linguistic expression to be judged as expressing metaphorical meaning? Most metaphor scholars are not simply interested in counting the number of metaphorically used words, but wish to understand whether individual linguistic expressions, and longer stretches of discourse, can be judged to be metaphorical or not. Not surprisingly, the metaphoricity of any expression may not be all or none, and it can more readily be seen as a matter of degree. For example, Jonathan Dunn asks us to consider the following statements:39 (a) Mary disproved John’s argument with her newly found evidence. (b) Mary demolished John’s argument with her newly found evidence. (c) Mary demolished John’s stronghold with her newly found evidence. (d) Mary demolished John’s stronghold with her newly found weapon. Many analysts would agree that (a) does not convey metaphorical meaning, while the verb “demolished” in (b) makes this expression somewhat metaphorical. The replacement of “argument” with “stronghold” in (c) makes this statement even more metaphorical than is (b), and expression (d) seems the most metaphorical of all four in the above list (assuming that people understand from context that Mary and John are engaged in a verbal, and not physical, conflict). A different set of statements also vary in their degree of metaphoricity. (e) Company profits continued to increase during the third quarter. (f) Company profits soared to new heights during the third quarter. (g) Company profits rose steadily during the third quarter. Expression (e) does not appear to be very metaphorical, while (f) seems to convey far more metaphoricity. Yet it may be more difficult to classify (g)
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as conveying metaphor given that the conventional use of “rose” is seen in many numerical contexts. Once again, determining the metaphoricity of any individual statement depends on our judgments of its “basic” meanings in other contexts. Most generally, there exists significant variability in the degree to which any linguistic statement expresses metaphorical meaning. Scholars can use MIP or MIPVU to make binary decisions about the potential metaphorical meanings of individual words in discourse. But ordinary speakers may experience metaphoricity as a matter of degree when they produce and interpret language. Jonathan Dunn argued that linguistic expressions with high metaphoricity typically have the following characteristics.40 First, they often have multiple metaphorical words as seen in the following example: (h) Veterans of many an evening at the routine pursuit of duty in the field, their emotional sacs barnacled with cynicism and their minds programmed for sardonic wit, sprang to their feet. Many words in this statement express metaphorical meaning, such as “sacs,” “barnacled,” and “sprang to their feet.” It is hard not to characterize this expression as anything but metaphorical, especially given the critical contribution these words have in our understanding the sentence’s main topic of “veterans.” Second, some metaphorical parts of expressions simply have high metaphoricity given our common understanding of their underlying concepts. For example, the verb “marry” in “I don’t marry myself to one belief system,” conveys high metaphoricity because the basic meaning of “marry” refers to the union of two people. Using “marry” in reference to an abstract mental action clearly links together two very different domains of experience by a process of comparison. Third, grammatical metaphors also give some statements high metaphoricity. Compare, for instance, the following two statements: (i) My normal sensations flooded back, although I had to migrate my eyes to get them pointed forward. (j) My normal sensations flooded back, as my eyes migrated forward again. Most speakers view (i) as expressing more metaphoricity than (j), despite the fact that both utterances convey similar meaning. Unusual and unexpected grammatical constructions, as seen in (i) may enhance our impression of metaphoricity.
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Many linguistic expressions, including those listed above, convey relatively stable meanings that are understood in roughly the same way regardless of their degree of metaphoricity. However, some linguistic statements express metaphorical meanings that are far less stable. Consider the following list of expressions, taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):41 (k) The seasons have married into this gumbo culture that’s something that people love to come visit. (l) The proliferating disguises and pen names through which Lorrain would constantly migrate attest to a need for self-fictionalization experienced as travel and change. (m) I don’t think the Bible describes our world; the Bible imagines it, and by imagining it creates a world drenched with grace from God. Each of these statements contains metaphorical parts (e.g., “migrate” or “drenched”) that individual people will interpret quite differently, if they are capable of understanding them at all. We may readily recognize these statements as metaphorical without necessarily being able to paraphrase these meanings in a completely non-metaphorical way. In some cases, people’s judgments that a statement may be metaphorical depend on their abilities to covertly paraphrase it without using metaphorical language. The following empirical study provided evidence in support of this idea. Native speakers of four languages (English, Spanish/Mexican, Russian, and Farsi) were asked to identify metaphors in twenty short passages, each of which averaged 100 words in length.42 These passages were taken from newspapers and Internet websites, and each discussed the topic of governance. A group of psycholinguists earlier determined those utterances in these passages that could be readily identified as metaphorical.43 These metaphorical utterances were each related to one of four general source domains for governance metaphors (BODY, FAMILY, BUILDING, SEEING). Participants in each language group were asked to underline “all non-literal” text and then later write a short explanation of why those underlined texts were “not literal.” The results showed that participants, averaged across the four language groups, correctly identified the pre-selected metaphors around 80% of the time (ranging from 76% for English to 87% for Farsi). However, while the BODY metaphors (e.g., “morbidly obese federal government”) were consistently identified across the different languages, metaphors related to the FAMILY (e.g., government be a “strict father or nurturing person”) and SEEING (e.g., “invisible achievements of government”) source domains
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were not uniformly detected. Thus, even educated individuals sometimes seem to fail to identify certain types of metaphor. Part of the variation in people’s abilities to recognize metaphors in language rests with the degree to which a metaphorical phrase fills a gap in the lexicon. For example, the metaphorical phrase “obese federal government,” which was successfully detected 95 percent of the time, may be readily restated in a non-metaphorical way, such as the phrase “excessively large federal government.” On the other hand, people had much more difficulty detecting the metaphoricity of the phrase “murky foreign policy” (40 percent of the time), which is difficult to paraphrase in a manner that is not metaphorical (e.g., “unclear foreign policy” is still metaphorical). Finding methods for assessing whether any metaphor fills a gap in the language may be critical, then, for future efforts to construct reliable metaphor identification systems.
corpus and computational studies Corpus linguists have explored various procedures for identifying metaphors in discourse. The primary motivations for these efforts are rooted in the variability seen in intuitionist studies of metaphor, as well as the sheer difficulty scholars encounter when trying to mark metaphors within very large databases. Anatol Stefanowitsch outlined several strategies that guide corpus linguistic work on metaphor identification.44 First, “manual search” requires that individual analysts closely read texts and manually extract those words or expressions viewed as expressing metaphorical meaning. This strategy is limited to metaphor identification within relatively smaller corpora, and suffers from the variability in analysts’ intuitions about what constitutes metaphor.45 Second, “searching for source domain vocabulary” more specifically aims to select potential source domains that are thought to be relevant to some metaphorical expressions. This method requires that analysts have some a priori idea of those semantic fields typically drawn upon in creating metaphorical language (e.g., analysts must already know that life is often talked about in terms of physical journeys). Third, “searching for target domain vocabulary” attempts to find metaphors related to particular topics (e.g., emotions or politics). This approach begins by seeking the specific words related to individual target concepts, and then identifying the more general source domains from which these lexical items emerge. One difficulty with this strategy is that it may only identify metaphorical expressions containing specific target domain vocabulary (e.g., “His pent up anger welled up inside him”), and may miss
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metaphorical phrases that do not contain mention of the target domain (e.g., “We got a rise out of him” does not refer to anger per se).46 Fourth, analysts can combine the two previous methods by “searching for words related to both the target and source domains.” Of course, applying this procedure also requires having a complete list of the source and target domains relevant to a particular topic. Still, this method has the advantage of allowing analysts to conduct metaphor identifications within very large corpora that would be virtually impossible to examine manually. Fifth, “searching for metaphors based on markers of metaphor” seeks the presence of linguistic devices that sometimes accompany the use of metaphor in discourse. For example, specific words, such as “metaphorically,” “literally,” “so to speak,” and “like,” as well as quotation marks, may signal the presence of metaphor.47 One difficulty, though, is that these signals are also evident when people are clearly not using metaphor.48 Each of these methods may be combined in different ways to allow analysts additional avenues for searching for metaphors. For instance, any procedure listed above can be applied to texts that are already annotated for particular semantic domains. This strategy may be especially useful when a researcher wishes to identify the conceptual mappings underlying any talk of restricted target domains that have already been exhaustively studied and analyzed. These corpus linguistic strategies have provided a rich body of empirical results related to both metaphor identification in language and the possible inferring of underlying conceptual metaphors (see Chapter 4). Corpus studies are critical to assessing which overt language forms are primarily used in metaphorical talk about particular target concepts. Most generally, corpus linguistic research has found evidence that is quite consistent with the main tenets of CMT. Many of the conventional expressions argued by CMT to convey metaphorical meanings have been extracted from different corpora using the research strategies listed above. Still, detailed corpus analyses also reveal that several of the conventional expressions advanced by CMT as support for the existence of specific conceptual metaphors are not widely used in naturalistic discourse. For instance, antonymous word pairs such as “hot” and “cold,” or “light” and “dark” do not equally appear in talk of specific target domains (e.g., “light” is relevant to HAPPINESS but “dark” is less used in reference to SADNESS), contrary to what may be expected by CMT.49 Different inflections of the same word (or phrase) also appear in different evaluative patterns when used metaphorically. Thus, the plural word “flames” conveys negative meanings (e.g., “His future crashed in flames”), while the
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singular “flame” mostly refers to positive evaluations (e.g., “George still carried a flame for Kelly”).50 When used metaphorically, the word “rock” conveys a positive meaning (e.g., “The sanctity of human life – the rock on which our society is built”), while plural uses of “rocks” describe negative events (e.g., “He lived in fear of his own marriage ending up on the rocks”). Both of these examples raise the possibility that metaphorical mappings may be based on individual word forms and not just any linguistic terms associated with a semantic domain. Many other corpus linguistic studies also demonstrate significant lexical and grammatical constraints on metaphorical mappings, constraints that CMT have not always sufficiently acknowledged.51 Corpus linguistic investigations have also detected that metaphorical language is generally far more fixed in its lexical and grammatical forms than are non-metaphorical expressions. These selective findings suggest that the richness and complexities of metaphorical language is greater than that evident from traditional intuitionist studies. Some scholars use the results of corpus linguistic research to criticize CMT for its failure to note the greater diversity of metaphorical language forms. Still, the overall data from corpus linguistic studies clearly show the vast extent to which conventional expressions are indeed metaphorical. But corpus linguistic results also remind us that many factors, including idiosyncratic historical and conventionalization forces (i.e., lexicalization and grammaticalization), play an important role in the creation and use of metaphorical language. These factors should, therefore, have an influence on both metaphor identification and interpretation. The challenge of identifying metaphor in discourse has led to the creation of automatic, computational systems for metaphor identification. These systems offer interesting insights into some of the complexities associated with identifying metaphor. Building an automatic system requires scholars to be quite detailed about the process leading to a decision that some word or phrase is metaphorical. For example, one system incorporated an algorithm that is capable of automatically identifying three types of metaphor in discourse as follows:52 Type I Type II
Type III
A subject noun is associated with an object noun via a form of the copula verb “to be,” such as in the case of “God is a king.” The verb is the focus of the metaphorical use representing the act of a subject noun on an object noun, such as in the case of “The war absorbed his energy.” An adjective–noun phrase such as “sweet girl.”
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The algorithm, called the “concrete overlap algorithm” (COO), is based both on selectional preferences and the determination of abstractness (as an indicator of whether a potentially metaphorical word is an extension of a word’s embodied meaning). Unlike many other metaphor identification systems, COO is learner and domain independent (i.e., it is not restricted to particular knowledge domains such as FINANCE or SPORTS). COO is fully automated and does not rely on handcrafted knowledge, and has been applied to two large corpora. However, the algorithm has been initially evaluated through the search of five, somewhat related, target concepts (e.g., governance, government, God, father, and mother). A natural language parser first identifies grammatical patterns relevant to each type of metaphor and discards phrases that are recognized as idioms within Wiktionary.53 The algorithm appropriate to each type is then applied to determine whether the word string is metaphorical or literal. One test of COO first had a group of four, trained analysts to rate whether the word strings identified by COO as metaphorical were metaphorical or not. A majority of this group (3 out of 4) agreed that 19% of the Type I form, 50% of Type II form, and 15% of the Type III form were metaphorical. These findings, again, suggested that human judgments of whether a particular phrase was metaphorical are highly variable. But the automated system was capable of recognizing those metaphors 71% of the time, a precision that is also significantly greater than observed when alternative algorithms were applied. Moreover, the COO algorithm showed a 24% improvement over a random guess whether a phrase is metaphorical based on the metaphors’ prevalence in the corpus as a whole.54 Once again, COO is capable of identifying three types of metaphor that represent only a subset of the complex reality of metaphorical language. Still, programs like this may be more consistently reliable than humans in identifying certain metaphors and may “catch” some verbal metaphors that are not readily recognized by even trained analysts. One empirical evaluation of four metaphor identification systems, however, revealed great disparities in their abilities to successfully detect metaphors in a common data set (i.e., a set of 2000 utterances taken from the COCA).55 The four systems were (a) a source-to-target mapping method, (b) a word abstractness measurement method, (c) a semantic similarity measurement method, and (d) a domain interaction method. These systems varied considerably in their approaches to metaphor. Some methods presume that source-to-target mappings are explicitly present in metaphorical language; others suggest that such mappings may only be indirectly present, and others maintain that these mappings are not at all relevant to metaphor
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or metaphor identification. Not surprisingly, the systems differ in their ability to detect metaphors depending on the type of metaphor encountered and the genre in which these metaphors were seen (e.g., conversations vs. academic discourse).56 Thus, the particular linguistic properties of the expressions seen in the corpus had a significant impact on the success of each system for identifying metaphors in the data set. This evidence from several automatic systems is consistent with earlier reported findings showing that success in metaphor identification differs depending on the number of metaphorically used words in an expression, and whether a metaphor fills a gap in the mental lexicon. Different methods may ultimately be required to properly identify different types of metaphor in language.57 Alternatively, some synthesis of the various systems may possibly be created to provide a broad, comprehensive method for metaphor identification. For instance, a method for identifying explicit source-to-target mappings may be first applied, with a domain interaction method then being used to identify cases in which the sourceto-target domain mappings may be less relevant. Of course, a variety of procedures may be jointly applied to identify virtually all of the potentially metaphorical instances of language within different discourses. This possibility reminds us to again consider the main goals of metaphor identification. Are we primarily interested in trying to accurately detect all instances of metaphor in different languages, regardless of the number of methods needed to do so? Or do we wish to create a single procedure for metaphor identification that is both theoretically motivated and capable of finding the highest proportion of metaphor in discourse? At least one large project, sponsored by the US government’s “Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity” (IARPA), has a practical goal of being able to detect metaphors in different languages “to understand the role metaphor plays in how people from different cultural backgrounds make judgments and decisions.”58 This project, titled “MetaNet,” hopes to automatically detect and understand the metaphors used in English, Persian, Russian, and Spanish.59 The team of linguists and psychologists aim to create this system “by building a multi-lingual metaphor repository that represents the network of conceptual metaphors and includes links to linguistic realizations.” One aspect of this “MetaNet” project specifically tries to identify metaphors as part of the metaphor interpretation process, rather than seeing identification as independent from metaphor understanding.60 Metaphor interpretation is based on determining a literal paraphrase for a metaphorically used word in discourse. Following this step, metaphor identification occurs through “symmetric reverse paraphrasing.” For example, the literal
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paraphrase of the verb “stir” in “stir excitement,” is “provoke.” But the reverse paraphrase of “provoke” does not lead to the verb “stir,” suggesting that “stir” has a non-literal meaning in the context of “stir excitement.” An experimental test of this system, when applied to a 14,000 word subcorpus of the BNC, showed that it successfully identified metaphorically used verbs in verb–subject (e.g., “stir excitement”) and verb–direct-object (e.g., “campaign surge”) relations 68 percent of the time, which is seen as a promising empirical finding. This system will serve as the basis for further attempts to create automatic metaphor extraction using “seed” metaphors that were previously identified by cognitive linguists as reflecting specific source-to-targetdomain mappings. For example, the simple statement “That flat tire cost me an hour” has a metaphorical word “cost” that expresses the mapping of the concrete source domain for “money” onto the abstract target domain “time.” A large-scale metaphor extractions system will, therefore, use a repository of information about different metaphorical frames to assist in the identification of metaphorical language. In this manner, automatic metaphor extraction uses a library of conceptual metaphors, earlier inferred from texts, to enable more reliable metaphor identifications. Scholars embracing this approach to metaphor identification believe that our conceptual metaphorical knowledge should have an important role in extracting metaphorical language across several languages. It will be interesting to see how successful this system will be, especially given the explicit goal to identify metaphors in four different languages. In practical terms, using extant conceptual metaphors to facilitate automatic verbal metaphor identification may be a great idea. Still, using conceptual metaphors in a top-down manner to help identify what is metaphorical in language does not allow for the clear separation of first identifying metaphorical language, and only then inferring conceptual metaphors from those previous identifications. As noted earlier, MIP and MIPVU were partly designed to specifically separate the identification of metaphorical language from any inferences about conceptual metaphors. There is an incredible range of computational systems being developed to automatically identify and interpret linguistic, as well as conceptual metaphors. Ekaterina Shutova provided an extensive review of these research efforts, and noted the important advances in the degree to which these systems are accurate and robust. However, she also concluded that, “the lack of a common task definition, shared dataset, and evaluation strategy makes the methods hard to compare, and thus hampers our progress as a community in this area.”61
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More generally, though, automatic, computational systems may surpass humans at reliably identifying metaphor, at least in certain contexts. This conclusion should not be disheartening to metaphor scholars who take great pride and pleasure in their own analytic powers to identify and explicate metaphorical meanings in discourse. Nonetheless, individual metaphor scholars should be cautious whenever they argue, based on their own intuitions, that any given word or expression must necessarily be metaphorical or not. At the very least, the results from both corpus studies and different automatic systems for metaphor identification should be taken into account in debates over the extent of metaphoricity in language. These research efforts appear to find a greater proportion of metaphorical language than seen by individual analysts of metaphor, including critics of CMT.
are some metaphors deliberate? The strong focus on conventional metaphors within CMT, and their possible relations to metaphors of thought, is seen by some critics as leading research away from the most vital aspects of metaphoricity in language. These scholars claim that certain verbal metaphors were deliberately, consciously produced for their special communicative possibilities. Consider Shakespeare’s famous metaphorical statement from “Romeo and Juliet” where Romeo, upon seeing Juliet step out onto the balcony above, said, “It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.” We have little idea what thought processes Shakespeare went through before he determined that “Juliet is the sun” was most appropriate for Romeo’s description of Juliet. Nonetheless, we can also imagine that Shakespeare did not come across these words automatically or without some conscious thought. As such, producing “Juliet is the sun” seems to be a perfect example of a “deliberate metaphor.” Metaphor scholars have long argued that certain notable metaphorical expressions in speech and writing may have been deliberately composed, and quite consciously employed for their unique, didactic qualities and sometimes poetic beauty. Gerard Steen has argued that deliberate metaphors are different from conventional ones, something that speakers and listeners, authors and readers tacitly recognize when they engage in metaphorical discourse.62 For example, Steen boldly declared the following: I propose that a metaphor is deliberately used when it is expressly meant to change the addressee’s perspective on the referent or topic that is the target of the metaphor, by making the addressee look at it
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Steen’s suggestion that deliberate metaphors appear as blatant falsehoods is essentially a restatement of the traditional, anomaly view of metaphor. Viewing metaphor as anomalies implies that people first sense the anomalous falsehood when reading a metaphor, but continue processing until the anomaly is resolved in some manner to create a sensible metaphorical meaning. But much psycholinguistic research shows that people do not first recognize anomalies and only then derive appropriate metaphorical meanings.64 If anomalous utterances are always first analyzed as falsehoods, then people should initially find metaphors to be deviant utterances, and always take longer to properly interpret than non-metaphorical statements. Some metaphors may take considerable effort to interpret, but many kinds of both novel and conventional verbal metaphors are quite easily understood in discourse and do not take longer to comprehend than comparable nonmetaphorical expressions. These results pose a major problem for any account of metaphor that assumes the immediate detection of anomaly as mandatory in the metaphor interpretation process. In any event, Steen continued his argument for deliberate metaphor by distinguishing it from non-deliberate metaphor. Thus, immediately following the above quote, he wrote, However, when somebody utters “we have come a long way” to talk about a relationship, it is quite dubious whether the addressee is in fact being asked to actually change their perspective on the topic of the sentence (the speaker’s relationship), or whether the speaker wishes to change the perspective. Current cognitive-linguistic analysis of the language and the conceptual structures would suggest that such a perspective change might have to go from the domain of relationships to the domain of journeys. Yet most language users might find this an odd and probably distracting suggestion.65
In making this last point, Steen placed himself in the company of critics of CMT who believe that linguistic analyses of conventional metaphors are not directly relevant to understanding the possible metaphorical nature of
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language and thought. Under this point of view, many conventional metaphors, such as “We have come a long way,” may have arisen in language with active cross-domain mappings, but over historical time have lost their metaphoricity and now express literal, non-metaphorical meanings for contemporary speakers. Chapter 5 presents an extensive overview of psycholinguistic evidence consistent with the idea that cross-domain mappings are inferred during our contemporary understanding of conventional verbal metaphors, contrary to Steen’s assertion. Steen, nonetheless, maintained that the theory of deliberate metaphor “raises the question whether the conceptual power of metaphor is as great and forceful as Lakoff and other cognitive linguists make it out to be. If people do not activate many metaphorical models during regular discourse processing unless these are used deliberately, the effect of metaphor on our lives may be much smaller than is sometimes claimed, since most metaphor is indeed used non-deliberate.”66 But consider the rest of Steen’s argument. Steen admitted that “it is quite possible for people to use conventional metaphor very deliberately. . . where deliberate metaphor use is signaled by word play and other added rhetorical devices.”67 Most importantly, though, he wrote, Deliberate metaphors are those cross-domain mappings that involve the express use, in production and/or reception, of another domain as a source domain for re-viewing the target domain. Deliberate metaphor is a relatively conscious discourse strategy that aims to elicit particular rhetorical effects.68
What are the possible textual clues for marking metaphors as “deliberate”? One discussion of the “signaling” devices that often accompany metaphorical language cite terms such as “metaphorically,” “figuratively,” or even, ironically, “literally”; various intensifiers, such as “actually,” “quite,” or “utterly”; semantic metalanguage, such as “more than one sense,” and “meaning”; the use of certain modals plus verbs, as in “one might say”; and other expressions, such as “so to speak,” and “as it were.” These different signals have varying effects on the communicative functions of metaphor, and apply, to some degree, to both “active” and “inactive” metaphors, an observation that does not restrict “deliberateness” to novel, active expressions alone. These markers for metaphors are seen more in speech and newspaper stories than in literary texts.69 Of course, most of the signals and tuning devices discussed in the literature on “deliberate” metaphor are not at all specific to metaphor! Words and phrases such as “almost,” “just,” and “sort of” are found
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throughout spoken discourse, and are sometimes described as “procedural cues” that, quite generally, assist listeners in understanding the conceptual content of what speakers say. The fact that metaphors are sometimes accompanied by different linguistic and paralinguistic signals does not imply that these signals are consciously intended to mark some sequence of words as being metaphorical. If people did interpret certain signals as instructions to interpret what follows, or what just proceeded, as a metaphor, then many instances of language that nobody sees as conveying metaphorical meaning should, at least initially, be interpreted as expressing non-literal messages. But there is no evidence to support this claim. In fact, one experimental study showed that reading a conventional metaphor, such as “We have come a long way since the wedding,” in reference to the progress on a relationship, with so-called signals of metaphor, not only fail to increase readers’ awareness of any cross-domain mapping, but sometimes interferes with people’s appreciation of speakers’ rhetorical messages.70 This pattern of results is directly opposite to what would be predicted by the deliberate metaphor theory. Most generally, any attempt to establish a set of deliberate markers of metaphor must explore a large range of discourses, including both metaphorical and non-metaphorical speech, before any conclusions can be forwarded on the clues accompanying metaphor. People may certainly employ tuning devices to assist listeners in understanding stretches of speech that scholars understand as “metaphor.” Yet understanding that some words have metaphorical meaning (as tokens) is not the same as determining that these words were deliberately created as metaphors (as types). These objections aside, metaphor scholars have gone on to outline the exact set of indicators within texts that possibly signal the presence of deliberate metaphor. For example, Tina Krennmayr suggests that researchers may search for deliberate metaphor in texts by considering the following set of questions.71 (a) Is the metaphorical unit signaled (e.g., by a simile or other signaling device)? (b) Is the metaphorical unit in the form of A = B? (c) Is the metaphorical unit expressed directly? (d) Is the metaphorical unit novel? (e) Is the metaphorical unit surrounded by metaphorical expressions from compatible semantic fields, which are somehow connected? (f) Is the metaphorical sense of the unit particularly salient through, for example, alluding to the topic of the text?
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(g) Does the metaphorical unit participate in word play? (h) Does the metaphorical unit elicit rhetorical effects, such as, for example, persuasion or humor? Krennmayr’s analysis of news reports showed, in fact, that people rarely signal their metaphors. But at least one of the above signals may be primary in the marking of deliberate metaphor, namely (e), the coherent use of several metaphorical expressions from the same semantic field. Consider the following excerpt from a psychology professor’s lecture on human aggression.72 And so, the thing you want to do to minimize violence is let people dribble some of this stuff [aggression] out innocently. Let’s prevent it from building up to the point where it’s really heavy and drain it off harmlessly a little bit at a time.
The boldface segments in this excerpt are presumed to be instances of deliberate metaphor, because the professor earlier introduced the analogy of the soul as a water reservoir in which aggressive impulse drips into. This conclusion is not surprising, on the surface, because we view professors as being thoughtful, or even deliberate, about what they say in their lectures. His use of an analogy that is then further commented upon later in the lecture surely reflects his conscious desire to communicate a specific metaphor for students to consider and understand. One can still ask whether the professor, perhaps when talking to his wife over dinner, would intend his metaphors deliberately if he said in reference to the demands of his job: “I feel all this heavy pressure building up and I need to find a way to drain it off harmlessly a little bit at a time.” Does the casual, non-academic situation in which the professor states his metaphorical assertion make it less deliberate? As Anke Berger observed, “we cannot give a general answer to the question how deliberate metaphors can be identified in discourse, since this seems to depend on the particular discourse context.”73 Determining what is the “particular discourse context” often demands that researchers make assumptions about what they believe a speaker or writer is trying to do, which is very much a matter of individual psychology, and not simply a matter of detecting overt signs in texts. Quite curiously, Steen suggested that some instances of mixed metaphorical messages may also be marked as examples of “deliberate metaphor.”74 For example, consider the following excerpt produced by a British Member of Parliament: “Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat. I see him floating in the air. But mark me, sir, I will nip him in the bud.” Steen argued that this example, along with many others, exhibits a clash of several images that are
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each deliberately produced. Combining these metaphors within a single narrative sequence highlights both their individual deliberateness and the visibility of the overall message, which readers are being explicitly instructed to attend to as a mixing of metaphors. My reading of these arguments, and the examples cited to support them, leaves me with a very mixed impression. On the one hand, the analysis of how different metaphors appear to function in different texts seems relatively correct. For instance, people may notice the clash of metaphorical images in discourse, just as they may also notice the ways that single metaphors are extended in a coherent manner in some texts. We do not have empirical evidence, somewhat surprisingly, on whether people even notice, in a conscious manner, different metaphor patterns within language. Still, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that some metaphors may be more visible than others because of either their coherent or mixed quality. But as a general theory of metaphorical language use, the idea of “deliberate metaphor” lacks any empirical validation, and indeed, has several contradictory elements in regard to whether, for example, the coherent or mixed nature of metaphor by themselves signal deliberateness on the part of the speaker/writer, which audiences are to then recognize as specific instances of the category “metaphor.” There remains another problem with the proposal on deliberate metaphor that bears mention, which touches on many aspects of linguistic, philosophical, and literary analyses of language. Consider again the brief excerpt from the psychology professor’s lecture on human aggression: And so, the thing you want to do to minimize violence is let people dribble some of this stuff [aggression] out innocently. Let’s prevent it from building up to the point where it’s really heavy and drain it off harmlessly a little bit at a time.
After re-reading this narrative, many readers may experience some sense of metaphorical coherence, especially if attention is given to the relations between the different boldfaced segments. But we should not mistake our after-the-fact analysis of what may be occurring in some discourse as an explanation of what people ordinarily do when they encounter some stretch of language for the first time. For instance, we can see the various conventional metaphorical words and phrases above, and sit back to consider their meanings and structure. We may even speculate about the possible intentions, consciously held or not, that a speaker may have in talking as he or she did. Ordinary language users, on the other hand, encounter speech or writing in real time, and construe metaphorical meanings moment by moment.
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The question, then, is whether people really make determinations of “deliberation” word-by-word as they infer metaphorical, and other, messages. Would a student listening to the professor above make a decision that “dribble” must be deliberately produced as a metaphor, and needs to be understood as such? Perhaps students only make such decisions after they have encountered several related metaphorical words or phrases, at a point where the evidence really points to the fact that “the speaker has produced all these related metaphors and must be deliberately instructing me to interpret these as cross-domain mappings.” Under this scenario, attributions of “deliberation” on a speaker’s part emerge only at selected moments of discourse processing. But this possibility also assumes that people accurately remember the specific words they heard earlier in discourse and keep these active so as to be able to re-interpret them at a later time if some judgment of deliberation has been made. None of these possibilities concerning explicit, or tacit, judgments about deliberate metaphor make any sense from a psychological point of view. I see no problem trying to discern the different ways that metaphor may be instantiated in real discourse. Scholars can also easily determine what metaphorical instances of language are novel to the extent that any individual case is infrequent within either a particular context or within the language as a whole. However, there are significant problems with interpreting certain textual signals as necessarily reflecting particular states of mind (i.e., deliberative consciousness), especially when these signals are used with others aspects of language. Metaphor scholars may certainly study whether people draw unique cognitive or rhetorical effects when hearing or reading certain metaphor types including the possible conscious reflection, “Wow, that is an interesting metaphor!” Yet language always emerges from the interaction of many subsystems, with none dominating control of what is stated, including those related to any experience of consciousness or deliberation. Speakers’ choices of words, and how they are expressed, and listeners’ interpretations of linguistic utterances unfold from dynamical processes that should not be reduced to the inner mental states of individual language users. People have limited awareness of their habitual behaviors, and more importantly, routine performances of all sorts often proceed independently from people’s conscious intentions. Speakers may sometimes even believe that they have created a metaphor deliberately, with their very conscious thought processes being the initial, primary cause for the creation of the metaphor, yet be mistaken about the real reason they wrote or said what they did.
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Listeners and readers also sometimes falsely believe that certain metaphors may be deliberately created because of the skillful efforts of the people who produced them. We marvel at artists, like Shakespeare, for their wonderful, inspiring metaphors, and assume that their creations are the result of brilliant minds doing things, at times, quite deliberately. But most creative acts are anything but conscious and deliberate. In many cases of creativity, psychological research has shown that individuals have the sense that something is happening to them rather than sensing the action being authored by those persons. Instances of insight appear to come out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing or prediction, not through slow, conscious deliberate reasoning. When a solution does arrive, it typically feels completely uninvited by the thinker and is attributed solely to unconscious processes. Many unconscious cognitive forces shape the online production and understanding of metaphors, which are simply not accessible to our conscious intuitions, despite our strong beliefs to the contrary. We can, for instance, imagine William Shakespeare in the moments of writing “Romeo and Juliet.” Rather than envisioning him being highly conscious and deliberate in his choice of words, including metaphors, it may be more accurate to conceive of this writing as in the “flow” of experience where words and phrases cascade from his fingertips without significant conscious effort. Even if Shakespeare eventually, and thoughtfully, rewrote what he first drafted, this revision process probably involved making choices that are not simply, and solely, guided by deliberate decisions to create cross-domain mappings. Shakespeare may have had various aesthetic, communicative intentions in writing his poems and plays. But we should not assume that some special parts of what he wrote were deliberate, with all others being the product of his unconscious, automatic mind. Similarly, the idea that only some metaphors are special because of the way they are produced, with all other metaphors seen as being automatic and not really understood metaphorically, embraces a simplistic, faulty view of the psychology of human language production.
metaphorical thought without metaphorical language Does the existence of metaphorical language necessarily indicate the active presence of metaphorical thought? This question is central to the “metaphor wars” in focus, and answering it again demands some way of assessing what constitutes metaphorical language. For the moment, it is
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appropriate to ask whether the newer human and computational procedures for metaphor identification provide new insights into the possible ubiquity of metaphorical thought in everyday life. Lakoff and Johnson argued in “Metaphor We Live By” that “most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature” and that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.”75 Still, how much of language, in purely quantitative terms, must be metaphorical if we are to believe that “most of our ordinary conceptual system” is metaphorical? Lakoff and Johnson have taken great pains over the years to note how many aspects of human thought and experience have little to do with metaphor. Nonetheless, if we are to believe that metaphor is a prominent part of thought, then some measure of metaphor’s existence within language and other expressive modes may be necessary. Does counting the number of metaphorically used words or expressions in language, or specific instances of discourse, provide an accurate reflection of people’s in-the-moment metaphorical thinking? It is certainly interesting to note, for example, that academic discourse employs more metaphorical words than does fiction. The fact that academic language often focuses on abstract topics makes it unsurprising, especially from a conceptual metaphor point of view, that this genre is significantly metaphorical (but still only 18 percent of all words according to one MIPVU analysis).76 My argument, however, is that simply identifying the number of metaphorically used words or expressions in different samples of language may not offer a proper characterization of how different ideas are being metaphorically conceptualized in human life. Simply counting metaphorically used words or expressions may actually underestimate the influence that metaphor has in structuring people’s thinking and communication. Consider the following short narrative, which was used as stimulus in a study on the embodied nature of metaphor understanding in narrative:77 Imagine that you are a single person. A friend sets you up on a blind date. You really like this person and start dating a lot. Your relationship was moving along in a good direction. But then it got even better. The relationship felt like it was the best you ever had. This continues to this day. No matter what happens, the two of you are quite happy together.
This narrative contains 69 words but only 3 to 5 of these potentially express metaphorical meaning. The bold-faced statement, for instance, expresses a very conventional metaphor (ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS
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ARE JOURNEYS) through the use of the phrase “moving along in a good direction.” Even though the overall proportion of metaphorically used words in this narrative is quite small (less than 7 percent overall), the use of the “relationships being journeys” idea has a large influence over people’s interpretation of the entire narrative. When a group of university students read this simple narrative, they easily drew several metaphorical inferences about the nature of the romantic relationship. For example, when questioned, the vast majority of the students stated that the relationship had progressed to a significant distance, was presently progressing at a fast rate, was progressing along a straight line, and that the two individuals in the relationship were both heading in the same direction. None of these assumptions were explicitly stated in the narrative, but were reasonable metaphorical inferences given the simple “moving in a good direction” statement. In this manner, even a small number of metaphorically used words can evoke a larger, dominant metaphorical conceptualization of some topic (e.g., a romantic relationship) that is further elaborated upon by non-metaphorical language. The “moving along in a good direction” narrative clearly illustrates the power of even a single, conventional phrase to metaphorically structure an entire discourse event, leading people to draw extended metaphorical inferences. One place where the power of metaphorical thought is evident, apart from direct uses of metaphorical language, is within linguistic expressions that reflect the entailments of metaphorical concepts. Alan Cienki examined the language and gestures used by two candidates, George W. Bush and Al Gore, during the US Presidential debates that occurred in October 2000. His initial aim was to explore whether the two candidates relied on the “Strict Father” (SF) and “Nurturant Parent” (NP) metaphorical models, as earlier proposed by George Lakoff for explaining the ideological differences between conservative Republican and liberal Democratic, respectively, politicians.78 Very few metaphorical utterances were directly related to these two models (43 expressions out of a corpus of 40,000 words). For example, Gore once spoke actually using a SF metaphor when saying “By giving parents the tools to protect their children against cultural pollution. . .” when talking about controls on Internet access. Bush even used an NP metaphor when he spoke of moral action as nurturing social ties in the following example, “And that’s a case where we need to use our influence to have countries in Africa come together and help deal with the situation.” The most interesting findings, however, were that both candidates referred to entailments of the SF and NP metaphors. These nonmetaphorical expressions were seen as logical consequences of the
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source-to-target domain mappings in both the SF and NP models. For example, Bush once stated, “We need to send 5 percent (of tax revenue) back to you that pay the bills,” which is motivated by the SF idea. On the other hand, Gore said the following in a discussion about the role of government in providing health care, “So I want to proceed carefully to cover more people,” which is directly tied to the NP model. Overall, 745 non-metaphorical expressions were viewed as being entailed by the two metaphorical models (again, compared to forty-three metaphorical expressions). As Cienki summarized, “This provides rather strong support for the argument that the SF and NP models as wholes, and not strictly in terms of the metaphorical parts of their structure, played a role in the logic of the two speakers’ arguments.”79 One larger possibility is that certain metaphorical models may influence individual reasoning in ways that are manifested as much, if not more so, in non-metaphorical language than in metaphorical speech. These observations raise the question, then, of whether simple counts of metaphorically used words or even metaphorically used expressions necessarily reflect varying degrees of metaphorical thought within some discourse or across larger segments of language within different genres. Determining the degree of metaphoricity in both language and thought likely requires very different metrics than employed by the methods developed thus far on individual metaphor identifications. The case of allegory also demonstrates how metaphorical meanings can be inferred apart from the presence of metaphorical language. Many famous instances of allegory in literature never explicitly refer to the target domains that are the main topics. One of the most famous allegorical poems in English is John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” This poem is the tale of “Christian,” and his journey to the “Celestial City,” which represents heaven. The entirety of the poem is devoted to showing the various stumbling blocks and challenges that Christian has to overcome to make it to his destination. But “Pilgrim’s Progress” is simultaneously a story of an individual man and his physical journey, and a wider allegory about the Christian path to salvation. Similarly, Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” describes a man’s journey walking through the woods, and ends with him considering the dilemma of which of two paths to follow. The poem concludes with the following lines: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
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As with Bunyan’s lengthy poem, Frost uses concrete language to refer to broader symbolic themes regarding the choices people make in life and the consequences that follow from these decisions. In both these poems, there is little overt metaphorical language to be found, even if they convey larger allegorical messages, which some CMT scholars argue refers to the common LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor. Using and understanding allegory is, therefore, different than just using metaphorical language per se. This book has primarily focused on the use, identification, and interpretation of metaphorical language, but understanding allegory requires a more general strategy where one applies a metaphorical reading to some instance of language or a situation to obtain allegorical meaning. Empirical studies demonstrate that ordinary readers are quite good at drawing broader allegorical, and indeed metaphorical, inferences from narratives, even those that make little or no references to the target domains (see Chapter 5). This research shows, then, that people can readily infer metaphorical meanings, and construe metaphorical understandings of language, even without the presence of metaphorical language.80 Once again, simply counting the number of metaphorically used words or expressions in language fails to capture the diverse ways that metaphorical thoughts are expressed in speech and writing.
some larger goals for metaphor identification Questions about the relations between metaphorical language and metaphorical thought are also evident in some of the “local wars” over how to infer metaphoricity in specific moments of human experience. Some scholars argue that metaphor’s true power lies in the ways that metaphorical language dynamically unfolds across time in the process of speaking and writing, and not merely as a matter of counting up individual instances of metaphorically used words or phrases. Consider the following excerpt from a remarkable set of conversations analyzed by Lynne Cameron.81 The dialogue is between a woman, Jo Berry, whose father, Sir Anthony Berry, was killed by a bomb in 1984, and Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb on behalf of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during their conflict with the British government. Jo Berry had asked to meet Pat Magee after he was released from prison in order to understand more about why the bombing happened. This excerpt is taken from the second recorded conversation between Jo and Pat, about twenty minutes into their talk. The words and phrases underlined are the source terms of the metaphors (i.e., those used metaphorically in this context). Up to
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this point, both Jo and Pat had talked about how the two of them came to be together in a reconciliation meeting, using similar JOURNEY metaphors to those seen below. 644 645 646 647 648 649 650 651 652 653 654 655 656 657 658 659 660 661 662 663 664 665 666 667 668 669 670 671 672 673 674 675 676
Pat
Jo Pat Jo
Pat Jo
...(1.0) 1984, when your father was killed, or when I killed your father, ... when the republican movement killed your father. ...(3.0) er, my journey, ...(1.0) preceded that you were catapulted into this struggle. ... I think, er, ...(1.0) my journey preceded that. ...(1.0) but, ...(1.0) our journey began that moment. ... and here we are. ... today. sixteen years later. seventeen years later. ...(1.0) it’s quite a remarkable journey. I think. er, ...(2.0) you – [er] [you] said that, ...(2.0) the price that er – ... you paid, for taking up violence, was part – ... partly losing some of your humanity. ... hmh ... and that now you’re ... refinding that. ...(1.0) through ... other meetings with – ...(1.0) ehm, other victims, and loyalists,
Cameron’s interest is in the functions that metaphor plays to express, and reflect, different types of linguistic, cognitive, affective, physical, and cultural ideas and meanings. These meanings are typically manifested through successive metaphor sources that shift and develop as people negotiate meaning, extend their ideas, or exploit potential opened up by the use of a source term. The key focus here, then, is
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“metaphor vehicles,” such as those underlined in the above conversational snippet. For instance, the journey source was used previously in the talk to refer to Jo’s effort to understand her father’s murder and, in the above excerpt, is successively re-used and adapted to refer to two further targets: Pat’s early history of politicization the process of meeting and reconciliation
“my journey” “our journey”
649, 653 655, 660
These micro-level shifts and changes in the dynamics of linguistic metaphors concretely demonstrate the emergence of metaphor in discourse interaction as an inherently social affair. One can track the patterns of specific instances of metaphor in discourse to reveal the way that metaphor shapes “talking-and-thinking” in the specific discourse events, such as Jo and Pat’s above exchange. Cameron’s approach uses metaphor identification, therefore, to understand “linguistic and cognitive phenomena as processes, flows or movements, rather than as objects.”82 She emphasizes that “Given the inherently fuzzy nature of metaphor in discourse, metaphor identification is never entirely straightforward.”83 Still, the discourse dynamic approach to metaphor sees metaphorical language use as being dynamically re-created depending on the specific histories of the participants at the very points in which their talk unfolds. “Although the metaphors are inseparable from the surrounding discourse, in metaphor analysis we identify and pick out these metaphors as if they were occasional lights or signals along the trajectory of the discourse system.”84 There is never a neutral position to which an individual speaker retreats after discerning a specific use of a metaphor source, because each word is spoken in an always changing dynamic context that constrains what words may express metaphorical meanings. This perspective sees metaphor identification only as a preliminary step toward uncovering the social and cognitive positioning of discourse participants as they attempt to reach personal and intersubjective goals. Trying to identify, and then count up, all the metaphorically used words in some discourse only scratches the surface of what metaphor allows people to do in discourse, both spoken and written. A different project also showed how metaphor develops across multiple instances of speech and language, something that would be missed if we simply counted all the metaphors in some discourse or corpora. Elena Semino, Alice Deignan, and Jeannette Littlemore investigated how metaphorical expressions employed in one context get re-used, and recontextualized, to serve different discourse functions and sometimes express novel metaphorical messages.85 One part of this study
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looked at how one metaphor for the Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, created by the journalist, Indro Montanelli, was borrowed and adapted in many other contexts. Montanelli wrote back in 2001 that he surprisingly, given his many criticisms, hoped that Berlusconi would win the next Presidential election for the following reason: Because Berlusconi is one of those diseases that are treated with a vaccine. And in order to be treated from Berlusconi we need a good dose of Berlusconi vaccine.
Of course, vaccines are always given as a preventive against disease rather than as a later antidote. Still, Montanelli’s metaphor captured his complex view of Berlusconi as a disease from which Italian citizens deserve protection, or immunization. Following this initial use of the “vaccine” metaphor, Montanelli employed it in a few other articles, but by May 2012 a search of the phrase “vaccine Berlusconi Montanelli” revealed over 700,000 hits on Google. Semino and colleagues analyzed the top fifty of these instances to see how the vaccine metaphor had become recontextualized “by left-wing critics of Berlusconi to explain his continued electoral successes and dominance of Italian politics.”86 For example, one editorial noted that “What Montanelli said was also not true . . . When you have injected it, you run the risk of making a disease chronic, rather than immunizing yourself against it.”87 A 2009 online forum showed several twists on the vaccine metaphor, such as, “So the country still has to complete its vaccination and the possible dangers need to be neutralized and eliminated.”88 A different argument from this forum stated: After 5 years of Berlusconi’s government, we thought that the Union’s victory in 2006; however narrow, was the reaction of the necessary antibodies. Antibodies in the country, not in then (and today’s) opposition. Instead we saw dear pianograde that the disease is not just in the Berlusconi infection but in our own side. It is here that among white and red blood cells (of various kinds and ideologies) nothing has been learnt and no antibodies have been produced to win against sectarianism, localism, and provincialism.89
These few examples illustrate the widespread influence of the vaccine metaphor as people borrowed and reshaped the metaphor, often extending its implications to convey something about the different reactions people have to Berlusconi and his leadership. Revitalizing the vaccine metaphor
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served many purposes, such as enabling critics to voice their opposition to Berlusconi, and to do so in a way that puts their own spin on the situation, all the while celebrating their beliefs with others using the intimacy that a shared metaphor is most capable of affording. Once again, the vaccine metaphor was not technically correct in its mapping of the idea of vaccines onto opposing a political figure given that vaccines are used as preventatives. Nonetheless, the fact that this simple metaphorical creation had such enormous impact on the ways people thought about Berlusconi demonstrates the social particularities of metaphorical ideas and the diverse ways they get instantiated in both metaphorical and non-metaphorical language. Even small stretches of metaphorical discourse, even a few words, can be generative of large-scale metaphorical thought that is shared and expanded upon by many people across time and space. Another project focused on the ways that metaphor identification changes as certain concepts become literalized over the course of even a short historical period. Scientific ideas are often expressed in metaphorical ways, as is evident from examining the discourses ranging from physics to psychology. One academic discipline in which metaphors flourish is biology. For instance, developments within molecular biology starting in the 1940s showed that DNA provides the “blueprint” and “software” of life. Most metaphor identification methods would likely mark these word uses as being “metaphorical.” In the 1990s, however, advances in biotechnology brought together engineers and biologists not only to understand the fundamentals of life, but also to be able to build new cellular systems that “direct cells in the ways that people program on computers.”90 Biologists started employing an assortment of engineering metaphors, referring to “switches,” oscillators,” and “logic gates,” among many other concepts, to both design and construct synthetic cellular systems. Synthetic biology, however, sees its metaphors not just as ways of understanding new concepts, but as literal renditions to artificially create new life. For instance, one prominent researcher, Jay Keasling, testified before the US Committee on Energy and Commerce how synthetic biologists assemble “standardized well-characterized components from existing wellstudied organisms, much like how one might assemble a computer from standard components such as a hard drive, sound card, motherboard and power supply.”91 As one writer summarized developments in synthetic biology, When new technologies emerge, optimism and enthusiasm often trump humility. In their excitement at making a discovery, many scientists,
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engineers and entrepreneurs suddenly believe that they can predict and control outcomes in complex physical and biological systems – and they frequently use metaphors to convey that belief.92
Yet critics also suggest that some of these metaphors give the impression that biological systems can already be built in ways that are both “reliable and controllable,”93 which may over-literalize an idea that is still very much metaphorical, therefore offering the public a false belief about the efficacy of research in synthetic biology. IIina Hellsten and Brigitte Nerlich analyzed a corpus of newspaper articles that discussed these recent developments in synthetic biology from the years 2008 to 2010.94 They generally found that descriptions of synthetic biology were framed in terms of several metaphors, including computers and computing; journeys; reading and writing; books; building and engineering; as well as sewing and mapping. For example, computer metaphors referred to codes, booting up, software, hardware, programming, executing, and tagging. Hardly any instances of blueprint metaphors were detected. Book metaphors were also frequent as seen in talk about reading or writing, instruction books, languages, and phrases. Metaphors about sewing were also common such as in descriptions about stitching and tailoring life, as seen in the following statements: “The scientists knew the order of the 1,089,202 DNA letters (‘nucleotides’) of Mycoplasma mycoides’s genome. They built it in pieces, nucleotide-by-nucleotide. Then they stitched the pieces together,” and “manufacturing life forms from scratch and eventually creating tailor-made creatures.” Finally, journey metaphors were prominent in the corpus, referring to progress, steps, breakthroughs, leaps, crossing boundaries, and paving the way to new knowledge, all of which are typically found in many facets of scientific discourse. But the most interesting part of this study concerned the frequent mixing of metaphors and the ways that some metaphors over time became literally true. Research in synthetic biology led scientists away from interest in the blueprint of life to actually building life “brick by BioBrick,” as evident in the following summary from 2008: Building a new organism from scratch is possible. In January this year a US team reported in Science magazine how it built the entire DNA code of a common bacterium in the laboratory using blocks of genetic material. The team synthesized small blocks of DNA before knitting them together into bigger “cassettes” of genes. Large chunks of genes were joined together to make the circular genome of a synthetic version of a mycoplasma bacterium.
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Altering genes isn’t like editing a document in Word. DNA is an invisibly thin molecule coiled upon itself with the millions of letters that we can’t see – trying to alter just three letters without damaging anything else is a truly daunting task. These dangers mean that designer babies are not possible now and may never be.95
This passage mixes several metaphors together, referring to a computer (Word program), books (DNA letters), and “knitting” materials into “cassettes.” Still, the text is coherent enough regarding the building of life such that the writer can also express something about the prospects of designing babies in the laboratory. Note, however, that various phrases in the above text, which may have been metaphorical at one time, may now be direct literal descriptions of events and processes. There may have been a period when DNA pieces were conceived of as the “building blocks of life” in a metaphorical sense of referring to how life emerges and self-organizes. But this old metaphor may now be literally read as scientists develop techniques to physically construct new, synthetic organisms (e.g., “BioBricks”). The following excerpt shows how the older metaphorical idea is now a practically reality: At the heart of the competition is MIT’s Registry of Standard Biological Parts, founded in 2003 as a physical repository and online catalogue of DNA pieces whose function and behavior have been defined. Called BioBricks, these are the building blocks that students use, Legolike, to build new organisms. Students are constantly designing new BioBricks, such as the DNA that arrived at U-Va.’s lab last month, a tweaked version of a gene that occurs naturally in plants.96
Overall, the rise of synthetic biology reflects a new understanding of the biology of life. The human genome project was earlier conceived as a way of deciphering the “book of life,” but is now seen as a guide, or set of recipes, for building, or cooking, new biological entities that are literally real and not just metaphorical models. As one journalist suggested, these developments show that “humans have, for the first time, the ability to evolve ourselves.”97 Of course, there are many negative responses to some of the newer developments in synthetic biology, mostly associated with classic fears of scientists creating unusual life forms (e.g., monsters) in the laboratory. Still, the turning of past metaphors into physical realities is seen by many as a new revolution in science and technology. As Hellsten and Nerlich commented: The wider narrative of synthetic biology as yet another great revolution provides the background against which the separate metaphors as well as chains of mixed metaphors make sense. While in the genetics and
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genomics debates the main narrative was conquering the unknown, i.e., gaining access to the map of DNA, or the book of life, in the debate on synthetic biology, the main narrative not only covers the position of synthetic biology as a particular type of revolutionary science, but positions it within a historical context of standardization, automation, assembly and control. The metaphors exploit knowledge of past technologies and technological revolutions to familiar audiences with what is hoped to be a future revolution.98
This discussion of the recent developments in synthetic biology raises the practical issue of whether many of its theoretical pronouncements should even be marked as metaphors. But the larger, societal concern focuses on whether people’s use of “runaway metaphors” is necessarily identified as such by both scientists and the general public. None of this should imply that the use of metaphors is inappropriate. At the same time, the easy slippage from metaphorical to non-metaphor uses of different words and concepts highlights the need for explicit methods for metaphor identification. This need is critical if we are to understand the content and larger implications of what both academics and laypersons say about important societal issues.
conclusion The “metaphor wars” are partly grounded in disputes over what is really metaphorical in language and, therefore, by connection, in human thought. Although various critics argue that the conventional expressions studied by CMT are not really metaphors, empirical attempts to create metaphor identification schemes now regularly mark these conventional instances of language as conveying metaphorical meaning. This fact alone does not necessarily entail that people always think in metaphorical ways when they use and interpret conventional metaphorical expressions. Psychological and neuroscientific studies are required to assess this latter possibility, as will be reviewed in Chapter 5. Still, the systematic linguistic analysis of conventional expressions, and the various corpus and computational methods for metaphor extraction illustrate the richness of metaphoricity in language, exactly as earlier suggested by CMT. Nobody disputes the difficulties, and nuances, associated with trying to design human or automatic methods for identifying metaphor in language. Still, these efforts have taught us a great deal about the complexities of metaphor, prompted the construction of several methods for reliable metaphor identification, and sharpened our questioning about how best
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to evaluate the relationship between metaphor in language and metaphor in thought. Anatol Stefanowitsch once wrote that the empirical efforts devoted to identifying metaphors, including his own, “are not particularly dazzling – and I mean that as a compliment.” However, he went on to say, We are grappling with a difficult issue of how to tell that we are dealing with a metaphor and how to classify a metaphor once we have identified it. Given the soaring heights of abstraction and generality at which the theoretical discourse on metaphor takes place, this issue is bound to seem dull and uninspiring. But it has to be done, if we are to make any progress on the deeper questions concerning the relationship between metaphorical language and metaphorical thought.99
I completely agree with this conclusion. At the same time, my argument that human metaphor identification, in particular, involves many complex unconscious factors should not imply that identifying metaphor is a completely subjective enterprise which is always in the “eye of the beholder.” Metaphor scholars may continue to debate whether or not any specific word or expression is metaphorical. There may be differences between the original metaphoricity of some phrase and how contemporary speakers use and understand it in discourse. But textual analyses alone will not be able to completely capture the psychology of real speakers, either individually or collectively, when using language. Too much depends on the particular language and context in which metaphor identification judgments are made. Furthermore, methods for identifying metaphor in language only provide the first step in the analysis of how metaphors are used for cognitive, social, and rhetorical purposes. I have also urged that metaphor scholars should not assume that certain metaphors were deliberately created and employed by people, with the assumption that the conscious nature of these deliberative acts serves as a cue to listeners and readers to somehow interpret these special cases in particular, novel ways. This cautionary message is grounded in the empirical evidence on the active metaphoricity of language, which is too often mischaracterized as being non-metaphorical and processed automatically. Furthermore, metaphor analysts should not assume that they can detect “deliberateness” from small sets of textual cues, which in reality do not distinguish some instances of language as being metaphorical in a unique manner. Finally, we must be very careful not to assume that the degree of metaphoricity in thought can be directly observed through the simple count of individual instances of metaphor in language. Many metaphorical
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concepts can be briefly stated in languages that are subsequently elaborated upon by non-metaphorical discourse. People also have a strong “allegorical impulse” to speak and write without using verbal metaphors in ways that, nonetheless, express larger metaphorical schemes of thought. We will soon see how metaphor arises in many aspects of experience apart from specific metaphorical instances of language, findings that add emphasis to the claim that metaphors are a major part of how we live.
4 Inferring Conceptual Metaphors from Language
Individual verbal metaphors may reflect the motivating presence of underlying conceptual metaphors, particularly when different linguistic expressions appear to be systematically related. To take one small example, the singer, and occasional actress, Madonna performed a series of concerts in Chile in 2008. During her visit, Madonna was widely criticized for her onstage behavior by local politicians and at least one member of the clergy. Recently retired Catholic Cardinal Jorge Medina commented on these events to his congregation by saying, The atmosphere in our city is pretty agitated because this woman is visiting and with incredibly shameful behavior provokes a wild and lustful enthusiasm. . . Thoughts of lust, impure thoughts, impure acts, are an offense to God and a dirty stain on our heart.1
What did the Cardinal mean by his statements that Madonna’s thoughts and acts were “impure” and that our hearts, or those of his congregation, contained a “dirty stain”? Most people acknowledge that it is impossible for immaterial entities like thoughts to be physically “impure” or that “a dirty stain” could be imprinted onto a human heart. Still, people readily recognize the metaphorical idea that impurity in thinking and acting refers to immoral behavior, and that a “dirty stain on our heart” describes the negative impact that Madonna’s behavior may have upon people’s souls (at least those in Cardinal Medina’s congregation). Why did the Cardinal choose these specific words to criticize Madonna and her actions? The Cardinal’s verbal metaphors were not novel because people often speak of immoral and unethical behaviors in terms of dirt or impurities. Consider, for instance, some common English expressions that reflect an association between dirt and bad behavior or thoughts.2
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“the stain of guilt/sin/illegitimacy” “impure thoughts/soul/character” “a dirty mind/look/word/secret” “an unclean thought/spirit/mind” “to contaminate a relationship” “to taint someone’s reputation” “to pollute someone’s mind/thoughts” The existence of these related linguistic expressions to talk of immoral and unethical thoughts and behavior may have emerged from the contrasting metaphorical concepts CLEAN IS GOOD and DIRTY IS BAD. People do not randomly talk about immoral or unethical behaviors, but do so for highly motivated reasons stemming from their bodily experiences for clean things being good and dirty ones being bad. In this manner, metaphorical language arises from bodily activities and people’s cognitions about their experiences. How justified are scholars when they draw inferences about people’s presumed conceptual metaphorical knowledge from an analysis of systematic patterns in language? Were the Cardinal’s words about Madonna really motivated by GOOD IS CLEAN and BAD IS DIRTY conceptual metaphors? Chapter 2 provided an overview of the cognitive linguistic research that supports the existence of conceptual metaphors in human language and thought. Systematic relations among many conventional expressions are claimed to be primarily due to underlying conceptual metaphors. However, for all its success in highlighting the relevance of conceptual metaphors for metaphorical language, CMT has not provided a reliable method for inferring the existence of different conceptual metaphors from the analysis of language. Some of the debate in the metaphor wars focuses on whether one necessarily needs to infer the presence of conceptual metaphors to explain systematic language use. In a related way, critics also argue that conceptual metaphors do not provide the most basic foundation for abstract thinking, but only reflect people’s situated, rhetorical attempts to talk about ideas and events that are really understood in non-metaphorical terms. Finally, other critics maintain that CMT fails to properly acknowledge various other factors which play important roles motivating the existence of certain metaphorical language. Each of these criticisms is generally directed toward downplaying the significance of conceptual metaphors in human thought and language. This chapter examines several possible problems with studies that posit the existence of conceptual metaphors from the analysis of language.
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Are conceptual metaphors inferred via circular reasoning in cognitive linguistic research, making the theory incapable of being falsified? Are all abstract concepts necessarily understood in metaphorical terms? Might there be other factors (e.g., linguistic, social, cultural) that shape the specific wordings of verbal metaphors apart from the influence of tacit conceptual metaphors? Do conceptual metaphors best reflect individual psychology or collective human cognition? My evaluation of these questions suggests, in most cases, that alternative explanations for conceptual metaphors do not invalidate CMT. Still, a theory of conceptual metaphors must be situated within a more comprehensive understanding of the interacting forces that constrain people’s thinking and language use.
linking conceptual metaphors with linguistic metaphors Questions have been raised about the methods by which conceptual metaphors are inferred in standard cognitive linguistic analyses. These discussions have led certain scholars to claim that conceptual metaphors have limited value in understanding how verbal metaphors work in discourse.
cross-domain mappings or categorization One of the most complex areas of disagreement in the metaphor wars is the long-standing contrast between the ideas that metaphors are understood in terms of cross-domain mappings as opposed to categorization processes. CMT firmly embraces the view that verbal metaphors, such as “We need to retrace our steps in trying to solve this problem,” arise and are interpreted from the cross-domain mapping of knowledge from a source (e.g., JOURNEY) to a target domain (e.g., LIFE). CMT sees these conventional expressions, along with other linguistic patterns, as “correlational” metaphors that provide evidence for the existence of cross-domain mappings, or conceptual metaphors. However, as mentioned earlier, most of the attention in metaphor studies address one-shot “A is B,” or resemblance, metaphors. Scholars have long assumed that resemblance metaphors best reflect people’s linguistic creativity, even though these instances turn out to be relatively rare in discourse. Understanding the metaphor, “My job is a jail,” for example, was originally thought to depend on how listeners figure out the properties that jobs and jails share. Psychological studies demonstrate, however, that
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the novel features emerging from metaphor comprehension are not salient in one’s separate understandings of the topic (e.g., “my job”) and vehicle (e.g., “is a jail”). Instead, similarity in meaning is created as an emergent property of metaphor understanding.3 Several theoretical proposals have been advanced to describe the process by which emergent metaphorical meanings are inferred, all of which have their roots in the “interactive view” of metaphor by Max Black.4 None of these, however, consider the possibility that conceptual metaphors play some role in how “A is B” metaphors may be interpreted. For instance, the “structure-mapping” theory of metaphor, by Dedre Gentner and colleagues, argued that people begin processing a metaphor by first aligning the representations of the source and target domain concepts.5 Once these two domains are aligned, further inferences are directionally projected from the source to the target domain. These inferences reflect relational, and not just feature-specific, aspects of the metaphor comprehension processes. For instance, when people read, “Plant stems are drinking straws,” they infer that both plants and straws convey liquid to nourish living things (a relational meaning) and not just that both plants and straws are long and thin (i.e., feature commonalities). Metaphors expressing relational information (e.g., “Plant stems are drinking straws”) are judged to be far more apt than those that only map object features (e.g., “Her arms were like twin swans”).6 To some extent, the structure-mapping view has rough similarities to CMT, as well as conceptual blending theory, because both approaches see metaphorical language as emerging from certain kinds of cross-domain mappings.7 Unlike CMT, structure-mapping theory sees cross-domain comparisons as beginning anew with each verbal metaphor encountered. This view does not acknowledge the possibility that entrenched conceptual metaphors, which arise from various non-linguistic and linguistic experiences, actively constrain verbal metaphor production and interpretation. Furthermore, structure mapping theory only addresses the comprehension of resemblance metaphors and does not consider how other linguistic expressions, such as conventional language, polysemy, and novel extensions of conventional statements, are used and understood. The major alternative to theories advocating the importance of crossdomain mappings in verbal metaphor use suggests that verbal metaphors are created and interpreted via categorization processes. For instance, “relevance theory” has long maintained that metaphor is a form of “loose talk” and can be understood through various pragmatic processes of narrowing and broadening, all of which are guided by the presumption
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of optimal relevance.8 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, most generally, claimed that relevance theory is “a deflationary account of metaphor,” which “is bound to disappoint those who feel that verbal metaphor deserves a full-fledge theory of its own.”9 Under their view, metaphors are understood, similar to any other utterance, as listeners attempt to maximize cognitive effects while minimizing cognitive effort. When people encounter a verbal metaphor, they infer sufficient meanings to make the speaker’s utterance most optimally relevant in the situation. Ordinary pragmatic processes, such as narrowing or loosening, enable people to create ad hoc categorizations, such that one can see how the statement “Your room is a pigsty” is relevant in context given the loosening of our typical understanding of the concept for “pigsty.” Relevance theory, therefore, does not assume that people engage in cross-domain mappings to use or interpret metaphorical expressions. Within experimental psycholinguistics, Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar also claimed that metaphors are better understood via categorization processes as class-inclusion, and not cross-domain, or comparison, statements.10 For example, the word “snake” evokes different meanings in the phrases “My lawyer is a snake” (i.e., the personality of a snake) and “The road was a snake” (i.e., how a snake moves). Thus, in the context of talking about lawyers, snake best exemplifies the abstract category of “unsavory personality attributes,” while it reflects something about the abstract category of “physical shapes of things” in the context of roads. Experimental studies show, in fact, that people do not consider the literal referents of metaphor vehicles (e.g., real sharks) when reading metaphorical statements (e.g., “Lawyers are sharks”), because this irrelevant information is suppressed during comprehension. These findings are most consistent with the claim that verbal metaphor understanding involves creating a new, ad-hoc category and not merely comparing one’s knowledge about topic (e.g., “lawyer”) and vehicle (e.g., “snake”) domains. A different proposal, by Brien Bowdle and Dedre Gentner, titled the “career of metaphor theory,” combined aspects of both the comparison and categorization views.11 This theory asserted that a shift occurs in the mode of mappings from comparison to categorization processes as metaphors become conventionalized. People preferred the metaphors (e.g., “Faith is an anchor”) to the similes (e.g., “Faith is like an anchor”) when these statements increased from being novel to conventional. Novel similes (e.g., “Friendship is like wine”) were read more quickly than metaphors, while metaphors (e.g., “Alcohol is a crutch”) were read more quickly than similes when these statements were conventional. Finally, giving people
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repeated exposures to novel similes using the same base term over time provoked individuals to shift to using the metaphor form in subsequent statements, indicating a shift from comparison to categorization processes of metaphor understanding within the course of a single study. Still, novel metaphors may not always be interpreted as comparisons, or in terms of their simile counterparts, contrary to the career of metaphor view.12 For example, one study asked participants to read very novel metaphorical expressions, such as “A newspaper is (like) a daily telescope,” in either categorical (i.e., “is”) or comparison (i.e., “is like”) form, and found that the categorization versions were read much faster than were the similes. The career of metaphor view is unable to deal with the idea that novel apt metaphors can be understood as metaphors rather than similes. Really good metaphors sound best as categorizations, and sometimes work only as categorical assertions, such as “My lawyer is a well-paid shark” (compared to “My lawyer is like a well-paid shark”). One possibility is that comparison and categorization models may reflect different processing strategies for understanding metaphor, with each one being better suited depending on the aptness of the metaphor. When a metaphor is apt, it is typically understood via a categorization process. Less apt metaphors and similes are interpreted via comparison processes.13 What’s interesting about the debate between the cross-domain and categorization views is that they rarely consider the relevance of conceptual metaphors in resemblance metaphor understanding. Psycholinguistic experiments, referred to above, only focused on “A is B” or “A is like B” metaphors or similes when they argued over the merits of the comparison vs. categorization views. Gentner, Glucksberg, and their colleagues have occasionally offered criticisms of CMT, but they have not explicitly contrasted their favorite view against CMT using the metaphorical expressions primarily studied within CMT. Within linguistics, relevance theory scholars have also criticized CMT, yet always from the perspective of their own interest in the understanding of resemblance metaphors. Lakoff has briefly suggested in two publications why CMT may be required to explain how certain resemblance metaphors are used and understood.14 But most cognitive linguistic discussions of resemblance metaphors adopt conceptual blending theory as the perspective that best accounts for the emergent properties of resemblance metaphors.15 Complicating matters further, as mentioned earlier, several scholars now suggest that primary metaphors maybe better characterized as metonymies, rather than metaphors. This move opens up the possibility that some of the cherished conventional
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expressions within CMT could be explained via metonymically driven categorization processes and not by cross-domain mapping principles. These complexities in metaphor scholarship have created an uneasy set of divisions between both psycholinguists and linguistics, and between those favoring different versions of the cross-domain or categorization perspectives, including theories which assume that either types of processing may be employed depending on the specific linguistic metaphor (e.g., the career of metaphor theory). I agree that different processing strategies may possibly be applied when people create and understand different forms of metaphorical language. However, we must be careful to not engage in blinded reverse-engineering when suggesting that one kind of metaphor must necessarily be explained via one type of mechanism and another processing mode must be adopted when people encounter a different type of verbal metaphor. After all, people hear or read metaphorical language, like all other forms of language, incrementally and so do not look at an entire linguistic statement before deciding which mental process to employ in order to understand the metaphor (in the way that metaphor scholars do when engaging in their analysis of metaphorical language). I do know this, however. Metaphor scholars should not simply assume, as they too often do, that they can explain all aspects of verbal metaphor use by only examining part of the wide diversity of metaphorical language. People should not dismiss the relevance of conceptual metaphors in verbal metaphor communication just because there are other theories (e.g., career of metaphor or relevance theory) that may be capable of explaining restricted aspects of verbal metaphor use (e.g., conventional “A is B” examples). For example, the fact that conventional resemblance metaphors appear to be understood via categorization processes, at least as suggested by the career of metaphor theory, implies to some scholars that all the conventional metaphors studied within CMT may also be interpreted via categorization, and not cross-domain mapping, processes.16 This argument, however, fails to account for the fact that what is conventional in resemblance metaphors differs from conventionality within CMT. Moreover, this argument also ignores the extensive research showing that many facets of verbal metaphor are interpreted in terms of cross-domain mappings. Chapter 5 describes some of the large literature on the psychology of conceptual metaphor understanding, and this evidence must surely be incorporated into any theory of metaphor use. Finally, metaphor scholars who are primarily concerned with how some verbal metaphors are understood must also, in my view, acknowledge the questions of how particular kinds of
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metaphorical language come into being in the first place and continue to have currency within different linguistic communities. Answering these questions may give proper recognition to the fact that people’s embodied metaphorical experiences and concepts play a critical role in the creation and communication of conventional metaphorical ideas.
do we really need conceptual metaphors to understand time? The concept of time is one topic that has generated much debate over its possible conceptual metaphorical motivations. Lakoff and Johnson explicitly argued in their book “Philosophy in the flesh” that people do not have a unique, sensory-perceptual system that perceives time apart from space.17 Our experience of time, including the ability to measure time, is understood primarily through motion. For example, the time it takes for me to stand up from my desk and move over to the window is assessed as a secession of moments experienced via my movements. Time is directional, irreversible, continuous, segmental, and capable of being measured. There are three basic conceptual metaphors that capture the main facets of our understanding of time in terms of motion. At a general level, the TIME ORIENTATION metaphor places the ego at the center of a time line, with the future being represented by objects and events lying in front of the ego, and past objects and events being situated behind the ego. The TIME ORIENTATION metaphor typically refers to cases in which there is no movement, as when a speaker stands still, and says “I am looking ahead to some good times,” or “I am leaving the past behind me.” Two other basic time metaphors conceive of either the ego or time as moving. The MOVING TIME metaphor sees the ego as stationary and time as a moving object (e.g., “Christmas is fast approaching”). On the other hand, the MOVING EGO metaphor conceives of time as stationary and the ego in movement (e.g., “We’re fast approaching Christmas”). These different conceptual metaphors illustrate how our understanding of time is based on our experiences of space and motion. Lakoff and Johnson, and many others, have gone on to claim that the MOVING TIME and MOVING EGO metaphors are common throughout the world’s languages.18 Vyv Evans has argued that there are several problems with the conceptual metaphor account of time.19 First, Evans suggested that time is an unelaborated concept existing prior to its metaphorical structuring in
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terms of motion. Lakoff and Johnson maintained that time may not exist as a thing by itself, and only arises from event comparison. But the ability to perceive duration may be a prerequisite to having an awareness of change in the external world. Evans questioned whether there is a tight correlation between experiences of time and motion, noting, for example, that we experience time whether or not we experience motion (e.g., sitting in a chair without moving). Certain time expressions, such as “We’re getting closer to the start of the school year” (MOVING EGO) refer to culturally relative events suggesting that some temporal concepts are cultural constructs, and not primary concepts. The basic idea that TIME IS MOTION does not explain why certain temporal expressions seem odd. For example, it is permissible to say that “The time for action has come/arrived/reached us” but not “The time for action has flown/ spun/turned around.” In general, time may be understood in terms of a range of different motion events, instead of a single motion concept (i.e., TIME IS MOTION). Evans’ alternative proposal is that our understanding of the word “time” may be related to several distinct temporal concepts. For example, consider the expressions “The time for action has arrived” and “Time drags when you have nothing to do.” The first expression relates to a distinct temporal moment, and the second to the magnitude of duration. On the other hand, the statement “The young woman’s time (for child birth) is approaching” is understood in terms of a particular frame of reference, such as an entire pregnancy, which differs from other aspects of temporality. Finally, the expression “Time flows on forever” relates to an unbounded temporal entity, or a temporal matrix, within which all experience unfolds. These various aspects of time are different enough to suggest, once more, that time may not be a single, simple temporal concept. There may be at least four distinct sets of temporal concepts associated with the word “time” including a Moment sense, a Duration sense, an Event sense, and a Matrix sense. These points raise the possibility that the basic conceptual metaphor TIME IS MOTION is an abstraction derived from many different lexical concepts rather than being a phenomenologically basic experience. Although much of the linguistic data support the conceptual metaphor view, this alone does not necessarily imply that it constitutes the correct level of generalization for describing people’s understanding of time and their use of temporal expressions. As we will see in Chapter 5, people’s metaphorical understandings of time are often based in their bodily, phenomenological experiences.
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conceptual motivations for verbal metaphors about arguments One of the most notable, and widely debated, conceptual metaphors, first described in “Metaphors We Live By,” is ARGUMENT IS WAR. Lakoff and Johnson listed several characteristics of arguments that are closely linked to our understanding of wars. For both arguments and wars, one participant continues a specific position, while the other participant adopts a different position. Both positions matter because one participant must surrender ground for the other to achieve victory, with differences of opinion being understood as a conflict. Both participants plan strategy, marshal their forces, attack the other’s claims, defend their own, maneuver to achieve a stronger position, and occasionally retreat when confronted with a stronger argument. These correspondences suggest that an argument can be metaphorically understood in terms of the concept of war. But several criticisms have been raised about linking conventional expressions with specific conceptual metaphors, as has been done with metaphors relating to ARGUMENT IS WAR. First, John Vervaeke and John Kennedy argued that many conventional expressions related to arguments also correspond to concepts of chess matches, bridge games, and other competitive activities.20 Chess itself is often used as a metaphor for war.21 The name of some chess pieces suggest a war metaphor (e.g., castle, knight), and war is frequently mentioned in the context of athletic and business competitions. Most of the conventional expressions consistent with the ARGUMENT IS WAR conceptual metaphor are consistent with other metaphorical schemes, such as ARGUMENT IS PLAYING CHESS and ARGUMENT IS BOXING. These observations highlight the difficulty with attempts to link specific conventional expressions with particular conceptual metaphors. If a specific conventional expression relates to several different conceptual metaphors, we may not be able to clearly hypothesize underlying conceptual metaphors from systematic linguistic analyses alone.22 A related problem is that CMT assumes that the source domains in metaphor are more familiar than the typically more abstract target domains. According to Lakoff and Johnson, for example, we understand arguments in terms of war because the source domain of war, or physical conflict, is directly related to our past and present experiences. But the reverse is actually true, at least for most Americans, in that our experiences of arguments, which may occur daily, are more common in
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everyday life than are wars or physical conflicts.23 Even if children do not have a well-formed concept of war, their schemas for physical and verbal fighting, contests, and games could easily provide the basis for understanding arguments as war. In fact, Lakoff and Johnson more recently recast their original formulation to suggest that ARGUMENT IS STRUGGLE, as opposed to ARGUMENT IS WAR, may better reflect the underlying metaphor because “All children struggle against physical manipulations of their parents, and as language is learned, the physical struggle comes to be accompanied by words.”24 More generally, it is not always clear which conceptual metaphor may directly, and solely, motivate a specific verbal metaphor. A more general concern with CMT is that it may be impossible to falsify. The strategy of linking conventional expressions with metaphorical concepts implies that no linguistic statement can be brought forward as evidence against the positing of a particular conceptual metaphor. CMT is sometimes perceived as engaging in circular reasoning by first analyzing language, then inferring the existence of a tacit conceptual metaphor to explain the systematicity in language, but then testing this hypothesis by referring back to language for empirical support. This language-to-concepts-to-language loop does not, in some critics’ view, sufficiently establish metaphor as an inherently conceptual, or cognitive, phenomenon.25 For instance, Lakoff and Johnson cite the expression “If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out,” as one of the linguistic instantiations for the ARGUMENT IS WAR conceptual metaphor. A corpus analysis of “strategy” and “wipe out,” however, reveals that most of their uses are related to the domains of business, finance, police, and employment, in addition to a few other special cases.26 Thus, the presence of the word “strategy” in an expression like “If you use that strategy he’ll wipe you out,” does not provide sufficient evidence for war being the motivating source domain for this conventional expression. A corpus analysis of “wipe out” offers a similar conclusion, and provides another reason why war may not be the motivating source domain for the above conventional statement. Finally, a search of the 365 million word “Corpus of American English” found no instances of the expression “Her argument was right on target,” or any related statement using other pronouns or tense markings, which also raises doubt about the cognitive linguistic evidence favoring the ARGUMENT IS WAR conceptual metaphor.27 As Vervaeke and Kennedy summarized in their critique of CMT, “one cannot simply group some metaphors, adduce a possible common base, and then expect derivations
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from the base to be apt.”28 CMT may be unfalsifiable if the only data in its favor is the systematic grouping of metaphors linked by a common theme. One response to these criticisms of CMT, offered by David Ritchie, is that there may be multiple connections between verbal metaphors and different conceptual metaphorical concepts.29 Conceptual metaphors, such as ARGUMENT IS WAR, arise from a field of interrelated concepts that are available for metaphorical application and can be extended to other topics such as business or politics. For example, American culture has a large, complex, and densely interconnected set of schemes for competition and conflict, ranging from friendly, low ego-involvement games through highly competitive games, shouting matches, fisticuffs, and brawls, all the way to full-scale wars.30 Within this conceptual field, we readily transfer experiences associated with one form of competition or conflict to another.31 When words such as “attack,” “defend,” or “strategy” appear in discussions about arguments, we cannot be sure whether any particular person will associate the term with chess, boxing, all-out war, or with nothing beyond an abstract concept. The word “attack” may have multiple, but independent, meanings, even if it originated from a single common metaphor. For example, the statement “Jane considered his attack on her argument as an attack on her intellectual integrity” could substitute a synonym such as “refutation of” for the first use of “attack” and a different synonym “assault” for the second use (e.g., “Jane considered his refutation of her argument as an assault on her intellectual integrity”). However, these substitutions would clearly change the meaning of the original statement. An “assault” in an argument is not the same as an “attack” and a “refutation of” one’s intellectual integrity doesn’t make much sense. Thus, “attack” may be both a synonym for “assault” and a synonym for “attempt to refute.”32 The generality at which implicit metaphors can be identified, and the family of metaphors to which a particular expression belongs, may therefore be indeterminate. Different individuals may interpret the same expression according to different implicit metaphors and derive different entailments.33 This possibility does not imply that conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) is circular or untestable. Nonetheless, there may not always be singular correspondences between specific verbal metaphors and particular underlying conceptual metaphors. Ultimately, it may not matter whether the conflict metaphor originated with war, childhood rough and tumble, or other forms of conflict, because they all carry a set of potential meanings that can be readily applied to talk of chess, bridge, basketball, and school debate-tournaments. These
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entailments, images, and responses may be available to people, but often arise in slightly different ways for different people depending on contextual circumstances. As the anthropologist James Howe once claimed, Lakoff and Johnson “show only that there is at least sometimes a congruity between metaphor and action; they offer no proof that when participants argue aggressively, their actions are motivated, compelled, or controlled by the war metaphor.34 Many CMT scholars now argue that many kinds of complex knowledge underlie the creation and use of verbal metaphors.35 Consider one analysis of English and Chinese metaphors, by Ning Yu, in which people think of and talk about prestige and dignity in terms of the human “face,” such as in the English statement, “With no option left, he was forced to borrow money from others at the sacrifice of his dignity,” which is a translation from the Chinese “Chuyu wunai ta zhihao she-lian xiang ren jie qian” (which literally says “out of no-choice he is forced sacrifice-face from others borrow money”).36 Although the conceptual metaphor HAVING DIGNITY IS KEEPING ONE’S FACE presumably motivates the meaning of “sacrificing face” as referring to dignity, the underlying conceptual knowledge used to understand this metaphorical part of the sentence includes, at the very least, the following: a. DIGNITY IS FACE AS A VALUABLE POSSESSION (a complex metaphor) b. DIGNITY IS FACE AS A PHYSICAL OBJECT (a complex metaphor) c. DIGNITY IS A FEELING (a proposition) d. FACE IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT (a complex metaphor) e. A FEELING IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT (a primary metaphor) f. FACE STANDS FOR A FEELING (a metonymy) g. DIGNITY IS A DESIRABLE FEELING (a proposition). This list of conceptual mappings and propositions may represent only a part of what people infer when they hear ordinary language, and there may, once more, be various other impressions, attitudes, and feelings that listeners experience when encountering this, or any other, form of metaphorical expression. We simply do not yet know to what extent people always, or ever, activate what kind of conceptual information during the experience of verbal metaphor understanding. Nonetheless, Yu’s analysis demonstrates the degree to which the understanding of simple metaphorical words may be grounded in a rather rich set of non-linguistic, conceptual knowledge, some of which arises from and continues to be rooted in
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embodied experience (e.g., in primary metaphors like A FEELING IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT). People’s experience of metaphorical meaning must include rich layers of conceptual and embodied knowledge, ranging from propositions to different sets of metaphorical and metonymic mappings.37 In general, there may be strong linguistic evidence that metaphors are fundamental principles guiding the ways people speak and think of their experiences, especially those related to abstract ideas and events. However, determining the exact conceptual motivations for a particular person’s use of any verbal metaphor likely requires evidence other than that obtained from examining systematic linguistics.
the need for corpus linguistics As noted in Chapter 3, a key development in cognitive linguistic research is the emergence of corpus linguistic studies. The examination of actual language patterns, as evident from the analysis of large-scale corpora, provides a firmer basis for determining underlying conceptual metaphors than can be provided by analyses that rely on dictionaries, thesauruses, or decontextualized verbal metaphors. Part of the concern here is that standard CMT analyses are too often based on the intuitions of individual analysts, which may be biased, inaccurate, or poor reflections of how metaphors are really used in discourse. Do corpus studies remedy this problem? For example, Anatol Stefanowitsch described one method for inferring relevant conceptual metaphors through the organized search of large-scale corpora.38 The analyst first searches for a specific keyword that is representative of a particular target domain (e.g., anger, fear, happiness). Second, metaphorical uses of words in these contexts are identified. Finally, metaphorical patterns are inferred. Metaphorical patterns are specifically defined as “multi-word expressions from a given source domain into which specific lexical items from a given target domain have been inserted.”39 This “Metaphorical Pattern Analysis” (MPA) does not capture metaphorical patterns that exclude explicit mention of the target domain (e.g., “I’m on cloud nine” when implicitly referring to being happy). Still, MPA is able to identify metaphorical patterns that show “how concepts expressed by individual lexical items interact with large-scale mappings between whole conceptual domains.”40 Consider one project that compared the result of MPA with an intuitionist analysis of conceptual metaphors. Zoltán Kövecses had earlier
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offered an intuitionist analysis of anger metaphors and suggested that many conceptual metaphors motivate the creation of these verbal expressions (e.g., ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER, ANGER IS AN OPPONENT IN A STRUGGLE, and ANGER IS A NATURAL FORCE). Stefanowitsch later on conducted a corpus analysis of 1000 uses of “anger” in discourse and showed that the verbal metaphors for “anger” identified by Kövecses amounted to only 14 percent of all the metaphorical patterns observed by MPA. The primary reason for this discrepancy was that Kövecses’s analysis omitted any metaphor that was related to the broader EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor, or metaphors that were relevant to all emotion concepts (and not just anger). For instance, cases of anger that were conceptualized as a location which people move in and out of (e.g., “run away from anger”), or where anger is viewed as a moving object (e.g., “anger returned,” “anger swept through someone”) account for almost two-thirds of all metaphorical expressions with “anger” in the MPA corpus. When verbal expressions related to the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphors were included in the overall study of anger metaphors, the intuitionist analysis did not refer to one-fifth of the anger metaphors identified by MPA. Some of these metaphors may reflect slightly different mappings than inferred by the intuitionist method, such as ANGER IS A SUBSTANCE/ LIQUID IN A CONTAINER and ANGER IS HEAT, noted by MPA, which can be combined to form the mapping ANGER IS HEATED LIQUID IN A CONTAINER. Similarly, ANGER IS LIGHT (e.g., “anger flashed across his face”) could be related to ANGER IS FIRE, given that fire often casts light. The mapping INTENSITY OF ANGER IS HEIGHT (e.g., “anger is rising”) could reflect the more general metaphor MORE IS UP. Finally, MPA observed ANGER IS A SLEEPING ORGANISM (e.g., “John aroused Mary’s anger”) could be subsumed by the ANGER IS A FIERCE ANIMAL, as noted by Kövecses and others. In general, although there are many similarities in the findings obtained by an intuitionist analysis and a corpus study, the examination of largescale corpora often provides more nuanced analyses of conceptual metaphors underlying verbal metaphors. An MPA analysis of “happiness” metaphors also showed many overlaps with the results from one intuitionist analysis, also done by Kövecses. Still various discrepancies between the two methods were also evident. For example, Kövecses observed that the following fifteen conceptual metaphors are relevant to our understandings of happiness (e.g., HAPPINESS IS X).41
The Need for Corpus Linguistics UP BEING OFF THE GROUND BEING IN HEAVEN LIGHT VITALITY WARM HEALTH AN ANIMAL THAT LIVES WELL A PLEASURABLE PHYSICAL SENSATION FLUID IN A CONTAINER CAPTIVE ANIMAL OPPONENT IN A STRUGGLE A RAPTURE/HIGH INSANITY A NATURAL FORCE
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We had to cheer him up. I am six feet off the ground. That was heaven on earth. Lighten up. He was alive with joy. That warmed my spirits. It made me feel great. He was happy as a pig in shit. I was tickled pink. He was overflowing with joy. His feelings of happiness broke loose. He was knocked out. I was drunk with joy. They were crazy with happiness. He was swept off his feet.
Stefanowitsch claimed that some of these metaphors may not be entirely independent but are special cases of the more general HAPPINESS IS UP conceptual metaphor (e.g., BEING OFF THE GROUND, BEING IN HEAVEN). The metaphorical mapping HAPPINESS IS AN ANIMAL THAT LIVES WELL (e.g., “He was happy as a pig in shit”) may also be more related to the HAPPINESS IS A PLEASURABLE PHYSICAL SENSATION conceptual metaphor. An MPA analysis of “joy,” which is arguably more central to the idea of happiness, showed, once again, that almost all of the conceptual metaphors observed by intuitionist methods could also be identified by an extensive corpus search. However, the mappings seen in the intuitionist analysis represent only seven percent of all metaphorical expressions related to “joy” in the corpus sample. As shown previously, many of the missing patterns are related to the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor referring, for example, to joy as a location or as a moving object. Other previously unfound metaphors include HAPPINESS IS HEAT/FIRE (e.g., “sparks of joy”), LIQUID (e.g., “river of joy”), SOMETHING IN A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER (e.g., “filled with joy,” “bursting with joy”), and HAPPINESS IS A MIXED/PURE SUBSTANCE (e.g., “mixed joy,” “pure joy”). Most generally, MPA has successfully identified conceptual metaphors presumed to underlie the emotion concepts of anger, happiness, fear, sadness, and disgust, as specifically noted by traditional cognitive linguistic intuitionist methods. But MPA has also shown that traditional intuitionist analyses sometimes misanalyse or ignore several potential conceptual metaphors because of insufficient data. Furthermore, MPA provides
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specific information about the relative frequency of different conceptual metaphors (e.g., ANGER IS AN OPPONENT IN A STRUGGLE is about 2½ times more frequent than expressions related to ANGER IS A NATURAL FORCE), something that intuitionist analyses are incapable of detecting with any accuracy. The increasing use of corpus linguistics methods enables scholars to observe a more detailed picture of how different, sometimes overlapping, metaphors motivate people’s use of different metaphorical language. However, intuitionist analyses of metaphor, which sometimes employ certain corpora, such as dictionaries, have provided a major source of data and empirical hypotheses that have been critical to further testing through corpus linguistic methods. In this way, the rise of corpus linguistic studies, by no means, signals an end to how linguists often do their research. At the same time, even corpus linguistic studies rely on analysts’ intuitions as seen, for example, in how scholars try to infer conceptual metaphors from the examination of large corpora. Finally, corpus linguistic studies may provide a more realistic sense of how metaphors are used in discourse, showing that conceptual metaphors may indeed be motivating forces in the ways people speak metaphorically. Still, this evidence alone does not necessarily represent what specific speakers and listeners are thinking when they produce or understand verbal metaphors in discourse. The fact that people speak metaphorically in certain ways at sometimes is very suggestive of the possibility of metaphorical cognition. Yet other kinds of empirical evidence are likely needed to more firmly establish the hypothesis that conventional metaphorical thinking underlies metaphorical language.
does cmt ignore lexical and grammatical factors? Several critics have argued that CMT ignores important lexical and grammatical factors which influence word choice in verbal metaphors. As noted in Chapter 3, Alice Deignan observed that some source-to-target domain mappings emerging from conceptual metaphors do not give rise to meaningful metaphorical language. Much earlier, Andrew Ortony argued that even with wide co-occurrence between source and target domains, much of the evidence for conceptual metaphor can best be explained on a lexical, and not conceptual, level.42 Determining which verbal metaphors can be explained at the conceptual, as opposed to the lexical level, is complicated by the fact that metaphorical strength varies from one word to another. For example,
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Jan Svanlund advanced the idea that there are several ways in which metaphorical strength can be measured.43 1. Width of activation (how many source domain concepts are recurrently activated by the metaphorical expression?) 2. Frequency of activation (how often are these source domain concepts activated by the metaphorical expression?) 3. Intensity of activation (how strongly are these source domain concepts activated by the metaphorical expression?) 4. Coherence of activation (how coherent are the source domain concepts when activated by the metaphorical expression? To what extent are the inference patterns preserved?). One corpus linguistic study examined the width and frequency of activation through analysis of two Swedish nouns “vikt” and “tyngd,” both of which are used to describe physical objects of weight, as well as to express metaphorical meaning (e.g., “The issue has been given greater weight”). In general, this collocational analysis showed that “vikt” and “tyngd” differ in metaphorical strength. Although “vikt” is predominantly employed with specific metaphorical meaning referring to “importance” (e.g., “Private enterprising is of utmost importance”), “tyngd” is used in a variety of ways, indicating a greater width of activation. For instance, “tyngd” is used in situations referring to human perception of weight (e.g., “I felt the words like a weight over me”), forces with spatial properties (e.g., “I was pressed down into the chair by a great weight”), and elements associated with transportation (e.g., “He had carried the whole weight of the attack alone”). A different analysis of “vikt,” and “vaga,” “(equivalent to “weight,” and “weigh”) examined their conceptual coherence. Both terms are projected from the same source subdomain, but are projected quite differently to their target concept and not as correspondences of a single, presumably, coherent conceptual unity. First, “vikt” and “vaga” frequently co-occur in nonmetaphorical contexts, but rarely do so when used metaphorically. Second, “vikt” has less metaphorical strength than “vaga” which can be employed in a variety of contexts when one is measuring the magnitude of some abstract idea or event. For this reason, the cross-domain mappings emerging from the conceptual metaphor IMPORTANCE IS WEIGHT may not be systematic. Svanlund argued that the metaphorical meanings of “vikt,” in particular, are likely motivated by obsolete discourse functions that are unrelated to concepts from the WEIGHT domain. CMT may be unable to account for these specific lexical patterns in some metaphorical word usage.
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Karin Sullivan claimed, however, that lexical choice in metaphorical language partly depends on frame-based constraints.44 Under this view, the frame semantics evoked by a word’s non-metaphorical sense plays an important role in determining which lexical items may overtly express a specific conceptual metaphor. The foundation for this approach is the invariance hypothesis: Metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the image-schema structure) of the source domain, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domain.45
Sullivan suggested that the notion of “cognitive topology” be extended to embrace frame semantics, along with image-schematic structure. Consider the conceptual metaphor HAPPINESS IS LIGHT as instantiated in the phrases “bright disposition,” “looking on the bright side,” and “bright outlook.” The adjectives “sunny” and “dark” are also related to HAPPINESS IS LIGHT as seen in “sunny disposition” and “dark mood.” Note, however, that not all adjectives referring to “light” are appropriate for the HAPPINESS IS LIGHT metaphor. English speakers never use “brilliant” to mean “happy” (e.g., we rarely see “brilliant disposition” or “look on the brilliant side”). What explains the differences between the uses of “brilliant” compared to “bright” or “sunny” in talk about happiness? Critics typically see these, and other, variations in the possible mappings within CMT as direct falsifications of the theory. However, corpus research provides a motivated reason for why “bright” works with happiness and “brilliant” does not.46 Sullivan showed that non-metaphorical uses of “bright,” “sunny,” and “dark” typically modify the location of light, such as “bright room,” “sunny place,” and “dark corner.” The adjective “brilliant,” on the other hand, is rarely used to denote a light location, but is primarily employed when referring to light emanating sources, as seen in “brilliant star” or “brilliant torch.” These different features of light, as a location or as a source, explain why there is variation in the lexical items seen in verbal metaphors. Any phrase with “sunny” will evoke the idea of a light’s location, which is appropriate to use when expressing the metaphorical idea of HAPPINESS IS LIGHT. But phrases with “brilliant,” which is inconsistent with the location idea, will not acquire a metaphorical meaning relevant to the domain of happiness. More generally, the frame semantics associated with a lexical item constrains how that word may be used in metaphorical language. Variation in the specific wording of metaphors should not be seen as evidence against CMT.
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Instead, conceptual metaphors provide an important, but not exclusive, constraint on verbal metaphor use. The meanings of particular lexical metaphors may have complex origins and motivations, including historical ones, which are not always directly related to conceptual metaphors per se. As Svanlund aptly concluded, “conceptual metaphors do not govern lexical metaphors, although they may sometimes guide them.”47 For this reason, “Conceptual metaphors should probably be seen as cognitive tendencies, rather than systematic and coherent structures that fully govern the semantics of a group of lexical items.”48
does cmt ignore socio-cultural forces? CMT is often characterized as a purely “cognitive” theory. Empirical research showing the embodied roots of many conceptual metaphors has also been widely seen as a rejection of the possible social and cultural forces that motivate metaphorical thoughts and communications. To be fair, Lakoff and Johnson explicitly noted in 1980 that “metaphors may create realities, especially social realities.”49 Some critics of CMT argue, nonetheless, that the theory cannot explain both the universality of conceptual metaphor based on embodiment and the cultural variations in metaphorical language use. For example, in her criticism of embodied realism within CMT, Marina Rakova specifically stated, The claim that there are cognitively significant cultural differences in the conceptualization of spatial relations is incompatible with the naturalistic stand that follows from the theory of image schemas.50
Zoltán Kövecses forcefully replied to this argument by noting that we should “not think of embodiment as a mechanical and automatic force shaping conceptual metaphors (and conceptual systems in general) but as a complex set of factors to which speakers can apply differential experiential foci.”51 Different cultures suggest different ways of experiencing events that may lead to cultural variations in verbal metaphorical talk. Still, critics have advanced different linguistic analyses to emphasize the socio-cultural dimensions of metaphorical language use, which serve as a major correction, to some, for CMT. For example, within the interdisciplinary world of metaphor scholarship, advocates of “critical discourse analysis” (CDA) aim to highlight the socio-political-ideological functions of metaphorical language use, often in contrast to the more presumed cognitive motivations for metaphoric language.52 Much of this research seeks to establish connections between cognition and metaphorical
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language use as social practice. Within this approach, the analysis of discourse not only uncovers important mental models and representations, but also reveals how metaphor, among other linguistic devices, creates and reproduces dominant social schemas. For instance, Veronika Koller examined how metaphor within business media discourse facilitates an aggressive, gender-biased working environment. Her analysis of merger and acquisition discourse showed that metaphors referring to war, sports, and games were most frequent, but still sometimes occurred along with metaphors related to marriage (e.g., MERGERS ARE MARRIAGES).53 These two conceptual metaphors seem quite different, yet, according to Koller, “marriage metaphors could be euphemisms for rape metaphors.”54 Consider the following example from a news story titled “A Marriage is Blessed: Its objections met, the FTC greenlights Time Warner’s deal with Turner Broadcasting.” For 10 months, three men circled like prizefighters, lovers or vultures. . . . Production married to distribution will allow a company to create . . . new products for the digital age.
Note above how the “metaphorical men are presented as dominant by being agents of various processes, while metaphorical women mostly represent affected entities (e.g., ‘Germany is more fertile territory for predators’)” (from another related news story).55 The use of certain metaphors, and their extensions, within business media discourse can be partly explained in terms of the strong influence that ideology has in the creation of metaphorical ideas and language. Conceptual metaphors, such as MERGERS ARE MARRIAGES, do not emerge simply from private, cognitive minds, but are significantly shaped by dominant ideologies, such as seen in the above instances regarding male agency and female passivity. Many source-to-target domain mappings in conceptual metaphors vary depending on several socio-cultural factors. Lisa El Refaie studied the economic metaphors employed in United Kingdom and Hong Kong discourse and showed that both English and Chinese frequently employed bodily movement metaphors (e.g., DOWN IS BAD and FORWARD IS GOOD), all of which are variations of the more general conceptual metaphor THE ECONOMY IS A LIVING ORGANISM.56 Nonetheless, the specific construals of these metaphors differ across the two languages. English economic metaphors exhibit more dynamic properties regarding bodily movement than has been seen in the Hong Kong corpus (e.g., “the economy took giant leaps” vs. “the economy was in terrible shape”). Moreover, economic metaphors in the United Kingdom focused more on the moving aspects of the
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economy (e.g., “plunging into a recession”), compared to the greater focus on locations within the Hong Kong corpus (e.g., “The Hong Kong economy will enter the low tide again”). Finally, UK economic discourse often relies on kinship metaphors, especially relating to marriage and divorce (e.g., “increasingly divorced from the economies with which they are nominally associated”). Hong Kong discourse rarely employed marriage metaphors and instead emphasized other kinds of relationships (e.g., “the economy and the politics always go hand in hand”). These various differences in the specific economic metaphors likely reflect cultural preferences in the understanding of how bodily movement may be used in describing abstract economic ideas. More generally, the hypothesis that complex metaphors are more likely to be culture-dependent than primary metaphors (e.g., MORE IS UP, DIFFICULTIES ARE PHYSICAL BURDENS, KNOWING IS SEEING) has been corroborated by several case studies.57 At the same time, cognitive linguistic research shows that two languages may share a conceptual metaphor, but that specific linguistic manifestations of these metaphors can reveal subtle differences in the cultural-ideological background in which conceptual metaphors function. 58 One proposal that is critical of CMT claims that certain “discourse metaphors” are quite different from conceptual, especially primary, metaphors given the former’s tight linkages to socio-cultural, discursive situations. A primary motivation for positing the existence of discourse metaphors stems from the increasing interest in studies of metaphor in discourse, which are clearly tied to the socio-cultural contexts in which they appear. To give one example, the FRANKENFOOD metaphor arose when agricultural biotechnology began to develop genetically modified (GM) foods in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, perhaps, people immediately began thinking and talking of GM-FOODS ARE FRANKENFOODS after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein character. As consumer and environmental groups took on the fight against GM-foods, the FRANKENFOOD metaphor rapidly spread to exert pressure on governmental agencies to strongly regulate the production and distribution of these products. The metaphor was seen less frequently when the crisis over GM-food abated in the 2000s. In general, metaphorical terms like “Frankenfood” emerge within the social, cultural contexts in which they function and not simply from purely conceptual metaphors. A discourse metaphor is “a relatively stable metaphorical projection that functions as a key framing device within a particular discourse over a certain period of time.”59 For example, Joerg Zinken argued that metaphorical language may be best explained in terms of the local interactions between the discourse participants, and not at the level of pre-existing
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conceptual analogies or metaphors.60 Consider German speakers’ different use of “weg” (i.e., “path”), and “bahn” (i.e., “course”) in metaphorical contexts, with “weg” primarily referring to the effort used to attain goals, while “bahn” refers to a pre-determined trajectory followed to reach some metaphorical destination. Why do people employ these metaphorically used words in different ways, despite their close similarity in basic meanings? Zinken argued that closely similar words often have quite different metaphorical functions because of specific form–meaning pairings negotiated between speakers (i.e., “conceptual pacts”) in different conversational interactions. Discourse metaphors, however, do not arise from habitual analogies or conceptual metaphors per se. People’s conversational interactions are obviously important in the ways words are used, metaphorically or otherwise, with participants sometimes clearly negotiating the way a word is to be used and understood in specific situations. But nothing in Zinken’s work actually explored the details of people’s real conversational interactions or how various “conceptual pacts” were established for “weg” and “bahn” or any other vehicle pairs studied. Zinken also limited his analysis to only so-called “active metaphors” that required “meta-lexical awareness” as when an author included a “tuning device” such as “so to speak,” or inverted commas.61 In this way, Zinken did not explore the full range of how any of the vehicle terms he studied were more completely used in discourse. For these reasons, Zinken’s theoretical emphasis on conceptual pacts, and his neglect of other possible constraints on metaphorical language use, misses a key, intermediate level of analysis between abstract conceptual metaphors and local discourse interactions. Another project, using both an experimental study and a corpus linguistic analysis, explicitly provided evidence for an intermediate level of constraint on metaphor in terms of people’s imaginative, embodied understandings of real-world artifacts. Marlene Johansson-Falck and myself examined the ways the English words “path” and “road” are used and possibly understood when used metaphorically.62 Read the two statements below and consider whether “path” and “road” convey the same metaphorical meaning. (1) The Spaniard lost 10–8, 6–3, 2–6, and 8–6 to Charlie Pasarell in 1967. And even if Agassi survives his first test, his path to a second successive final is strewn with trip wire, with former champions Boris Becker, Michael Stich top seed Pete Sampras and powerful ninth seeded Dutchman Richard Krajicek all in his half of the draw.
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(2) The learner who is well on the road to being a competent reader does bring a number of things to the task, a set of skills and attributes many of which are still developing. He or she brings good sight and the beginnings of visual discrimination. The word “path” seems appropriate in (1) because of the uneven nature of Agassi’s journey toward winning the tennis match, while “road” seems apt in (2) because the journey becoming a competent reader’s is wellestablished, and one that many people have metaphorically travelled. Do people understand “path” and “road” to be different when used as metaphorical vehicles? We investigated this question by first asking people to form mental images for “being on a road” and “being on a path.” After this, participants were given different questions and had to pick “path” or “road” as the best answer to each one (e.g., “Which is more likely to go through problematic terrain?”). People think of paths as being more problematic to travel on, more up and down, more aimless in their direction, something that you stop on more often, and something you travel on foot significantly more often than is the case for roads. On the other hand, roads are viewed as straighter, wider, and paved, leading to a specific destination, and something you drive along far more than is the case for paths. We next explored whether people’s intuitions about their embodied experiences on paths and roads map onto their metaphorical uses of “path” and “road” in discourse. In the second study, we selected a random sample of 1000 uses of “path” and “road” from the British National Corpus (BNC), and discovered that 284 of the “path” instances, and 49 of the “road” instances were used metaphorically. A closer analysis of the metaphorical target domains in the corpus showed that there is a strong connection between the metaphorical uses of “path” and “road” and people’s mental imagery for paths and roads. For instance, the tendency for metaphorical uses of “road” to describe people’s PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITIES/LIVES and POLITICAL/FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENTS/PROCESSES is clearly in line with people’s imaginative perceptions of the road as a more efficient means of transportation than path. To someone who is eager to quickly reach a given goal, travelling along a paved and straight road must be a better option than travelling along an earthen path. Accordingly, the tendency to think of paths as earthen artifacts on which we tread or walk makes “path” more apt for structuring people’s experiences of COURSES OF ACTION/ WAY OF LIVING than “road.” Our manner of motion on an imaginary
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path (i.e., we walk in a more haphazard fashion) is much closer to the way we typically move around in our real lives (i.e., our lives are rarely straight and fast) than is the case with “road.” Moreover, the imaginary path, on which we sometimes stand, seems to better match the step by step features of metaphorical paths in talk about complex COMPUTER/MATHEMATICS DEVELOPMENTS/PROCESSES. Overall, people’s metaphorical uses of “path” and “road” are motivated by their imaginative, embodied understanding of these real-world paths and roads, or in terms of what these artifacts afford. These data are inconsistent with the claim that metaphor use is primarily determined by local discourse constraints. One lesson from the debate over discourse metaphors is that we should not dismiss the relevance of embodied conceptual metaphors in language unless we explicitly seek to find conceptual, and then possibly fail to do so. People’s choice of what to say metaphorically in discourse is motivated by several factors. Still, it is clear that conceptual metaphorical knowledge provides a crucial constraint on exactly how people speak and write metaphorically in discourse.
does cmt ignore indeterminacy of poetic understanding? Cognitive linguists and others have claimed that conceptual metaphors play a significant role in people’s creation and interpretation of poetic metaphor. Consider Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” which ends with the following stanza: I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
This poem is one of the most widely discussed literary works in the world of cognitive poetics. George Lakoff and Mark Turner argued that the Frost poem evokes a general knowledge of life via the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY.63 Readers presumably infer the poet’s intentions in part through their recruitment of this specific conceptual metaphor. As Lakoff and Turner maintained, “without a LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, there would be no explanation for . . . why we understand this passage to be about life or why we reason about it as we do.”64
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Some literary scholars complain, nonetheless, that CMT vastly underestimates the complexities of literary meaning and interpretation. For example, Reuven Tsur argued in a critique of Lakoff and Turner’s analysis of “The Road Not Travelled” that, “The proper response to Frost’s poem involves the uncertainty whether the image is metaphorical or not.” Readers of literature do not necessarily create a single interpretation of a trope. The idea that any crossroads and journeys, as in Frost’s poem, demand a particular symbolic interpretation, such as the evocation of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor, is a conclusion that, for Tsur, “becomes utterly trivial.” A conceptual metaphor understanding of Frost’s poem “points out merely one possible meaning in a wide range of images, and not necessarily the most important one.” The primary difficulty with the CMT analysis of the Frost poem, according to Tsur, is that it is “only concerned with comprehension, or the moment-by-moment processes of creating an immediate understanding of the linguistic utterance.” CMT ignores “deferred conceptualization” that is often the focus of literary analysis through its primary emphasis on the “standard response” or meaning for a literary work (e.g., inferring that the LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor is the meaningful basis of Frost’s poem). According to Tsur, CMT advances a theory with “pre-established meanings” that completely ignores the indefinite range of potential meanings emergent in different contexts. In a similar vein, Elena Semino and Gerard Steen also observed, “While cognitive metaphor theory in particular relates conventional metaphorical patterns in a language to shared cultural and cognitive models, many studies of metaphor in literature relate distinctive, idiosyncratic metaphorical patterns in a writer’s works, a single text, or parts of a text to an individual’s particular cognitive habits, concerns, goals and worldview.”65 Monika Fludernik, more generally, outlined a larger assessment of CMT in regard to literary interpretation: For literary critics, then, conceptual metaphor theory has been problematic on two accounts; one, universality or reductionism in opposition to textual specificity; and, two, its theoretical position regarding the creativity or originality of metaphors. Traditional literary critics insist on seeing metaphors as singular achievements in poetic creativity, which opens a particularly direct access to a poet’s genius. Hence, metaphor appears as the incarnation of creativity and aesthetic achievement.66
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James Swan offered a similar opinion: Explaining metaphor as the activities of unconscious, basic-led schema makes it difficult to account for the activity of a cultural subject acting as an ethical, intuitive agent capable of judgment.67
My general response to these criticisms is that they simply misunderstand the aims of CMT. Nobody claims that conceptual metaphors offer a complete account of how verbal metaphors are created and understood either during the earlier moments of quick comprehension to long, reflective acts of literary interpretation. However, conceptual metaphors offer a significant, enduring constraint on human meaning making. Consider, for example, the poem by Christina Rossetti, titled “Up-Hill.”68 Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn. Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door. Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.
When discussing this poem in my book, “The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding,” many years ago, I wrote that Rossetti’s “words are intended to draw deeper comparisons between a day’s journey and a person’s life whereby the uphill road represents the course we travel in life and the wayfarer’s inn the resting place after death.”69 Although this general metaphorical theme, A LIFETIME IS A DAY, surely provides part of the underlying motivating structure for the poem, Rossetti’s composition offers many more intricate understandings, including questions as to whether “death can hide the shelter, which is heaven,” or “if there are other souls in death, which again is equated to night,” and even. “if there will be rest and finality in heaven.”70 We can also import some of our knowledge about Rossetti, and her religious beliefs, to ask questions as
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to whether the implied narrator in “Up-Hill” may possibly be Jesus or God. Still, each of these questions is parasitic with our conceptual metaphorical interpretation of the poem’s general theme. Even if inferring conceptual metaphors, along with their complex entailments, does not capture the various meanings one can ascribe to any poem, conceptual metaphors, once more, offer a critical constraint on our abilities to make sense of poetic creations and respond to them in personal and aesthetic ways. As Swan also noted, “There is nothing to prevent a cognitive approach to metaphor from joining a description of its systematic structure with accounts of particular, situated acts of meaning.”71 Many literary scholars, working within the CMT framework, explicitly demonstrate how conceptual metaphors, at the very least, provide important meaning structures upon which more elaborate, sometimes indeterminate, literary interpretations may be understood (see Chapters 2 and 5).CMT has, nonetheless, never been advanced as a complete theory of poetic understandings, or even mundane, conventional ones either.
are cultural models partly metaphorical? Doubts about whether conceptual metaphors are at the root of many abstract concepts have also been raised in regard to our understanding of culture. CMT claims that conceptual metaphors not only motivate people’s use of linguistic metaphor, but also underlie larger cultural models shared by speakers within different cultural communities. For example, George Lakoff and Zoltán Kövecses outlined how cultural models for experiences like anger are fundamentally structured in terms of metaphor.72 They argued that the metaphors and metonymies associated with anger constitute a cultural model for anger. One analysis of the metaphors and metonymies in American English talk of anger gives rise to the following cultural model for anger. This model is composed of five temporally linked stages that characterize how anger is provoked, expressed, and coped with. 1. Offending Event: Wrongdoer offends self. Wrongdoer is at fault. The offending event displeases self. The intensity of the offense outweighs the intensity of the retribution (which equals zero at this point), thus creating an imbalance. The offense causes anger to come into existence. 2. Anger Anger exists.
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The self experiences physiological effects (heat, pressure, agitation). Anger exerts force on the self to attempt an act of retribution. 3. Attempt to control anger The self exerts a counterforce in an attempt to control anger. 4. Loss of control The intensity of anger goes above the limit. Anger takes control of self. The person exhibits angry behavior (loss of judgment, aggressive actions). There is damage to self. There is danger to the target of anger, in this case, the wrongdoer. 5. Retribution Self performs retributive act against wrongdoer (this is usually angry behavior). The intensity of retribution balances the intensity of offense. The intensity of anger drops to zero. Anger ceases to exist. One piece of evidence in support of this model comes from the linguistic “but” test. For example, the sentence “He was angry, but he didn’t lose control” sounds more natural than the sentence “He was very angry, but he lost control.” This intuition is due to the fact that the conjunction “but” is used to counter expectations. In this case, the expectation dictated by the prototypical model would be that once we are very angry (stage 2), we tend to lose control (stage 4). The “but” test can therefore be used to examine the reality of this cultural model for anger. How can metaphors create a cultural model for anger? Kövecses asserted that a cultural model for anger emerges from a set of mappings that characterize conceptual metaphors.73 Some metaphors play a central role in defining a particular model for a concept. In the case of anger, the central metaphor that provides structure to the model in a variety of cultures is THE ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER. This conceptual metaphor gives rise to a variety of mappings that critically define our anger experiences. These mappings include the reasonable inferences that the person who is angry experiences the heat or pressure of the substance, that the intensity of anger relates to the forceful substance in the container, that the anger is trying to keep the forceful substance inside the container, and that explosion of the substance out of the container refers to the involuntary expression of the anger.
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These mappings play a constitutive role in our folk understandings of anger and its counterparts in different cultures. Without these metaphorical correspondences (e.g., imposing the schematic structure of how the force of a fluid or gas behaves in a container onto anger), it is difficult to see how anger and its counterparts could have acquired the structure they possess. More generally, conceptual metaphors and metonymies systematically contribute to the structure and content of our prototypical cultural models. As Kövecses argued, “we can offer a satisfactory explanation of the emergence of cultural models of emotions if we take into account the possibly universal experiential basis of our emotion concepts, the conceptualization of this experiential basis by means of conceptual metonymies, the conceptual metaphors that often derive from these metonymies, and the broader cultural context.”74 Critics have vigorously argued against the CMT account of cultural models and aimed “to rescue culture from metaphor.” For example, Naomi Quinn has analyzed many hours of discourse on the topic of marriage by American couples and showed that there are only eight classes of metaphors underlying people’s talk of their marriages. These eight metaphors referred to the following concepts: Sharedness: “I felt like a marriage was just a partnership.” or “We’re together in this together.” Lastingness: “It was stuck together pretty good.” or “It’s that feeling of confidence we have about each other that’s going to keep us going;” Mutual benefit: “That was really something we got out of marriage.” or “Our marriage is a very good thing for both of us.” Compatibility: “The best thing about Bill is that he fits me so well.” or “Both of our weaknesses were such that the other person could fill in.” Difficulty: “That was one of the hard barriers to get over.” or “The first year of marriage was really a trial.” Effort: “She works harder at our marriage than I do.” or “We had to fight our way back almost to the beginning” Success or failure: “We knew that it was working.” or “The marriage may be doomed.” Risk: “There’re so many odds against marriage.” or “The marriage was in trouble.” The fact that the participants’ verbal metaphors in talking about marriage can be reduced to eight distinct classes reflects, in Quinn’s view, which conceptual elements define the single model of marriage held by
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most Americans. For example, Americans expect marriage to be shared, mutually beneficial, and lasting. These expectations arise from the mapping of our cultural conceptions of love onto the societal institution of marriage and the consequent structuring of marital expectations in terms of the motivational structuring of love. People want to be with the person they love and so expect marriage to be shared, they want to fulfill the loved person’s needs and have their own needs fulfilled, they expect marriage to be beneficial to both participants, and they do not want to lose the person they love and wish for that person to go on loving them. Most importantly, according to Quinn, the verbal metaphors people use to talk of their experience simply name parts of an underlying, nonmetaphorical cultural model. Metaphorical talk does not provide a direct reflection of how people actually think about their marriages. Consider the following example from one participant’s discussion of marriage: Accepting the differences that were there and that were going to, you know, and that I would have to put up with some of the situations that I didn’t like and continue to until we had worked it out. But that however long and stony a road it was, we had agreed to set out on it and meet each small situation as it came.75
The “long and stony road” metaphor conveys something about the difficulty and lastingness of marriage. Quinn suggested that the speaker adopted a particular verbal metaphor to highlight some non-metaphorical thoughts already in mind, as opposed to being blindly led to his beliefs given the previously unrecognized entailments of some conceptual metaphor (e.g., MARRIAGE IS A JOURNEY). Under Quinn’s view, journey metaphors are quite popular to talk about marriage because they are excellent “cultural exemplars of a protracted activity having an ultimate objective, beset with difficulties that require effort to overcome, and that can be undertaken with another person – a cluster of factors that also characterize marriage.”76 Metaphors that can clarify many of the complexities of concepts, such as marriage, will be most appealing and become widely shared among speakers. In this way, metaphor does not constitute how people grasp their marriages, but is simply a rhetorical device they use when talking about different aspects of a non-metaphorical concept. Consider also the following passage from Quinn’s interview with a male participant about his marriage experience: But it could be that the situation when we got married, that it was such that we had lots of room to adjust. Because we didn’t have any idea what
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we were getting into. That gave us a lot of room to adjust. And by the time we had been through the first year we realized, you know, there would have to be adjustments made. And a few years afterwards, when things really got serious we were, you know, when the marriage was strong, it was very strong because it was made as we went along, it was sort of a do-it-yourself project.77
A conceptual metaphor analysis would claim that the chain of reasoning underlying the husband’s talk rests on an overlapping entailment of two metaphors: MARRIAGE IS A CONTAINER (e.g., “We had no idea about what we were getting into”) and MARRIAGE IS A MANUFACTURED PRODUCT (e.g., a “do-it-yourself project”). Although the speaker starts out using one metaphor to make his point (i.e., the container metaphor), he soon switches to another (i.e., the manufactured product metaphor) to complete his momentary thoughts about marriage. On the other hand, speaking metaphorically, like this, suggests to Quinn, that people are not talking about a single, stable assemblage of ideas about marriage. Instead, people use metaphor to momentarily illuminate different parts of the completely non-metaphorical concept for marriage. Quinn’s arguments against the metaphorical view of cultural experience suffer from several problems. First, Quinn identifies eight metaphors that structure people’s marriage talk. But she summarizes these in entirely nonmetaphorical ways by calling them sharedness, lastingness, compatibility, difficulty, success or failure etc. Yet each of these concepts may be fundamentally understood via metaphor, such as our conceiving of sharedness and compatibility in terms of different kinds of physical unity, difficulty in terms of physical progress, and success, or failure, in terms of physically reaching specific destinations. Critics of CMT often resort to this rhetorical substitution when they redefine a metaphor into a more abstract linguistic term and assume that the new term is not really understood via metaphor. Second, it is by no means evident that people possess internally consistent, stable mental representations for abstract concepts like marriage. The fact that speakers often employ a variety of metaphors in talking about marriage, sometimes switching quickly between tropes, does not imply that these expressions only refer to parts of some non-metaphorical cultural model. People use different metaphors, even within the same narrative, because each verbal metaphor reflects different aspects of their complex metaphorical understanding of some experience. A person’s cognitive model for marriage may consist of various conceptual metaphors that capture different aspects of their understanding of marriage such as compatibility, mutual benefit, and marital lastingness. These metaphors may be
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contiguously linked, perhaps as a kind of radial structure, yet these need not be completely consistent with one another. Imagine, for example, that I am thinking about my marriage. Several metaphorical themes can help me do this, including the cross-domain mappings of MARRIAGE IS A JOURNEY and MARRIAGE IS A BUILDING, among many others. Both conceptual metaphors offer concrete, even embodied, understandings for the abstract concept of marriage. I may recruit either of these metaphorical concepts in different contexts depending on my particular needs, such as when I sit and consider whether or not I am satisfied with the present state of my marriage. One metaphor, MARRIAGE IS A JOURNEY, highlights the changing nature of marriage over time, with the people facing different obstacles and making various choices on how to proceed as the marriage continues. The JOURNEY metaphor also emphasizes how different circumstances shape the path that any marriage takes. On the other hand, the MARRIAGE IS A MANUFACTURED BUILDING metaphor emphasizes the stable nature of marriage and how the participants need to build a solid foundation for their marriage as a more static entity. Adopting either of these conceptual metaphors entails rather different consequences for me as I evaluate the present status of my marriage and its possible future. Conceptual metaphors serve intra-personal needs in enabling me to coordinate the various plans and goals that may be active at any moment in life. If people really possessed an entirely non-metaphorical cultural model of marriage and only used verbal metaphors to highlight different parts of this model, we should expect people to use a tremendous variety of verbal metaphors. Yet people don’t talk about their marriages in just any manner. For instance, people don’t talk about their marriages in terms of mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, reading books, going to the store, or mailing a letter; they do talk about their marriages in terms of journeys, being in good locations, and being balanced. The fairly limited range of conventional metaphors that underlies people’s talk about marriage actually reflects the constraints of their metaphorical understandings of their various marriage experiences. None of this implies that people’s conceptual understandings of marriages are totally metaphorical. Some of our conceptual understandings of love, marriage, anger, and other abstract concepts may be nonmetaphorical, but a great deal of these abstract concepts appears to be constituted by metaphor. We may be able as analysts to abstract away from people’s metaphorical understanding of their experiences and provide a detailed, idealized, even culturally sensitive model that appears
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independent of metaphor. Still, the idealized, metaphorical model should not be equated with what actually structures people’s in-the-moment thinking about abstract concepts, even ones strongly infused with cultural meanings. The relationship between metaphor and culture is one of the most widely debated topics in contemporary metaphor studies. Many studies have shown, for example, that widespread primary metaphors, such as UNDERSTANDING/KNOWING IS SEEING, may not be universal in quite the way implied by some metaphor scholars. In fact, the presence in various cultures of bodily based actions other than vision to conceptualize how people understand objects, events, and concepts has led some to propose that a better formulation of the primary metaphor is COGNITION IS PERCEPTION, which avoids specification of the exact sense modality.78 Nonetheless, even primary metaphors are not untouched by cultural and environmental influences. Another way in which culture shapes metaphorical thinking and language is seen in work on historical linguistics. Not only are there variations in metaphorical language across contemporary cultures, verbal metaphors often change over time within the history of a particular language. For instance, Dirk Geeraerts and Caroline Gevaert conducted a historical analysis of anger metaphors in Old English and other languages and claimed that many of these could have arisen from a culturally based belief in classic humoral theory, as opposed to universal conceptual metaphors.79 Humoral theory, which dates back to the ancient Greeks, maintained that the human body was comprised of four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. These humors have been applied to characterize different human temperaments. Consider, for instance, the following German idiom” läuft die Galle über,” which literally states that “someone’s gall/bile is overflowing,” and figuratively means that “someone is getting very angry.” A classic CMT analysis would suggest that the “gall” is simply a container for the bodily fluid of anger (i.e., ANGER IS A HEATED FLUID IN THE BODILY CONTAINER). But Geeraerts and Gevaert argued that the particular German idioms here may actually be motivated by people’s pre-scientific belief in the humoral theory, such that “bile” literally denotes the temperament of anger. Although the humoral theory is no longer valued, many aspects of our contemporary metaphorical language, such as different emotion metaphors, retain their historical roots. For this reason, the existence of certain verbal metaphors for emotion may not be motivated by embodied conceptual metaphors. As Geeraerts and Gevaert concluded,
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(A)n exclusive focus on metaphorical conceptualizations (a fortiori, on embodied metaphorical conceptualizations) is likely to distort the picture of actual cultural models at work. It is only by systematically comparing the weight of the embodied and/or metaphorical conceptualizations with the alternative ones that their true salience can be assessed.80
I agree wholeheartedly with this methodological imperative. As with other aspects of the metaphor wars, the ultimate answer in this debate may lie in an expanded understanding of conceptual metaphors and how they arise within experience. For example, Kövecses argued that variation in metaphor across culture depends greatly on “differential experiential focus,” in which people attend to different aspects of their bodies depending on physical and cultural contexts.81 Many metaphor scholars have embraced the general idea that all embodied metaphors are deeply situated within culture, enough so that every conceptual metaphor is, to some extent, inherently embodied.82 One vision of how this specifically works is offered by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antunano, in which she introduced the notion of a “cultural sieve.” This is defined as an active mediating device that makes our physical, sensorimotor universal experiences shift through the complex and socially acquired particular beliefs, knowledge, and worldview(s) intrinsic to belonging to one or several cultures. The cultural sieve is not a passive element; it is not just a bunch of pieces of culture that add contextual information to metaphor. The culture sieve has to be understood as an active action in metaphor analysis. It manipulates culture elements in two ways. On the one hand, it “filters” those elements that are in accordance with the premises of a given culture, and on the other, it “impregnates” the mapping with touches of a culture in contrast with other cultural and social systems.83
I cite this particular paragraph because it is representative of the current trend in metaphor research to view conceptual metaphors as closely linked to cultural experience. It is simply inaccurate to criticize CMT for presumably ignoring, or downplaying, culture in our experience and expression of metaphor.
is mathematics metaphorical? Mathematics is reputed to be the ideal case of disembodied thought. On the surface, mathematics seems to reflect highly abstract, transcendental
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ideas that have nothing whatsoever to do with poetic constructs like metaphor. But George Lakoff and Raphael Núñez, in their book “Where does mathematics come from?” advanced the idea that many mathematical concepts are formed by two fundamental types of embodied metaphor: grounding metaphors and linking metaphors.84 Grounding metaphors situate mathematical ideas in everyday embodied experience, which allow us to conceptualize arithmetic operations in terms of forming collections, constructing objects, or moving through space. These metaphors preserve image-schematic structures so that inferences about collecting, constructing, and moving are mapped onto the abstract domain of arithmetic. Consider some of the ways people talk about arithmetic: “A trillion is a big number.” “How many 5’s are there in 20?” “There are four 5’s in 23, and 3 left over.” “How many times does 2 go into 10?” “If 10 is on one side of the equation and 7 is on the other, What do you have to add to 7 to balance the equation?” Lakoff and Núñez contend that there is much systematicity in these verbal expressions, which is motivated by two basic grounding metaphors, referring to object collection and construction. These two conceptual metaphors are presented below along with some of their important entailments. Arithmetic is Object Collection – numbers are collections of physical objects of uniform size – the mathematical agent is the collector of objects – the result of an arithmetic operation is a collection of objects – the size of the number is the physical size (volume) of the collection – equations are scales weighing collections that balance – addition is putting collections together to form larger collections – subtraction is taking smaller collections from larger ones to form other collections – multiplication is the repeated addition of collections of the same size a given number of times – division is the repeated dividing up of a given collection with as many smaller collections of a given size as possible – zero is an empty collection
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Arithmetic is Object Construction – numbers are physical objects – arithmetic operations are acts of object construction – the result of an arithmetic operation is a constructed object – the size of the number is the size of the object – equations are scales weighing objects that balance – addition is putting objects together with other objects to form larger objects – subtraction is taking smaller objects from larger objects to form other objects – multiplication is the repeated addition of objects of the same size a given number of times – division is the repeated segmentation of a given object into as many objects of a given smaller size as possible – zero is the absence of any object These entailments, in particular, make a great deal of sense in terms of the specific actions we engage in when doing arithmetic. Furthermore, other linguistic expressions suggest differences between object collection and construction, as seen in the following lists. Object Collection “How many more than 5 is 8?” “8 is 3 more than 5.” Object Construction “If you put 2 and 2 together, it makes 4.” “What is the product of 5 and 7?” “2 is a small fraction of 248.” A different grounding metaphor is ARITHMETIC IS MOTION, which has the following entailments: – numbers are located on a path – the mathematical agent is a traveler along that path – arithmetic operations are acts of moving along the path – the result of an arithmetic operation is a location on the path – zero is the origin (starting point) – the smallest whole number (one) is a step forward from the origin – the size of the number of the length of the trajectory from the origin to the location – equations are routes to the same location
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– addition of a given quantity is taking steps in a given distance to the right (or forward) – subtraction of a given quantity is taking steps in a given direction to the left (or backward) – multiplication is the repeated addition of quantities of the same size a given number of times – division is the repeated segmentation of a path of a given length into as many smaller paths of a given length as possible Once more, everyday language illustrates the ARITHMETIC IS MOTION metaphor, with statements such as the following. “How close are these two numbers?” “37 is far away from 189,712.” “4.9 is almost 5.” “The result is around 40.” “Count up to 20 without skipping any numbers.” “Count backwards from 20.” “Count to 100, starting at 20.” “Name all the numbers from 2 to 20.” These examples show how a few conceptual metaphors underlie the systematic talk of arithmetic and arithmetic operations. Lakoff and Núñez’s book, along with further of their joint and individual publications, greatly extends the above sort of arguments to explain the metaphorical, and bodily, basis of many complex mathematical concepts. As is seen in many aspects of the metaphor wars, several mathematicians have taken issue with claims that mathematical ideas are, to a significant extent, related to embodied metaphorical thought. To take just one instance of these criticisms, one mathematician published a review of “Where does mathematics come from?,” which raised several small complaints about the book, in addition to offering several positive comments. Still, the reviewer ended his review by stating the following: It may be that metaphors don’t play a central role in formulating more advanced mathematical concepts, or that if they do, they will need to be of a different nature than those used on more elementary mathematics. Mathematical concepts, once they develop, acquire a life of their own and are dealt with directly. It is difficult for me to conceive of a metaphor for a real number raised to a complex power, but if there is one, I’d sure like to see it.85
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The statement that “Mathematical concepts, once they develop, acquire a life of their own and are dealt with more directly” summarizes what many scholars, from different disciplines, often believe when confronted with evidence on the metaphorical nature of certain abstract knowledge. Are conceptual metaphors only temporary scaffolds for what eventually become non-metaphorical abstract understandings? This possibility reflects some people’s intellectual desires rather than empirical reality. There is a large literature showing that scientists employ conceptual metaphors when describing their solutions to different problems. For example, students’ performance on solving math problems dramatically improves once they are introduced to some of the metaphorical bases for different math concepts.86 Some research even revealed that Ph.D. students used conceptual metaphors five times more often than did undergraduates when solving different problems in thermodynamics.87 Conceptual metaphors were not devices that allowed people to attain mastery of difficult science concepts which were then discarded once these concepts were learned. Instead, novice students typically relied on formal physics rules to solve problems but later relied on conceptual metaphors to a far greater degree as they created more sophisticated understandings of thermodynamic principles.88 The continued assertion that advanced knowledge of mathematics or other scientific domains is inherently non-metaphorical may simply not be true. At the very least, embodied conceptual metaphors provide both part of the motivation for how mathematics comes into being and also, quite critically, how sophisticated mathematicians engage in complex mathematical reasoning.
do conceptual metaphors emerge from language? A related critique of CMT proposes that conceptual metaphors do not emerge from human cognition, or from embodied experiences, but arise entirely from verbal metaphors in discourse. For example, Daniel Sanford argued that conceptual metaphors “ultimately derive from the repeated use of linguistic metaphor, and thus arise from communicative rather than purely cognitive reasons.”89 He observed that, “the striking feature of metaphor is not the productivity of conceptual metaphor – far from it. Rather the same words and expressions, with the same figurative meanings, are repeated over and over.” According to his usage-based account, called “Emergent Metaphor Theory” (EMT), every instance of a linguistic metaphor is stored in long-term memory, with each example increasing in
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strength with greater frequency of use, and its proximity to other instances depending on their degree of similarity. More specifically, different figurative expressions that indicate a specific cross-domain mapping give rise to an emergent metaphorical schema. Thus, the expressions “Men are dogs,” “She’s a fox,” “John is a gorilla” all contribute to the creation of the metaphorical conceptual structure PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS. As a person encounters further linguistic metaphors relevant to the PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS mapping, the schema becomes strengthened, leading to speakers’ more frequent use of certain verbal metaphors, and to listeners’ easier processing of their figurative meanings. However, people may understand expressions such as “John is a gorilla” without accessing the underlying conceptual schema, or conceptual metaphor, PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS, precisely because its figurative interpretation is encoded as part of the conventional meaning for “gorilla.” Sanford’s position is one that various metaphor scholars have alluded to in the past as a possible alternative to CMT.90 One of the great ironies about CMT is its surprising neglect of the power of language to partly shape people’s orientations to the world, including the strong influence that metaphorical language may have on the ways people ordinarily think. Many conventional metaphorical concepts have surely been influenced by people’s exposure to, and use of, different verbal metaphors. This fact must clearly be acknowledged and more thoroughly explored empirically in contemporary metaphor research.91 Still, the idea that people’s use of verbal metaphor is either solely or mostly responsible for the emergence of enduring metaphorical concepts suffers from several major problems. First, why is it that people talk about certain ideas and events in the specific metaphorical ways they do? Why do people speak of “impure thoughts” and “stain on our hearts” when referring to immoral or unethical thoughts and behavior? Some metaphor scholars assume that whatever historical motivations enabled certain metaphorical words and expressions to arise in language are not relevant to contemporary speakers’ use of metaphorical language. Today’s speakers are presumed to have little explicit or tacit understanding of why verbal metaphors typically have the meanings they do, simply because these are historically obscure. Of course, some metaphorical words and phrases have opaque meanings, yet the important fact is that most do not. The enormous literature from cognitive linguistics describes virtually hundreds of metaphorical concepts, evident in a huge assortment of languages, which are partly motivated, typically in terms of people’s ongoing bodily experiences.
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Speakers’ use of “impure” and “stain” reflect the influence of ordinary experience where people typically view things that are clean as being healthy and good and dirty things to be unhealthy and bad, leading to the existence of the primary metaphors GOOD IS CLEAN and BAD IS DIRTY. People’s frequent use of verbal metaphorical tokens increases the salience of these primary metaphors, both in terms of their actual bodily correlations, and their continued employment of certain metaphorical language. Even if the usage-based account tries to explain the existence of metaphorical concepts without reference to bodily experiences and other experiential, non-linguistic factors, it never specifically details what these schemata are ever used for. Sanford acknowledges that there may be a conceptual structure that governs the creation and use of specific metaphorical phrases. Emergent metaphorical schemas may be accessed to derive certain metaphorical meanings, especially in unusual contexts. But as Sanford also stated, “The repeated use of a word or construction to evoke a particular aspect of a source domain causes the form in question to take on a degree of autonomy from its governing schema.” For example, the KNOWING IS SEEING schema may be activated when “illuminate” is used to convey metaphorical meaning. “Still, speakers don’t need to use the overall schema to reconstruct anew its metaphorical meaning every time that the word is used or uttered in a figurative sense – the word invokes a direct connection between a particular concept within the source domain (increasing lighting making something more visible) and a particular target (making an idea more easy to understand).” These claims stand in stark contrast to the wide variety of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies which show that people’s use and understanding of different embodied metaphors actually recruit bodily based concepts and sensorimotor based areas of the brain (see Chapter 5). Together with the cognitive linguistic analyses of embodied metaphors, the behavioral and neuroscientific evidence strongly implies that embodied activity is not only critical to how certain linguistic tokens come into the language, but also why certain metaphors continue to be employed and understood as being meaningful to contemporary speakers. A related difficulty with the usage-based account of metaphorical concepts is its inability to explain metaphor in non-linguistic expressions. Much research now documents the extensive manner in which metaphor pervades gesture, art, music, dance, and many other aspects of multimodal performance and material culture (see Chapter 6). Bodily based conceptual metaphors are not just evident in systematic patterns of language use, but
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within many non-linguistic domains that express many similar metaphorical concepts. Where do these non-linguistic metaphors come from? CMT maintains that non-linguistic metaphorical expressions are motivated, once more, by recurring patterns of bodily experience. It is again possible, though, that frequent use of metaphoric tokens in language may have some effect on the creation and continuous use of conceptual metaphors in nonlinguistic domains. At the very least, work on the non-linguistic expression of conceptual metaphors must be explained in some manner by the usagebased account if it is to succeed as an explanatory theory of metaphor. Of course, one may argue that systematic patterns of linguistic metaphors would not really exist unless there were underlying conceptual metaphors causing people to create, as a diachronic issue, and speak, as a synchronic issue, in particular metaphorical ways. But the reality of human experience suggests a more complex relationship between figures of thought and figures of speech, such that metaphorical cognition and communication are tightly coupled. Just as people speak metaphorically because of recurring bodily and cultural experiences, so too do they think metaphorically in specific ways, partly because of the guiding force of metaphorical language. Rather than trying to claim that it must be either metaphorical cognition leading to metaphorical communication or the reverse, it is far more reasonable to construct theories of metaphor that recognize the mutuality between thought and language (and between bodily experience, thought, language, social, and cultural contexts).
agency and conceptual metaphorical thinking One enduring, general complaint about CMT is that it pays little attention to the importance of personal, communicative agency in the creation and use of metaphorical language. CMT appears, to some, as a theory demanding that people think in terms of conceptual metaphors and are necessarily stuck with these specific metaphorical concepts. This criticism is a significant misunderstanding of the theory, because there is much research showing the importance of social, communicative practices in our conceptual metaphorical understanding of human life activities.
metaphor in politics, business, and illness Politics is another domain that is a major battlefield in the wars over metaphor. Similar to the debates over time and culture, scholars have argued whether political metaphors reflect underlying metaphorical
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thought or are simple rhetorical devices for thinking about ideas that are fundamentally non-metaphorical. There is a long history of study on the role that metaphors play in political discourse. Presidential politics is an almost constant theme in American political life, and Fall 2015 represents a full-blown effort by many Democratic and Republican candidates to replace President Barack Obama when his term ends in early 2017. Consider one analysis of the public debates among politicians running for the Republican nomination for President and the challenge they will face in opposing the likely Democratic candidate Hilary Clinton:92 Preparing (to debate other candidates), may have a lot more to do with the game plan itself rather than the particular issues. How can you know what the game is? Some games are obvious. Donald Trump’s one-man show of coming out swinging is clearly a boxing match. You might think the same of Christie, but I have a hunch his game is Five-Card Stud. Ben Carson keeps a poker-face and plays close to the chest. Jake Tapper, the dealer (i.e., the moderator of several televised debates), might be preparing for several of the candidates to be Blackjack players, but Carly Fiorina likely is basing her game on Serena Williams and improving on that last match. Jeb Bush, with the family castle to defend and the armies against him, had best be good at chess. Only a fool would go to the roulette table, so we will probably see a few of them do that. Other than that, it’s a crap shoot. To be ready to face Hillary Clinton, whichever candidate comes out of these debates and primaries as the nominee ought to be brushing up on bridge. Not only is Hillary a bridge builder, she plays the game . . . and excels at it. Bridge is a game of partners. No one develops partners like Hillary Clinton does. Bridge is Hillary Clinton’s signature game. The Republicans can practice any games they want to play with each other, but when it comes to facing Hillary Clinton, if they do not hone their bidding and partnering skills, Hillary Clinton will take every trick.
The verbal metaphors fly fast and furious in this casual analysis of the ongoing politics in seeking election to be the next US President. Each candidate may be employing a specific strategy, or playing a different game, in their attempt to obtain their respective party’s nomination. This
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analysis highlights both the diversity of ways that one can metaphorically think about a topic and the important fact that our metaphorical choices may have real consequences. After all, a candidate better be prepared to acknowledge, and respond to, rivals’ different metaphorical styles if he or she expects to win the November 2016 election. George Lakoff has forcefully argued that conceptual metaphors are at the heart of political debates. In one early essay, titled “Metaphor and war: The metaphor system used to justify war in the Gulf” from 1992, Lakoff wrote about then President Bush’s metaphorical beliefs about Saddam Hussein. Metaphors can kill. The discourse over whether we should go to war in the gulf is a panorama of metaphor. . . The President (George Bush) says that the US is in the gulf “to protect freedom, protect our future, and protect the innocent,” and that we must “push Saddam Hussein back.” Saddam is seen as Hitler. It is vital, literally vital, to understand just what role metaphorical thought is playing in bringing us to the brink of war.93
Lakoff argued, more specifically, that there were two central metaphors advanced by President Bush in his speeches which underlay many of his arguments for going to war in the Gulf – THE STATE IS THE PERSON and JUST WAR IS A FAIRY TALE. These two metaphors constitute our basic understanding of relationships and war among nations. Indeed, “it is hard not to use this system when thinking about issues in international politics. Like most conceptual systems, it is largely unconscious and automatic and is not seen as metaphorical.” In later writings, Lakoff proposed that the conceptual metaphor THE NATION IS A FAMILY plays a critical role in structuring political discourse.94 Conservative politicians in the United States adopt the “strict father model” of the family, which assumes that stern discipline is necessary to educate family members. This implies that there should not be a welfare program or other governmental support because this will not train family members to be independent and self-sufficient. Liberal politicians, on the other hand, embrace the “nurturant parent model” of the family by which family members grow through love, empathy, and caring. This metaphorical view leads to advocacy for government programs that help family members, or citizens. Steven Pinker has offered a vigorous critique of Lakoff’s arguments about politics and the idea that metaphors underlie abstract thought. He claimed that debates over politics, and, more broadly, the nature of
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objective truth and rationality, are not just contests between competing metaphors, as Lakoff appears to embrace in his writings on American political discourse. For example, Pinker concluded in his book “The Stuff of Thought,” that Lakoff’s theory of conceptual metaphor is a lollapalooza. If he is right, conceptual metaphors can do everything from overturning twenty-five hundred years of misguided reliance on truth and objectivity in Western thought to putting a Democrat in the White House.95
Pinker’s main rebuttal was that “people effectively transcend the metaphors implicit in their language.”96 He proposed that people are quite capable of ignoring verbal metaphors in discourse, and can, on other occasions, analyze which parts of a metaphorical mapping may be relevant to a situation and which are not. Lakoff’s theory is, according to Pinker, “a condescending and cynical theory of politics, implying that average people are indiscriminately gullible and that political debate cannot and should not be about the actual merits of policies and people.”97 Furthermore, even if “conceptual metaphors are an essential tool of rhetoric, ordinary conversation, and thought itself . . . this doesn’t mean that people are enslaved by their metaphors or that the choice of metaphor is a matter of taste or indoctrination.”98 Most notably, “Rival framings can be examined and evaluated, not just spread by allure or imposed by force.”99 Do people have the ability to ignore or reject the conceptual metaphors by which they often think about abstract concepts? Of course they do! Research on CMT has uncovered a vast number of conceptual metaphors that have long shaped the ways people think about abstract topics, including political ones. Yet people are often unaware of the metaphorical foundations for many of their ideas, which is one reason why CMT has been such an eye-opener in the worlds of both metaphor studies and cognitive science. Still, CMT has never suggested that the “metaphors we live by” are unchangeable, only that much of our thinking is fundamentally metaphorical, a fact that often has direct consequences for the nature of our beliefs and the actions we take. Pinker is surely right that many people possess the skills to think hard about dominant metaphors in talking about a specific topic, including politics. Indeed, Lakoff and others have explicitly aimed to alert people to metaphorical thought patterns that underlie political discourse and, in some cases, to facilitate the adoption of different metaphors which may have a direct impact on policy. Consider, for example, a debate over which conceptual metaphor is best to think of an important political concept. Back in 1990, US Senator
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John Heinz and US Trade Negotiator Carla Hills engaged in a heated debate over possible US trade sanctions against the Japanese government. Heinz, who was greatly critical of Japan, embraced the idea that international trade is a war and suggested that Japan was engaged in “industrial targeting.” Our real problem is not access to Japan’s markets but Japan’s destruction of ours. We’re erecting tombstones over US industries – semiconductors, machine tools, robotics, computers – targeted for extinction by Japanese government-business collaboration. Our high-tech economy is looking more like an industrial graveyard.100
On the other hand, Hills pushed for new negotiations with Japan and adopted the TRADE IS A JOURNEY metaphor: Down one path lie closed markets and gravely diminished prosperity. Down the other lie open markets, expanded trade and economic growth. Through our policy of global and individual negotiations, and use of our new trade laws, we are determined to walk the path of prosperity.101
Contrastive metaphors, like TRADE IS WAR and TRADE IS JOURNEY, are often at the center of political debates, as well as many other types of conflicts (e.g., business, interpersonal relationships, illness). The fact that we have these debates, and argue the merits of different metaphorical concepts for abstract ideas, is excellent testimony to the flexibility of conceptual metaphorical thinking in everyday life. Conceptual metaphors are now widely recognized as essential features of how people understand organizations and engage in organizational change processes. One proposal argues that there are four basic metaphors for organizational change: repair processes/mechanic (fix and maintain); trainer/coach (build and develop); guide/explainer (move and relocate); and liberator/visionary (liberate and recreate).102 One analysis of her leadership discourse revealed several pertinent conceptual metaphors.103 For example, one business leader described his role in the following way: A successful business must have the right person at the helm. I must navigate this company through the storm. We need direction, so I need to know which way the wind is blowing.
After giving his overall view of his leadership role, the man was asked several specific questions, each of which were intended to better understand the leader’s perspective. These inquiries included:
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1. Did the leader feel alone at the helm? 2. Was his crew engaged in the sailing of the business? 3. How did he find out which way the wind was blowing? 4. Was the storm a result of competition, the regulatory environment, economic environment, or internal turmoil? Answering these questions enabled the leader to better understand his metaphorical perspective and to switch metaphors (e.g., A BUSINESS IS A FAMILY) when appropriate for particular business situations (e.g., dealing with employees). Changing conceptual metaphors is not only possible, but sometimes necessary when people strive to meet different adaptive challenges. Another arena in which the battle over metaphors is quite fierce is within studies of health communication. Many scholars and physicians agree that metaphor can help patients impose order on a suddenly disordered world. For physicians, metaphors serve as time-efficient tools for helping patients understand complex biological processes, which is one reason why physicians often describe illness and the treatment of illness in terms of waging war. One cancer patient, Cornelius Ryan, who was the author of many war novels, adopted this perspective as seen in a letter he once wrote to a close friend about being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer: About the best I can say is that I feel as though a half-track has rolled back and forth across my stomach non-stop for several days. I have a neat tattoo of the entire beachhead right across my abdomen. . . The attack was successful, although I am expecting a counterattack any moment from all sides, if any more of these nodes are malignant. Notwithstanding, I have surrounded myself by barbed wire, land mines, and several squads of infantry, and we are ready to take on all comers.104
As with all metaphors, the WAR metaphor has important limitations, and is often rejected by patients as inappropriate for their own struggles. Susan Sontag famously criticized the war metaphor for cancer and blamed health care professionals for the silent acceptance of these ideas: There is the “fight” or “crusade” against cancer; cancer is the “killer” disease; people who have cancer are “cancer victims”. . . Cancer cells do not simply multiply; they are “invasive” . . . Cancer cells “colonize” from the original tumor to far sites of the body. Rarely are the body’s “defenses” vigorous enough to obliterate a tumor that has established its own blood supply. . . Patients are “bombarded” with toxic rays.105
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Sontag went on to argue that “The metaphors and myths . . . make people irrationally fearful of effective measures such as chemotherapy, and foster credence in thoroughly useless remedies such as diets and psychotherapy.”106 Patients sometimes voice dismay with the WAR metaphor for its implied suggestion that winning the war (defeating the cancer) depends on fighting hard enough and that the metaphor ignores the existential, psychological, and social facets in their experience of cancer. One patient with colon cancer, who was a Vietnam War veteran, stated in this context: “The standard comparison of cancer as a war to be fought – a ‘battle with cancer’ – was less than palatable. I had already experienced real war in Vietnam and was not anxious to repeat anything closely resembling that.”107 Journey metaphors are frequently embraced by patients precisely because this opens up discussion about their own goals, directions, and progress, with physicians serving as trusted guides rather than as authoritative generals in a war scenario.108 Many other metaphors for illness are created by patients, referring to source domains like chess matches, a monster, a dream, and a dance. As one patient wrote in his own protest against the WAR metaphor: Doctors, I think, don’t get the nuts and bolts. I have to look at my whole life, not just the disease, but my family, my job, my finances, my psyche. What concerns me, then, when the patient loses the battle, then they (the physicians) withdraw, they turn it over to someone else, and the patient’s left fighting the rest of the war by themselves and I want them to stick there, all the way to the end. Just because we’re going to lose the war, doesn’t mean that everyone has to leave the field.109
This patient’s metaphorical vision of his illness placed cancer into the wider context of his life’s journey, which may enable them to cope better with the disease. Lance Armstrong, the once famous cyclist, once wrote about his own cancer experiences and talked about in a way that made most sense given his own life when he began to positively respond to chemotherapy: I had opened up a gap on the field. I knew that if I was going to be cured, that was the way it would go with a big surging attack, just like in a race. . . [the tumor markers HCG and AFP] . . . were my motivator, my yellow jersey. . . I began to think of my recovery like a time trial in the Tour [de France]. . . I wanted to tear the legs off cancer, the way I tore the legs off other riders on a hill.
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All these examples highlight the fact that the metaphors we live by are not necessarily dictated to us in ways that are unchangeable. People can resist dominant metaphorical concepts and come to discover alternative conceptual metaphors that better meet with our needs and goals. Even if we live by metaphors to a significant degree, our adoption of different metaphorical concepts is not fixed. Indeed, one of the great pleasures in life is to come to new metaphorical realizations about ourselves and the world in which we live.110 Pinker’s critique of CMT did not end with his misunderstandings about the flexibility of conceptual metaphorical thinking. He more boldly argued: Thinking cannot trade in metaphors directly. It must trade in a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic – progress toward a shared goal in the case of journeys and relationships, conflict in the case of argument and wars – while sloughing off irrelevant bits.111 Conceptual metaphors can be learned and used only if they are analyzed into more abstract elements like “cause,” “goal,” and “change” which make up the currency of thought.112
Pinker’s complaint ignored the fact that many conceptual metaphors are grounded in image schemas. Image schemas can generally be defined as dynamic analog representations of spatial relations and movements in space. For instance, our BALANCE image schema emerges through our experiences of bodily equilibrium and disequilibrium and of maintaining our bodily systems and functions in states of equilibrium. The BALANCE image schema supports the understanding of literal expressions such as “He balanced the weight on his shoulder” and is metaphorically elaborated in a large number of abstract domains of experience (e.g., psychological states, legal relationships, formal systems), as seen in expressions like “He was psychologically imbalanced” and “The balance of justice.”113 Image schemas have an internal logic or structure that determines the roles these schemas can play in structuring various concepts and in patterns of reasoning. It is not the case that a large number of unrelated concepts (for the systematic, psychological, moral, legal, and mathematical domains) all just happen to make use of the same word “balance” and related terms. Rather, we use the same word for all these domains because they are structurally related by the same sort of underlying image schemas, and are metaphorically elaborated from them. In this way, many aspects of metaphorical meaning are image-schematic in nature and therefore are experientially grounded.
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Finally, one of the great ironies in Pinker’s criticisms of CMT is that the very concepts he believes must be at the root of human cognition, such as cause, goal, and change, are really understood as embodied primary metaphors (e.g., CAUSATION IS A PHYSICAL FORCE, GOALS ARE DESTINATIONS, and CHANGE IS MOTION)! The embodied metaphorical foundation of what many believe are semantic or conceptual primitives offers another reason to view human cognition as fundamentally structured in terms of conceptual metaphors. As noted in earlier chapters, many facets of both linguistic meaning and abstract thinking emerge from our bodily capacities and abilities to metaphorically project these experiences to create concrete understandings of abstract cognition. One rule of thumb that perhaps all language scholars should embrace, in this regard, is to not immediately assume that some meaning or concept is non-metaphorical unless its possible metaphorical foundations have been first empirically investigated.
competing visions of metaphorical thought CMT has had a major influence on metaphor theory, in part because it has led to new, alternative proposals on the nature of metaphorical thought, language, and communication. For example, critics have complained that most conceptual metaphor analyses embrace a top-down strategy in which a metaphor analyst first examines some discourse, identifies metaphorical expressions, and then determines the underlying conceptual metaphor partly through recall of conceptual metaphors inferred from other analyses of discourse from the same domain. This method stands in contrast to a bottom-up strategy in which an analyst aims to identify a specific conceptual metaphor from only the local discourse context being examined. A bottom-up approach does not, therefore, assume that some conceptual metaphor must be at work simply because that same mapping had been identified for similar languages in other contexts. One proposal that adopts a bottom-up perspective claims that it is possible to specify potential cross-domain mappings in five steps. Gerard Steen argued that a propositional analysis, similar to that employed by psychologists studying text comprehension, can readily be applied to infer specific cross-domain mappings.114 The five steps include identification of: 1. metaphorical focus 2. metaphorical idea
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3. non-literal comparison 4. non-literal analogy 5. metaphorical mapping The first step aims to identify the metaphorical focus where the term “focus” follows Black’s terminology where a metaphorically used word compared to a literal focus. In Step 2, metaphor idea identification expands on the metaphorical focus. The third step, non-literal comparison, details the source and target domain comparison through which some similarity may be exhibited. Step 4, non-literal analogy, fills in the specifics of the open comparison to create a completed, determinate metaphorical analogy. This analogy consists of two references to their states of affair via their implicit propositions. Finally, Step 5 identifies the metaphorical mapping. Elena Semino, John Heywood, and Mick Short applied Steen’s fivestep procedure to selected examples from a corpus of conversations between patients and physicians about cancer.115 Consider one segment from a cancer patient reporting something she said earlier to a doctor.116 So I mentioned to him last time, I went; I said come on that’s nearly double, galloping away; he said oh no it’s the way they measured it.
The words “galloping away,” refer to the speed of the cancer’s development. Semino and colleagues analyzed this metaphor in the following manner. Step 1: Step 2: Step 3: Step 4: Step 5:
galloping away P1 (GALLOP-AWAY CANCER) (GALLOP-AWAY CANCER) Either
metaphorical focus (GALLOP-AWAY CANCER) (EF) (Ey { sim (f (CANCER), GALLOP-AWAY (y)]} (EF) (Ey { SIM [DEVELOP FAST (CANCER); GALLOP-AWAY (HORSE))]}
FAST DEVELOPMENT OF CANCER IS GALLOPING AWAY The cancer corresponds to a horse. The speed of development of cancer corresponds to the horse’s speed when galloping. The body corresponds to the ground on which the horse moves. or
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Cancer is a Horse The speed of development of cancer corresponds to the speed of the horse’s movement. The fast development of cancer corresponds to the horse galloping away. The body corresponds to the ground on which the horse moves. There are several things to note about this explication of the metaphorical meaning for “galloping away” in reference to cancer. First, Step 2 represents the inference that “galloping away” referred to the cancer. Step 4 used the phrase “developing fast” as the literal paraphrase of “galloping away,” although other phrases like “grow unchecked,” “spread very fast,” or “develop out of control” could have worked too, perhaps with slightly different implications for the metaphorical correspondences determined in Step 5. Finally, Step 5 offers the possible conceptual metaphor that may underlie the use of “galloping away,” both of which conforms to key correspondences between CANCER and HORSE. More generally, the five-step procedure enables analysts to both describe metaphorical thought in source and target domains as explicitly mentioned in a text, and metaphorical ideas in which either the source or target domains must be inferred. One difficulty with this proposal is that it aims to provide a completely bottom-up analysis of metaphorical mappings for individual verbal metaphors. But analysts may be using tacit conceptual metaphors when determining the actual mappings, as in Steps 4 and 5. For example, there may be a superordinate conventional metaphor CANCER IS AN ANIMAL that has HORSE and (HIBERNATING) ANIMAL as basiclevel categories, which give rise to the submapping CANCER IS A HORSE and CANCER IS A HIBERNATING ANIMAL. People may very well quickly infer these different conceptual metaphors when encountering a verbal metaphor in the context of the cancer “galloping away” discussion. The research from experimental psycholinguistics certainly supports this possibility (see Chapter 5). Metaphor scholars may be making judgments about the metaphorical mappings underlying verbal expressions and may be influenced by their unconscious recruitment of conceptual metaphors, even if they maintain that their analyses are immune from other conceptual metaphor mappings.117 A different approach to inferring metaphorical thought is the theory of “metaphorical scenarios.” Andreas Musolff argued that a main metaphorical domain such as JOURNEY contains many subdomains or
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submappings (e.g., travelers, modes of travel, destinations) that separately construct different aspects of the JOURNEY domain. These subdomains collectively form a metaphorical scenario that reflects a person’s understanding of the main metaphorical domain JOURNEY. A metaphorical scenario is specifically defined as, “a set of assumptions made by competent members of the discourse community about ‘typical’ aspects of . . . situations, for example, its participants and their roles, the ‘dramatic’ storylines and outcomes, and conventional evaluations of whether they count as successful, unsuccessful, normal, or abnormal, permissible, or illegitimate, etc. These scene-based assumptions are mapped . . . onto the respective target concepts.”118 Metaphorical scenarios capture a significantly broad range of knowledge regarding different source domains, more so than is typically acknowledged within CMT. For example, the source domain of JOURNEY in the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY is not a barren, imageschematic structure referring to SOURCE–PATH–GOAL, but a more complex scenario regarding people’s beliefs and varying experience about the socio-cultural nature of journey-taking experiences. Musolff conducted a large-scale analysis of how Europe and the European Union (EU) are described by the European press and found that authors consistently refer to and elaborate upon different metaphorical scenarios. For example, consider the following newspaper description of the roles that Germany and France had in one economic project within the EU: In the long gestation of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union – conceived in Maastricht 1991, to be delivered in Frankfurt 1999 – it suddenly seems likely this week that the anxious parents, Germany and France, are expecting a soft baby euro.119
This excerpt illustrates how different entailments of the metaphorical concept A NATION IS A FAMILY underlie talk about Germany and France’s role in the EU economic project. More specifically, Germany and France are depicted as marriage partners who are the parents of a child (the EU project). People frequently understand a great deal about a source domain, such as FAMILY, which may be exploited for different rhetorical purposes. To take another example, a 1996 newspaper article observed about the EU: The reality behind the will they – won’t they, pre-nuptial dances among aspirant members of Europe’s monetary union club is that as long as
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the . . . economic slowdown doesn’t turn into a gull-blown recession the project will probably go ahead.
Once again, specific subdomain knowledge regarding families and marriages has been used to better understand the complexities of EU economic strategy. Two other examples also highlight the MARRIAGE subdomain of the FAMILY metaphor: The economic marriage that the eleven partners are about to embark upon would have needed a longer engagement period. That was not to be. Let’s hope this marrying in haste does not lead to regrets at leisure. While Europeans from 11 other countries celebrated the birth of a single European currency, an ICM poll found Brits unmoved by the euro’s launch.
It may be unusual for a marriage to include the union of eleven partners, but “the birth of a baby of multiple parents that underlies these examples serves as the source input to a ‘blended’ conceptual space.”120 More generally, metaphorical scenarios may be “a necessary complement to the study of source domains and of domain-mappings in metaphorical language use.”121 Another alternative to CMT also emphasizes the importance of rich source domain information in metaphorical thought and language. John Barnden has argued that people’s reasoning about source and target domain mappings extends beyond the single conventional parallel mappings typically seen in CMT.122 There are other non-parallel systems operating concurrently with conceptual metaphors, such as affective and socio-cultural factors, which critically shape how people create and understand particular tropes. Under this view, many metaphors in discourse obtain their meanings less from systematic parallel mappings from source to target domain (i.e., the invariance hypothesis), and more from compensatory within source domain reasoning. For example, consider the metaphorical expression “We are driving in the fast lane on the freeway of love.” This novel metaphor is partly motivated by the underlying conceptual metaphor LOVE RELATIONSHIPS ARE JOURNEYS, which gives rise to various source-to-target mappings including the idea that the lovers are traveling in a vehicle together. But people typically interpret this novel metaphor as suggesting that the lovers are in the vehicle together and experiencing great emotional excitement during this part of the journey, possibly because of the speed in which they are moving on the fast lane of a freeway. These ancillary assumptions about the nature of the love journey alluded to by this novel
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metaphor are not specific to the particular conceptual metaphor at work here, namely LOVE RELATIONSHIPS ARE JOURNEYS. For this reason, ancillary assumptions, called “value neutral mapping adjuncts” (VNMAs) help create lower-order submetaphors related to people’s reasoning about source domains. More specifically, VNMAs are non-parallel adjuncts that relate tacit social and cultural knowledge to conceptual metaphors. This analysis points to the possibility that many metaphors arise not from source-to-target domain parallelism, but from extensive, contextually driven source domain inferences. Consider the following excerpt from the Nick Hornsby novel “High Fidelity.”123 I tried not to run down Phil too much – I felt bad enough as it was what with screwing his girlfriend and all. But it became unavoidable because when Jackie expressed doubts about him, I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances with their own cat-flaps, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.
How do we understand the creative use of metaphor in this example, where “grievances” were first conceived of as “sickly kittens,” and soon became “healthy” with their “own cat-flaps”? Consider the case of “catflaps,” which generally conveys the idea that the grievances about the boyfriend could freely enter the conversation as a kitten may enter and leave a house at will through the cat-flap doors. There does not seem to be a single source-to-target domain mapping between cat-flaps and the idea of freely talking about the boyfriend’s problems. Instead, cat-flaps contribute to the further development of the source domain of grievances as kittens, or cat-like entities, and they provide a richer scenario for thinking about the grievances as kittens, with their own free will. Even if people initially attempt to establish clear source-to-target domain mappings for interpreting creative metaphors, people may fail to draw these inferences, and still extract additional information from the source domain (i.e., all things related to kittens and their behaviors) to create contextually relevant interpretations of the metaphors. More importantly, though, the ubiquity of non-parallelism in metaphor, both conventional and novel, also suggests that understanding metaphorical language is not a matter of finding some independent meaning for each and every bit of target domain meaning. Whenever a metaphorical view of some topic is provided, as in the Hornsby passage, only some of the word choices may have direct relations to the target domain, with others acting to fill out, often in creative ways, our understanding of the source domain. As Barnden correctly, in my view, concluded:
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Context opportunistically selects which aspect of a source-domain scenario ends up being mapped or transferred to the target domain, and thereby when metaphorical sentences or parts of sentences end up with target-domain meanings of their own, leaving other related metaphorical chunks merely to contribute toward building the source scenario.124
Similar to many other critics, Jonathan Charteris-Black contended that CMT too often ignores the rhetorical, ideological motives for people’s metaphorical language use. He has offered a variation of the theory, called “critical metaphor analysis” (CMA) that combines three different aspects of metaphor analysis – corpus linguistics, CMT, and critical discourse analysis. Most generally, the aim of CMA is to broaden the scope of metaphor analysis to acknowledge the ideological, social, and political forces that directly influence people’s choices of metaphorical words in context. CMA first searches texts, such as for example those produced by politicians, journalists, and religious leaders, for instances of metaphorical language. The guiding criterion for linguistic metaphor is “the presence of incongruity in semantic terms – either at linguistics, pragmatic, or conceptual levels – resulting from a shift in domain use.”125 Metaphors used frequently are viewed as conventional metaphor, which are the primary focus of Charteris-Black’s analysis, as these more directly reflect different rhetorical and ideological strategies. The metaphorically identified words are then searched for in a larger corpus to examine their more typical meanings. For example, after the 9/11 attacks in the United States, President Bush talked of the nation having to engage in a “crusade against terrorism.” When the keyword phrase “crusade against” is searched within a larger corpus, various collocates are readily found, such as “slavery,” each of which conveys a negative evaluation of the discourse topic. From this, one may infer that Bush’s statement provides evidence of the POLITICS IS RELIGION conceptual metaphor, which is related to the CONFLICT IS RELIGION metaphor implicit in many of Osama Bin Laden’s earlier comments. Charteris-Black argues that the general shift toward religious metaphors in political discourse leads to the inference that some political statements should be interpreted as incontrovertible religious texts. Studies like this, again, hope to elicit some of the social forces that motivate metaphorical talk. Lynn Cameron’s research also aims to situate metaphorical language within the very specific conversational contexts in which verbal metaphor
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arises. She conducts metaphor analyses by working inductively from the data rather than assuming that particular conceptual metaphors are active when a speaker produces a related linguistic metaphor. Metaphor performance is typically manifested through successive metaphor sources that shift and develop as people negotiate meaning, extend their ideas, or exploit potential opened up by the use of a source term. Consider again the following excerpt from the reconciliation conversations, discussed in Chapter 3, between Jo Berry and Patrick Magee. Once more, Jo and Pat had talked earlier about their coming together for a reconciliation meeting, using similar JOURNEY metaphors to those seen below. 644 645 646 647 648 649 650 651 652 653 654 655 656 657 658 659 660 661 662 663 664 665 666 667 668 669 670 671 672 673 674 675 676
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...(1.0) 1984, when your father was killed, or when I killed your father, ... when the republican movement killed your father. ...(3.0) er, my journey, ...(1.0) preceded that you were catapulted into this struggle. ... I think, er, ...(1.0) my journey preceded that. ...(1.0) but, ...(1.0) our journey began that moment. ... and here we are. ... today. sixteen years later. seventeen years later. ...(1.0) it’s quite a remarkable journey. I think. er, ...(2.0) you – [er] [you] said that, ...(2.0) the price that er – ... you paid, for taking up violence, was part – ... partly losing some of your humanity. ... hmh ... and that now you’re .. refinding that. ...(1.0) through .. other meetings with – ...(1.0) ehm, other victims, and loyalists,
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The journey source was used previously in the talk to refer to Jo’s effort to understand her father’s murder and, in the above excerpt, is successively re-used and adapted to refer to two further ideas, namely Pat’s early history of politicization and the process of both meeting for these reconciliation dialogues. The question, though, is whether or not these varied uses of metaphor sources, in this case revolving around the idea of “journey” are driven by the activation of some pre-stored conceptual metaphor, such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Cameron argued that the micro-level shifts and changes in the dynamics of linguistic metaphor, as seen above, concretely demonstrate the emergence of metaphor in discourse interaction as an inherently social affair. Conventional metaphors do not have similar meanings in different contexts, but are dynamically re-created depending on the specific histories of the participants at the very points in which their talk unfolds. There is never a neutral position to which the cognitive system retreats after each use of a metaphor source, because each word is spoken in an always changing dynamic context that constrains what words, and metaphors, will come next. For this reason, conceptual metaphors may be better characterized as emergent stabilities, termed “systematic metaphors,” that become “actualized” as people solve different problems for themselves and coordinate their actions with others.126 Cameron’s alternative vision of metaphors in thought vitally depends on the speakers’ specific discourse circumstances. She resists attributing conceptual metaphors as motivating forces in how people use metaphors, because these entities are typically found in discourses other than those in which speakers and listeners are currently engaged in. The fact that someone utters a conventional metaphor in some context does not imply that this verbal utterance was motivated by a conceptual metaphor seen from other discourse analyses. These different alternative approaches to inferring patterns of metaphorical thought in discourse all emphasize the communicative dimensions of verbal metaphor use. Particular verbal metaphors emerge in language not simply because people necessarily, and blindly, think in metaphorical ways. Instead, metaphorical discourse expresses ideas that have specific rhetorical motivations. Verbal metaphor, in this way, exhibits a far greater degree of individual and collective agency than is typically acknowledged in standard conceptual metaphor analyses. My own view is that verbal metaphorical language does emerge from particular cultural, social, and interpersonal contexts, but still underestimates the larger complex of factors which motivate any specific instance
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of metaphorical behavior. For example, people’s vast experiences of thinking and speaking with metaphor give rise to rich conceptual metaphors that serve as a significant constraint on what some individual is doing in the moment when using metaphor in some context. Metaphorical thinking in discourse may be emergent, and quite specific, as suggested by different systematic metaphors, for instance. Nonetheless, entrenched conceptual metaphors play an important part in the context-sensitive shaping of metaphorical behaviors, including verbal, gestural, and other non-linguistic extensions. It is not surprising, then, that systematic metaphors, as shown by Cameron, appear to be very close in character to traditional conceptual metaphors as studied by cognitive linguists and others. One other, different, extension of CMT suggests that the source domains within conceptual metaphors are themselves often quite metaphorical, and even convey allegorical meanings. Consider, again, a brief spoken narrative given by the American journalist Chris Matthews where he described an upcoming televised debate in 2012 between President Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney: Let me finish tonight with next week’s first debate in Denver. I’ll be out there to watch the two of them go at it. I have no real idea what to expect. I think Romney will take some hard shots; he may spend the whole 90 minutes blasting away at the President, serving him with one indictment after another, hoping that something will stick. I think Obama will play with him, parry the assaults, block the blows, try to keep his head clear so he can avoid getting hurt. I think it will start slow with both men trying to be cautious, neither able to land a punch, not hard enough to register with the tens of millions watching. Then it will happen: Romney will deliver what is clearly a pre-rehearsed moment, a sound byte. It will be something about Obama not delivering on a promise, something about the economy he said he’d do but hasn’t. He will expect the President to defend himself. When he does, pointing to what he inherited from Bush, Romney will pounce. He’ll say that Obama’s not running against Bush. This will be the Romney strategy: get Obama to pass the buck on the tough economic recovery and then land his Sunday punch. I suppose President Obama knows this is all coming and is preparing to deal with it. The good news is this: a month ago, all his rival had to do
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was say that Obama’s done his best – he got his stimulus, got his healthcare program . . . and here we are. I think that might have nailed it – a month ago. Something’s changed. It could have been something as definite as Bill Clinton’s speech but people don’t feel stuck like they did, don’t think all we need is some other president.
A traditional CMT analysis of this narrative would suggest that the verbal metaphors are mostly organized around the conceptual metaphor POLITICAL DEBATES ARE BOXING MATCHES. The assumption here is that people use their concrete, physical understanding of boxing matches to metaphorically structure the more abstract idea of political debates. However, the source domain of boxing matches may itself be understood metaphorically! One study asked people to read the Matthews’s narrative and then answer questions, including ones asking them to describe how political debates and boxing matches may be similar.127 A remarkable set of responses indicated that some participants saw boxing matches as political events. Boxing matches are not just physical encounters between two people, with one eventually overcoming the other through physical expertise. Instead, boxing matches are often “symbolic” in the sense of the two combatants representing different types of people (e.g., experience, personal appearance, boxing styles, national or ethnic backgrounds, and geographical locations). Audiences cheer for one boxer, as opposed to another, for a wide variety of reasons, including many that have little to do with a performer’s physical abilities alone. If people see boxing matches in highly symbolic terms, then it is quite possible that many source domains in political metaphors are themselves metaphorical! We do not, therefore, map physical source domains onto more abstract target domains, as in POLITICAL DEBATES ARE BOXING MATCHES, to create conceptual metaphors, but may just see the isomorphism between the metaphorical qualities of both boxing matches and political debates. Many common conceptual metaphors identified within cognitive linguistic studies, for example, such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, also have rich affective and cultural meanings which suggest that they too are highly allegorical and not just purely cognitive mappings. Finally, another extension of CMT suggests that basic sensorimotor experiences are far more complex, and “deeply imbued within sociocultural meanings” than typically acknowledged by CMT.128 Elisabeth El Refaie observed that within CMT, “the body is still often conceptualized as a normative and unchanging object, and insufficient attention is paid to the
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ways in which our physical experience itself is shaped by socio-cultural models, and to how it may vary over time and in accordance to our changing personal circumstances.”129 This complaint is echoed by others who note that “I am dissatisfied when an approach to metaphor assumes that the building blocks of language are formed by able bodies and are transferred to those with disabilities by contagion contact.”130 A dynamic view of embodiment seeks to recognize how bodily experience is constantly changing depending on available socio-cultural meaning resources. In many cases, the body is not the source domain from which metaphorical thoughts emerge, but serves as the target. Consider one description of how concrete physical illness in the body is viewed as the enemy: After the cancer’s invasion of the body, the immune system launches an offensive to beat the disease. The army of killer T cells and stealth viruses fight the tumour cells. However, this is not enough to wipe out or eradicate the invader completely. . . Thus, a bigger arsenal of weapons, consisting of magic bullets and blunt instruments, target the enemy. If the cancer is still resistant to the cancer-fighting tools, other weapons are injected to attack the disease or to boost the body’s own defences. This attack may eventually lead to defeating the disease. . .131
When speaking metaphorically, people tap into readily available sociocultural ideas that are related to bodily experiences, even if they have not previously experienced these in a directly embodied manner. Metaphor allows individuals to discuss corporeal realities, as seen in patients with cancer that differ from typical, non-ill experiences. Another instance of how metaphor shapes how people experience illness or disability is seen in a graphic memoir, titled “Cancer wisdom” by the cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto. This memoir described one woman’s obsession with her illness as she received her cancer diagnosis and began chemotherapy. One comic depicted her breasts in place of her eyes, as she described her struggle to complete a writing assignment before her chemotherapy began. This visual metaphor conveys a novel twist on the typical UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING primary metaphor, because Marchetto apparently “sees/understands everything through the distorting filters of her disease.”132 Marchetto is essentially claiming that she is unable to understand anything given her cancer diagnosis and the prospects of her upcoming treatment. The breasts for eyes switch shows how a traditional body part and activity (e.g., eyes and vision) serve as the target of the
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metaphor rather than the source domain. When the body is foregrounded, as in illness, “the direction of metaphorical mapping from embodied perspectives to more abstract experiences is often reversed.”133
are conceptual metaphors based on individual or collective psychology? A caricature of CMT assumes that conceptual metaphors originate solely from the inner minds of individuals as constrained by unconscious cognitive processes, embodied experience, and neural activities. Many of the criticisms of CMT outlined in this chapter, and elsewhere in this book, maintain that many other forces besides conceptual metaphors work to shape the ways people speak and write with metaphorical intention. Conceptual metaphors alone, so the critics claim, are simply insufficient to explain where verbal metaphors come from and how they are linguistically expressed in complex ways in discourse. For these reasons, metaphor scholars have raised important questions about the locus of conceptual metaphors. Do verbal metaphors constitute evidence of what a person was thinking when speaking? Should conceptual metaphors be understood as being in the minds of the actual speakers? Does the fact that conceptual metaphors motivate many verbal metaphors necessarily imply that all listeners and readers infer these as part of their understandings of what other people communicate? Might conceptual metaphors only serve as reflections of a specific language system (e.g., English) as a whole? Metaphor scholars have offered various responses to these questions. Lynne Cameron distinguished between two levels of metaphor analysis. Level 1, the “theory level,” refers to the “level at which theoretical analysis and categorization of metaphor takes place. Level 2, the “processing level,” is concerned with individuals’ online processing of metaphor.”134 Zoltán Kövecses argued that there are three main levels at which conceptual metaphors may be found. In a nutshell, the supraindividual level is one at which linguists identify conceptual metaphors mainly on the basis of decontextualized linguistic examples. The individual level is one at which metaphors exist in the heads of individual speakers, as studied, for example, by psycholinguists in various experimental situations. Finally, the subindividual level is one at which we find universal sensorimotor experiences that underlie and motivate conceptual metaphors.135
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Kövecses also raised the critical question of how these three levels interact, and whether a specific conceptual metaphor necessarily must be found across the three realms. But Kövecses went on to note that metaphor research has, over the last several decades, identified metaphor within language, thought, culture, the body, and the brain. One possibility is that this sequence (i.e., from language to the brain) reflects the temporal ordering of the discovery of metaphor in human experience through interdisciplinary scholarship. Nonetheless, Kövecses boldly concluded that “Ultimately, it is in the brain’s neurons where metaphors reside and where we produce metaphorical thought.”136 Gerard Steen has proposed that recent developments in metaphor scholarship suggest at least four distinct approaches to how metaphors are used in language, and noted specific scholars whose research embraces each approach:137 1. The semiotic approach focuses on the linguistic and conceptual structures and functions of metaphor in text and talk (Semino). 2. The psychological approach examines the mental processes and products of metaphor use in, typically, text comprehension (Gibbs). 3. The social approach studies metaphor patterns in, typically, face-toface interactions in order to examine the way metaphors are shared between language users (Cameron). 4. The historical approach addresses metaphor patterns across distinct discourse events in order to trace the evolution of metaphor over time (Musolff). However, Steen generally views these approaches as being distinct, and it is not clear how, if at all, they may be merged to create a more comprehensive theory of human metaphor use. How do we evaluate these various proposals on “where conceptual metaphor is located” in human experience? There are two related difficulties that, in my view, plague discussions about this question. First, many scholars who embrace aspects of CMT still typically assume that conceptual metaphors really originate at one particular level of experience, as opposed to others (e.g., the supraindividual level but not the individual or subindividual). Second, other scholars may recognize that conceptual metaphors may be related to many different systems (e.g., the semiotic, psychological, social, historical systems), but assume that these can, or even should, be studied independently with each system requiring its own respective methodological tools to investigate and understand. In both cases, however, there is little attempt to integrate the different levels,
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approaches, or systems into a more comprehensive theory of metaphor. After all, collective systems are obviously related to what individual people do. My claim is that conceptual metaphors are not the mere fictions of cognitive linguists because they play a major role in human thought, language, and action. Many of the critiques of CMT have led to research that significantly expands our theoretical understanding of conceptual metaphors. We no longer simply see conceptual metaphors as purely cognitive entities. Instead, conceptual metaphorical thinking emerges from a complex interaction of forces, ranging from history and culture to cognition and neural activities. Conceptual metaphors specifically incorporate rich socio-cultural, embodied knowledge which shape people’s sensitive, in-the-moment metaphorical actions. The process of inferring conceptual metaphors from language provides a significant body of evidence to support this conclusion. However, extensive research from psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience enables us to flesh out the prominence of conceptual metaphors in how specific individuals metaphorically think and communicate.
5 Psychology of Conceptual Metaphors in Verbal Metaphor Use
The previous chapters provide linguistic evidence showing that conceptual metaphors are a critical, but perhaps not exclusive, motivating force in the creation and continued use of many verbal metaphors in language. However, many critics are skeptical about the linguistic evidence, and demand different, scientific proofs that people really think via conceptual metaphors when they produce and understand metaphorical language. After all, speakers may appropriately employ certain cliché, conventional expressions without any sense, consciously or unconsciously, as to why these words and phrases mean what they do. Consider the following brief narrative from a client in psychotherapy who elaborated on his difficulty in expressing emotions:1 I keep things inside me until they blow out instead of like a normal progression. This is bothering me now and I just overlook it and one day it’ll get so big – Mount Vesuvius will blow up. . . To just keep things tied up inside me until they get so much and then I just blow them all out at one time.
Several conventional expressions in this narrative (e.g. “keep things inside me,” “I just overlooked it,” “I just blow them all out at one time”) are widely thought within cognitive linguistics to be motivated by enduring conceptual metaphors (e.g., EMOTIONS ARE FLUIDS IN A CONTAINER, SEEING IS UNDERSTANDING, ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER). It is not clear, though, that the speaker either knew these conceptual metaphors, or if known, accessed them as part of the cognitive and linguistic processes involved in formulating what he said. A person may simply understand, for example, that “I just overlooked it” means “I didn’t attend to it.” This possibility seems reasonable given that many aspects of linguistic meaning are arbitrarily determined, such that 168
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contemporary speakers may not know, even unconsciously, any motivated explanations for why words and phrases have the meanings they do. The methodological difficulty here is that one cannot necessarily know what underlies, or motivates, a speaker’s use of a verbal metaphor simply by examining the language alone. As Dominik Sandra and Sally Rice once asked, whose minds were cognitive linguistic studies uncovering – “the linguist’s or the language user’s.”2 Cognitive linguists may respond to this question by noting that their work focuses on detailing the contents and structure of human conceptual systems in general, rather than on what specific individuals may be thinking on particular occasions. Thus, the aim of positing the existence of conceptual metaphors is to suggest a fundamental principle for how people typically conceive of ideas and events and, as such, provide a major contribution to cognitive theories of language and mind. Determining whether particular individuals use conceptual metaphors in different circumstances is another matter, even if cognitive linguists tacitly assume that the use of many conventional expressions must be motivated in some manner by individual speakers’ metaphorical thoughts. Psychologists, and many others, are, again, skeptical of claims about human thought based solely on the analysis of linguistic patterns. They strongly argue that finding metaphors in thought must be accompanied by evidence that shows exactly what people were thinking, or how they ordinarily conceive of different topics, when they speak metaphorically or when they employ clichéd, conventional expressions. How best to study ordinary people’s conceptual metaphorical understanding of verbal metaphor is, however, a matter of much debate. Nonetheless, psychologists agree that experimental tests of conceptual metaphors must be examined with ordinary people, unaware of the hypothesis, and conducted in controlled situations, if we are to ever understand how people really think and use language. Of course, even psychologists are rarely interested in the specific people they study (e.g., university students), and employ different statistical tests to generalize the findings obtained from any experiment to make conclusions about populations of people. In this way, both cognitive linguists and psychologists are interested in general principles and constraints on human thought and language, but they differ in their beliefs about the kind of data needed to properly understand the nature of the metaphorical mind. Several empirical methods have been applied to uncover the psychology of conceptual metaphors in verbal metaphor use. Most of the empirical techniques discussed here examine people’s use, understanding, and
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reactions to various forms of metaphorical language as a window into the possible existence of conceptual metaphor.
several possible hypotheses The general claim that conceptual metaphors are part of the process of using verbal metaphors represents a very broad idea, and as such cannot be entirely examined, and potentially falsified, within a single experimental test. Instead, the possibility that conceptual metaphor really affect verbal metaphor use suggests several specific hypotheses, each of which may be experimentally examined under varying conditions using different psychological measures. Consider some of the possibilities. (a) People have an ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, but this cognitive ability is only applied momentarily in very specific situations without any long-term impact on ordinary conceptual representations or in real-time verbal metaphor communication. (b) People’s repeated metaphorical construals of certain, mostly abstract, concepts result in these concepts being represented in long-term memory in metaphorical terms. This conceptual metaphor knowledge provides part of people’s unconscious motivation for why various words and phrases express metaphorical meanings. However, conceptual metaphors may not be automatically recruited during most aspects of verbal metaphor use. (c) People’s tacit knowledge of conceptual metaphors not only motivates their understanding of various words and phrases, but it also plays a direct role in their use of metaphorical language. These hypotheses spell out how some concepts may be spoken of metaphorically in discourse, but suggest different means by which such metaphorical talk arises. Cognitive linguistic evidence alone may be limited in distinguishing between, and empirically evaluating, these hypotheses. Testing, and potentially falsifying, these particular hypotheses requires different experimental methods. Some of these methods seem quite commonsensical, and easy to apply, while others are based on more sophisticated “indirect” techniques from psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience for assessing the structure and functions of the unconscious mind. The empirical research described in the rest of this chapter represents a range of potential techniques for uncovering different aspects of conceptual metaphors in producing and understanding metaphorical language. My conclusion is that there is an abundance of experimental evidence to support the claim that
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conceptual metaphors are an essential part of verbal metaphor use, but that future research requires greater sophistication regarding the degree to which conceptual metaphors influence speaking and understanding metaphor.
describing our thoughts after speaking metaphorically One might imagine that a good method for understanding the ways people think is simply to ask them to describe their thoughts when engaged in some activity. We do this all the time in conversation, and in written exchanges, when questions arise about the reasons for why someone acts in particular ways, including using different verbal metaphors. Consider an example of metaphor in psychotherapy in which a client, Jake, commented that “Marriage is a cocoon.”3 This metaphor, by itself, is rather ambiguous, or indeterminate in meaning, and could refer to marriage as being a safe place, a place to develop, a place of constraint, a place to escape from, or some combination of these possibilities. There are situations, of course, where the context, or the common ground between speaker and addressee, constrains the meaning understood from Jake’s metaphor. But in this specific instance, the “Marriage is a cocoon” metaphor functions as an invitation to the listener to negotiate with the speaker exactly in what ways marriages are cocoons. In fact, the therapist asked Jake to say more about what he was thinking after producing the “Marriage is a cocoon” metaphor, and Jake tried to clarify what he meant. Yet the talk that occurred here may not specifically indicate everything Jake had in mind before stating his “cocoon” metaphor. Even if we are never sure whether the ultimate meaning understood reflects Jake’s thoughts prior to speaking, the dialogue surely produced a clearer understanding of at least one reasonable version of how Jake was metaphorically thinking about his marriage. In other cases, speakers appear to have some definite metaphorical concept in mind that motivates what they say. For instance, later on in the above conversation, Jake described to his therapist, Bonnie, some of the problems he faced in his current job:4 jake: “. . . it’s all looking real bad and I’m saying ‘Well, it’s not going to be much longer and I’m going over the hill. . . and it’s gonna be downhill. I don’t have. . . I’m just trying to hang on till that time.” bonnie: “When you say ‘over the hill,’ what do you, what do you mean?” jake: “Oh, probably feeling sorry for myself. You know, just thinking, everything is happening, everything is going wrong with me.”
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bonnie: “Mm” jake: “Well, I think there’s good things if you can” bonnie: “So, ‘the hill’ is really not bad, but good.” jake: “Yeah, about the time you think you’re at the peak of it. . .”
The therapist initially misunderstood Jake’s use of the conventional metaphor “over the hill,” and they then attempted to resolve the miscommunication to arrive at Jake’s personal understanding that life is a hill, uphill is hard, but downhill is easy, and you need to get to the peak in order to get to the easy part. Note that Jake did not respond to the therapist’s request for clarification by better explaining the meaning of “over the hill.” Rather, he described thoughts he had in mind that prompted him to use this metaphorical phrase when discussing this aspect of life’s journey. Only when he said, “I think there’s good things” did the therapist recognize that Jake had a particular metaphorical conception of the LIVING LIFE IS CLIMBING OVER A HILL idea.5 Consider now a different case where a person was asked to describe his thoughts after producing a verbal metaphor. This example is taken from an anthropological study of how people make sense of major life crises, in which metaphor, not surprisingly, plays a significant role. The main narrative is produced by Sam, who with his wife was struggling with infertility given their strong desire to start a family:6 It (infertility) became a black hole for both of us. I was happy when I was getting married, and life to me was consistently getting better. And she was continually depressed. Everything was meaningless because she couldn’t have a baby. And so it was a tremendous black hole, it was a real bummer. . . it seemed like every time I was, like, taking off, and feeling good, and she was dragging me down. . . It ruined our sex life. It was just like everything was going down the black hole.
At this point, the interviewer interjected “There’s something about the symbolism of that” to which Sam immediately responded: The notion of the black hole is that it’s this magnet – this negative magnet in space through which all matter is irretrievably drawn – that was the image I had of it. It was just sucking everything down out of our lives. Down this negative hole. It was bad.7
Sam’s metaphor aptly characterized the depression that he, and his wife, experienced through the rich image of infertility as a black hole. The interviewer’s comment prompted Sam to further explain his thoughts in
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regard to the metaphor, which revealed the possibility that the conceptual metaphor BAD IS DOWN may have been part of his previous thoughts. Once more, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether metaphorical language was motivated beforehand by a clear metaphorical conception or thought about the topic under discussion. Still, asking people to explain their thoughts when using verbal metaphors provides one kind of empirical evidence on the existence of conceptual metaphors in a way that simply looking at individual verbal metaphors alone does not provide. People’s further explications of the structural correspondences that arise from metaphorical mappings, as was illustrated in each of the above cases, offer relevant insights into the structure and content of people’s metaphorical thoughts about what they have just said.8
reflecting on metaphorical meaning Another way to assess the extent to which people employ conceptual metaphors in verbal metaphor use is to have them explain the meanings of metaphorical language produced by others. There are several ways in which this has been done. For instance, one small study simply asked people to explain the meanings of three conceptual metaphors that are central to economics.9 The primary aim here was to explore individual differences in conceptual metaphor understanding in relation to people’s varying cognitive styles. Students who had been tested as being either “analytic” or “holistic” in their cognitive styles toward processing information were given three metaphors (e.g., ECONOMIC COMPETITION IS RACING, AN ECONOMY IS A MACHINE, ECONOMICS IS HEALTH CARE), and asked to explain what each one meant. Analysis of the verbal protocols showed that over 40 percent of the participants explained the metaphors by referring to structural correspondences between the source and target domains (e.g., “Economic competition is like racing in the sense that entrepreneurs correspond to the athlete and markets correspond to physical exercise”). Thirty-five percent of the participants also explained one of the three metaphors by referring to elements that were not part of the source domains, but were part of participants’ understanding of the target domains (e.g., “Economic competition is talked about in terms of racing because it is a merciless jungle where the fittest survive”). At the end of the explanation task, participants were asked to list the ways that the target domain differed from the source domain. For example, participants listed things like economic competition is not really a race because there is no definitive finish line in economic competition. Most
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importantly, participants whose main cognitive style was “holistic” deviated from the source domain in their explanations of the metaphors more so than did the “analytic” participants, especially when attributing to the source domain features that were more characteristic of the target domain. This suggested that “analytic” participants were more aware of the source and target domains as separate entities, compared to the “holistic” ones who tended to view the two domains as an integrated entity. This research offers an important lesson for conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), namely that there are significant individual differences in how people conceive of common conceptual metaphorical mappings. But does the evidence showing that 40 percent of the participants could explain the structural relations underlying the three special conceptual metaphors necessarily imply something about the generality of conceptual metaphors in human cognition? Answering this question, however, requires that criteria be established for what counts as sufficient, general success in explaining metaphorical meanings of conceptual metaphors, or more narrowly, people’s understandings of these specialized conceptual metaphors about economics. At the same time, the fact that many people failed to describe the mappings for conceptual metaphors does not imply that participants were incapable of thinking metaphorically in these specific ways. Simply asking people to explain conceptual metaphors may be a difficult task in exactly the way that paraphrasing any verbal metaphor can be quite challenging. The problem with making assertions about the psychological reality of conceptual metaphors by looking at people’s explications of isolated verbal metaphors is also seen in the extensive literature on proverb understanding. Some work suggests that people can explain the metaphorical meanings of many isolated proverbs, which is often seen by many as evidence of abstract, metaphorical thinking abilities.10 Participants in one study were asked to explicate the meanings of different isolated proverbs, which revealed several levels of metaphorical inference in how people make sense of these expressions.11 For example, the greatest number of paraphrases for “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” focused on the act of misjudgment or misperception of a situation. People suggested that things either “seem better,” “look better,” or “appear more attractive” on the other side of the fence. Some participants extended the metaphor of sight into their paraphrase as in “Other people’s situations sometimes look better than they really are.” “Things look better with other people.” “Things appear to be more attractive or better when you are not involved.” Other informants simply stated that things “seem better” as in “Things
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which are unobtainable always seem better.” “Once we make our choices, the choice not taken always seems better.” These paraphrases reveal how people appear to use conceptual metaphors (e.g., UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING) to make sense of what proverbs specifically mean. There are several problems, however, with using explanations of metaphorical sayings as direct indicators of metaphorical thought processes.12 First, explaining the metaphorical meanings of isolated proverbs, for example, can be difficult even for educated adults. College students often simply state a different metaphorical expression that has similar figurative meaning when they are asked to explain what various idioms and proverbs mean (e.g., “let the cat out of the bag” means “spilling the beans”). The problem schizophrenics and others sometimes experience explaining the meanings of proverbs is not that they necessarily lack an ability to think abstractly or metaphorically, but they have difficulty engaging in “atopical” thinking. Because participants have difficulty finding some context in which to illustrate an isolated proverb’s meaning, they instead focus on more personalized associations to a proverb or to certain words in these sayings. In fact, schizophrenics are often quite capable of explaining the meanings of groups of proverbs that have the same figurative meaning (e.g., “Strike while the iron is hot,” “Hoist your sail when the wind is fair,” “Grab with a quick hand the fruit that passes”). Patients’ improvements in explaining the meanings of multiple proverbs suggest an input deficit rather than a deficit in abstraction ability. Second, it is not clear that providing a metaphorical interpretation of any verbal metaphor necessarily indicates that people truly understand why the saying expresses that meaning. After all, people know the meanings of many words and phrases without necessarily understanding, consciously or otherwise, the motivations for these interpretations. People may simply learn the meanings of proverbs in a rote manner where they arbitrarily match a proverbial saying with its accepted meaning. This associative linking is quite commonly thought to explain how people learn many kinds of speech formula such as idioms, proverbs, slang, and other conversational gambits. Another possibility is that people may at first tacitly recognize certain metaphorical connections between verbal metaphors and their figurative meanings. But through continued use of these conventional expressions, people may forget the original conceptual metaphorical motivation for why any verbal metaphor means what it does and simply recall its figurative interpretation in a rote fashion. For example, an elderly patient may respond that “A rolling stone gathers no moss” means “It is better to keep
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moving than to stand still” even though he or she exhibits a limited ability to engage in abstract thought as measured by other tasks. In summary, the evidence from psychological tests that many people can explain the meanings for certain verbal metaphors does not rule out the above alternative explanations in regard to these individuals’ metaphorical thinking abilities. We might very well be judged to be competent speakers through our ability to explain the meanings of verbal metaphors and in matching these with their correct paraphrases. Yet these abilities do not necessarily reflect the cognitive processes by which people make sense of why metaphorical expressions mean what they do through their application of enduring conceptual metaphors.13
generating metaphorical mappings Getting people to think metaphorically on demand is not always an easy task to accomplish. There are, however, a few interesting psychological studies that have asked people to produce metaphorical relations in specific experimental contexts. For example, one project used a version of a talkout-loud method to specifically investigate how pre-existing conceptual metaphors constrain people’s interpretations of literary metaphors in love poetry.14 A first study employed cognitive linguistic methods to analyze college students’ folk notions about the concept of love in addition to how they metaphorically conceptualized of their own love experiences. Participants in this study wrote their own definitions of love and then described the feelings they experienced when they first fell in love. Consider just one woman’s definition of love.15 The overall concern for another person. Sharing of yourself but not giving yourself away. Feeling like you are both one, willing to compromise, knowing the other person well with excitement and electrical sparks to keep you going.
Not surprisingly, students’ protocols revealed patterns of conventional expressions that seem clearly motivated by a relatively small set of enduring conceptual metaphors for love, such as LOVE IS A UNITY, LOVE IS A NATURAL FORCE, LOVE IS PHYSICAL CLOSENESS, LOVE IS A VALUABLE RESOURCE, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, and LOVE IS INSANITY. Some of these conceptual metaphors, such as LOVE IS A UNITY, LOVE IS A NATURAL FORCE, and LOVE IS PHYSICAL CLOSENESS, were employed in conventional expressions by more than 50 percent of the participants. The presence of this fairly limited number of
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conceptual metaphors in participants’ discourse, at the very least, illustrates the dominance of metaphor in how people talk about love and their love experiences. A second experiment investigated whether people could generally recognize the presence of conceptual metaphors in various instances of love poetry. Participants read ten fragments of love poetry, each of which was followed by a list of five conceptual metaphors (e.g., LOVE IS A NATURAL FORCE). The participants’ task was to read each fragment and select the conceptual metaphor that best reflected the underlying theme about love in that poem. Overall, participants were very accurate in choosing conceptual metaphors that motivated the poetic fragments they had just read. A third experiment had a different group of participants read the same poetic fragments and then pick from a list of five the conventional expression (e.g., “We were sick with love”) that best reflected the concept of love described in the poem. Once again, participants were quite good at picking the conventional expressions that were motivated by the same conceptual metaphors underlying the poetic fragments. A final study in this series employed a written version of the talkingout-loud task to see whether the inferences readers drew about the meanings of poems reflected their conceptual metaphorical understanding of the poets’ own conceptions about love. Consider these lines from the poem titled “Ode and Burgeonings,” by Pablo Neruda: My wild girl, we have had to regain time and march backward, in the distance of our lives, kiss after kiss, gathering from one place what we gave without joy, discovering in another the secret road that gradually brought your feet close to mine.
An analysis of the participants’ interpretations generated while reading the poems in a line-by-line manner provided good evidence that conceptual metaphor structured their understanding of the poems. Across all the poems and the participants, 78 percent of all statements in the talking-outloud protocols referred to the entailments of the underlying conceptual metaphors that partially motivated the meanings of the poems participants had read. For example, when participants read the fragment from Neruda’s poem, they referred to entailments of the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor
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such as the path (e.g., “They learned a better path to happiness,” “They had to retrace their steps to find true love,” “They found a special road that they could travel together on in the same direction”), the goals (e.g., “The future of their love lay ahead of them,” “They had to catch up”), and the impediments to travel (e.g., “They managed to get over the rough places, rediscovering what was missed”). Readers were processing the poems in light of these different conceptual metaphors about love. At the very least, people’s conscious, reflective interpretations of poetry seem strongly constrained by their conceptual metaphorical knowledge. A very different empirical project that elicited people’s conceptual metaphorical knowledge is seen in marketing research. The “Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique” (ZMET) is a qualitative methodology that uses in-depth interviews to probe people’s metaphorical thoughts and impressions of advertising.16 Informants were first asked to bring in visual images, in this case from advertising, and describe how each picture related to their impression of advertising (i.e., storytelling). Later on, informants described their impressions of advertising using the different senses of sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, as well as emotional feelings that arose from these impressions. Informants then imagined a short movie that described their thoughts and feelings about advertising. Finally, the informants created a composite of their thoughts and feelings about advertising. This was done by first having informants select specific images from the various pictures that they wanted to include in the summary image. A graphic artist then scanned these images into a computer, and worked collaboratively with the informant to create a summary image. The verbal protocols were analyzed to determine the conceptual metaphors that structured people’s knowledge and impressions of advertising. First, researchers searched through the protocols for instances of metaphorical words, phrases, and expressions. Next, these verbal metaphors were compiled and analyzed to identify a set of thematic categories that indicated something about people’s overall impressions of advertising. The next step linked the thematic categories to specific conceptual metaphors. Finally, a smaller set of deep metaphors were identified that represented a higher level of abstraction from conceptual metaphors. One study using ZMET revealed that there were three deep metaphors (resource, force, and the essence) that structured people’s broad interpretations of advertising. Under these three deep metaphors were several groups of specific conceptual metaphors. The deep metaphor of resource, for example, was organized in terms of five conceptual metaphors: advertising as a hostess, teacher, counselor, enabler, and magician. For instance,
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the hostess metaphor is associated with the thematic category of advertising serving to introduce how products and services have different benefits and values, as seen in one informant’s comment in reference to an ad for motor oil, “in an ad I read that I need certain oil in the summer and certain oil in the winter. I feel good. . . knowing that I am going to using the right product at the right time.” Advertising as a counselor goes beyond the hostess metaphor to suggest emotional and cognitive benefits with a product or service, as seen in the comment “advertising helps me to know which products will and will not reflect the sort of person I am.” The magician metaphor describes advertising’s ability to make people think differently, beyond the ad content, as seen in the comment that ads “stimulate your imagination” or “suggest avenues,” “open doors of thought,” or “evoke memories of happy things.” The deep metaphor of advertising as a force refers to advertising’s powerful presence in contemporary culture, with conceptual metaphors (i.e., advertising as omnipresent being, a noisy neighbor, a broken record, a con-man, and a seducer) mostly expressing negative views about advertising. For instance, informants commented that ads are things “you just can’t get away from” (omnipresent being), or are like “a horse sticking his nose through the fence” (nosy neighbor), that “are on again, and again, and again. . . pretty soon you tend to tune out” (broken record), or can “set a trap for you” to “get you to do what they want” (con-man), and “encourage me to buy things that I do not need” (seducer). The final deep metaphor evident in this analysis was of advertising as an essence, providing idealized images of people and products. The main conceptual metaphor at work here is advertising is an evil therapist, as seen in the comment that ads “create within the individual feelings of anxiety, need, longing, desire, hunger, loss, helplessness, and anger that can only be relieved through the consumption of the product or service” being offered. In general, ZMET elicited a wide range of metaphors, suggesting how people’s understandings of ads are deeply organized around different conceptual metaphors. The beauty of the technique is that it systematically prompts people to creatively think and say more about what they conceptualize of particular conceptual metaphorical ways.
reasoning and problem solving Solving problems often involves analogical and metaphorical reasoning that may be shaped by conceptual metaphors. There is a large literature
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showing that scientists employ conceptual metaphors when describing their solutions to different problems.17 Experimental studies have also illustrated the ways that conceptual metaphors can shape reasoning and problem solving. Consider first a study that asked college students to solve everyday dilemmas as presented in stories that are structured around one of two different conceptual metaphors. For example, the argument over whether or not nations should impose trade tariffs may be structured by two different conceptual metaphors, as shown in the following texts.18 Trade is War International trade is a war. Tariffs, or trade rules, are barricades that shield the vital interests of countries from harm. Victory is achieved when a country maintains its own safeguards but is able to penetrate the markets of its adversary. The trade deficit means that we are losing ground on the battlefield of the trade war. Tariffs would shield us from such loss and help us reclaim our trade territory. Trade is a Two-Way Street International trade is a two-way street. Tariffs, or trade rules, are obstacles in the road that impede the flow of trade traffic. Success in trade is achieved by removing all obstacles on both sides of the street allowing the free passage of goods. The trade deficit means that these obstacles are causing stop and go traffic on the road of trading. Tariffs would prevent us from speeding up again and reaching our trading destination.
These two metaphorical frames offer different solutions to the trade tariff dilemma. College students were presented with stories like these and were asked their opinion about, in this case, the effectiveness of trade barriers. As expected, individuals’ resolutions of dilemmas described in these short stories were influenced subtly by the particular conceptual metaphors used to frame the debate (i.e., the “metaphor framing effect”). For example, more people who read the TRADE IS WAR story favored tariffs than those who read the other vignette. Interestingly, only a few of the participants were at all aware, when questioned, of the underlying conceptual metaphors’ influence on their reasoning.19 One line of research on conceptual metaphor and abstract problem solving explored the “metaphoric fit hypothesis”: “If an embodied metaphor focusing on an abstract problem prompts people to reason about it using their knowledge of a bodily problem, then they should positively evaluate candidate solutions that are themselves framed metaphorically as
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addressing that bodily problem.”20 A test of this hypothesis asked people to read one of two articles about a new medication for dealing with clinical depression. One story described depression in metaphorical terms, specifically comparing depression to being down (e.g., “Depressed individuals feel that while other people’s lives have both ups and downs, their life was constantly down”). The other story was the no-metaphor condition (e.g., “Depressed individuals feel that while other people’s lives have both positive and negative periods, their lives have considerably more negative periods”). After reading either the metaphorical or non-metaphorical story, people read a brief news item about a new medication for treating depression. This description talked about the drug’s possible benefits in metaphorical terms (e.g., “has been shown to uplift mood”). Finally, people rated what they believed to be the likely effectiveness of the new medication. People who read the earlier metaphorical description of depressions (e.g., DEPRESSION IS DOWN) rated the new drug to be more effective than when they first read the non-metaphor story. Similar results were found when different metaphors were used (e.g., DEPRESSION IS DARKNESS), and when the drug’s benefits were described in similar metaphorical ways (e.g., “has been show to brighten mood”). These findings indicate that presenting problems in metaphorical frames can often lead to particular ways of thinking about the issue and help individuals to be open to certain solutions. A similar set of experiments examined whether a single metaphorical statement can influence reasoning. University students read a report about the crime rate in a fictitious city, named Addison.21 Some of the students saw the report in which the crime was early on described as “a beast preying” on Addison, and the other students saw the crime report with a metaphor of “a virus infecting” Addison. Both stories contained identical information, presented after the metaphor, about crime statistics. After reading their respective stories, the students had to propose a solution to the Addison crime problem. The specific metaphor people read influenced their proposed crime solutions. Participants reading the “beast preying” metaphor suggested that harsher enforcement should be applied to catching and jailing criminals. But participants who read the “virus infecting” metaphor proposed solutions that focused on finding the root causes of the crime and creating social programs to protect the community. Once again, people’s problemsolving solutions was covert as students did not mention the metaphors when asked to state what influenced them the most in coming up with
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their crime solution (i.e., most people focused on the crime statistics). Even a single verbal metaphor can activate conceptual metaphorical knowledge that tacitly constrained people’s subsequent problem-solving choices. A more complex empirical project showed how people’s metaphorical understandings of one social problem led them to favor different social policies.22 The rise of obesity, and the possible causes for this, is widely discussed in contemporary American life, ranging from blaming individuals (e.g., obesity is the result of sinful behavior) to seeing obesity as something that just happens to certain individuals (e.g., obesity is genetic, or an addiction), to obesity being blamed on the food industry and governmental indifference (e.g., obesity is caused by the promotion of unhealthy foods and poor public treatment programs for overweight people). Not surprisingly, metaphors are rampant in these debates, with people adopting several different metaphorical ideas for thinking about obesity. One large-scale survey gave people a list of different conceptual metaphors related to obesity. For example, consider two metaphorical concepts about obesity that differ in the extent to which the blame is placed on the overweight individual.23 Obesity is Sinful Behavior A big problem with America is that people are unwilling to work hard or control their impulses. People who are overweight aren’t even trying to get healthier. Fat people can’t do their jobs well and cost us all the more for their health care. So it’s unfair when those people make others pay for their lack of effort. When I see people who are overweight, they disgust me. Obesity is a Toxic Food Environment A big problem in this country is that we’re surrounded by choices that are cheap and easy but not good for us. We have become so used to eating fatty, sugary foods that healthy foods are lost in a sea of unhealthy alternatives. So people are overweight because processed foods displace natural foods and large restaurant portions replace reasonable meals. It’s not fair that it’s become so hard to find healthy foods at a reasonable price. When I see a person who’s overweight, I get angry at our society for allowing bad food choices to drive out the good ones.
People read seven of these metaphorical scenarios, which included obesity as sinful behavior, addiction, time crunch, eating disorder, disability, industry manipulation, and toxic food environment. After reading each scenario, participants were asked to answer the question, “Out of every
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100 Americans with weight problems, for how many do you think this accounts for or explains a lot about why they are overweight?” Following this, people rated their agreement with sixteen obesity-related policy statements about what the government might best do to address the situation, ranging from providing treatment programs, outlawing unhealthy foods, taxing certain foods, asking overweight people to pay higher health insurance premiums, and offer legal protections against discrimination for obese individuals. Finally, people completed surveys asking about their health, political beliefs, and political affiliations. The study results showed that people saw all seven metaphors to be useful explanations of obesity, with about half of all participants suggesting that four or more of the metaphors were important causes of obesity in the United States. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between people’s perceptions of the different conceptual metaphors and their support for different social policies for dealing with the obesity crisis. For example, people who agreed with mid- and low-blame metaphors (e.g., obesity as disability, eating disorder, addiction) positively rated policies that required governmental support for patients suffering from obesity. On the other hand, these same people negatively evaluated more punitive price-raising policies such as having higher taxes on unhealthy foods or requiring overweight people to pay higher health insurance premiums. People who embraced metaphors involving eating disorders and toxic food environments agreed most with policies requiring employers to pay for workers’ gym memberships or give them time off each workday for exercise. Yet people who adhered to obesity as sinful behavior argued against these same policies and agreed more with policies charging overweight people higher fees for insurance.24 Media depictions of obesity clearly play a critical role in suggesting different metaphorical possibilities for thinking about the causes and consequences of being overweight. But studies like this highlight how differences in people’s conceptual metaphors influence their particular beliefs about political action and governmental policies. Imagine now a different reasoning task in which people are asked to arrange objects on a table in temporal order. Would you do this by arranging the objects in a horizontal, left-to-right, manner or in a vertical, up-down way? One study examined this question with groups of English and Mandarin speakers.25 Both English and Mandarin use horizontal front/back spatial terms to talk about time. For example, English speakers use expressions such as “We can look forward to the good times ahead” and “We are glad that the difficult times are behind us.” However,
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Mandarin speakers also use vertical metaphors, so that earlier events are said to be “shàng” or “up,” and later events are described as “xià” or “down.” About one-third of all time expressions in Mandarin use the vertical metaphor. Experimental studies show that when asked to arrange objects on a table in temporal order, one-third of Mandarins did so along vertical dimension, yet English speakers never used the vertical dimension in completing this time task. These results show how people’s temporal judgments are influenced by their most salient conceptual metaphors. Studies like these demonstrate some of the ways in which different conceptual metaphors shape people’s reasoning, and decisions about, ordinary problems. It is unclear from this work whether people spontaneously engage in creative metaphorical thought or merely access conceptual metaphors relevant to a particular experimental task. Still, the above research indicates that conceptual metaphors can have an important role in leading people to certain problem solving solutions.
mental imagery Looking at the way people form mental images for verbal metaphors has been shown to provide an excellent window into the use of conceptual metaphors in understanding why many verbal metaphors have the meanings they do. Consider the idiom “spill the beans.” Try to form a mental image for this phrase and then ask yourself the following questions.26 Where are the beans before they are spilled? How big is the container? Are the beans cooked or uncooked? Is the spilling accidental or intentional? Where are the beans once they’ve been spilled? Are the beans in a nice, neat pile? Where are the beans supposed to be? After the beans are spilled, are they easy to retrieve? Most speakers can form mental images for idioms like “spill the beans” and answer these questions about their mental images without difficulty. One set of studies used mental imagery to investigate the hypothesis that the meanings of many idioms are specifically motivated by different conceptual metaphors.27 People formed mental images for twenty-five idioms, five of which expressed figurative meanings about anger (e.g., “blow your stack”), five about exerting control or authority (e.g., “lay down the law”), five about secretiveness (e.g., “keep it under your hat”), five about insanity (e.g., “lose your marbles”), and five about revelation (e.g., “spill the beans”). Each participant described their mental image for an idiom and then answered a series of questions designed to reveal their beliefs about the causes of actions in their mental images.
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Analysis of participants’ protocols revealed that they had very similar schemas underlying their mental images for idioms with similar meanings. On average 75 percent of participants’ mental images collapsed across different groups of idioms, which described similar general images. These general schemas were not simply representative of the idioms’ figurative meanings, but captured more specific aspects of the events within an image. For example, idioms such as “flip your lid” and “hit the ceiling” both figuratively mean “to get angry,” but people specifically imagined some force causing a container to release pressure in a violent manner. There is nothing in the surface forms of these different idioms to tightly constrain the images subjects reported. After all, lids can be flipped and ceilings can be hit in a wide variety of ways, caused by many different circumstances. Still, participants’ protocols revealed little variation in the general events that took place in their images for idioms with similar meanings. People’s general images for idioms with similar meaning only revealed part of what they understood about their mental images. More specific information is seen in participants’ highly consistent responses to different probe questions about their mental images for idioms. For example, for the anger idioms, people responded that the cause of the anger was internal pressure, that the expression of anger was unintentional, and that it was done in a forceful, irreversible manner. The mental images people reported for idioms within each group were structured by a very small set of conceptual metaphors. For example, the anger idioms are structured by two basic conceptual metaphors: THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and ANGER IS HEAT. The MIND IS A CONTAINER metaphor is part of the more general CONDUIT metaphor,28 and the ANGER IS HEAT metaphor comes from the common folk theory that the physiological effects of anger are increased body heat, increased internal pressure, and agitation. As anger increases, so do its physiological effects. We also know that when fluids get hot and begin to boil, the fluid goes upward. So, when the intensity of anger increases, the fluid rises as seen in the expressions “His pent-up anger welled up inside him,” “My anger kept building up inside me,” and “We got a rise out of him.” When anger builds beyond the point at which a person can control it, we imagine that the fluid or heat escapes violently from the container holding it. This is exactly the kind of image that participants had for anger idioms so that, for example, participants’ images for “blow your stack” and “flip your lid” often consisted of a person’s head blowing up from internal pressure with steam coming out the top of the head as it violently blew off.
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Conceptual metaphors, more generally, form part of the link between an idiom and its figurative meaning (e.g., the link between “spill the beans” and “reveal secret”) and constrain people’s understanding of the events within their conventional images for idioms. People’s knowledge about their mental images for literal phrases, such as “spill the peas,” was far less definite and more variable than was the case for corresponding idiomatic expressions, such as “spill the beans.” The greater variability in mental images for literal phrases is due to their meanings not being constrained by underlying conceptual metaphors in the way seen for metaphorical idioms. A different series of experiments explored whether people’s mental imagery reveals anything about their embodied understandings of verbal metaphorical phrases.29 These studies specifically compared people’s mental images for concrete (e.g., “chew on the gum”) and metaphorical (e.g., “chew on the idea”) phrases. Unlike imagining non-metaphorical action statements (e.g., “chew on the gum”), where people’s images should focus on the procedural characteristics of the concrete actions (i.e., moving their mouths as they chew the gum), people’s mental images for metaphorical phrases should show an analogical understanding of how abstract domains, such as ideas or concepts, can be metaphorically structured in terms of embodied source domains (i.e., chewing on something to get more out of it). Participants were first presented individual phrases, which were either metaphorical or non-metaphorical, and then had ten seconds to form a mental image for each phrase. They were then asked, “What is particularly noticeable in your image?” People’s responses were divided into two groups. The first set of answers made some specific reference to the participants actually performing the action mentioned in the statement. For example, “My jaw goes up and down as I chew,” was one response given to “chew on the gum.” People gave far more of these specific references to participating in the action responses for the non-metaphors (63%) than to the metaphors (29%). But for the metaphors, people gave significantly more conceptualized descriptions of the action (71%) than they did for the non-metaphors (37%). For instance, for the metaphor “stretch for understanding,” one person said that the most noticeable thing in this image was “there is much stretching going on both in terms of the ideas being stretched out to see if they are true and me stretching to better see or examine the idea.” The participant essentially noted that IDEAS ARE OBJECTS which can be physically inspected by stretching them out to more effectively examine them, and that UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING enables the person to extend his or her body to better control
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the object, and thus better understand it. This response concretely illustrates how embodied metaphors constrain the mental images people construct when interpreting metaphorical action statements. Participants were also asked, “Why is this concept (e.g., idea) sometimes associated with this action (e.g., chewing)?” as in regards to the phrase “chew on the idea.” Once more, people could give a concrete explanation of the relevant process or action, such as “That is what you do with gum, chew on it” for “chew on the gum.” But for the metaphors, people specifically provided analogous, conceptual explanations as to why some concept was sometimes associated with some action or process. For example, for the metaphorical phrase “chew on the idea,” one person said, “Chewing is related to a slow methodological activity and it could be related to turning something over in your mind to better understand it.” Overall, people gave analogous, conceptual explanations far more often to the metaphors (77%) than to the non-metaphors (36%), showing that people’s mental images for metaphorical action phrases were constrained by their embodied, metaphorical understanding of the target domains referred to in these expressions (e.g., ideas, concepts, feelings). These studies on mental imagery for conventional metaphors do not imply that people always form mental images during idiom comprehension, or that conceptual metaphors are automatically activated during immediate idiom comprehension. But it is clear that people’s existing knowledge of embodied conceptual metaphors motivates their understanding of why conventional metaphors have the complex figurative meanings they appear to possess.
episodic memory tasks Several episodic memory studies have explored the automatic activation of conceptual metaphors in verbal metaphor understanding. A first set of experiments, by Albert Katz and Tamsen Taylor, examined people’s understanding of a single conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY.30 Participants first wrote down life events in terms of a course followed until one reached the age of seventy. The analysis of the events listed showed high agreement both in terms of their sequential order and the specific age at which one was likely to experience an event. Another study explored people’s more detailed understanding of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, and found that several submetaphors emerged, including LOVE IS A JOURNEY and OBTAINING ONE’S INDEPENDENCE IN LIFE IS A JOURNEY. These submetaphors help organize life events into several
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thematic clusters. A final study employed an episodic memory task in which participants were presented with a random list of forty events related to the JOURNEY metaphor. After a ten-minute delay, participants then recalled as many of the forty items as possible in whatever order they preferred. People recalled the events primarily around submetaphors (e.g., PARENTING IS A JOURNEY) and not in the order in which they were originally presented. However, people’s recalls did not simply follow a general, sequential LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. These findings suggested that people’s understandings of life events were structured around the specific themes associated with the general conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, rather than being organized in a strict linear order starting at birth and ending at age seventy.31 A different episodic memory test employed a phenomenon known as “release from ‘proactive interference (PI)’.”32 Proactive interference refers to situations in which previously encountered material interferes with the memory of more recently viewed information. For instance, if people see the words “robin,” “hawk,” and “chickadee,” they will later on be poorer at recalling a fourth word, such as “seagull,” if it comes from the same conceptual category (e.g., birds), than if the fourth word refers to an entirely new category (e.g., “tulip” for the category of flowers). Thus, the build-up of information of an underlying conceptual category (e.g., birds) makes this a less effective retrieval cue when people have to recall all four items from the same category. However, when the last, or fourth, item represents a new category (e.g., flowers), there is a “release from PI,” which enables people to more readily recall the last word (e.g., “tulip”) compared to when the last item comes from the same category as instantiated earlier (e.g., birds). This same technique was applied to study the build-up of conceptual metaphorical information over time. People read three conventional metaphorical statements (e.g., Waiting has cost me an hour,” “I invested a lot of the day working on that project,” and “This saved me hours of work”), each of which were motivated by the same conceptual metaphor (e.g., TIME IS AN EXPENDABLE RESOURCE). One group of people then read a fourth statement from the same conceptual metaphorical category (e.g., “Please budget your time wisely”), while another group saw an expression motivated by a different conceptual metaphor (e.g., “Her love cast a spell over me,” for LOVE IS MAGIC). People saw the four statements, then engaged in a distractor task for 15 seconds (i.e., counting backwards by threes from a certain number), and then recalled, as accurately as possible, the four statements presented earlier. The results revealed a classic effect
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off release from PI in that people recalled the last item better when it was motivated by a different conceptual metaphor than the same conceptual metaphor underlying the first three statements. This finding demonstrated that people were implicitly accessing the conceptual metaphor TIME IS AN EXPENDABLE RESOURCE when understanding the first three conventional metaphorical expressions. “In summary, these data provide support for the unconscious arousal of conceptual metaphor” when people read conventional metaphorical language.33
speeded processing and production of verbal metaphors Measuring the time to understand the meanings of verbal metaphors has been one of the most commonly used techniques in psycholinguistics to explore the moment-by-moment processes by which people comprehend metaphorical meaning. Related studies investigate people’s speeded responses to words referring to conceptual metaphors after they have read a verbal metaphorical phrase in context. In a sense, then, many experimental studies have examined people’s speeded reactions to metaphorical language as a way to see whether conceptual metaphors are quickly, perhaps automatically, recruited during understanding both conventional and novel metaphors. Psycholinguists have sometimes argued that “conceptual metaphors are not accessed” during understanding of some verbal metaphors,34 but the vast empirical evidence shows this contention is not true. There are many factors that affect people’s speeded comprehension of verbal metaphors. One possibility is that people should find it relatively easy to read verbal metaphors whose meanings are motivated by conceptual metaphors identical to those structuring the previous discourse or text. Under this hypothesis, people automatically access conceptual metaphors as they read and make sense of discourse. The activation of a specific conceptual metaphor should facilitate people’s comprehension of a verbal metaphor if that expression is motivated by the same conceptual metaphor, compared to reading a verbal metaphor motivated by a different conceptual mapping. First, studies demonstrate that people recognize that some idioms, but not others, are appropriate in certain contexts because of the congruence between the motivating conceptual metaphors of these phrases and how a context metaphorically describes some topic. For example, participants were quite good at linking idioms (e.g., “blow your stack”) with their
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underlying conceptual metaphors (e.g., ANGER IS A HEATED FLUID IN THE BODILY CONTAINER), suggesting that they have tacit beliefs of conceptual metaphors that motivated their understanding of some idioms.35 These findings showed that people use their tacit conceptual metaphor knowledge to make sense of why some idioms and conventional metaphors convey specific metaphorical meanings.36 Second, several psycholinguistic studies showed that conceptual metaphors affect the online processing of verbal metaphors. For example, people read euphemistic metaphors (e.g., “She’s turning my crank” motivated by SEXUAL DESIRE IS AN ACTIVATED MACHINE) more quickly in contexts that depicted similar conceptual metaphors than in contexts that conveyed different conceptual metaphors.37 Other studies showed that people were faster to judge two words (e.g., “captain” and “soldier”) as being semantically related when these were presented in a canonical spatial order (e.g., “captain” presented above “soldier”) than when seen in the reverse position (e.g., “soldier” above “captain”)38. This pattern of result is consistent with the idea that people tacitly inferred a conceptual metaphorical understanding of the two words which influenced their speeded decisions about the semantic relatedness of the two words. Thus, the conceptual metaphor CONTROL IS UP provides some structure to the relationship between a captain and a soldier such that it makes greater spatial sense to have “captain” being above “soldier” than the reverse. Third, the presence of consistent conceptual metaphors enhanced readers’ abilities to link together elements of a brief narrative.39 Consider the following passage instantiating the metaphor ANGER IS HEAT. Edward was boiling with anger. The sales clerk has completely screwed up his order. The manager saw there might be trouble and rushed over. Hoping to prevent a scene, she tried to lower his thermostat. (Novel schema-instantiating priming sentence) Hoping to prevent a scene, she tried to cool him off. (Conventional schema-instantiating priming sentence) Hoping to prevent a scene, she tried to fix the problem. (Neutral priming sentence)
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Participants read a passage, like the above, on a computer screen, one line at a time, and immediately afterwards were presented with a test word (e.g., “boiling”) that related to the metaphorical schema in the story. These test words were related to the dominant metaphorical schema in the story (e.g., “boiling” for ANGER IS HEAT). Participants were faster at recognizing the test words after having just read conventional schema-instantiating priming sentences than after neutral sentences. This result suggests that people actually instantiated an underlying conceptual metaphor, such as ANGER IS HEAT, when reading conventional expressions, such as “Hoping to prevent a scene, she tried to cool him off.” Interestingly, the participants were not faster at recognizing the test words after reading the novel schema-instantiating priming sentences.40 Novel metaphorical expressions (“Hoping to prevent a scene, she tried to lower his thermostat”) were not immediately seen as being related to the general metaphorical schema for the story (ANGER IS HEAT), at least as measured by this word recognition task. In contrast to these experimental findings, Boaz Keysar and colleagues report psycholinguistic results showing that conventional metaphorical expressions may not be understood through the recruitment of conceptual metaphors. Specifically, Keysar et al. found that when novel metaphors, such as “Tina was currently weaning her latest child,” were read in the context of related conventional metaphors (e.g., talk of Tina as prolific and conceiving new findings, all related to the conceptual metaphor IDEAS ARE PEOPLE) they were comprehended no more quickly than when read in the context of non-metaphoric language. However, people were faster to read the same novel metaphors when seen in contexts containing related novel metaphors (e.g., “Tina thinks of her theories as children, she is fertile, and giving birth to new ideas”). This pattern of results suggested that understanding novel metaphors activates a deeper conceptual metaphorical base, while reading conventional expressions do not, contrary to the claims of CMT. However, a more recent corpus analysis revealed that many conventional metaphors used by Keysar et al. did not appear to be related to similar underlying conceptual metaphors as well as the novel metaphorical expressions.41 Paul Thibodeau and Frank Durgin first replicated the same findings obtained by Keysar et al. using their original stimuli. But a second study employed new stimulus materials that had consistent relationships between conventional and novel metaphors in terms of their being motivated by identical conceptual metaphors. The results of a second reading time study with these revised stimuli demonstrated that reading
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conventional metaphors facilitated understanding of novel metaphorical language, contrary to the conclusions of Keysar et al. A third study in this series compared pairs of conventional metaphorical scenarios that depicted different “metaphor families” for a target domain (e.g., ANGER IS HEAT “I was fuming” and ANGER IS A DANGEROUS ANIMAL “I was bristling”), with non-metaphorical expressions (e.g., “I was furious”). Once again, novel metaphors were comprehended more quickly when they were read after a story containing conventional expressions motivated by the same conceptual metaphor than when they followed conventional expressions motivated by a different conceptual metaphor. One conclusion of this work is that “conventional metaphors remain productive,” and that “families of conventional metaphors. . . can facilitate the mappings of relevant conceptual structures when interpreting novel metaphorical language.”42 Part of the challenge in conducting psycholinguistic experiments on verbal metaphors is to determine whether any individual expression is conventional or novel. Another study, conducted in Persian, first performed an extensive corpus search to assess the degree of conventionality for metaphorical statements. Using these stimuli, one experiment showed that reading conventional metaphors (e.g., “They take positions against each other” in reference to an argument) within a story facilitated the processing of novel metaphors (e.g., “He doesn’t have enough weapons and ammunition to continue the battle”) seen later in a passage.43 However, first reading conventional metaphors did not speed up the processing of subsequent novel metaphors as much as when people first read nonconventional metaphors. (e.g., “They built trenches against each other” when referring to an argument). This latter finding suggests that conceptual metaphors may not be activated as strongly, or to the same degree, when people read conventional metaphors than when they see nonconventional expressions. A different research project also measured reading times to assess people’s conceptual metaphorical knowledge when understanding very specific metaphorical meanings.44 Participants read stories that described different human events, such as revealing secrets, getting angry, losing control of themselves, and so on. These stories contained information about the causes of the event, the intentionality of the action performed by each story’s protagonist, and the manner in which the actions were performed. Some stories depicted this information in a manner that was consistent with the entailments of particular conceptual metaphors (the no-violation contexts). At the end of each story, readers saw either an idiomatic phrase, which was motivated by the same conceptual metaphor
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depicted in the context, or a literal paraphrase of the idiom. Presented below is an example of a no-violation story: John heard some interesting gossip about Paul and Mary. Even though Paul and Mary were married to other people, they had recently started having a passionate affair. John was very surprised when he found out about the affair. So John called up another friend who knew Paul and Mary and quickly blurted out what he knew. The friend commented to John that he had really “spilled the beans” (or) “revealed the secret”
Note that each of the entailments about the cause, intentionality, and manner in which a secret was revealed is stated explicitly and correctly in this story, each of which arises from the conceptual metaphors THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE PHYSICAL ENTITIES. Now consider a story from one of the violation conditions in which one of the original entailments (Intentionality) has been altered. John heard some interesting gossip about Paul and Mary. Even though Paul and Mary were married to other people, they had recently started having a passionate affair. John was very surprised when he found out about the affair. John fully intended never to say a word to anyone. One day he was talking to someone who knew Paul and Mary, when John accidentally said something about what he knew. The friend commented to John that he had really “spilled the beans” (or) “revealed the secret”
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Do people understand idioms and their literal paraphrases in different ways depending on whether a story context was consistent or inconsistent with the specific entailments of the conceptual metaphors that motivate the meanings of those idioms? In a first study, participants simply rated the appropriateness of each final phrase given the preceding story. The results showed that the participants rated the idioms (e.g., “spill the beans”) and their literal paraphrases (e.g., “reveal the secret”) as being equally appropriate in the no-violation story contexts. However, the participants judged idioms as being less appropriate in the different violation conditions than they did literal paraphrases in these same contexts. Literal paraphrases are not constrained by conceptual metaphors in the way idioms are limited. Consequently, phrases such as “reveal the secret” were seen as appropriate in most story contexts regardless of the cause of the revelation, the intentionality of the act, or the manner in which it is done. This was not the case for “spill the beans.” A second experiment showed that idioms took longer to read when they were seen at the end of violation contexts than in the no-violation stories, whereas the literal paraphrases were roughly as easy to process in the violation stories as in the no-violation conditions. These findings demonstrated that idioms are not equivalent in meaning to their simple literal paraphrases. Idiomatic phrases have very specific metaphorical meanings that arise from the source-to-target domain mappings of their underlying conceptual metaphors. Literal phrases, such as “reveal the secret,” are not motivated by the same conceptual metaphors and consequently are less specific in meaning. The fact that idioms were seen as less appropriate and read slower in the different violation contexts strongly suggests that people accessed the underlying conceptual metaphors for idioms when they quickly read these metaphorical expressions in context. A lexical priming set of studies has also demonstrated that people access conceptual metaphors during online processing of idiomatic metaphors. For example, people’s reading of idiomatic phrases (e.g., “John blew his stack”) primed their subsequent lexical decision judgments for word strings related to the conceptual metaphors motivating the figurative meanings of the idioms (e.g., “heat” for ANGER IS A HEATED FLUID IN THE BODILY CONTAINER).45 Furthermore, people took less time to make lexical decisions to a word like “heat” after reading “John blew his stack” than after “John jumped down his throat,” which was motivated by a different conceptual metaphor (e.g., ANGER IS ANIMAL BEHAVIOR).46 Although these findings show that conceptual metaphors immediately
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shape even conventional metaphor understanding, it is unclear whether people compute the conceptual metaphor mappings at the time when they interpret the idioms or simply retrieve them en bloc from memory. Several of the above studies were based around the widely noted observation that many abstract domains (e.g., ANGER) are structured in terms of multiple conceptual metaphors (e.g., ANGER IS A HEATED FLUID IN THE BODILY CONTAINER and ANGER IS ANIMAL BEHAVIOR). The concept of time is another example of an abstract domain that is organized around more than one metaphor. For instance, English has two separate metaphors to sequence events in time. The first is the ego-moving metaphor in which the ego or observer’s movement progresses along the time-line toward the future (e.g., “We’re coming up on Christmas”). The second is the time-moving metaphor in which a person is standing and the time-line is conceived as a river or a conveyer belt in which events are moving from the future to the past (e.g., “Christmas is coming up”). These two conceptual metaphors assign different roles to the front and back in our understanding of time. In the ego-moving metaphor, front is assigned to a future or later event. For instance, “The revolution is before us” implies that the revolution is a later or future event and is said to be before because it is further along the observer’s direction of motion. When an observer moves along a path, objects are ordered according to the direction of motion of the observer. In the time-moving metaphor, front is assigned to a past or earlier event (e.g., “The revolution was over before breakfast”). Revolution is the earlier event, and is said to be before because it is further along in the direction of motion of time. Once again, an analogous system exists for ordinary objects in space. When objects without intrinsic fronts are moving, they are assigned fronts based on the direction of motion. Are ego-moving and time-moving expressions understood through different conceptual schemes? If this is true, switching from one conceptual metaphor to another in reading temporal expressions may require additional cognitive effort over that needed to understand time expressions motivated by the same conceptual metaphor. There have been several experimental tests of this idea, employing different methods. In one study, by Dedre Gentner and colleagues, people at an airport (Chicago O’Hare) were presented a priming question in either the egomoving form (e.g., “Is Boston ahead or behind in time?”) or the timemoving form (e.g., “Is it earlier or later in Boston than it is here?”).47 After answering, the participants were asked the target question “So should
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I turn my watch forward or back?” that was consistent with the egomoving form. The experimenter measured response times to the target question with a stopwatch disguised as a wristwatch. Once again, response times for consistently primed questions were shorter than for inconsistently primed questions. Switching schemas caused an increase in processing time. These results are consistent with the idea that two distinct conceptual schemes are involved in sequencing events in time. A different experiment in this series more precisely measured processing time for various similar or different temporal expressions. Participants were presented with a block of temporal statements that were either consistent with one scheme, or switched between ego-moving and timemoving schemes. For each statement (e.g., “Christmas is six days before New Year’s Day”), participants were given a time-line of events (e.g., past . . . New Year’s Day . . . future), and had to place an event (e.g., Christmas) on the time-line. People read these statements, one line at a time on a computer screen which measured the time it took participants to read each sentence and push a button indicating that they understood its meaning. Participants took more time to do this when the temporal statements switched between the two metaphors. These findings also imply that understanding metaphorical expressions about time activates their respective conceptual metaphors, which when switched add an extra burden to processing.48 One set of experiments examined people’s understanding of TIME IS MOTION by first asking people to read fictive motion sentences, as in “The tattoo runs along his spine,” where the motion mentioned is not read (e.g., the tattoo does not actually run).49 Participants read either fictive motion statements or sentences that did not imply fictive motion (e.g., “The tattoo is next to the spine”), and then answered the classic ambiguous time, or “move forward,” question (e.g., “The meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days. Which day is the meeting now scheduled for.”). People gave significantly more Friday than Monday responses after reading the fictive motion expressions, but not the non-fictive motion statements. This result demonstrated that people inferred motion when reading the fictive motion expressions which primed their responses to the ambiguous “move forward” question. A follow-up group of studies had participants fill in the missing numbers in an array that either went in ascending (e.g., between 5 and 17) or descending (e.g., between 17 and 5) order. When the participants then answered the “move forward” question, they gave far more Friday responses after filling in the numbers for the ascending condition and gave
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more Monday answers having just filled in the numbers for the descending order condition. A similar pattern of results was observed when participants first filled in the missing letters in the forward sequence (e.g., G to P) or backward (e.g., P to G) sequences. In a final study, participants read a story that described the start of an eating contest with either a forward (e.g., “one, two, three, four, five, start”) or backward (e.g., “five, four, three, two, one, start) sequence. As expected, people gave more Friday responses after reading the forward sequence, and more Monday responses after reading the backward sequence. One other set of experiments showed that hearing fictive motion expressions implying metaphorical motion, such as “The road goes through the desert,” influences people’s subsequent eyemovement patterns while looking at a scene of the sentence depicted.50 This suggests that the simulations used to understand the sentence involve a particular motion movement of what the roads does, which interacts with people’s eye movements. Overall, these studies show that temporal reasoning can be influenced through abstract motion. People appear to understand the metaphorical meaning of time expressions through a mental simulation of the implied motion. Several other studies have also explored people’s various metaphorical understandings of time. For instance, the spatial metaphor TIME IS MOVEMENT ALONG A PATH raises the possibility of time moving from left to right, although there is no linguistic evidence of the left-right axis being used in talk about time (e.g., the rightward month). Nonetheless, understanding of a left-right flow of time does appear in cultures whose language has a left-right writing direction. One psychological study explored the automatic activation of the left-right axis in processing of temporal concepts.51 Participants made speeded categorizations of individual words and phrases as to whether they referred to the past or future (e.g., “after,” “next,” “I will then,” “before,” “recently,” “I thought”). These words and phrases, however, were visually displayed on either the right or left side of the computer screen, and participants made their speeded responses by pushing a button with either the left or right hand. In general, participants were faster when past and future time was seen on the left and right sides of the screen, respectively, and when the left and right hands made the responses, respectively. This pattern of data suggests that irrelevant parts of the judgment task (e.g., speeded processing of words on the screen and hand response) played a role in people’s immediate judgments of temporal concepts, a view that is consistent with the predictions of a specific conceptual “mapping between past time and left space and future time and right space.”52 People’s experience in the left-to-right
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writing direction, and reading, provides some of the experiential motivation for the existence of this spatial understanding of past and future along the left-to-right axis. These findings are especially interesting because they suggest how “time can be spatialized in ways that have no corresponding reflection in language.” Although it is not clear when and how people immediately adapt different spatial time metaphors, and resolve possible conflicts between them, attention surely plays an important part in highlighting the relevant space–time metaphor for particular individuals in different cultural contexts. These various studies, employing different methods, provide a significant source of evidence on the constraining influence of conceptual metaphors on verbal metaphor understanding. But conceptual metaphors also may affect verbal metaphor production. Participants in one study were first presented two pictures that both related to a specific abstract concept (e.g., an apple in a box for CONTAINMENT, and a boy holding an apple for POSSESSION), or they could be shown a neutral prime (e.g., a boy using a computer).53 After they saw the two pictures, participants were then shown a linguistic prompt, consisting of a name and state (e.g., Sally, trouble). Their task was to produce a related linguistic expression. An analysis of the sentences produced showed that they were typically closely related to the previously seen pictures. Thus, seeing CONTAINMENT pictures led to a greater number of related metaphorical statements such as “Sally was in trouble,” while seeing POSSESSION pictures significantly prompted the production of metaphorical statements such as “Bob kept a good relationship with his girlfriend.” These “metaphorical priming effects” were not found when people first saw neutral pictures unrelated to the source domains in enduring conceptual metaphors.54 Overall, being in a particular conceptual metaphorical frame of mind can lead people to produce certain kinds of linguistic metaphors that are consistent with these frames.
inferring metaphorical entailments Do people draw metaphorical entailments when understanding verbal metaphors that are motivated by conceptual metaphors? CMT posits that we understand the conventional expression “I was strengthened by her love” via the instantiation of the conceptual metaphor LOVE IS A NUTRIENT. This same conceptual metaphor motivates the conventional expressions “I am starved for affection,” with the entailment in this case being that the hungry person is one who desires love. “She is sustained by love,” which expresses the entailment that effects of nourishment
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correspond to the consequences of love, and “She is love-starved,” where the entailments expressed comes from the idea that hunger corresponds to the desire for love. One study examined whether a person who read “I was given strength by his love,” and other verbal metaphors from different target domains, actually recognize that the various entailments associated with the LOVE IS A NUTRIENT are implied.55 On the other hand, if a person read “I was given much strength by his love,” do they see expressions such as “Their relationship is really going somewhere” or “They are making great progress in their marriage” as being unrelated because these remarks are motivated by a different conceptual metaphor (e.g., LOVE IS A JOURNEY)? The answer to both these questions is yes. Participants in one experiment rated whether different conventional verbal metaphors implied various entailments that were consistent (same conceptual metaphor – same entailment), related (same conceptual metaphor – different entailment), or unrelated (different conceptual metaphor). People gave equally high ratings to the consistent and related statement than they did to the unrelated expressions. These data suggest that people can recognize that a verbal metaphor implies certain meanings that are related to the underlying conceptual metaphor motivating the existence and continued use of that linguistic expression. However, understanding verbal metaphors does not directly imply entailments about the target domain (e.g., LOVE) that arise from different conceptual metaphors for that topic (e.g., JOURNEY as opposed to NUTRIENT). The results of this study do not indicate whether people always infer relevant entailments when encountering verbal metaphors. Testing this possibility would require a more sophisticated, online experimental methodology. Drawing entailments when processing verbal metaphors may likely depend on the context and task (e.g., fast conversation vs. slow literary reading). Nonetheless, there is at least some evidence to suggest that people can clearly distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate entailments of underlying conceptual metaphors which may be recruited during some aspects of verbal metaphor interpretation.
embodiment in verbal metaphor understanding Cognitive linguistic research reveals that speakers often talk about abstract concepts using embodied metaphor.56 For example, we conceive of “ideas” as physical entities that we can grasp, juggle, hold on to, chew, swallow, digest, and spit out given a wide-spread conceptual metaphor IDEAS ARE
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PHYSICAL ENTITIES. This embodied metaphor maps source domain knowledge of our bodily experiences with physical entities onto the target domain of ideas, a mapping that gives rise to a range of meaning entailments, such as that ideas can be possessed, hard to handle, deliberately examined, accepted, and rejected. There is a voluminous literature within cognitive linguistics that advances the idea that conceptual metaphors often have embodied foundations. The question remains whether people recruit bodily based metaphors as part of their understanding of verbal metaphors. Several hypotheses can be identified on the role that embodiment may play in linguistic metaphor use: (a) People’s bodily experiences are critical to the formation of conceptual metaphors, but conceptual metaphors are not, once established, linked to continued sensorimotor activity. Verbal metaphor use is, therefore, not an embodied process. (b) People’s bodily experiences get recruited during the creation of certain metaphorical source domains, and continue to be essential in maintaining various conceptual metaphors, even if people’s bodily actions have no immediate effect on metaphorical language use. (c) People’s bodily experiences get recruited during the creation and continued maintenance of source domains for many conceptual metaphors. Moreover, bodily activity can have a direct effect on people’s production and understanding of verbal metaphors. Let’s now review some of the behavioral research related to these hypotheses. My contention is that there is significant evidence to suggest support for hypothesis (c), above, although there remain important questions regarding what CMT specifically claims about the embodied nature of conceptual metaphor processing. One project examined whether embodiment influences people’s interpretations of metaphorical expressions about human desires.57 Consider how one American college student, Margo, described her romantic desires as hunger in the following narrative: Back in high school, I had this HUGE crush on this guy, James, who was a total hunk. He would flirt with me when we’d talk, but I didn’t get a chance to know him very well, never mind ever be alone with him. I was dying to get closer to him, and felt starved for his attention. I walked around for over five months feeling silly and empty because I wanted him so bad. I wanted to eat him alive! He was yummy!
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Margo fluently referred to what must be a highly correlated experience for people of all cultures, namely, the correlation between hunger and desire (i.e., the primary metaphor DESIRE IS HUNGER). Asserting this metaphorical relationship is not just a conventional or arbitrary way of speaking about desire, because there appears to be rich, systematic correspondences between feeling hunger and feeling different aspects of desire. One series of studies showed how both Americans’ and Brazilians’ previous bodily experiences of hunger (e.g., its effects on body parts, overall body sensations, and its psychological impacts) partly predict their use and understanding of metaphorical expressions referring to different forms of desire, as seen in more abstract statements like “I hunger for fame” or “I craved her affection.”58 People have specific metaphorical conceptions of abstract ideas (e.g., desires for affection or fame) that are shaped by recurring bodily experiences (e.g., bodily experiences of hunger), mappings that are quite similar across two cultural contexts (e.g., California and Brazil). These data indicate how certain kinds of bodily experience motivate why people speak metaphorically in specific ways about particular abstract topics. Psycholinguistic studies also show how immediate bodily experience shapes verbal metaphor interpretation. For example, Lera Boroditsky and Michael Ramscar explored how people’s very recent embodied actions affected their understanding of time metaphors.59 Students waiting in line at a cafe were given the statement “Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days” and then asked “What day is the meeting that has been rescheduled?” Students who were farther along in line (i.e., who had thus experienced more forward spatial motion) were more likely to say that the meeting had been moved to Friday. Similarly, people riding a train were presented with the same ambiguous statement and question about the rescheduled meeting. Passengers who were at the end of their journeys reported that the meeting was moved to Friday significantly more than did people in the middle of their journeys. Although both groups of passengers were experiencing the same physical experience of sitting in a moving train, they thought differently about their journeys and consequently responded differently to the rescheduled meeting question. These findings indicate that people’s thoughts about spatial motion, and not just the physical experiences themselves, influence their metaphorical understanding of temporal events.60 Consider now an example of verbal metaphor in which the physical action noted is incapable of being performed in the real world. A flyer posted on a university bulletin board invited people to attend a meeting
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with the statement “You have feet. Use them to stomp out racism in your scene.” Do people infer bodily actions when understanding the phrase “stomp out racism,” which cannot be physically enacted? One set of studies examined the possible influence of bodily action on speeded processing of simple metaphorical phrases, such as “stamp out a feeling,” “push an issue,” “sniff out the truth,” and “cough up a secret,” each of which denote physical actions upon abstract items. These metaphorical expressions are physically impossible to perform, unlike non-metaphorical action statements such as “grasp a spoon,” “chew on the gum,” “swallow your food,” or “push the carriage.”61 If metaphorical concepts are understood via bodily actions, then performing a related physical movement should facilitate speeded sensibility judgments for a figurative phrase that mentions this action. Participants first learned to perform various specific bodily actions (e.g., throw, stamp, push. swallow, cough, grasp) given different non-linguistic cues. Following this, participants were individually seated in front of a computer screen. The experiment consisted of a series of trials where an icon flashed on the screen, prompting the participant to perform the appropriate bodily action. After doing this, a string of words appeared on the screen and participants had to judge as quickly as possible whether that word string was “sensible.” Analysis of the speeded sensibility judgments showed that participants responded more quickly to the metaphorical phrases that matched the preceding action (e.g., the motor action kick was followed by “kick around the idea”), than to the phrases that did not match the earlier movement (e. g, the motor action chew was followed by “kick around the idea”). People were also faster in responding to the metaphor phrases having performed a relevant body moment than when they did not move at all. In short, performing an action facilitates the understanding of a figurative phrase containing that action word, just as it does for literal phrases. A second study showed that same pattern of bodily priming effects when participants were asked to imagine performing the actions before they made their speeded responses to word strings. This result reveals that real movement is not required to facilitate metaphor comprehension, only that people mentally simulate such action. These experiments do not distinguish between the possibility that sensorimotor activity is actively recruited in metaphor comprehension and the idea that functionally independent conceptual representations are activated when metaphors referring to abstract concepts are understood. But the data are consistent with the idea that many aspects of verbal
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metaphor processing are tied to what the body is doing at any one moment. People create embodied simulations of speakers’ messages that involve moment-by-moment “what this must be like” processes that make use of ongoing tactile-kinesthetic experiences. These simulation processes operate even when people encounter language that is abstract, or refers to actions that are physically impossible to perform. In this way, processing metaphorical meaning is not just a cognitive act, but involves some imaginative understanding of the body’s role in structuring abstract concepts. An extension of the above line of research investigated how bodily action affects “offline” metaphor interpretation.62 Participants in a first study rode a stationary bike and then read a text while standing in front of a computer terminal. One group of participants read the text with one leg advanced 40 centimeters in front of the other, while a second group read the text with both feet parallel to one another. The text participants read was an adapted version of US President Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Great Society” speech given back in the 1960s. This speech contained several metaphorical phrases that implied forward movement (e.g., “We will break the wall of hesitation to safely navigate our vessel to a better future”). Afterwards, participants quickly judged whether certain statements correctly summarized the text’s meaning. Following this, participants quickly judged whether they previously saw individual words in the previously read text (e.g., “advance,” “follow,” “pursue”). An analysis of people’s speeded responses indicated that they made quicker judgments to both the summary statements and the individual words when they had first read the text with one foot advanced in front of the other than when their two feet were aligned. These findings support the claim that interpreting verbal metaphors in discourse is based on the construction of relevant embodied simulations of the events described in the text. The results also show how these sensorimotor effects extend to discourse understanding, and not simply the understanding of isolated metaphorical words or phrases. The embodied simulations people engage in when understanding metaphorical statements may also affect their subsequent bodily behaviors. One study revealed that people walked further toward a target when thinking about a metaphorical statement “Your relationship was moving along in a good direction” when the context ultimately suggested a positive relationship than when the scenario alluded to a negative, unsuccessful relationship.63 However, this same difference was not obtained when people read the non-metaphorical statement “Your relationship was very important” in
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the same two scenarios. People appear to partly understand the metaphorical statement from building an embodied simulation relevant to LOVE RELATIONSHIPS ARE JOURNEYS, such that they bodily imagine taking a longer journey with the successful relationship than the unsuccessful one. Finally, studies show that reading novel metaphors may subsequently affect people’s sensory judgments. People in one study read novel metaphors referring to time or weight (e.g., “The past carries particular weight for where you are today”).64 Afterward, participants made judgments about the real physical weight of a scientific book, in addition to estimating its age and popularity. People who first were exposed to a metaphor that the past was heavy, or burdensome, judged the book to be physically heavier than did participants who read a different metaphor. These behavioral results are consistent with the idea that comprehending an embodied metaphor may alter one’s understanding of the abstract concept alluded to in order to include sensorimotor information. One other production study explored whether people modulate their prosody when speaking about both concrete (e.g., fast driving) and abstract, metaphorical (e.g., fast career progress) events.65 Participants read aloud stories referring to fast rates of speed more quickly than they did slow stories for both the concrete and metaphorical events. They also read both types of stories in lower pitch when these referred to events that were physically heavier (e.g., lifting a heavy object) or metaphorically more important (e.g., having an important meeting). These findings suggest that people’s metaphorical understanding of events influences the spoken quality of their speech when talking about these events. For example, noting that a metaphorical event refers to a fast LIFE IS A JOURNEY or a heavy IMPORTANCE IS WEIGHT situation alters the vocal quality of their language productions. Many of these studies are consistent with the claim that people engage in embodied simulations during their production and understanding of verbal metaphors. However, as I will elaborate upon soon, one must be careful to not assume that people necessarily create rich, full-blown embodied simulations when they encounter every linguistic metaphor in each context. Dave Ritchie, for example, has described some of the linguistic and contextual conditions under which richer as well as more impoverished embodied simulations are likely to arise during verbal metaphor use.66 Thus, embodied simulations vary in their intensity and richness and may involve different types of simulators. My claim, therefore, is that embodiment has a critical role in the ways verbal metaphors are created and interpreted, but that embodied simulations may vary according to various constraints.
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cognitive neuroscience evidence on embodied conceptual metaphor Do people access sensory representations in relevant brain areas as part of their comprehension of verbal metaphors? If people engage in embodied processing of many verbal metaphors, then there should be activation of relevant source domains in specific sensory areas of the brain. Many cognitive neuroscience studies provide evidence that this possibility may be true. For example, one study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate people’s comprehension of literal (e.g., “Sam had a bad day”) and metaphorical (e.g., “Sam had a rough day”) sentence pairs.67 Participants lay in a scanner, read the different sentences as they individually appeared, and pushed a response button as soon as they understood each statement. The analysis of the fMRI data showed clear evidence of localized, domain-specific cortical areas during the processing of metaphor, but not literal paraphrases. Thus, there was evidence of activation for somatosensory areas of the brain related to touching when people read “Sam had a rough day” as if they were almost feeling a rough texture. A different study explored the sensory activation related to people’s understanding of taste metaphors (e.g., “She looked at him sweetly”) compared to non-gustatory paraphrases (e.g., “She looked at him kindly”).68 An analysis of the brain areas most associated with gustatory perception showed increased activation in these areas when people read the metaphorical expressions than when they saw the non-metaphorical paraphrases. Once again, some metaphor processing activates selective parts within the brain’s somatosensory region that are related to the source domains from which the metaphors originated (e.g., “sweetly” is related to taste). Cognitive neuroscience studies have also explored the neural processing of metaphorical action phrases, such as “grasp the concept,” and showed nearly identical activation in motor areas of the brain as when people interpret literal action statements (e.g., “John grasped the straw”).69 Similar findings have been reported when people comprehend idiomatic phrases such as “kick the bucket.” Both neuroimaging and neurostimulation experiments have demonstrated that understanding many idioms, such as “kick the bucket,” involves the activation of relevant motoric brain areas (i.e., related to the action of kicking).70 Experiments in support of an embodied account of metaphor understanding have been extended to metaphors based on auditory (e.g., “Her
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limousine was a privileged snort”) and motion (e.g., “The editorial was a brass-knuckle punch”) modalities.71 An analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) collected when participants read these different metaphors showed divergent patterns of activation. Thus, auditory regions of the brain’s sensorimotor cortex were activated when people read “Her limousine was a privileged snort,” while motion areas were activated when reading “The editorial was a brass-knuckle punch.” This pattern of findings is consistent with the idea that metaphor understanding involves modalityspecific neural processing.72 The neuroscience research is mostly consistent with the theoretical claims of CMT, and provides some data that aligns with the neural theory of metaphor. To be fair, there is some neuroscience research that fails to find activation of relevant sensorimotor brain areas when people interpret aspects of metaphor comprehension.73 At the same time, the time-course of brain activations in verbal metaphor understanding experiments have proven to be somewhat inconsistent. For example, one experiment measuring participants’ ERPs asked them to read either literal (e.g., “ascend” or “descend”) or metaphorical (e.g., “inspire” or “defeat”) as they concurrently made upward or downward arm movements.74 The analysis of the ERPs showed that there were strong congruency effects (e.g., moving an arm upward while reading “ascend”) for both types of words, although the effects for metaphorical words were delayed in time compared to the literal words. These findings suggest that metaphorical language does activate relevant parts of somatosensory cortex, but that metaphor brain relations were later developing, with participants most likely using embodied processes to draw pragmatic inferences rather than engaging in rapid, bottomup word comprehension. Several debates have risen in the literature regarding whether embodied metaphor processing necessarily requires the early activation of relevant sensorimotor brain areas.75 Part of the difficulty in evaluating the idea that verbal metaphor processing involves activation of sensorimotor cortex is that some modality-specific areas of the brain are also involved in other perceptual and cognitive processes. Daniel Casasanto and Tom Gijssels argued “that source-domain representations are implemented in multimodal or amodal brain areas – not in modality-specific simulations.”76 This possibility raised doubts in their minds as to whether conceptual metaphors are truly embodied.77 Still, Casasanto and Gijssels also correctly observed that CMT typically assumes that the source domains in conceptual metaphors are imageschematic. Image schemas are analogue entities that arise from recurring
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bodily experiences across different sensory modalities, such as CONTAINMENT, BALANCE, and SOURCE–PATH–GOAL. A critical point, however, is that image schemas are often viewed as being abstracted away from the body and exist in a disembodied manner. If this is true, then it is not clear whether CMT necessarily demands that sensorimotor brain areas must be activated during processing of verbal metaphors, even if these metaphors were originally motivated from embodied source domains. My argument, though, is that image schemas retain close connections with ongoing bodily experience, both within specific modalities and the body overall.78 Consider again the single metaphorical expression “Sam had a rough day.” Our experiences of roughness may be more closely related to the modality of touch, yet we also have sensations of roughness for taste, vision, audition, and even smell, similar to the way that “smooth” can be used metaphorically to talk about “a smooth taste,” “a smoothing tone of voice,” and so on. To take another example, consider the metaphorical statement “John had an unbalanced personality.” Balance may be primarily related to kinesthetic equilibrium, yet this concept can also be readily used to refer to taste, sight, audition, and smell (e.g., “A balanced tasting soup,” “The picture frame is not properly balanced,” “The stereo speakers are not balanced”). Each of these image-schematic concepts is manifested across several bodily modalities and is not restricted to a single dimension of neural experience. This possibility poses a challenge for neuroscience studies that insist on modality-specific effects if verbal metaphor processing is believed to be embodied. Experimental findings showing the activation of specific sensorimotor brain areas when people encounter verbal metaphors may, therefore, seek to uncover more distributed effects across several regions of sensorimotor cortex. Indeed, there is neuropsychological evidence that primary and complex conceptual metaphors have different neural realizations.79 Understanding primary metaphors seems to involve a greater binding of neural assemblies, whereas understanding complex conceptual metaphors relies more on exchanges between different neural assemblies, some of which cut across modality-specific brain areas. One can still conclude that there is significant experimental evidence showing that verbal metaphor interpretation involves extensive activation of sensorimotor brain areas even if there are uncertainties about the timecourse and modality-specific nature of this neural activity. These neural activations are generally consistent with the idea that embodiment is part of both conceptual metaphorical thinking and verbal metaphor use.
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experimental evidence contrary to cmt Some psycholinguistic studies have presented data that may contradict aspects of CMT as a psychological theory of verbal metaphor comprehension. I earlier described the debate between Keysar et al. and Thibodeau and Durgin over the role that conceptual metaphors may have in conventional metaphor understanding. Right now, the evidence seems to support the possibility that conceptual metaphors are recruited during online conventional metaphor understanding, as well as when interpreting novel expressions. But other psycholinguistic studies report findings that disagree with the putative predictions of CMT. For example, one set of studies appears to raise questions about the validity of mental imagery research in favor of conceptual metaphors in verbal metaphor use, described earlier. Cristina Cacciari and Sam Glucksberg used a procedure similar to that of Gibbs and O’Brien, and asked people to form mental images for different idiomatic phrases.80 Participants overwhelmingly produced images based on the idioms’ concrete literal meanings. Cacciari and Glucksberg argued that these images do not directly offer information about idiomatic meanings or conceptual metaphors that might underlie many idioms, contrary to the claims of Gibbs and O’Brien. However, Gibbs and O’Brien never claimed that ordinary speakers’ mental images for idioms were simply based on what these phrases figuratively mean or even the conceptual metaphors underlying these metaphorical phrases. Indeed, similar to Cacciari and Glucksberg, we found that people primarily form very concrete mental images for American idioms (e.g., “blow your stack”). More interestingly, though, people’s mental images across different idioms (e.g., “blow your stack,” “flip your lid,” and “hit the ceiling”) were highly consistent (e.g., some force acts to release the internal pressure of a container in a violent manner). We showed that this consistency is not due to these phrases having similar figurative meanings, but can be explained in terms of the idea that each idiom is motivated by a similar conceptual metaphor (e.g., ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER). These conceptual metaphors form part of the link between idiomatic phrases and their overall metaphorical meanings. For this reason, the data from Cacciari and Glucksberg may actually provide a confirmation of Gibbs and O’Brien, and can possibly be seen as support for CMT. For instance, one possibility is that ordinary people’s intuitions about the meanings of idioms depend on their knowledge of the stipulated
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(i.e., historically given) figurative meanings of the phrases, and not on recognizing the possible conceptual metaphors that give rise to idioms and conventional expressions in the first place. Boaz Keysar and Brigitte Bly tested this idea by first having people learn either the original or opposite meanings of unfamiliar idioms (e.g., for the idiom “The goose hangs high” meaning either “things look good,” its original meaning, or “things look bad”).81 Later on, when participants were asked to rate whether an idiom’s meaning made sense, the learned meanings were generally perceived as being more transparent than the non-learned meaning. Importantly, this result was obtained regardless of whether the original meaning of the idiom was stipulated or not. In other words, if people were told that the meaning of “The goose hangs high” is “things look bad,” when in fact its original meaning was “things look good,” they believed that the meaning presented to them originally made more sense as best capturing what the phrase “The goose hangs high” could mean. Keysar and Bly interpreted these findings to suggest that intuitions alone about why idioms mean what they do should not be trusted as evidence for CMT. The major problem with Keysar and Bly’s findings, however, is that the vast majority of the idioms they studied are based on metonymy and not metaphor. Thus, the phrase “The goose hangs high” means “things look good” because the act of hanging a dead goose up for all to see metonymyically stands for an entire sequence of events leading up to the successful slaughter of the goose for food. Contemporary speakers often have great difficulty explaining why metonymically based idioms mean what they do, even for widely used expressions (e.g., “kick the bucket”). Furthermore, Keysar and Bly’s results may be due to the fact that all of their idioms had low transparent meanings (i.e., had opaque relations between their surface forms and figurative meanings). Studies that examined second-language learners’ understandings of more transparent meanings found that participants could give highly consistent and correct definitions for these phrases, even when these were encountered for the first time.82 Thus, Keysar and Bly’s “use of low-transparency idioms in highly biasing contexts and forced definitions choices may have preempted the partial reliance of participants on idiom-inherent features to form their interpretations.”83 This possibility casts further doubt on the Keysar and Bly studies as evidence against CMT.84 Another set of studies, by Mathew McGlone, whose results may also be contrary to CMT, asked people to paraphrase verbal metaphors, such as “The lecture was a three-course meal,” to see if these may reveal the presence of conceptual metaphors in people’s processing of these linguistic
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expressions.85 The analysis of these paraphrases revealed that only 24 percent contained any references consistent with underlying conceptual metaphors, such as IDEAS ARE FOOD. Even when participants were more specifically asked to give “figurative paraphrases” of the verbal metaphors in a second study, they still only did so 41 percent of the time. (i.e., mentioning source domain terms, like “food” related to the conceptual metaphor IDEAS ARE FOOD). A follow-up study found that people do not perceive expressions motivated by conceptual metaphor to be any more similar in meaning than they did expressions motivated by different conceptual metaphors. These data were interpreted as showing that people’s interpretations of verbal metaphors might not be related to their putative, underlying conceptual metaphors. As suggested earlier, asking people to verbally paraphrase a novel metaphor may not be the best indicator of the possible underlying presence of conceptual metaphors in interpreting these novel expressions. Given the long-noted difficulties people have in paraphrasing metaphors, the fact that 41 percent could provide interpretations that seem to meet some criteria for conceptual metaphor may be a positive finding in favor of CMT. Moreover, the specific metaphors examined in his studies may not be related to conceptual metaphors, as most were classic “A is B” resemblance metaphors. Some of his examples, such as “Dr. Moreland’s lecture was a three-course meal for the mind,” are examples of XYZ metaphors (e.g., “Religion is an opiate of the masses”), which are not typically motivated by single conceptual metaphors, and likely produced and understood through complex conceptual blending processes.86 A different psycholinguistic study whose findings were interpreted as contrary to CMT examined people’s understanding of temporal metaphors. People took less time to comprehend temporal metaphors (e.g., “The meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days”), when these were seen in contexts with consistent temporal perspectives (e.g., time is moving while an observer is still or an observer is moving while time is still – both different versions of the TIME IS MOTION metaphor), compared to when these same verbal metaphors were read in contexts with inconsistent metaphors (e.g., moving-observer and moving-event metaphors juxtaposed). However, these data were interpreted as being most parsimonious with the idea there is some abstract similarity, and not metaphorical mapping, between time and space (or motion through space). Under this view, the idea that time can move, as in moving a date forward, is grounded in those abstract features that are common to both time and space, or movement through space.
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The difficulty with this explanation, however, is that time and space generally have a directional relationship such that time is understood in terms of space, but space is not typically understood in terms of time. Thus, the directional relationship between time and space suggests that time is metaphorically understood (e.g., TIME IS MOTION), which is exactly the claim of CMT. One can argue, then, that the abstract similarity position is untenable as an account of verbal metaphor understanding, For this reason, these results on understanding temporal metaphors (e.g., the “moved forward” statement) may actually be consistent with the tenets of CMT.87
preliminary conclusions One of the fiercest attacks that have been advanced by critics of CMT is that the theory lacks empirical support. This claim is primarily directed against the cognitive linguistic findings on conceptual metaphors. But many critics, especially from psychology and cognitive science, also argue that insufficient experimental evidence exists to support any suggestion that conceptual metaphorical knowledge either exists or plays any meaningful role in people’s use of verbal metaphors. Several scholars, in particular, only cite evidence that they interpret as being contrary to the claims of CMT, while others ignore the large body of psycholinguistic and neuroscience literature surveyed in this chapter when they advocate alternative views of metaphor (e.g., deliberate metaphor theory). My review of the literature on CMT clearly demonstrates a wealth of empirical data showing that conceptual metaphors are a critical part of verbal metaphor use. These many dozens of studies have employed a variety of experimental methods and examined different kinds of verbal metaphor. Crowning the winner of the metaphor wars cannot be done simply on the basis of which side has more empirical findings in its favor. One cannot help but be impressed, nonetheless, with the diversity of experimental research that is consistent with the idea of conceptual metaphor compared to the very few studies that argue against the theory. It is patently absurd, then, to glibly claim that CMT has no evidence to support its claims as a psychologically real theory of verbal metaphor use. Critics of CMT can continue to be selective in their citation of experimental studies on metaphor understanding or persist in assuming that no adequate data exists to support any role for conceptual metaphors in human thought and language. My plea, though, is for a fair hearing of all of the experimental and linguistic data on conceptual metaphor as we continue to debate the
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merits of CMT. Only through a complete analysis of the extant empirical research will we ever come to broader theoretical agreements about the complexities of metaphor use and understanding. Nonetheless, questions remain regarding the role that conceptual metaphors may have in the determination of metaphorical meaning and in using verbal metaphors in discourse. First, the experimental evidence reviewed in this chapter suggests, at the very least, that people recruit conceptual metaphors at least some of the time when comprehending and more deeply interpreting certain verbal metaphors. Still, it is not clear from the evidence presented above, or from cognitive linguistic work, precisely how conceptual metaphors work in the understanding process. Even if conceptual metaphors are active during metaphor processing, this fact alone does not specify whether this knowledge is accessed as prestored chunks of information or computed in the moment as a person creates, or recreates, the source-to-target domain mapping during each instance of verbal metaphor understanding. Furthermore, if conceptual metaphors are activated as holistic units from long-term memory, are all of their entailments accessed as well, or might these be computed online after the basic conceptual metaphor structure has been accessed? Are there constraints on the number, or types, of entailments that are accessed or computed during verbal metaphor processing? Each of these questions is asked given the assumption that activating conceptual metaphors facilitates what a particular verbal metaphor means in context. A different possibility suggests that people do not recruit conceptual metaphors, either by accessing them as pre-stored units or computing these from scratch, to construct an interpretation of some verbal metaphor. Instead, conceptual metaphors arise as emergent products of the understanding process so that a person may tacitly see how the specific meaning of a verbal metaphor points to other higher-order conceptual structure, namely a particular conceptual metaphor. For instance, people would then interpret a conventional phrase like “John blew his stack” to mean get very angry in specific ways, and then, at a later moment in the understanding process recognize some connection between this phrase, its meaning, and the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER. Drawing this inference about the relation between a verbal metaphor and its underlying conceptual metaphor may be particularly useful for coherent processing of narratives or discourse. A final suggestion is that conceptual metaphors may be accessed or computed during linguistic processing or even emerge as later products of verbal metaphor understanding, yet does not assist people interpretations
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of metaphorical language. People may know many conceptual metaphors as part of their ordinary conceptual systems, and even tacitly know that many verbal expressions are systematically linked to this knowledge. However, conceptual metaphors may not play a role in how a person constructs what a linguistic expressions means in different discourse contexts. Under this view, conceptual metaphors, at least in some cases, are passively encoded remnants of prior thought processes that are brought along for the ride, so to speak, during verbal metaphor interpretation. There may be instances when conceptual metaphors become revitalized and help structure the interpretation of language. Still, conceptual metaphors, even if they are recruited during language processing, do not operate to determine specific metaphorical meanings in discourse. These different questions are worthy of consideration for future experimental research studies. Different metaphor scholars likely have their own opinions about the extent to which experimental research directly bears on these various hypotheses. Still, I raise these ideas in the hope of expanding the scope of theoretical debates on CMT. We should not simply argue whether conceptual metaphors really exist or not, nor struggle only with whether conceptual metaphors play a role in verbal metaphor use or not. It is now time for a more sophisticated approach to thinking about the role that conceptual metaphors play in human life, and part of this discussion must acknowledge the empirical complexities associated with people’s use and understanding of verbal metaphors.
the way forward: interacting constraints in verbal metaphor use The main problem in the wars over metaphor is that scholars typically propose various alternatives to CMT and assume that only one theory must ultimately be correct. If an alternative theory is seen as having certain explanatory advantages, then CMT is presumed to be completely invalidated. The most notable instance of this is seen in the extensive research on “A is B” or resemblance metaphors (e.g., “My job is a jail”). After noting specific characteristics of these resemblance metaphors, and showing different experimental findings on how these expressions may be understood (e.g., “career of metaphor” and “property attribution” theories), CMT is presumed to be refuted because of its inability to explain the empirical data.88 These arguments, however, fail to note that very different metaphors are being studied in various research traditions (e.g., resemblance
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metaphors vs. ones based on correlations). Still, the assumption is that one theory should explain all aspects of metaphorical language use. Another case where scholars advance different explanation from CMT is seen in the extensive research from Relevance Theory (RT), which aims to account for all pragmatic language use and not just metaphor alone.89 I have personally talked with many younger metaphor scholars who, in the course of pursing their Ph.D.s, have reported being urged to focus on one of these theories (e.g., RT), and not the other (e.g., CMT), when they conduct their respective linguistic and psychological research. However, Markus Tendahl, sometimes in collaboration with me, has explored various ways in which CMT and Relevance Theory may be complementary theories rather than contrasting ones.90 People’s understanding of verbal metaphors in discourse have been empirically shown to follow various pragmatic principles, such as the principle of optimal relevance, which guides the extent to which people aim to expend cognitive effort to recover cognitive effects during verbal metaphor use.91 Some combination of CMT and RT may go a long way toward explaining different facets of verbal metaphor use and understanding in context, including different experimental results on speeded metaphor comprehension and the meaning products inferred when people encounter verbal metaphors in different situations. Other alternative proposals on metaphor understanding are also advanced as a way of eliminating the need for CMT. For example, understanding conventional verbal metaphor is sometimes presumed to operate entirely according to lexical disambiguation processes.92 As Gerard Steen argued, “lexical (and conceptual) disambiguation can finish the job of utterance processing much more efficiently” than what may occur if embodied source domain knowledge is accessed to infer speaker’s contextual meanings as presumed by CMT. However, there is simply no empirical foundation for this alternative proposal. First, the idea that lexical disambiguation alone can produce understandings of metaphorical meanings via the passive look-up of entries in the metaphor lexicon cannot explain the experimental evidence showing that cross-domain mappings are often inferred during verbal metaphor interpretation. If the theory of lexical disambiguation is to replace CMT, then that theory must explain why the experimental literature demonstrates cross-domain mappings in the ways it does. Second, the research on lexical disambiguation has never explicitly examined whether embodied metaphorical knowledge is recruited during people’s online interpretation of verbal metaphors. In fact, many experimental studies have already tested and rejected the idea that lexical priming between words in contexts and the words in verbal metaphors best explains
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speeded metaphor comprehension, to take one widely studied phenomenon.93 In this way, the lexical disambiguation proposal cannot be used to refute the massive body of evidence showing that the embodied roots of metaphorical source domains are routinely activated as part of people’s ordinary interpretations of metaphorical discourse. Of course, lexical disambiguation processes are a critical part of linguistic understanding, and surely have a role in online verbal metaphor interpretation. The debate here is not between CMT and a theory of lexical disambiguation. Instead, the question is whether verbal metaphors are entirely understood via lexical disambiguation processes without any activation of their conceptual metaphorical roots. I see no reason to believe that this may be the case. Alternative accounts of conceptual metaphor findings must test these hypotheses against the predictions of CMT in the context of experimental studies. Casually tossing out an untested alternative in some critical discussion of CMT simply does not pass muster in the scientific world of metaphor studies. There is no doubt, as discussed in Chapter 4, that people’s use and understanding of metaphorical discourse relies on lexical, grammatical, and socio-cultural information. But the existence of these constraints on verbal metaphor use does not imply that conceptual metaphors are irrelevant to how specific verbal metaphors are created and used in discourse. People’s performances in different psycholinguistic tasks, such as speeded reading of metaphors in context, are likely shaped by multiple interacting constraints. To give one example illustrating this possibility, consider two very different perspectives on metaphorical language, CMT and Walter Kintsch’s theory of metaphor predication based on latent semantic analysis (LSA).94 On the surface, these two theories seem radically different, with CMT emphasizing the grounding of meaning in embodied action, and the predication model claiming that patterns of metaphorical language and understanding are best explained by the distributional patterns in which words appear in discourse. Rather than viewing these two broad approaches as being incompatible, with one eventually emerging as most relevant to psychological accounts of metaphor understanding, both theories may have something important to contribute to a comprehensive theory of verbal metaphor use. More interestingly, people’s experiences with word co-occurrence and their recurring bodily experiences in the world may feed off one another to create complex webs between language and experience. Research shows, for example, that certain word cooccurrences in discourse may be closely linked to people’s spatial,
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embodied experiences.95 Thus, “attic” followed by “basement” is more frequent than “basement” followed by “attic,” at least partly because of the spatial bias toward a top-to-bottom iconic relationship. Our embodied experiences with attics being above basements seem to have caused those two words to have a bias in their typical word order. But there is a bidirectional flow between word co-occurrence information and embodied experience. People’s experiences with the statistical distributions of words influence their understandings of spatial experience in terms of reinforcing their conceptualizations of how different events relate to one another in the real-world. The important conclusion to be drawn for these examples is that very different approaches to metaphor and thought may not be opposing, but quite complementary both in their real-world realizations and in our scientific characterization of how bodies, thoughts, and language interact. More locally, different variables often seen as completely independent in theories of metaphor may have closer linkages than we imagined and can jointly affect metaphorical discourse behaviors. People’s verbal metaphor behaviors may better be characterized as the in-the-moment outcomes of dynamical processes where many sources of constraint interact to give rise to an emergent meaning product, one that is always specific to the person, language, task, and social situation. Consider just a few of the constraints that together produce verbal metaphorical behaviors: Evolutionary forces (bodily, cultural, cognitive, linguistic) Present cultural conditions (beliefs, customary actions, ideologies) Present social context (who, what, where, when) Knowledge of language (lexical, grammatical, pragmatic) Present bodily states (gestures, postures, eye gaze) Present motivations and cognitions (needs and desires, communicative aims, interactional goals) Immediate linguistic processing (production and reading of words, utterances, longer discourses) Neural processes (brain activities at both the local and global levels)
Each of these factors operate at different time-scales, with forces toward the top of the above list moving at very slow speeds, and with those forces
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toward the bottom of the list moving at very fast speeds. The various time scales are not independent, but are hierarchically organized, and nested within one another such that various forces affecting metaphoric experience are coupled in complex, non-linear ways. Most importantly, any specific meaningful behavior, such as speaking in some metaphorical way, emerges from the interaction of all these factors. Conceptual metaphors may emerge from the interaction of various factors in human experience and are not simply located, or mentally represented, at what is traditionally believed to be the purely cognitive level. Embracing the idea that metaphorical language behavior emerges from the interaction of multiple, interacting constraints sets the stage for a more sophisticated explanation of verbal metaphor use. Different experimental results that are now seen as contradictory may actually reflect different dynamical outcomes which changes depending on people, language, task, and method of understanding assessment. Briefly consider how these different factors may shape the a few ways people use verbal metaphor, including having reliance on putative conceptual metaphors. People: Individuals differ from one another along a vast number of dimensions, and research on metaphor has shown that these affect aspects of how metaphors are used and interpreted. A partial list of these different factors includes the following: age, language experience, gender, occupation, social status and culture, political background/beliefs, cognitive differences (e.g., IQ, working memory capacity), bodily action, geographic origin, personality, social relationship, and common ground. Language Materials: The kinds of metaphor studied within the linguistic and psycholinguistic literatures reveals numerous differences, including the following: specific language, conventionality (e.g., novelty, creativity, sophistication), frequency, familiarity, prototypicality/salience, discourse coherence, grammatical structure, prosodic and intonation patterns (e.g., accent, speed of delivery), collocations and word co-occurrences, relation to enduring conceptual metaphors, relation to embodied experience, genre, discourse and text contexts, and gesture/bodily movements. Understanding Goal/Task: Interpreting metaphorical meaning is not a singular, monolithic activity but differs depending on a person’s goals or the task he or she has undertaken. Consider some of the understanding goals that people face with metaphor: quick comprehension in conversation/reading, explicit recognition that some word or phrase is a metaphor, reflective interpretation in reading, solving problems/making decisions, arguments/persuasion, memory, appreciation/explicit aesthetic judgments (e.g., humor, creativity, mastery), hypothesis or expectation confirmation,
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valence judgments (e.g., metaphors as having positive or negative connotations), and emotional reactions. Methods of Assessing Metaphor Understanding: Given that people often have different goals or tasks during metaphor understanding, what are the best methods for assessing both the cognitive effort and cognitive effects in metaphor interpretation? Consider some of the ways that psychologists have examined people’s ability to understand metaphor: whole sentence reading-time (and paraphrase judgments), word-by-word parsing (e.g., moving window), priming, eye-tracking, brain activity/scanning, comprehensibility ratings, memory, open-ended interpretation, sentence–picture matching, meaning preference, picture drawing, summarization, translation, problem-solving, and discourse analysis/naturalistic observation. These four general factors, and their individual components, all affect the empirical findings obtained in psycholinguistic and neuroscience studies on metaphor use.96 Not surprisingly, the recruitment of conceptual metaphors in verbal metaphor use may also depend on the people, the specific metaphorical language, the task, and method for assessing metaphorical understanding. Various studies, for example, illustrate how different personality differences and variations in metaphorical thinking styles affect the degree to which conceptual metaphors immediately influence verbal metaphor interpretation.97 Of course, differences in the types of verbal metaphors encountered, and whether they are also motivated by other schemes, such as metonymy, also clearly lead to possible inconsistencies in the degree of conceptual metaphorical activations. Finally, some experimental and real-world tasks may better elicit conceptual metaphorical knowledge than others. My general argument is that debates over whether conceptual metaphors do, or do not, shape verbal metaphor use depends on the interaction of all these factors. I advance this claim because debates about CMT typically ignore these real complexities in metaphorical experience. We should not expect, however, that an ultimate theory of metaphor use will necessarily demand that conceptual metaphors are always, automatically employed in each and every instance of verbal metaphor use. Conceptual metaphors are a major force, or constraint, on the ways people produce and understand verbal metaphors. Still, this conclusion is not falsified if some instances arise when verbal metaphors are used without any evidence of conceptual metaphorical thinking. This new vision of the debate over conceptual metaphors in linguistic metaphor use and understanding suggests an even more nuanced way of thinking about how conceptual metaphors unfold in metaphorical
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f i g u r e 5 . 1 Sequential activation of conceptual metaphors
experience. My suggestion here is that conceptual metaphors are used in probabilistic ways, often in complex interaction with other conceptual metaphorical knowledge given the prior discourse and ongoing gestural actions. Consider a brief conversational exchange between two scientists discussing one of their theories in which one person states that, “I can’t see the point of your argument. Your theory needs more support.”98 Figure 5.1 presents a schematic description of how a listener understands these conventional metaphoric expressions, according to a standard analysis within CMT. Under this model, a listener hears an utterance and then automatically searches for relevant conceptual knowledge to understand what the speaker means. For the first expression, “I can’t see the point of your argument,” people search for and then access the conceptual metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING. Afterward, listeners apply this metaphoric concept to infer that the speaker meant he could not understand what his addressee was previously trying to say by his argument. Similarly, listeners next access the relevant metaphorical concept THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS to interpret “Your theory needs more support.” In this manner, enduring conceptual metaphors are sequentially retrieved from long-term memory and then applied to create contextually sensitive interpretations of speakers’ metaphorical utterances one-by-one. But the complex reality of human interaction suggests that multiple forces simultaneously constrain people’s understanding of verbal
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f i g u r e 5 . 2 Interacting subsystem of constraints
metaphors. People’s interpretation of “Your theory needs more support” may be influenced by conceptual metaphors recruited during understanding of previous verbal metaphors and metaphorical gestures, as well as by conceptual metaphors that are most relevant to the particular utterance currently being processed (i.e., UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING), along with any other presently enacted metaphorical gestures (e.g., imagine the speaker placing a cupped hand outward signifying the foundation for THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS). Figure 5.2 presents a schematic representation of this account. Under this theoretical model, conceptual metaphors are not necessarily accessed en bloc, with all their possible entailments spelled out, but can contribute partial constraints on people’s metaphorical behaviors. This dynamical view does not deny that conceptual metaphors are an entrenched part of human cognition, yet sees the influence of conceptual metaphors in thought and language as a continually emergent process, serving multiple adaptive purposes in everyday life. The challenge now is for CMT scholars, and others, to create more dynamical explanations of how people in real-time use and understand verbal metaphors in complex discourse situations. At the very least, we need to begin describing the interacting constraints that give rise to metaphorical language and interpretation rather than simply, and endlessly, arguing about whether conceptual metaphor are, or are not, recruited in verbal metaphor use. Creating experimental paradigms to
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explore systems of interacting constraints in metaphorical language will be difficult, yet the existing data can also be re-analyzed to assess when and how conceptual metaphor shape verbal metaphor use given different circumstances. We are not yet done understanding the complex realities of conceptual metaphor experience and will now turn to the extensive linguistic and experimental research on metaphor in multimodal contexts. This fascinating body of research unveils an even richer portrait of the conceptual metaphorical mind in action.
6 Conceptual Metaphors in Multimodal Experience
Can people experience metaphor without language? Consider the case of an art performance, titled “The Artist is Present” that was held from March till May 2010 at the “New York Museum of Modern Art.” Marina Abramović, a Serbian born artist, created a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile on a bare chair in the museum’s atrium, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. Over the course of the 10-weeks, 7-hours per day, 1576 people individually sat silently with Abramović, for as long as they desired, as she gazed at each person with full attention. Some visitors sat for just a few minutes, many others up to one hour, with one woman sitting with Abramović for more than six hours. One man returned to sit with Abramović 21 times over the 10-week period. This incredible feat of physical and emotional endurance received considerable attention in the art world and beyond. One interesting part of the exhibition was seeing people’s visible reactions as they sat there, which were recorded by a photographer, with some sitters smiling, others crying, as did Abramović on occasion, and many staring blankly. The sitters’ photographs provide one kind of evidence on their cognitive and emotional responses as they sat looking at Marina. But some sitters even wrote about their time with Marina. Here are several examples of their comments:1 She looks up. I start with the obvious question about whether this is art and why. I think of the common saying that art only becomes art through the eyes of the viewer. Never is this more true than in this self-portrait by Marina Abramović. I found Marina conveyed such a non-judgmental and accepting attitude. She embodied a welcoming presence that drew not only the person on the other side of the table, but all who were viewing the exhibit at the time. 222
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At certain times I thought that we were really in sync. Other times I didn’t. Other times I was totally hallucinating. She looked like a childhood friend I once had. Then she looked like a baby. [. . .] I thought time was flying by. Then time stopped. I lost track of everything. No hunger. No itching. No pain. I couldn’t feel my hands. I am drained, and marvel at the intensity of the experience, which is unlike any other engagement with art that I have ever had.
These reminisces offer valuable insights into people’s understandings of their non-linguistic experience sitting with the artist. Not surprisingly, though, many visitors employed metaphors to describe what it was like to be present with Marina, with some sitters articulating their feelings using specific metaphorical comparisons, such as one who wrote, “She is a blank slate, a giant canvas of projections onto which the audience can assign their own meaning to her work.” One gentleman, known as “The Unknown Hipster,” wrote about his sitting with Marina using even more explicit metaphorical terms.2 I did my best to sit in front of the artist with the appropriate seriousness. But when she lifted up her eyes, Marina didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic. I felt like a forgotten lump of clay on a sculpture stand, half-dry, and not very enticing, so that after a little consideration the artist finally decides not to use it. I felt like another mile in the endless journey of a truck driver.
This “Unknown Hipster” was clearly disappointed in his little moment of time with Marina. The question, though, is whether his metaphorical descriptions really reflected what he actually experienced. Did the “Hipster” genuinely feel “like a forgotten lump of clay on a sculpture stand, half-dry, and not very enticing” or “like another mile in the endless journey of a truck driver”? These similes may only be linguistic means to describe non-verbal experiences that are truly not metaphorical. After all, metaphor is presumably one of our greatest weapons for talking about ideas and experiences that are difficult to articulate using more literal language. This sitter may not have really felt “like a forgotten lump of clay,” but his metaphorical words still capture something apt about his immediate reactions to sitting down with Marina. People’s non-metaphorical experiences of sitting with Marina were transformed into metaphorical ones through the sitters’ attempts to verbalize into words what it was like to participate in “The Artist is Present.”
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Another possibility is that people’s use of metaphorical language when speaking of their sitting with Marina may accurately convey their in-themoment metaphorical experiences, even if no words were spoken. People later spoke metaphorically of their sitting with Marina precisely because they conceptualize their experiences in thoroughly metaphorical ways, both in the moment and later on. The Unknown Hipster, to take one example, did not think whatever he thought and then simply wrote about this via “a forgotten lump of clay” and “another mile in the endless journey of a truck driver,” but actually understood his experiences as being infused with metaphorical meanings. Metaphor pervades our meaningful understandings of many mundane and artistic life moments, and enables us to make sense of what is otherwise inchoate. This is not just a matter of providing linguistic labels to organize certain vague experiences, but a continual, instinctual impulse to conceptualize what is happening now in terms of what we already understand more directly. This chapter explores the ways that embodied conceptual metaphors are manifested in different non-linguistic, and multimodal, experiences. Multimodal metaphors are those “whose terms are represented exclusively or predominately in different modes.”3 Conceptual metaphors are not just evident within language, but also structure the creation and understanding of many life events, including those pertaining to categorization, memory, emotion, and different social judgments, as well as our experiences of static images, film, gestures, music, dance, and other forms of material culture. These demonstrations are not surprising given the hypothesis that metaphors are part of how we live. Still, the research described here offers a compelling rebuttal to critics who dismiss the linguistic data related to conceptual metaphors, and demand non-linguistic evidence to truly establish the psychological reality of conceptual metaphors. For example, back in 1996 Gregory Murphy argued in regard to conceptual metaphor that “the empirical base for this theory needs to be expanded beyond linguistic phenomena.”4 Much has changed over the past twenty years, as many studies from psychology, linguistics, and other disciplines have emerged showing that conceptual metaphor shapes many aspects of our non-linguistic, and multimodal, experience.
conceptual metaphor in categorization and creativity Are tomatoes fruits or vegetables? Answering this question requires that people make a categorization judgment, such as “Tomatoes are a member of the category of fruits.” This judgment implicitly taps into the idea that
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individual categories are “containers” which “hold” different instances of the category (e.g., the fruit container holds apples, oranges, pears, and even tomatoes). Do people actually recruit the bodily idea of CONTAINMENT when they engage in categorization tasks? Experimental evidence suggests a positive answer to this question, even when people are presented with non-linguistic stimuli. For example, one study asked participants to judge as quickly as possible whether two pictures were from the same or different categories (animals and vehicles).5 The picture contained a rectangle form that bounded either one item or both items. On some trials the two items from the same category were completely within the rectangle, and in other cases the two items were positioned within different rectangles. Results show that the rectangular frame influenced people’s speeded category decisions even though the frames were irrelevant to the specific judgments they were asked to make. People were faster to judge two items as belonging to the same category when both were presented inside the same “container” or rectangle. These findings are consistent with claims that the concept of “categories” is metaphorically represented in terms of containers, as seen in the conceptual metaphor CATEGORIES ARE CONTAINERS. Consider now a different categorization task in which people were asked to judge as quickly as possible whether two stimuli were similar or not. Linguistic examples show that people often express their thoughts about similarity in terms of spatial distance as in “Their opinions in this case couldn’t be further apart,” which many interpret as being motivated by the primary metaphor SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS. One study presented participants pairs of abstract words (e.g., “grief” and “justice”) and asked them to rate their similarity/dissimilarity in meaning.6 The two words were presented side-by-side, horizontally on a computer screen, where the distance between the words was either quite close, or somewhat separated, or far apart. People judged the words as being more similar when they were closer to one another than more distant. A different study asked people to judge whether two squares were similar or dissimilar in color.7 Participants decided that two colored squares were similar in color faster when the squares were closer together, while dissimilar colors were judged faster at longer distances apart. Moreover, when people made similarity judgments for pairs of unfamiliar faces, they saw faces presented further apart as being less similar than those presented closer together. These data provide additional support for the
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idea that the SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS conceptual metaphor is part of how people make categorization judgments and not just a metaphor they use when they speak about similarity. Another form of non-linguistic, spatial categorization is seen in the ways people think about political affiliations. A common way of distinguishing between people’s political views associates liberal beliefs with the left (or left-wing) and conservative opinions with the right (or right-wing). This left–right separation originated in seventeenth-century France where the Assembly sat different political groups in the left or right of the hall. Do people now conceptualize political ideologies along a left–right spatial orientation? One study examined this idea by asking participants to quickly categorize photos of well-known politicians as either conservative or socialists.8 They made these judgments faster when the photos appeared in a spatially consistent position (i.e., conservatives to the right, socialists to the left). Thus, the spatial metaphors widely associated with political positions shape one of the ways individuals think about politics. Daniel Casasanto has proposed the “body specificity hypothesis” that claims people with different body characteristics have different mental representations for highly abstract conceptual domains.9 For example, studies show that right- and left-handers associate positive ideas such as intelligence, attractiveness, and honesty with their dominant side, and negative ideas with the non-dominant side. An extension of this work had people watch the final debates in the 2004 and the 2008 United States presidential elections.10 Participants viewed right-handed gestures as being more positive than left-handed gestures when they viewed the two righthanded candidates (Bush, Kerry). Yet people viewed the left-handed gestures as being more associated with positive speech than right-handed gestures when they observed the two left-handed candidates (McCain, Obama). Further studies demonstrated that temporarily changing people’s primary fluency with the right or left hand through wearing of a cumbersome glove can quickly alters people’s association of right with good and left with bad.11 People’s responses to left and right spatial orientations generally reflect their embodied metaphorical knowledge and belief, some of which apparently are shaped by their own left- or right-handed experiences. Conceptual metaphor also plays an important role in creative cognition. One set of studies revealed that physical and psychological embodiment of metaphors for creativity facilitates people’s problem solving abilities.12 For example, the expression “think outside the box” is frequently employed as a way of urging others to come up with atypical, novel solutions to
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problems. But does physically thinking outside of a box enhance creativity? One test of this idea had participants sit comfortably inside a five-foot square box, sit outside of the box, or sit in a room without any box, and then complete a 10-item Remote Associates Test (RAT). The RAT presented people with three clue words (e.g., “room,” “blood,” “salts”) and asked them to think of a word (e.g., “bath”) that was related to each one of the clues. Participants who were physically sitting outside the box generated more correct associates to the clue words than did people who sat either inside the box, or in a room without a box. A related study in this series asked students to walk along a fixed rectangular path, similar to being inside a box, or to walk freely, or simply to sit down before they figured out solutions to two divergent thinking problems. The Droodle task had people generate captions for a drawing while the Lego task asked people to come up with object names for three novel Lego block assemblies. People who walked freely generated more original solutions on both the Droodle and Lego tasks than did people who walked in a fixed manner along a path or who merely sat. The findings of both of these studies are consistent with the idea that people’s experiences of embodied metaphors for creativity, such as “thinking outside the box” can facilitate their creative problem solving abilities. Nobody claims that the experimental data described in this section showing the relevance of certain embodied conceptual metaphors offers a complete theory of how people behave given different categorization or creativity tasks. Nonetheless, these experimental findings are a small part of the empirical foundation demonstrating that certain conceptual metaphors play an important role in non-linguistic thinking.13
conceptual metaphor in social cognition Some of the most exciting sources of empirical evidence on non-linguistic conceptual metaphor come from research in social psychology. These studies explore how non-linguistic, metaphorical associations in experience influence people’s social perceptions and judgments. For example, there is the widespread set of metaphors suggesting that GOOD IS UP and BAD IS DOWN (e.g., “He is feeling up today,” and “There was a downturn in his luck”). Experiments suggest that these correlations in experience can lead to different evaluative judgments. Thus, people evaluated positive words faster when these were presented in a higher vertical position on a computer screen and recognized negative words faster when they appeared in the lower part of the screen.14 People judged a group’s social power to be
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greater when these judgments were made at the top of a computer screen than when presented in the lower part of the screen.15 Participants remembered emotionally positive images better when these were shown at the top of a computer screen, with negative images being recalled better when they were seen toward the bottom of the screen.16 Depressed individuals are also more likely to attend to lower regions of vertical space, perhaps given their downward affective experiences.17 Finally, in a different situation, people can mimic a smile better when they hear a high-pitched tone, and a frown when hearing a low-pitched tone.18 These findings are consistent with the linguistic evidence showing that people conceive of good and bad as being spatially located along a vertical dimension, a concept that arises from good experiences being upward (e.g., being alive and healthy) and bad ones being downward (e.g., sickness and death). When people physically engage in certain actions, this can also lead them to adopt metaphorical concepts that influence their social judgments. Having people hold warm, as opposed to cold, cups of coffee, for a few minutes led them to subsequently judge another person’s interpersonal traits as being warmer,19 a finding that is consistent with the primary metaphor AFFECTION IS WARMTH. Feeling something warm, compared to feeling something cold, also increases people’s trusting others when playing cooperation games.20 In this way, simply experiencing an embodied source domain (e.g., feeling warm) can automatically prime people to think about a specific target domain (e.g., affection). Social context also affects people’s evaluations of other individuals using tacit embodied metaphors. Participants in one set of studies first wiped their hands using either a hot or cold wet paper cloth.21 Afterward, they read a neutral description of a hypothetical person who would later be either an adversary or a teammate on a computer game. Following this, participants rated the hypothetical person on several “kindness” scales. Similar to earlier findings, participants who first experienced warmth (i.e., the hot cloth) rated the hypothetical person to be kinder than those who wiped their hands using a cold wet cloth. However, participants also gave higher kindness ratings to the target person when they had been told that this individual would be a teammate (i.e., a member of an “in-group”) than when told he would be an adversary (i.e., a member of an “outgroup”) in the computer game. These results suggest that social context has a role in modulating the effect that automatically experienced embodied metaphors (e.g., KINDNESS IS WARMTH) have on social judgments.
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Within a different experiential domain, having people, sitting in a dirty room, make judgments about a fictitious individual’s behavior caused them to rate the behavior as more immoral than when the same judgments were made in a clean work area.22 Similarly, asking people to recall an immoral deed, as opposed to an ethical one, made them more likely to choose an antiseptic wipe, rather than a set of pencils, as a free gift after the experiment.23 Law students who chose to use “dirty evidence” in a mock trial were more likely to accept a bottle of hand sanitizer, compared to a pen, as a gift for their participation than did students who did not rely on dirty evidence.24 People who exhibit a greater desire for cleanliness even have a stronger association between morality/immorality and the colors white/ black than do people with less interest in cleanliness.25 Clean people are viewed as being better cooperative partners than are physically dirty individuals.26 Finally, ethical behavior also relates to the metaphors GOOD IS LIGHT and BAD IS DARK. After recalling an unethical transgression, people judged a room to be darker than after remembering an ethical act.27 Simply sitting in a dimly lit room, or wearing sunglasses, enhanced the likelihood of engaging in unethical conduct.28 These different empirical results are entirely consistent with people’s understandings of the primary metaphors GOOD IS CLEAN and BAD IS DIRTY, as well as the closely related pair GOOD IS LIGHT and BAD IS DARK.29 Other bodily actions also affect people’s social judgments. When asked to determine whether a fictitious person is suitable for a job, people judged job applicants to be better if they were also holding a heavier, rather than a lighter, clipboard,30 which surely reflects the common idea that IMPORTANCE IS WEIGHT. Studies also showed that sitting on a hard, as opposed to a soft, chair when reading criminal scenarios led participants to recommend harsher sentences for criminals (e.g., SEVERITY IN JUDGEMENT IS PHYSICAL HARDNESS).31 Research on conceptual metaphor and social judgments has been extended to gustatory and olfactory experiences. English speakers sometimes talk about people as being “sweet” when they are especially pleasant. Experimental studies indicate that people rated others, as described in short narratives, as being more agreeable if these strangers were reported to like sweet food (e.g., candy, chocolate cake), compared to those liking other kinds of food (e.g., salty peanuts, peppers).32 Within the olfactory domain, one study with English speakers examined whether smelling something fishy would raise people’s suspicions about others when playing a trust game (e.g., “There was something fishy
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about John’s new business scheme”).33 People were led to a room that had been sprayed with fish oil, a fart spray, or odorless water. When these participants smelled something fishy, as opposed to the other smells, they were less willing to contribute money toward a publically shared resource, indicating greater social suspicion in the fishy smelling condition. Participants who sat in a clean-scented room exhibited greater reciprocity in a trust game, and donated more money to a non-profit organization than did people who sat in a neutral smelling room.34 These results are consistent with the conceptual metaphor SUSPICION IS A FISHY SMELL. Interestingly, inducing social suspicion also improved people’s abilities to correctly identify a smell as being fishy.35 This shows that the mapping between SUSPICION and FISHY SMELL has become bidirectional. People’s experiences of different tastes influence their social judgments regarding harmful acts. One study asked participants to first fill out a questionnaire about their eating behaviors, and then had them rinse their mouths for 10 seconds with either sweet flavored water or neutral tasting water. They then swallowed the liquid.36 Following this, participants read a story about someone committing a harmful act that was either motivated by revenge or not. When asked to judge the avenger and his actions, people who just tasted the sweetened water rated the offense more leniently than did those who tasted the flavorless water. A second study replicated the first and suggested that the avenger was not motivated by revenge, but by schadenfreude. In this case, however, first tasting the sweetened water did not enhance people rating the person more leniently. Tasting something sweet does “not indiscriminately increase participants’ willingness to rate just any (aggressor) story more leniently.” For this reason, the idiomatic phrase “revenge is sweet” only applied to situations in which the person was motivated by revenge and not to any circumstances in which a harmful event is desired (e.g., this is why we do not have the phrase “sweet schadenfreude”). Activating the source domain for something, via direct bodily experience, clearly increases the application of the “sweet revenge” metaphor when judging a harmful act. One arena of human life in which verbal metaphors flourish is in people’s talk of emotions. Speakers describe their anger experiences, for example, through reference to their “blood boiling,” “blowing their stack,” “getting hot under the collar,” “seeing red,” or that someone is “hotheaded.” Do these verbal metaphors reflect people’s actual felt experiences? For instance, do people really see red when they are sometimes angry? Eric Schwitzgebel explicitly argued that talk of “seeing red” when angry is, well, just talk and does not reflect anything meaningful about people’s inner
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experience.37 But experimental research lends credence to the claim that people really can see red when angry. Studies indicated that people strongly associate anger with heat, and related bodily responses, such as “seeing red” or being “hot-headed.”38 When people made judgments as to whether a word was a member of the category “anger” or “furniture,” they were faster to see anger related words (e.g., “annoyed,” “mad,” “outraged”) when these appeared with a campfire background, as opposed to an igloo, and when the word’s font looked like flames rather than icicles. Furthermore, reading anger words promoted people to estimate the room’s temperature as being higher than when people read furniture words. Temporally making people feel anger led them to offer higher estimates of average annual temperatures for unfamiliar cities. Finally, people rated ambiguous facial expressions as being more “angry” when they first saw a picture of a campfire as opposed to an igloo. These various experimental findings demonstrate that people’s non-verbal experiences of anger are closely related to experiences of heat, which is one reason why speakers in many languages talk of anger using heat metaphors. Studies have also shown that making social judgments about a person can subsequently influence their attention to different regions of space. For example, when people were asked to state whether a “king” was powerful or not, they were quicker to identify a letter as being a P or Q when it was presented at the top of the screen than when it was shown toward the bottom of the screen.39 Similarly, people could make the P or Q identification faster when these letters were shown at the bottom of the screen right after they had judged whether a “servant” was powerful or powerless. Thus, even thinking about a person’s power quickly prompts a metaphorical sense of that individual along a vertical axis, which shifted their attention upward or downward.40 All these experimental results make sense given the conceptual metaphors POWER IS UP and LACK OF POWER IS DOWN. Finally, engaging in certain bodily actions also prompts people to think of their own experiences in metaphorical ways. Having people physically move backward or forward prompted their recollection of past events or thoughts about future events, respectively. These, results demonstrated the existence of the primary metaphors THE FUTURE IS FORWARD and PAST IS BACK.41 Another set of experiments asked participants to recount positive or negative autobiographical experiences as they moved marbles upward or downward between two cardboard boxes.42 People spoke more quickly about positive memories when moving the marbles up and negative memories when they moved the marbles down – a result that is
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consistent with two conventional metaphors for positive (e.g., “His spirit rose”) and negative (e.g., “Her hopes fell”) emotions. Moving marbles upward also facilitated people talking more about positive experiences (e.g., GOOD IS UP) and moving them downward more about past negative experiences (e.g., BAD IS DOWN). Overall, people’s bodily actions are significantly tied to their abstract conceptualizations of emotions and the specific metaphors they employ in talking about their past lives. The social psychological research described in this section offers extensive scientific evidence that embodied metaphors emerge in everyday experiences and not just language alone.43 But to what extent are these social judgment findings due to people’s previous exposure with metaphorical language? For example, people employ many linguistic statements that refer to an association between affection and warmth such as “He greeted them warmly,” “The college reunion had a warm atmosphere,” “He anticipated a warm reception when he got home,” and “She was given the cold shoulder.” People’s experiences with these linguistic statements may prompt them to implicitly evolve the primary metaphors AFFECTION IS WARMTH and DISLIKE IS COLD in addition to their embodied experiences per se. Embodied and linguistic experience may both continually contribute to the emergence of different embodied metaphors.44
gesture One of the greatest developments in metaphor studies is the dramatic rise in research on gesture. Conceptual metaphors play a significant role in people’s use and understanding of gestures. Metaphorical gestures depict semantic content through metaphorical mappings, such as when a speaker cups her hands to express “holding an idea,” which is motivated by the IDEAS ARE OBJECTS conceptual metaphor.45 As Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller argued, “Abstract gestures are inherently metaphoric by virtue of rendering a non-physical idea in terms of a physical, spatial– temporal representation.”46 Consider several examples of how gestures may be motivated by conceptual metaphors, and concretely articulated through physical movements. First, even simple beat gestures can express metaphorical meaning. For instance, when a speaker says that “things are getting better” and quickly moves his hand slightly upward, the gesture provides a concrete instantiation of metaphorical idea GOOD IS UP.47 One study showed that people used upward beat gestures more so when talking about the weather getting better and employ downward gestures when speaking
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about buying a car for a cheaper price (i.e., LESS COST IS DOWN).48 These observations suggest that beat gestures occasionally reflect speakers’ in-the-moment metaphorical thinking. One exploration of teachers’ and students’ gestures in discussions of mathematics demonstrated how many metaphorical gestures reflect bodybased conceptual metaphors.49 For instance, one professor described a sequence that “oscillated” between two values, while also moving his right arm back and forth. Another professor referred to an unbounded monotonic sequence that “goes in one direction” while simultaneously moving his hand in a circular motion and walking forward in front of the classroom. Both gestures reflect the conceptual metaphor NUMBERS ARE LOCATIONS IN SPACE. A different study showed a middle-school teacher using gestures based on the conceptual metaphor of ARITHMETIC IS A GROUP OF COLLECTIBLE OBJECTS.50 The teacher was using a pan balance, with objects on each side, to illustrate the concept of balanced equations. At one point, she mentioned removing identical objects from both sides of the pan balance by saying “I am going to take away a sphere on each side,” while making a grasping handshape over the spheres on each side of the pan balance. Following this, the teacher said, “Instead of taking it off to pan balance, I am going to take it away from this equation.” After stating this utterance, the teacher removed a sphere from each side of the pan balance and then made the grasping handshape gesture over the S symbol on the two sides of the equation. In making this last gesture, the teacher conceptualized the metaphorical idea of taking objects away from both sides of the equation, again consistent with the ARITHMETIC IS A GROUP OF COLLECTIBLE OBJECTS conceptual metaphor. These metaphorical gestures are crucial to how teachers embody abstract knowledge for their students, and emphasize the importance of body-based conceptual metaphors in mathematical concepts and reasoning. Some gestural performances can be accompanied by conventional metaphorical speech. For example, a speaker (talking in German) was describing her first romantic relationship said “Well there I did already realize, well,” while repeatedly touching her two open palms together. She then continued, “This is pretty clingy,” while her flat hand repeatedly touched and moved apart as if the partners were standing together.51 In this case, the speaker’s gestures enacted the metaphorical source domain before the verbal expression “pretty clingy” was spoken. The metaphor here was “waking” because it was active in the speaker’s imagination as part of “a cognitive realm of richimage information” at the very moment of speaking and gesturing.52
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Speakers can express metaphorical ideas using gestures even when their co-occurring speech is non-metaphorical. Alan Cienki examined students’ discussions about honesty when taking exams. In one case, a student said “Like dishonest suggests, like, um, not truthful, the truth is what like.” When saying “truth,” the student made a flat-hand gesture with her left hand in the vertical plane, fingers pointing away from her body.53 This gesture seems motivated by the conceptual metaphor of TRUTH or HONESTY IS STRAIGHT (e.g., “straight talk”) even though nothing in the speech denoted this metaphorical idea. Metaphorical gestures are not simple duplications of metaphorical lexemes, but reflect an independent mode of expression that is grounded in embodied conceptual metaphors.54 Another example from a different study showed an American student making a metaphorical gesture when uttering a non-metaphorical statement.55 The student first said, “as far as an abstract thought of honesty is,” and simultaneously lifted both hands from front of her chest and placed them next to each other with the palms facing her, with slightly curled fingers, as if she was holding and squeezing a ball. This suggests that “abstract thought” was metaphorically conceived as a physical object although none of the speaker’s words expressed metaphorical meaning. Later on, the same speaker said, “there, there is no gradation. Either your right, you’re wrong, y’re blackm r’white, y’know.” When she said, “there is no gradation,” she enacted a gesture that began with both palms flat together, and then she pulled up her right hand and used her fingers to tap back and forth across the outer edges of her left palm. The speaker verbally described the opposition between white and black, right or wrong, but the gesture taps on the left hand indicated different spatial locations for the concepts of “right” and “wrong,” “black” and “white.” Thus, the gesture and words structure the same thought, but represent different source domains. These examples are instances of “verbal–gestural metaphoric compounds.”56 Irene Mittelberg and Linda Waugh presented a different case of nonmetaphorical speech accompanied by metaphorical gesture in a study of how linguistic lecturers refer to the syntactic structuring of sentences.57 Many abstract linguistic concepts (e.g., nodes, branches, semantic roles, subordination) are structured in terms of image schemas that are enacted gesturally with the fingers, hands, and arms.58 In one instance, the instructor said, “while they’re made up of words,” while her two hands, palms open and upright, were far apart. She continued by saying “aren’t made up of words.” Although the speaker does not say something metaphorical, her gesture enacts the conceptual metaphors IDEAS ARE OBJECTS,
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CONTENTS ARE CONTAINERS, and CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE IS A GEOMETRIC PHYSICAL STRUCTURE. Note, however, that to understand the conceptual metaphors, a viewer must engage in metonymic reasoning from the kinds of imaginary objects (e.g., the conceptual metonymy ACTION FOR THE OBJECT INVOLVED IN ACTION), followed by a metonymic reference that the imaginary concrete entity maps onto the abstract entity, in this case the sentence. This example illustrates how metonymy is often needed to access a conceptual metaphorical idea. One investigation of conversations among German literary critics discussing books demonstrated that their narratives were systematically rooted in spatial language, which was exhibited by their use of both linguistic metaphors (e.g., “the work sometimes lets flash up a smart thought”) and metaphorical gestures (e.g., quick one-hand upward sweep), which typically accompanied story summarization and commentary.59 These metaphorical enactments reflect different conceptual metaphors for literary narratives including TIME IS A PATH, CAUSALITY IS A FORCE, and THEMATIC REALMS ARE SPACES/PLANES/CONTAINERS. Although metaphorical gestural patterns are roughly similar across languages, there exist important variations across some cultures. For example, Raphael Núñez and Eve Sweetser interviewed Aymara speakers from South America about their use of various time expressions and found that they typically gestured backwards to talk about the future and forward when speaking about the past.60 The interviews first revealed that Aymara speakers use “nayra” (meaning “eye” or “sight”) when talking about the past and “qhipa” (meaning “back” or “behind) when referring to the future. Moreover, Aymara speakers, especially older ones who were not fluent in Spanish, gestured by pointing or waving their thumbs over their shoulders when describing a future event. They also swept their hands or arms in front of them while speaking of the past and did so by keeping their hands closer to their bodies for events in the recent past while making wider hand or arm gestures when talking about the distant past. These metaphorical gestures, and speech patterns, are likely motivated by the Aymara cultural epistemology that conceive of the past as something which is already known, and therefore has been seen (i.e., in the front), with the future being unknown and as of yet unseen (i.e., in the back), as motivated by the KNOWING IS SEEING conceptual metaphor. Finally, what happens if people are unable to gesture when speaking about abstract concepts? One study asked university students to discuss scenarios concerning justice and honorable behavior, either when they were free to gesture or when they were prevented from gesturing (i.e., they
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held down two keys on a laptop when speaking).61 An analysis of the talk exchanges showed that people prevented from gesturing used significantly less spatial language (e.g., “honest is very close to righteousness,” “the truth was covered by lies”) than did those who were free to gesture. This empirical finding is consistent with the general hypothesis that some metaphorical conceptualizations arise from spatial imagery which underlies both gesture and speech. The cognitive linguistic research on metaphorical gestures highlights the ways gestures offer concrete, physical enactments of conceptual metaphors even when no metaphorical language is spoken. In some cases, people’s gestures reveal different conceptual metaphors than those that motivate their verbal metaphors.
static and moving images Paintings, photographs, and other static images often express metaphorical meanings. For instance, our friend “The Unknown Hipster,” mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, created a series of four drawings, posted on his website, which depicted something of his experience in sitting with the artist Marina Abramović.62 The first drawing simply showed him sitting upright in a chair, similar to what he did went he first began to be present with the artist, but the next three pictures depicted him successively falling backwards in his chair until he was sprawled over the floor. Thus, the hipster’s drawings offered a visual conception of his metaphorical experience of feeling used and abandoned by the artist, something which he clearly was no longer able to tolerate or stand (e.g., STANDING ERECT IS PERSISTING OR STAYING ALIVE AND ALERT). One place where conceptual metaphors are evident in static images is within comics that convey information about the characters’ emotional experiences. Comics use different graphical devices to denote various human sensations and emotions, such as squiggly lines above a turd to allude to its repugnant smell, jagged lines around a thumb just struck by a hammer to represent pain, and spirals around a person’s head to suggest dizziness or confusion.63 Similar pictorial devices are frequently employed to depict anger. Charles Forceville presented an analysis of anger in the Asterix album “La Zizanie,” a French series, well-known in Europe, which focuses on a small Gaul village during the Roman Empire in conflict with Caesar.64 The humor in the series stems from Caesar’s continued failure to conquer the village because of the inhabitants’ drinking of a druid’s magic brew that briefly induces super, physical strength.
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Several elements of the comic series include visual ideas about anger. These include bodily actions such as bulging eyes, often accompanied by a V-shaped brow, plus frown lines or an extra line under the eyes, opened mouth, red/pink face, arm/hand positions, such as a fisted hand, or pointing toward someone with the index finger, shaking, spirals emanating from an angry person’s head, and straight lines emanating from a person’s mouth, suggesting the great force by which something is said, as well as boldface, jagged lines in the text balloons. The analysis of 103 angry devices in “La Zizanie” showed that 85 of these signaled anger through eyes, mouth, and arm/hand motion, while 45 of the 103 cases had spirals emerging from their heads. Most generally, these pictorial devices for anger were entirely consistent with the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER. Nonetheless, individual signs may also exemplify other anger metaphors, such as ANGER IS AGGRESSIVE ANIMAL BEHAVIOR, or ANGER IS INSANITY. Some of these elements of anger are not typically observed in linguistic studies, such as the loud voice of anger, the intensity of the eyes, and the positions of the mouth and hand/arm position in angry persons. Note, however, that the connection between the graphic devices marking anger and our experiences of anger are far from arbitrary: both are embodied, metaphorical, as well as metonymic (e.g., eyes bulging out). A different study of emotions in static images examined political metaphors of emotion in Japanese comics.65 Many linguistic metaphors for emotion in Japanese are motivated by the traditional idea that the heart is a microcosm for our emotions with inner emotions being understood in terms of natural, meteorological events. One analysis of contemporary Japanese (manga) comics showed for the emotions of anger, happiness, love, anxiety, surprise, and disappointment that (1) the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS A HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER is shared by verbal and visual modalities, (2) even if a conceptual metaphor is seen in different modalities, different properties of that concept may be manifested in the different modalities, and (3) the culture-specific aspects of Japanese verbal metaphors for emotions are also evident in Japanese comics. But there are other, more culture-specific metaphors in these political comics. For example, meteorological phenomena, such as thunder, wind, rain, clouds, or fog, express a person’s emotional states, often in the scene’s background. More specifically, thunder is anger, lightening is surprise, darkness means disappointment, birds refer to happiness, flowers to love, and drooping petals on flowers shows disappointment. The general conceptual metaphorical motivation for these correspondences is EMOTIONS
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ARE EXTERNAL, METEOROLOGICAL/NATURAL PHENOMENA. These metaphors are, therefore, experientially motivated, even if this may not necessarily be universal. Print advertisements also frequently offer visual instantiations of conceptual metaphors. Veronika Koller presented several examples showing how corporate branding uses personification in their commercial images to evoke their customers’ loyalty to the brand.66 For example, IBM’s webpage has a DNA double-helix, with the statement referring to “The DNA of a company,” which made explicit reference to the conceptual metaphor BRANDS ARE LIVING ORGANISMS. One analysis of a large corpus of corporate ads, mostly of company websites, showed that multimodal metaphors are dominant in several ways, such as when IBM presents pictures of children and nature on its website to facilitate people’s understanding of the company as “nurturing possibility,” which in turn “brings IBM’s value to life.” This multimodal message conveys the basic metaphorical idea that CORPORATE BRANDS ARE LIVING ORGANISMS or CORPORATE BRANDS ARE PEOPLE. Although people do not typically associate technology companies with nature or with soft-hearted human beings, IBM aims to create a more humane vision of the company through multimodal conceptual metaphor. An extreme version of the attempt to humanize a multinational corporation is seen in a print ad for the energy company “Total,” which presented a logo on its company website of an open ball in red, yellow, and light blue colors intertwined. The company’s website included the following text accompanying the image: The logo’s spherical shape suggests both the Earth and the international scope of our business. Constructed from a set of colored, curving lines, it symbolizes the diversity and complexity of an ever-changing world. As the company explicitly suggests, its logo symbolizes multiple energies. The colors chosen naturally evoke the idea of heat. The intersecting curving lines convey an impression of movement. The logo is airy and light, signifying that energy is more than just a natural resource, but the product of humankind’s ingenuity and exchanges. The fluid font uses “stick” characters with rounded angles and ends to convey our ability to listen and take into account the human factor. The uppercase letters emphasize the brand’s stature. The smaller letters after the initial T add movement and life, strengthening the feeling of openness.67
Koller rightly questioned whether casual readers of this ad will infer all these metaphorical messages. Still, even as a failed attempt, the Total logo and text again highlights the lengths to which corporations will go to take
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control of their public image through conceptual metaphors (e.g., ENERGY IS A HUMAN PRODUCT, FLEXIBILITY IN THINKING IS CURVED VISUAL IMAGES). Filmmakers also employ conceptual metaphors when they express different abstract concepts. Consider the conceptual metaphor TIME IS MOTION, and the specific mappings of time leaping forward to the future and flashing back to the past.68 For example, one scene from Michelangelo Antonini’s film “The Passenger” has the protagonist, Jack Nicholson, sitting at a table, when the camera moves horizontally from right to left, at which point another man appears representing someone from the protagonist’s past. As a dialogue emerges between the two men, the camera swings back from left to right, focusing on Nicholson in the present, and then back to the man from the past. The moving image reflects the common metaphorical idea of left and right indicating past and present, respectively. Moving the camera to capture left-to-right and back again movement embodies the TIME-MOVING metaphor.69 Time can also be understood in terms of the EGO-MOVING metaphor in which time is represented as a landscape through which a character moves. An excellent purely visual illustration of this metaphor is seen in the film “The Traveling Players,” where in one scene a group of fascist collaborators leave a nightclub party in 1946.70 As they move down a street about 300 yards, the group slowly transforms from a collection of singing, drunken right-wing individuals to a full-fledge fascist group marching in lockstep to martial music. The group ends up marching into a crowd, as was done at a famous Papagos rally in 1952. This seven-minute sequence metaphorically elaborates on the SOURCE–PATH–GOAL schema as the characters proceed and change from one location and time (1946) to a different destination and time (1952). Once again, filmmakers visually represent different time metaphors through entirely non-linguistic means. Charles Forceville presented other examples of how movies depict various beliefs and attitudes through non-linguistic conceptual metaphors.71 For example, the primary metaphor BAD OR EVIL IS DARK is seen in many films in which a character is portrayed in dark or dark lightning to convey doubts or suspicion about the person, often in contrast to other characters in the same scene who are depicted in light.72 In director Orson Well’s “Citizen Kane,” the main character, Kane, is mostly seen in shadows and dark lightning. In Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate,” a much younger Benjamin informs his older lover, Mrs. Robinson, that his encounters with her are the only thing he looks forward to each day, and does so with a darkened face, suggesting that
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these thoughts emerge from his “dark side” in contrast to the lighted image of Mrs. Robinson in the same scene. Earlier in “The Graduate,” when Mrs. Robinson first tries to seduce Benjamin, she prevents him from leaving her house by asking him to bring her handbag up to her as she stands prominently at the top of a staircase looking down at the much smaller image of Benjamin. This image conveys the primary metaphors of IMPORTANCE IS SIZE and CONTROL IS UP, which emphasizes how Benjamin is coming under the control of Mrs. Robinson’s desires. Later on, Benjamin tries to tell his girlfriend, Elaine, that he has been having sex with her mother, but does so awkwardly. As Elaine listens, her image is at first blurred, but as she begins to understand the import of what Benjamin is really saying, her face comes into greater focus on camera, which is an obvious visual manifestation of the UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING primary metaphor. The conceptual metaphor AN INTENSE MENTAL STATE IS AN UNSTOPPABLE FAST TRAIN is illustrated in Francis Ford Coppola’s film “The Godfather 1.”73 In one scene, Michael, played by Al Pacino, wishes to do better in his family’s business and arranges a meeting with his primary opponents at a familiar restaurant. He earlier placed a gun in the restaurant’s toilet, and when he goes to fetch the gun during the meeting, the soundtrack features a rumbling sound, readily understood as a moving train. As Michael walks back to the table, now carrying the gun, you continue to hear the train sound, but it stops when the camera pans to his opponents, only to begin again when the camera moves back to Michael. This sound effect suggests that Michael’s present mental state should be understood metaphorically as AN INTENSE MENTAL STATE IS AN UNSTOPPABLE FAST TRAIN. Even if viewers do not consciously link the sound track with a train, they may still unconsciously apprehend the “something is rumbling” sound and map this auditory image to better apprehend Michael’s disturbed state of mind. Ning Yu offered a detailed analysis of one commercial on Chinese educational TV to demonstrate how the prominent conceptual metaphors LIFE IS A JOURNEY and LIFE IS A STAGE are exemplified in both language and moving images.74 The commercial depicts a “Chinese country girl who dances all the way from a rural village to a modern metropolis.”75 The girl ends up standing on top of a tall building gazing into the distance at the shape of a modern city skyline. As she stands there, the TV screen displays the linguistic message “In everyone’s heart there is a big stage, however big one’s heart is, that’s how big the stage is.” Most generally, the girl’s physical journey represents her subjective experience
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of advancing in life, similar to the way that China, as a nation, has advanced in the modern world. This commercial evoked several messages that are grounded in two widespread conceptual metaphors, each of which composed of various primary metaphors and metaphorical entailments. First, the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor carries with it the cultural beliefs that people should have goals in life, and should act to achieve these goals. Several primary metaphors also structure our understanding of the commercial, including STATES ARE LOCATIONS, CHANGE IS MOTION (from one location to another), CAUSES ARE FORCES, ACTIONS ARE SELF-PROPELLED MOTIONS, and PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS. Together, the conceptual metaphors and cultural beliefs create a complex understanding of the girl’s own journey and that of China, more generally. But the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor is combined with the idea that LIFE IS A STAGE as the girl changes stages from small village to big city, which are accompanied by changes in her dress and the type of music played in the background (from peasant folk songs to contemporary music) along the way. In the final scene, the girl stands on the building top representing SUCCESS IS UP and the specific instantiation of A SUCCESSFUL LIFE IS PERFORMING ON A BIG STAGE. Several metonymies help structure the commercial’s metaphorical meanings referring to the girl’s changing clothing, the different dances she performs, and the different music played, including STYLE OF CLOTHING STANDS FOR CULTURE, STYLE OF DANCE STANDS FOR CULTURE, and STYLE OF MUSIC STANDS FOR CULTURE. Once again, we understand changes in the girl’s clothing, dance, and the music as a conceptual metonymy for Chinese cultural development. This TV commercial demonstrates how conceptual metaphors are infused with different primary metaphors, various metonymies, and specific cultural beliefs to create a larger symbolic, even allegorical interpretation of a mostly non-linguistic event. Different visual images can also trigger the emergence of conceptual metaphors in film.76 For example, Nicolas Roeg’s film “Bad Timing,” describes the twisted love relationship between a woman (Milena) and her psychotherapist (Alex). The film presents a series of interspersed visual images showing Alex and Milena making love and Milena undergoing a tracheotomy operation. There is an implied link between sexual penetration and the image of a speculum being inserted into Milena during her tracheotomy. Milena’s closed eyes are similar during ecstatic love making
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and her laying in a coma on the operating table. A soundtrack presents echoes of both the sounds of pleasure and those of great pain. Finally, there is an implied link between images of the operation table (i.e., the “death bed”) and the bed in which Alex and Milena make love. These pairings of image metaphors give rise to a series of source-totarget domain correspondences, which allude to a more global, and poetic, conceptual metaphor of LOVE IS DEATH. Scene in the hospital Source domain Thanatos Source Image Operating table (Death bed) (visual) Closed eyes (Coma) (visual) Applying speculum (visual) Echoes of pain (sound) Tactility of operation (visual)
Scene in the bedroom Target domain Eros Target Image Bed (Love bed) (Visual) Closed eyes (Ecstasy) (visual) Penetration (visual) Echoes of ecstasy (sound) Tactility of corporeal expressions (visual)
These complex metaphorical mappings would be quite difficult to evoke using one modality (language, sound, picture) alone. Even though many film metaphors help us understand abstract concepts in terms of bodily experiences, examples such as that from Roeg’s film demonstrate metaphorical ideas in which the concrete is better structured and understood through the concrete. One approach to multimodal metaphor explores the dynamic orchestration of audio-visual compositions in different media, such as TV news reports, advertisements, and film. Herman Kappelhoff, Cornelia Müller, and colleagues have proposed that “Expressive movement shapes the same kind of felt experiences in a spectator as a bodily expressive movement that accompanies speech. In doing so, expressive movements provide the experiential grounds for the emergence and construction of metaphor.”77 Their work offers an important advance in metaphor studies by not focusing solely on the instantiations of conceptual metaphors in different audio-visual formats, but reconstructs the dynamic emergence of metaphorical meaning through the temporal unfolding of audio-visual composition. For example, one study analyzed the metaphor dynamics in a sixminute TV news report on the financial crisis in Germany back in 2008.78 A central metaphorical theme that underlies, and orchestrates, the news report is that WINNING AND LOSING ARE EXPERIENCED AND UNDERSTOOD AS OPPOSITIONS OF MANY KINDS. Early on in
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the report, there is a scene of a group of business consultants at a reception. As the voice-over commented that “business runs brilliantly,” the camera focused on the consultants, standing close together in a circle, lifting their sparkling glasses of champagne high into the air in celebration of their successes. The image of the sparkling glasses lifted high nicely matches the verbal metaphor of “brilliantly” in the voice-over comment, which evoked a specific sensory-motor experience of success as sparklingly light moving upward. A follow-up scene presents an interview with one businessman who commented on those bankers who have not succeeded. “These people, who, in fact, high, from high have fallen,” and then “. . . actually, they want to dive away and not be seen,” while he made a downward gesture. These words and gesture create the strong metaphorical impression of losers being down and away from those who have succeeded during the financial crisis. Later on, a group of upset small investors are shown marching down a narrow path, approaching a door on the ground floor of a tall building, ringing the bell, and then talking to someone over an intercom, yet not being allowed into the building. At the end of the scene, the camera pans upward to higher floors and windows, implying that the successful “winners” are upward and inside, compared to the “losers” who are down and outside. Most generally, this research program demonstrates how “audio-visual metaphors are dynamic forms of meaning making and are affectively grounded in the sensory experiences of the cinematic expressive movements.”79 Our experience of metaphor in multimodal contexts is emergent and deeply felt across many sensory domains. We do not simply interpret verbal and nonverbal metaphors one-by-one, but understand these, and experience them with our bodies, in intricate, dynamically-linked ways that temporally unfold over time as orchestrated movements. Finally, Charles Forceville has argued that metaphor in film exhibits several unique qualities.80 1. Films have more opportunities at their disposal to create metaphors and blends than written texts. 2. Whenever the sequential nature of the elements in a visual metaphor or blend requires unfolding, the elements in a visual metaphor/blend can be cued simultaneously. 3. Some non-verbal modalities do not have a “grammar” in the way language has and the construal of metaphors that do not draw on the verbal modality tends to be more open to interpretation and controversy.
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4. Non-verbal modalities in films trigger emotions quicker, and perhaps more subtly, in audiences than the verbal modality, and this characteristic is inherited by multimodal metaphors. It is not at all surprising that so many static and moving images are motivated by conceptual metaphors, ones that also ground both conventional and novel instances of metaphorical language. The demonstrations of conceptual metaphors in images offer powerful testimony on the ubiquity of entrenched metaphorical concepts in human thought and expression. Static and moving images may, again, express embodied conceptual metaphors in subtle ways that differ somewhat from their instantiations in verbal speech. Pictorial manifestations of conceptual metaphors may have unique cognitive and affective effects precisely because they provide concrete analogs of familiar human experiences.
music People often talk of their experiences listening to music in thoroughly metaphorical terms. Consider a review written in 1810 of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable. Here shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night, and we become aware of a giant shadow swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us and destroying within us all feeling but the pain of infinite yearning, in which every desire, leaping up in a sound of exultation, sinks back and disappears. Only in this pain, in which love, hope and joy are consumed without being destroyed, which threatens to burst our hearts with a full-chorused cry of all the passions, do we live on as ecstatic visionaries.81
This passage illustrates, from a nineteenth-century perspective, a critic’s appreciation of the sublime, organic character of Beethoven’s music, mixing together different metaphorical statements about the musical content and its emotional effects on the audience. As noted earlier, metaphor is frequently found in musical discourse, and this review of Beethoven’s Fifth provides numerous, poetic examples of linguistic metaphors in action (e.g., “shining rays of light shoot through the darkness”). A project investigating people’s metaphors for music asked music students to use specific words or images to describe short excerpts of music.82 The words provided included polar opposites, such as “moving– static,” “up–down,” and “attracting–repelling.” The images also showed
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polar opposite concepts, such as a picture of a full glass or of an empty box. Participants listened to each musical piece and then discussed it with one another, and were urged to employ some of the earlier provided words and images. An analysis of participants’ discussions showed that their musical descriptions were clearly related to several image schemas, such as SOURCE–PATH–GOAL, CONTAINER, MOMENTUM, and VERTICALITY. These data highlight the idea that the language of music offers compelling insights into music structure, especially regarding the importance of embodied conceptual metaphors in music conceptualization and understanding. Still, do people experience music in metaphorical ways apart from how they may later talk about what they have heard? One response to this question claims that musical experience is not metaphorical. Michael Spitzer offered one opinion along this line.83 Metaphor theorists who assume that we conceptualize music in the same way we conceptualize language are naïve, or at least ill versed in aesthetics. The watchword of aesthetics is particularity, which means that art affords a richly grained mode of experience that is valuable precisely because it cannot be subsumed by concepts.
If Spitzer is correct, musical experience is not conceptual. Inferring the presence of widespread conceptual metaphors as motivating musical production and experience may, under this view, constitute a vast overinterpretation of musical compositions. However, even though musical experience may sometimes feel transcendent, and convey particular aesthetic impressions, this should not imply that music is non-conceptual. As Larry Zbikowski observed, music’s “primary function is to represent thought patterns via various dynamic processes that are common in human experience,” especially in regard to emotion regulation, and the movement of bodies through space.84 Part of the struggle in debates over metaphor and music is that scholars, including composers, write about music using many different verbal metaphors.85 Should we take these verbal metaphors as evidence of what the music alone expresses or communicates? Many people suggest that the answer to this question is a clear “yes.” For instance, Mark Johnson and Steve Larsen argued that people’s understanding of musical motion is metaphorical and grounded in three pervasive bodily expressions of physical motion.86 The MOVING TIME metaphor conceptualizes a musical event as an object that moves past the stationary listeners from front to back. Thus, a future musical event exists as a musical space in front of the listener and it
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moves toward the listener (e.g., “Here comes the recapitulation,” or “The refrain comes in soon”). Once the event arrives, it is experienced as heard, as it now exists in the present moment. After the music has been heard, the musical event is behind us and exists in the past. This analysis is similar to how we experience seen objects as things move in physical space. Just as moving objects trace out an imaginary path of motion, segments of a musical path are called “passages.” Moreover, just as objects can creep, crawl, fly, speed up, slow down, etc., so too does music move slowly, abruptly, gently, or forcefully. A second relevant metaphor for musical concepts is the MUSICAL LANDSCAPE metaphor. People have the experience of moving from a starting point along some path, through intermediate stages, to reach some destination. In a similar way, listeners experience music as traveler in a music landscape, where what has already been heard is understood as a landscape behind us and music not yet heard is in the front part of the path that we will experience later (e.g., “We’re coming up to the coda,” “The melody rises up ahead”). One can experience music as an observer or as a participant. A participant moves over the music landscape (e.g., “You can approach the refrain” or “Pass the dissonant part”). Adapting the participant’s perspective enables one to strive, seek, push ahead, and so forth as actors with a piece of music. An observer’s perspective, frequently employed by musicians analyzing a score, is conceived as a distant standpoint from which one can observe the path through a music landscape. One advantage of the observer perspective is that it enables a person to conceive of the entire musical piece at once, as if it is an object that can be visualized from afar. Finally, the third metaphor for musical experience is MUSIC AS A MOVING FORCE. People ordinarily experience physical motion when physical forces like wind, water, and large objects move us from one point to another. Music may be thought of as a metaphorical force that has causal effects such as when someone is moved, pushed, pulled, bowled over, blown away, or dragged down by a musical piece. Indeed, much research demonstrates that our experiences of music are quite embodied, and not transcendent of ordinary thought and experience. For instance, the relationship between the VERTICALITY schema and our characterization of musical pitch with reference to the spatial orientation “up–down” is fairly universal. When we make low sounds, our chest resonates, when we make high sounds, out chest no longer resonates in the same way, and the source of the sound seems located nearer our heads. This “up–down” of musical pitch thus correlates with the spatial “up” and “down” – the vertical orientation of our bodies. The VERTICALITY schema offers a
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straightforward way to explain why our characterization of musical pitch is in terms of high and low. Note also that pitch is graphically represented in musical notation by placing notes that are the result of very rapid vibrations of the sounding mechanism higher on the page than notes that result from less rapid vibrations. Different empirical studies lend support to the idea that people conceive of music in conceptual metaphorical terms. Steve Larson showed that listeners identified a number of patterns within musical scores as being related to metaphorical concepts such as MUSICAL GRAVITY, MUSICAL MAGNETISM, and MUSICAL INERTIA, each of which are partly shaped by people’s earlier sensorimotor experiences.87 Mihailo Antović studied eleven-year olds’ verbal descriptions of different musical sequences (e.g., high and low tones, soft and loud tones, major and minor triads, fast and slow tempos) and also found that participants metaphorically conceptualized various musical relations.88 Even blind children describe musical relations using conventional musical metaphors (e.g., PITCHES ARE HEIGHTS, MUSICAL SCALES ARE VERTICAL MOVEMENTS).89 Studies also show that people make faster meaningfulness judgments for statement such as “The soprano sang a high aria” when making an upward motion to press the “yes” key than when making a downward movement.90 This finding makes sense given people’s conceptual metaphorical understanding of MUSICAL SCALES ARE VERTICAL MOVEMENTS. Finally, musicologists also claim, more specifically, that several image schemas (e.g., CONTAINER, CYCLE, CENTER–PERIPHERY, BALANCE, and SOURCE–PATH–GOAL) structure our understanding of harmonic relationships, such as a cycle of fifths and the resolution of unstable patterns.91 In this way, pitches are correlated with points in space – the succession of focal pitches correlates with movement along a path. Research in whole body computing has also explored embodied metaphorical experience in the context of creating musical sequences. One study used an interactive audio environment, the Sound Maker, in which the system sensed people’s location and movements to produce different sound effects.92 Pairs of people were asked to make different sounds through their body positions and movements in this space. The system was designed so that it would produce sounds given embodied metaphorbased mappings, or mappings that did not follow standard body and sound correlations. For the embodied metaphor-based mappings, for example, speed was linked with tempo (fast is fast, slow is slow), activity with volume (more is loud, less is quiet), proximity with pitch (near is high, farther is low), and flow was linked with rhythm (smooth is rhythmic,
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choppy is chaotic). For the non-embodied mappings, flow was linked to tempo (smooth is fast, choppy is slow), proximity with volume (farther is quiet, near is loud), speed with pitch (slow is high, fast is low), and activity with rhythm (more is rhythmic, less is chaotic). The participant pairs were given a series of sounds to make that varied along a single parameter (e.g., volume, tempo, pitch, and rhythm), or combined two parameters at once (e.g., volume and tempo). They also had to verbally explain their movements after completing the desired sound sequence. Most generally, people were far more able to bodily demonstrate and explain correct sound sequences when using the embodied metaphorical mappings than with the non-embodied mappings. Some of this success using the embodied metaphors was through people’s reflective thinking about the mappings required and not just through their body movements alone. Still, the “embodied metaphor based system facilitated a proportional mix of experiential and reflective intuitions that resulted in users more successfully learning to control and understand the system.”93 Once again, people’s intuitive discovery of how to make certain music sounds in Sound Maker was significantly based on their bodily actions facilitated by their past experiences of embodied metaphors. These observations and findings lead to the conclusion that “We hear a sonic representation of the dynamic processes associated with these actions, and thus understood the actions through sound.”94 For example, one may interpret pitches as being analogous to points in space and yet also conceive of the movement through space via the dynamic processes set up by a succession of pitches. More generally, as Larry Zbikowski has also argued, “language and music may simply offer different resources for structuring thought: language excels at capturing objects, events and the relations that hold between them, but is less good at representing dynamic processes; music, by contrast, excels at representing dynamic processes, but represents objects, events, and relations only under the most contrived circumstances.”95 In this way, musical metaphors arise from pervasive conceptual metaphors underlying metaphorical language, but also express slightly different facets of those metaphorical experiences, especially in regard to dynamic movement.
metaphors in computing experience Most people think that computers are far from metaphorical or are not related to metaphor in any substantial way. Yet in describing their multimodal experiences with computers, people have particular metaphorical
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ways of talking. For example, when searching for information on the internet, people say things such as “Let’s go to your web site,” “I returned to that place with the information about skin cancer,” “I wandered around the Apple web site,” or “Do you remember how you got there?” Each statement mentions physical spaces (e.g., “that place” or “web site”) or motion (e.g., “go,” “returned,” or “wandered around”) to refer to information sources and information actions. Interestingly, these common expressions are systematically used by both experts and novice computer users. Beginning in 1996, before the internet had become so immensely popular, a series of psychological studies interviewed people about their experiences using the web. The results of one study by Paul Maglio and Teenie Matlock showed a high degree of consistency in the description of their actions.96 For example, people (a) often referred to themselves as actively moving along trajectories toward information objects even though they did not travel anywhere at all (e.g., “I went from Yahoo to Altavista”), (b) rarely referred to themselves as passive recipients (e.g., “I waited, and then it brought me the information”), which seems more likely considering that in reality the information actually does travel to the user’s computer over physical wires and signals, and (c) consistently used language referring to self-directed motion along a path, more typically along a horizontal, but not a vertical direction. More recent studies by Matlock and colleagues examined whether people’s metaphorical experiences in computing have changed over the last two decades. For instance, one study had university students use the web for a ten-minute period and then describe what they had just done, in as much detail as possible.97 The analysis of what students reported showed that they now almost exclusively employed the motion verb “go” (and corresponding words “went” and “gone”), as when a student stated “I went to NBA.com,” or “Then I went to some, like, fraternity sites.” This finding contrasts dramatically with the 1996 study which observed that web users employed a far greater variety of motion verbs, with “go” being stated just over one-half of the time. Furthermore, the 2013 study showed no examples of passive language (e.g., “It brought me to. . .”), which differed from what was seen in 1996. Participants in 2013 also no longer referred to their internet use in terms of “backing out,” “surfing,” or “floating.” Early web users, back when the internet first became popular in the late 1990s, conceived of their activities in terms of the conceptual metaphors A WEB PAGE IS A PHYSICAL SPACE and OBTAINING INFORMATION IS MOVING THROUGH PHYSICAL SPACE. Even though these
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metaphors are still relevant to contemporary internet use, people have widely adopted “go” related lexical items for several possible reasons. First, “go” is easily seen as expressing a metaphorical meaning, especially as related to mental states and functioning (e.g., “I need to go over that idea again”). Second, improvements in computer technology have enabled people to worry less about the mechanics of their interfaces. Third, and most obviously, people have gotten much better at navigating to a variety of internet sites, along with using other mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets) that make computing experience so much easier. Most generally, there is no need to speak of computing experiences in various metaphorical terms of “surfing” (or even literal terms like “I clicked on that site”). Spatial metaphor such as “go” readily reflect both the immediacy and ease of information access. People still think of internet use in enduring metaphorical ways, but have narrowed their conceptions of what specific actions best specify their virtual moving through physical space. A related aspect of computing experience is our understanding of new concepts referring to “big data,” cases where massive amount of information collected usually through social media for purposes of predictive modeling. One analysis suggested that two key conceptual metaphors are central to our present understanding of “big data.”98 The first states that BIG DATA IS A FORCE OF NATURE TO BE CONTROLLED, as manifested in the following narrative: Data is a powerful natural resource that if used wisely can drive U.S. economic competitiveness and lead to rewarding careers in the future dedicated to building a smarter planet.99
A second conceptual metaphor for “big data” is BIG DATA IS NOURISHMENT OR FUEL TO BE CONSUMED. One example of this metaphor in action is seen in the following statement: Beyond that, however, lies the promise of a style of computing that more closely mimics the functioning of the human mind as it takes in data from many different sources, forming thoughts and making decisions in real time.100
These alternative metaphorical conceptions of “big data” are by no means neutral in their implications for social and political policy about, for example, the ways private information is gleaned off of social media for use by governments and corporations. As with many evolving concepts, the numerous ways that we metaphorically understand them can, and often should, be discussed and debated. Yet it is impossible to think of
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“big data” and many other abstract ideas in the domain of computing without embodied conceptual metaphors rushing in to help us more concretely understand what at first seems vague and unfamiliar.
conceptual metaphors in dance Does dance sometimes express metaphorical meanings? Some philosophers are deeply skeptical of the idea that the meaning of dance can be understood through non-verbal, conceptual metaphors.101 Part of this reaction stems from a worry that metaphors must always be verbal because to insist that “there is such a thing as non-verbal metaphor . . . has stretched the concept of metaphor” so far that “it might be said to use the concept, at most, metaphorically.”102 As was the case with debates about metaphor and music, this criticism arises from the traditional belief that conceptual knowledge must necessarily be tied to verbal language. For example, Eva Kittay argued that “We can have metaphor in dance” but that “only through its expression in some representational system can we grasp the structure of metaphor, and the most elaborated representational system to us is linguistics.”103 These critical statements about metaphor and dance, once again, raise a challenging question. Does the fact that people can talk about their experiences using conventional verbal metaphors imply that they are thinking in entrenched metaphorical ways? One possibility is that verbal metaphors emerge in the context of people’s bodily actions, as with gesture, and not simply as after-the-fact reflections about what is really a completely nonmetaphorical experience. Herman Kappelhoff and Cornelia Müller asked groups of psychology students, dance movement therapists in training, and clinical patients to bodily improvise some aspect of their life in a short tenminute period.104 After doing so, the participants had to select one feature of their movements, repeat it several times, and then talk about the movement as they continued enacting it. For example, one participant enacted the movement pattern in which she swung her upper body to the left and then to the right, eventually swinging her arms in the same direction. As she started the second swinging motion she verbally described her present life circumstances as being like a wave (e.g., one’s life is like a wave”). Thus, the swinging motions preceded the verbal metaphor suggesting that the metaphorical concept of one’s life is like a wave arises from felt bodily movements of the swinging motions of her arms and body. As the participant continued to swing back and forth, she elaborated on her multimodal metaphor by noting in reference to her life that
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“sometimes it goes up” and “sometimes it goes down,” and coordinated these comments precisely with her body actions such that the upward movement reached its peak as she said “it goes up” and the downward movement was synchronized with the statement “it goes down.” The participant’s speech and actions do not merely reflect an outward manifestation of an inner, previously encoded conceptual metaphor because she is both conceptualizing and expressing life as a wave in the very moment of her movements and speech. Later on in the sequence, the same participant enacted a spiral movement downward with her left hand. Soon after that, she said “and to spiral downward” to provide a verbal metaphorical description of her multimodal experience of the course of life as moving downward in a specific spiral manner, and, as she continued to make the same gestural motion, said, “it always goes from up to down I have just noticed.” Finally, the participant moved her hand upward, again in a spiral manner and said, “doesn’t go from down to up” suggesting that her coordinated enactment of the upward spiral was not appropriate for her momentary conceptualization of life. In fact, after completing the upward gestural movement, she held her hand above her head, looked at her hand and laughed, then focused her eye gaze with the person observing her so as to insure that her enactment has been fully understood by her audience. Overall, the sequence of bodily actions and speech are dynamically composed and visibly expressed by the participant so that “what we see is a metaphoric process of meaning construction which oscillates between verbal, gestural, and verbo-gestural realizations of metaphoric content.”105 Embodied metaphors, such as life is a wave, which are related to the primary metaphors GOOD IS UP and BAD IS DOWN, represent ideas “in” the minds of individuals, which are recruited to motivated speech and bodily actions. As listeners and observers, one might argue that our understanding of people’s metaphorical meanings demands some inferences about the causal bases of these overt behaviors. Positing the existence of some specific conceptual metaphor, even an embodied conceptual metaphor, is what many metaphor scholars presume how metaphorical meanings are interpreted. A different perspective maintains, however, that the bodily actions enacted by a person are the way metaphorical conceptualizations are created. People’s speech, gestures, and dance are themselves metaphors and not just outward manifestations of private, inner mental processes of metaphorical thought. The interplay of language with gestures and actions highlights the degree to which metaphor is spread out across the entire
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body in action. In this way, embodied metaphor is an aesthetic and affective process that unfolds over time and is not passively encoded “in” language or bodily action. Another demonstration of embodied conceptual metaphors in expressive actions is seen in contact improvisation dance. I have earlier written about how dancers express metaphorical ideas, which audiences, to some degree, recognize, in a piece titled “Hilary,” by Julyen Hamilton and Alito Alessi originally performed as a part of Cappella Motion (1995).106 Julyen and Alito’s performance begins with the two dancers walking onto the stage and Julyen lying face down on the floor, arms extended in front. Alito moves over to squat on the back of Julyen’s thighs. Julyen then raises his head and shoulders and looks behind to observe Alito, simultaneously extending his arms in front of him. Julyen lies back down and Alito moves upward onto Julyen’s back, balancing himself, arms extended, then standing on Julyen’s back as Julyen once more rises, this time to his hands and knees. Alito sits on top of Julyen, riding him. Soon Julyen couples his hands around Alito’s feet as Alito wraps his legs around Julyen’s trunk. Julyen stands, walks around the stage and twirls Alito around in circles as Alito twists on Julyen’s back, extending arms and legs outward in different directions, sometimes using Julyen’s one extended arm as a guide. Julyen then stops his walking and slowly pulls Alito around in front of him, and while still standing, cradles Alito in his arms. Even within these first few minutes of Julyen and Alito’s duet, movements across the stage reflect aspects of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor with embodied experiences of physical journeys as the source domain. Here the movement from point A along some path to point B expresses progress toward some concrete or abstract, sometimes personal, goal. One sees the struggle when the dancers first begin a journey (some movement from point A to point B), the obstacles they encounter along the way, how they try, and sometimes fail, to support each other, the times when they seem to be spinning their wheels (including one moment later in the performance when Alito actually walks briskly in place) until they break free and almost fly toward their long-anticipated goal. Other aspects of Julyen and Alito’s performance also make use of bodybased metaphors. Upward movements, following the conceptual metaphors of HAPPINESS IS UP, GOOD HEALTH IS UP, and HAVING CONTROL IS UP, are suggestive of positive affect and of greater conscious control of one’s body and, more generally, one’s life. For instance, there are many moments in Julyen’s and Alito’s dance, when their upward
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movement (both while on the ground and while standing) signifies positive emotions, especially when they are in balanced positions of contact. On the other hand, downward body postures and movements reflect the metaphors SADNESS IS DOWN, SICKENSS IS DEATH, SICKNESS AND DEATH ARE DOWN, and BEING SUBJECT TO CONTROL FROM PEOPLE IS DOWN, suggesting negative affect when individuals are under stress, experience poor health, and have little control over their movements and their lives. The opening of Julyen and Alito’s performance, when Julyen lies prone with Alito on top of him, suggests, even if for a moment, Alito’s control over Julyen. At the very beginning, Julyen lifts his head and looks over his shoulder at Alito as if to question this control. Some of their unsteady movements and positions reflect the metaphor of NEAR FAILURE IS UNEASINESS and suggests uncertainty. Falling reflects the FAILURE IS FALLING metaphor, and represents lack of control, illness, and feelings of debasement. At a later moment in Julyen and Alito’s dance, Alito runs toward Julyen and leaps into his arms, as if wishing to establish a more personal bond between them. But the movement fails because the dancers are immediately unbalanced and the two dancers tumble onto the stage very gracefully and start anew to establish contact. The movements Julyen and Alito perform are not interpreted by observers simply as arbitrary physical acts with no sense of purpose or communicative meaning. Instead, the basic images in their dance are movement structures that are imaginatively patterned and flexible, both in terms of their physical instantiations and their symbolic interpretation. The beauty of contact improvisation is that the embodied metaphors are enacted inthe-moment as the dancers react to their immediate bodily situations. It seems unlikely that the dancers’ movements are directed by internal, private embodied metaphorical concepts, as their metaphorical meanings emerge throughout their full-bodied actions. Conceptual metaphors unfold over time in course of embodied actions. As is the case with other aspects of the wars over metaphor, not everyone agrees with the kind of conceptual metaphorical analysis presented above on Julyen’s and Alito’s contact improvisation performance. Karen Schaffman wrote that “In Contact Improvisation, the moving body, defined by momentum and touch, defies traditional Western codes, though not through an inversion of conceptual metaphors. Instead, as a practice, Contact Improvisation presents alternatives to those conceptual metaphors that we hold as common language.”107 For instance, in contrast to my discussion of GOOD IS UP and BAD IS DOWN and their relations to aspects of the dancers’ movements, Schaffman replied, “Contact
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Improvisation celebrates failing and in doing so proposes an embodied alternative to the metaphors of space and failure that Gibbs adheres to.” She continued, “The question of failure in Contact Improvisation remains valid, but it is not measured in terms of stability or instability. Rather, it has to do with issues as reluctance, manipulation, and lack of attentiveness to the moment.” I applaud these responses to my conceptual metaphor overview of the “Hilary” performance. Schaffman rightly highlights the possibility of alternative metaphors being created in the moment of the dancers’ joint actions, some of which may, as she put it, “supersede” some of “Gibbs’s conceptual metaphors.”108 Conceptual metaphorical analyses are not intended as stating exactly what any human artifact necessarily means. My analysis only points to the constraining presence of particular embodied conceptual metaphors in the creation and understanding of specific human experiences. There will be occasions when people actively, even consciously, aim to subvert common metaphorical concepts, or engage in expressive actions that “supersede” entrenched conceptual metaphors. As one Contact Improvisation dancer once said to me, “I never feel so free as when I am crawling across the floor on my hands and knees.” One may superficially argue that the action of crawling on the floor represents powerlessness, or instantiates the BAD IS DOWN metaphor. But people have the agency to sometimes express new twists on pervasive conceptual metaphors, as perhaps was evident in the dancers’ performance in “Hilary.” This recognition, however, does not invalidate conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), but acknowledges the human tendency to think, speak, and act in creative ways which are very much tied to the conventional metaphors we live by.
conceptual metaphors for the artistic process Karen Sullivan proposed that CMT may be “a tool for understanding the artistic process.”109 She advanced several conceptual metaphors that capture what artists do. For example, a primary metaphor for the artistic process is ART IS MONOLOGUE in which the range of techniques (e.g., brushstrokes) is understood as vocabulary. This metaphor underlies why artworks can be seen as conveying a “message,” a “protest,” a “statement,” or an “argument.” Artworks may even be “truthful” in exactly the same ways in which certain speech acts may be “believable.” Special cases of ART IS A MONOLOGUE are ART IS STORYTELLING, (e.g., Degas was once praised for painting “a prose . . . articulating a new . . . observation”),
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and ART IS WRITING (e.g., the abstract artist Calvin Seibert called his paintings “a diary, a visual text”). Viewers of artworks sometimes feel as if they are in conversation with artists, and vice versa, leading to the conceptual metaphor ART IS CONVERSATION. Performance artworks, such as Marina Abramović’s “The Artist is Present,” explicitly aim to bring viewers’ reactions into defining an artwork’s meaning or significance. To give another example of the ART IS CONVERSATION metaphor, one performance piece exhibited “a series of blenders containing live goldfish which museum visitors could either blend or refrain from blending.” This artwork clearly relied on people’s reactions to the possibility of using the blender to pose questions about human nature and our responses to the environment. Projects like this represent a “conversation” more so than do traditional artwork–observer relationships. Some artists consider themselves as having conversations with their artmaking materials (e.g., canvases, clay), rather than with human observers. The contemporary artist Masako Kamiya embraced this idea when she wrote, “I engage in a dialogue with paint. My statement is each dot I make with the brush; then I respond intuitively to each unexpected play of dots. . . This process is an interchange with the painting activity.”110 Abstract art takes the conceptual metaphor ART IS CONVERSATION in a slightly different direction when talking about how the materials interact with one another as if in a spontaneous dialogue. The artist Annie Neely claimed that her artistic goal was to examine “how color, paint and form meet and respond to one another.”111 These varying conceptual metaphors for artistic endeavors describe some of the ways that both artists and art observers think about the processing of making and appreciating artworks. As is true with most other abstract target domains, several embodied source domains are explored to offer different perspectives on what artists are doing and what artworks may partly mean to audiences. These conceptual metaphors are not optional to understanding the artistic process, but provide a fundamental framework for understanding how art “speaks” and conveys “meaning.”
enacting conceptual metaphors in material culture Another demonstration of conceptual metaphors in multimodal experiences is seen in studies on material culture. Christopher Tilley’s book, Metaphor and Material Culture, presented an analysis of several
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archeological and ethnographic studies that highlight the role of metaphors in the creation and interpretation of various material forms (e.g., texts, sculptures, canoes, tools, settlement designs, rock carvings, pottery, cave drawings, animal figures, and ceremonial practices).112 Tilley strongly argued that “Solid metaphor cannot be reduced to a series of linguistic metaphors,” and that the interconnectedness of different material artifacts reveals the power of the metaphorical mind to create and appreciate varying cultural forms. Let me summarize his argument through quoting the following passage:113 The artefacts work as prompts to perform processes of conceptual mappings between them. Perhaps the most common case of this is the perception of shared parts or elements such as bodies and pots and houses having openings or orifices or being containers, thus permitting them to be linked, or shared aspects of physical structure (e.g., houses and axe blades having a trapezoidal form), sharing the same shape or form. Technological processes such as weaving or potting or smelting may provide the dynamic images of movement and change which may be compared with the movements of kin or animals or the seasons. Basic ideas such as a distinction between something being covered/ uncovered can be used to liken clothing with house decoration or spatial distance to create analogies between forms of animal and human life. Colours may be mapped by virtue of their being shared and so on. Such metaphoric and metonymic mappings work because of the almost limitless proliferation of detail in the world of things in which a source image is mapped onto a target domain that is also an image.
Research on material culture unveils the ubiquity of metaphorical thinking and how the study of human artefacts offers compelling evidence against critics who argue that conceptual metaphors only emerge from language use. Let’s consider, though, a specific example of how conceptual metaphors can be enacted in material culture. Rob Wiseman examined why huntergathers build their dwellings close to people who are typically their kin and argued that these buildings are material examples of the SOCIAL DISTANCE IS PHYSICAL DISTANCE metaphor.114 Although linguistic evidence provides support for this metaphorical mapping (e.g., “I am feeling very close to you”), case studies within ethnoarcheology offer additional credence for the impact of metaphor SOCIAL DISTANCE IS PHYSICAL DISTANCE. A large-scale analysis of 1792 examples from 117 hunter-gatherer societies showed a positive correlation between kinship distance and spacing
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between shelters. Closer examination of these living arrangements indicated a progressive expansion with parents and dependent children being closest, followed by grandparents and dependent grandchildren, adult parents with adult siblings, and then elders with elder siblings. These spatial living arrangements cannot be explained by presumed functional reasons such as sharing food or protection against predators, because these goals could readily be achieved through many different spatial organizational schemes. However, the prominence of correlations in bodily experiences, such as AFFECTION IS WARMTH and EMOTIONAL DISTANCE IS PHYSICAL DISTANCE give rise to the SOCIAL DISTANCE IS PHYSICAL DISTANCE metaphor, as well as its associated DIFFERENT IS DISTANT. These embodied metaphors offer a motivated explanation for why people construct their settlements in the regular ways they do, both within prehistoric and contemporary societies. The fact that settlements are routinely created, torn down, and rebuilt in a different location, especially in certain hunter-gatherer societies, shows how the SOCIAL DISTANCE IS PHYSICAL DISTANCE metaphor is being continually enacted over time.115 The archeological record provides a distinct kind of empirical support for the real-world significance of conceptual metaphors, even apart from ordinary language use. One extensive analysis of prehistoric pottery and pleated basket design from the American Southwest demonstrated important correspondences between these artifacts and different conceptual metaphors.116 For example, many features of pottery and woven baskets, along with other stitched fabrics, were quite similar, all of which were suggestive of the possibility that the conceptual metaphor POTTERY IS A TEXTILE was a widely shared idea among Southwest American potters. Thus, the pottery and textiles were connected to metaphorical expressions of an earth-bowl and sky-basket cosmos. Creative artworks not only reveal aspects of contemporary conceptual systems, but also show important continuities between the metaphorical minds of archeological cultures and modern ethnographic groups. Modern history also reveals the presence of conceptual metaphors in human artifacts, including, not surprisingly, contemporary architecture. Rosario Caballero has studied the discourse of architecture and observed the prominence of verbal metaphors both in terms of how architects talk of their creative processes and how reviewers of completed structures describe their aesthetic judgments of these artifacts.117 As Caballero observed, “Not only do architects often think in metaphors when
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approaching a new design, but such metaphors are translated into visual and graphic forms.”118 Architects often work with a range of conceptual metaphors, including, BUILDINGS ARE LIVING ORGANISMS, ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE IS CLOTH MAKING, BUILDINGS ARE CLOTH, ARCHITECTURE IS LANGUAGE, BUILDINGS ARE TEXTS, BUILDINGS ARE MACHINES, ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE IS MUSIC MAKING, and BUILDINGS ARE MUSICAL PIECES.119 Consider one review of a building, designed by Steven Holl, and called “Cite de L’Ocean et du Surf,” that is structured around the idea of BUILDINGS ARE LIVING ORGANISMS. Holl understands the visceral thrill of continuing with the ocean’s rollicking power. Such experiences feed through in the muscular yet sensuous architecture, which cups and cradles visitors with the concrete wave. The curved platform also acts as a belvedere rising up to address the site and frame views to the distant western horizon where sea meets sky. This sense of compression and release is intended to suggest the experience of surfing. “is analogous to being on a rolling sea” says Holl, “when you dip down in a valley of water and are spatially enclosed (. . .) then the sea lifts you up and you can see in every direction.”120
Reading this review reinforces the idea that our experiences of certain buildings are like interacting with a living being, an impression that strongly emerges given the human predisposition to understand objects and events in life, even very concrete ones, in familiar metaphorical terms. Kshmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser have asserted that “metaphor, metonymy, and other blends are literally ‘built in’ to the architecture and art to structure the experiences of people in these spaces.”121 They considered two religious architectural wonders, the ninth-century Buddhist monument of Borobudur in Indonesia and the medieval cathedral church of Chartres in France. Visitors to these holy sites often engage in ritual bodily acts as they move through and up these shrines. For example, the physical act of circumambulating up the Borobudur is seen as enabling the walkers to attain nirvana, which emerges as a specific instantiation of the correlation between vertical height and status, power, and authority (i.e., STATUS IS UP, POWER IS UP). These conceptual metaphorical conceptualizations become “spiritually charged” given the LOTUS metaphor, in which different stages of life development correspond to the image of the lotus flower. Thus, by traveling from the flower’s roots (the base of Borobudur), along the stem (the central vertical section), and up to the flower (the crest), one acquires “the perfection that the lotus metonymically symbolizes.”122
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In a similar way, the vertical structures of Chartres, a classical gothic cathedral with very high ceilings and tall towers, were constructed to “reach upwards toward the sky of God’s metaphoric home in heaven.”123 Inside the church, visitors encounter an altar up on a platform which the congregation must look upward to observe. Suspended above the altar is the cross, signifying Christ, while breaded wafers sit on the altar, standing for the body of Christ. Both the congregation and priests must genuflect (i.e., drop to one knee and bow) when approaching the altar and cross, creating an even greater distance between humans and material symbols. People’s experiences of the cathedral is, therefore, imbued with symbolic meanings that are structured around widely shared embodied primary metaphors, namely STATES ARE LOCATIONS and CHANGE OF STATE IS MOTION, each of which is immediately felt as one moves from a distant location to enter Chartres. On the cathedral’s floor is a unicursal labyrinth that one can literally follow, as if walking on this path will enable the person to let go of “personal agency with respect to direction of movement, trusting that the journey will lead to the right goal.”124 Walking along the labyrinth also enacts KNOWING IS SEEING as one progressively arrives at places within the church where different religious symbols (e.g., stained glass window with religious narratives) can be examined and understood, until one arrives to the cathedral’s essence (i.e., ESSENTIAL IS CENTRAL). This study of people’s interactions with Borobudur and Chartres illustrates how architectural structures offer “material anchors” for “complex cultural constructs” that are deeply rooted in conceptual metaphorical thinking. These holy sites were designed many hundreds of years ago to enable visitors an embodied sense of widely shared metaphorical ideas, but crucially within the context of fostering profound religious experiences.
conclusion The wealth of research on multimodal experience represents some of the most exciting, new developments in the study of the metaphorical mind. Long-time critics of CMT have argued that conceptual metaphors must be demonstrated within non-linguistic domains. This plea emerges from skepticism about the circularity in cognitive linguistic analyses on conceptual metaphors and the concern that enduring metaphorical concepts may arise from language alone.125 However, the diverse topics explored in this chapter clearly illustrate the extent to which metaphor infiltrates, and gives structure to, different kinds
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of conceptual reasoning, social judgments, gesture, artworks, music, dance, and material culture. Of course, scholars interested in these non-linguistic aspects of experience do not conduct their research studies simply to refute the critics of CMT. The studies described above, nonetheless, point to significant commonalities between the conceptual metaphors underlying language with those that motivate other facets of human expression. Still, some of the research on multimodal metaphors and metaphors in completely non-linguistic experiences has slightly different manifestations than are seen within language. Moreover, studies on non-linguistic metaphors enables us to recognize variations in metaphorical thinking, such as seen in gradation in conceptual metaphorical activation within gesture, music, or dance. The beauty of this research, both for scholars and laypersons, is the analogue nature of metaphoricity in many multimodal forms. Because many of the domains examined in this chapter unfold in real time, metaphor scholars have begun to increasingly acknowledge the importance of dynamic movements, even when objects are still, in our understanding of their meaning and value. Most notably, metaphorical experiences are inherently multimodal and should always be understood as emerging from, and enacted by, the entire body in action. There is clearly room for future empirical research that explores in more detail the extent to which people infer conceptual metaphors as part of their interpretation of gestures, artworks, and material cultural artifacts. Similar to debates over the cognitive linguistic evidence on conceptual metaphors, we still need better experimental data showing that metaphorical concepts not only motivate aspects of multimodal expressions, but also shape how participants (both creators and observers) understand the metaphorical basis of what is meaningful in different bodily and artistic enactments. For the moment, though, it is more than fair to assert that the empirical evidence, once again, points to the constraining presence of conceptual metaphors in many complex particularities of human life.
7 Conclusion and the Future
There was a time, not very long ago, when it was almost preposterous to suggest that metaphor had a major role in human life. Most everyone recognized that metaphors may occasionally burst forth, typically because of the poetic genius of very special people. Creative writers and artists possess imaginative gifts that enable them to spin words into novel metaphorical constructions. Certain verbal metaphors can pull us away from clichéd, mundane reality and let us briefly experience a transcendent, aesthetic world. All of us have some potential for appreciating the wonders of metaphor as a linguistic or artistic creation. Still, the world of metaphor has always traditionally been viewed as a special refuge that has little to do with ordinary human cognition. Metaphor wars have been fought over a new vision of metaphorical language and thought. Contrary to the traditional view, articulated above, metaphor is a fundamental part of human conceptual systems and not just a special facet of speech and writing. The astonishing idea that metaphor may be a basic scheme of human thought has been proposed by several scholars over the centuries. It was, however, only with the publication of “Metaphors We Live By” in 1980 that empirical research began appearing in support of the conceptual metaphor hypothesis. The present book presented an overview of the vast literature demonstrating that metaphor is a critical part of how we ordinarily think and talk. These studies reveal how conceptual metaphors are not the mere fictions of cognitive linguists, but are psychologically real features of human thought and expression. At the same time, many research programs described in this book have been motivated by a desire to expand conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) so that it can be more inclusive of the incredible mosaic of human experiences beyond those that are narrowly seen as within the “cognitive” domain. For example, conceptual metaphors are now widely understood to have significant roots within 262
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human embodied activity, something that few scholars would have anticipated back in 1980. Furthermore, and quite importantly, conceptual metaphors have now been shown to structure many non-linguistic expressive experiences and, indeed, are indicative of various social, cultural, and even neural influences on human thought and language. My primary aim in writing this book was to gather in one place many of the arguments and empirical evidence supporting the possibility that conceptual metaphors are crucial in defining human life. Describing this research is necessary because metaphor wars have too often been fought by people who simply do not know the complexity of the data that lend credence to CMT, as well as offer refinements to the theory. I am hopeful that future debates about conceptual metaphors in human life will be more informed about the empirical contents of CMT. My plea for a fair reading of the literature is intended as a cautionary warning to those who glibly dismiss the theory in its entirety, because of different linguistic intuitions, selective readings of the experimental data, or because of the theory’s embrace of the terms “conceptual” and “cognitive.” Productive arguments over conceptual metaphors must acknowledge all of the empirical evidence from a variety of academic fields that directly addresses the ways conceptual metaphors add meaningful structure to human life. One of the most forceful criticisms of CMT is that the theory is reductionist and fails to capture many of the specificities of meaningful metaphorical experience. These complaints stem, to a significant degree, from the rendering of conceptual metaphors as short, schematic pairings of words in small caps, such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING, and ANGER IS HEAT. Critics view these simplistic summaries as the presumed entirety of conceptual metaphorical experience, almost as if these words alone represent metaphorical concepts, rather than serving as shorthand for complex, dynamic webs of thoughts and feelings, each of which are continually defined and bodily enacted. We must recognize that the labels for conceptual metaphors are only communicative devices employed in scholarly discussions and are not reflections of actual metaphorical concepts and experiences. Moreover, our understanding of every conceptual metaphor changes in each moment of real life, bodily action (i.e., linguistic and non-linguistic). Conceptual metaphors do not sit individually in some mental cabinet, waiting to be activated and then mechanically applied in a generic way for each and every interpretive act. Instead, conceptual metaphors are always articulated in slightly different ways in each context. Just as each snowflake may be unique, despite the fact that all snowflakes are made of the same substances, the precise
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conditions under which each conceptual metaphor emerges make then all exquisitely particular. It is really important to acknowledge the specificity of metaphorical experience when talking about conceptual metaphors and their functions in everyday cognition and expression. Each CMT analysis of a particular verbal metaphor, literary work, gestural action, artwork, or musical composition may suggest that one or more conceptual metaphors partly motivate what is meaningful about different communicative and expressive actions. But nobody claims that the meanings of a linguistic metaphor or a literary creation, to take two examples, are completely defined by conceptual metaphors, or that interpretations of human artifacts can be reduced to conceptual metaphors (and their embodied and/or neural roots). Still, the empirical evidence overwhelmingly validates that embodied conceptual metaphors are enduring constraints which motivate why we act in metaphorical ways and interpret human artifacts as expressing different metaphorical meanings. The original proposal that metaphor was part of our ordinary conceptual system was never intended to dismiss the historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic dimensions of metaphorical experience. Yes, metaphor is not just a linguistic device, and has many roots in pervasive patterns of cognitive and embodied activity. However, this claim, which offered a major reorientation to the ways that metaphor had traditionally be conceptualized and studied, is consistent with the fact that speaking, writing, gesturing, and creating artworks are all human actions that are clearly shaped by a confluence of factors ranging from historical and cultural forces, operating at slower time-scales, to cognitive and neural forces, working along fast time-scales. Metaphors in thought are not just static entities within an isolated cognitive system. Contemporary debates over what is the right level of analysis or best empirical method to adopt when studying metaphor has led to unproductive stalemates because researchers too often quickly dismiss, or are even completely ignorant of, the general perspective and empirical findings offered by those working from different points of view. For example, some criticisms of CMT focus entirely on whether or not a cognitive approach is best to study and explain metaphor. I think this debate really focuses on the wrong question. Our attention should be directed toward how different types of knowledge and experience interact with one another to give rise to particular metaphorical actions. Investigating this issue demands that scholars not assume that they can simply study one facet of metaphor in some domain of experience from their own, autonomous, point of view
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(e.g., the cultural, social, linguistic, cognitive, neural perspectives). Instead, metaphor scholars must realize, and openly acknowledge that metaphorical actions always emerge from the interaction of a constellation of forces. What happens at the level of culture is shaped by actions at linguistic level. What happens at the social level is always influenced by embodied actions and experience. What happens at the cognitive level is partly determined by neural and evolutionary constraints. The discourse level is always partly embodied, and, indeed, bodily experience is itself shaped by cultural and discourse factors. Mark Johnson nicely captures this idea of the interconnectedness of thought and language with many other dimensions of our social experience:1 Since thought is a form of coordinated action, it is spread out in the world, coordinated with the physical environment and the social, cultural, moral, political, and religious environments, institutions, and shared practices. Language – and all other forms of symbolic expression – are quintessentially social behaviors.2
Most generally, every level of analysis is always in interaction with every other level, such that human metaphorical actions should be properly characterized as dynamical and emergent, and not merely an assortment of isolated perspectives or properties of mind. Despite the abundance of empirical research in favor of CMT, there is certainly room for new advances. Let me mention four topics that are ripe for scholarly attention. First, CMT requires greater precision in reliably identifying conceptual metaphors from the systematic analysis of language patterns. Developments in corpus linguistics and automatic conceptual metaphor identification studies will be especially critical in this regard. At the very least, though, scholars should always outline the exact steps they engage in when drawing inferences about underlying conceptual metaphors from samples of language or other expressive modalities (e.g., gesture, art, music, dance). How did you first determine what was metaphorical in your sample? How did you then explicitly infer that certain conceptual metaphors, but not others, were the motivating force for overt metaphorical expressions? Furthermore, we all need to explore in greater detail how conceptual metaphors are elaborated upon through non-metaphorical language and media. The constraining presence of conceptual metaphors is not just manifested in metaphorical language and actions. As Lakoff and Johnson earlier noted, for example, “We live our lives on the basis of inferences we derive via metaphor,”3 and my suggestion is that some of these inferences
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are often characterized in non-metaphorical ways. This possibility should be one focus of new work in metaphor studies. Second, a classic interpretation of conceptual metaphors is that these are created from the mapping of usually concrete, often embodied, source domain knowledge which is projected to better structure target domain concepts, typically referring to ideas from a dissimilar aspect of experience. Consider the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY where the JOURNEY source domain is understood as having image-schematic structure, as in the SOURCE–PATH–GOAL schema. CMT usually assumes that embodied source domains within conceptual metaphors are nonmetaphorical given their direct relations to recurring patterns of bodily experience across different bodily modalities. However, our experiences of journeys, and the emergence of image schemas, such as SOURCE–PATH–GOAL, are rarely untouched by other symbolic meanings. Our physical journeys in life, again across different bodily modalities, always are imbued with existential, social, and cultural meanings, often in the form of allegorical themes. When we walk from point A to point B, our journey is dictated by our desires and goals. The obstacles we face along the path as we move toward our physical destination are interpreted given varying cultural beliefs and personal ideals. For these reasons, many recurring patterns of bodily experience are deeply socialized, enculturated, and may even be metonymic in the sense of standing for larger metaphorical, and allegorical, themes in our lives. The most important implication of this idea for CMT is that metaphorical meanings do not necessarily arise from the mappings of purely embodied knowledge onto abstract concepts. Instead, the source domains in conceptual metaphors are themselves metaphorical in nature. Of course, the metaphoricity of source domains may arise via feedback from source-totarget metaphorical mappings, especially as seen in the various entailments or correspondences created by conceptual metaphors. After all, we may understand many aspects of LIFE from our concrete, physical experiences of JOURNEYS, but the association of JOURNEYS with LIFE can clearly create a metaphorical interpretation of journey-taking activities in life. The most important implication of this “metaphorical source domains” hypothesis is that metaphoricity in experience will not be restricted to what we typically view as abstract concepts, but will extend more massively into concrete bodily experiences and actions. Some of the experimental results from social psychological studies, reviewed in Chapter 6, offer support for this claim. If this is true, metaphor will be recognized as emerging in a far greater range of human life experiences than has generally been
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acknowledged so far. This is surely another topic that requires much further study and discussion. Third, CMT needs to further explore the ways conceptual metaphors may be organized and applied within different dimensions of human life. This imperative does not imply that a system of conceptual metaphors must be completely logical or internally consistent. As Lakoff and Johnson aptly observed, “Our conceptual systems are not consistent overall, since the metaphors used to reason about concepts may be inconsistent.”4 Nonetheless, greater attention should be given to showing how conceptual metaphors may interact with one another, as well as with many other kinds of figurative and non-figurative schemes of thought. Conceptual metaphors are not fully, and discretely, recruited in each instance of their application. Rather, conceptual metaphors are articulated in partial, probabilistic, ways, which exactly define the particularities of metaphorical experience. Some work consistent with this idea is already ongoing within cognitive linguistics (e.g., gesture studies), and research from psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience will be especially useful in detailing gradations in the emergence of conceptual metaphors.5 The partial nature of conceptual metaphorical experiences vary, given the people studied, the languages they use, the particular forms of metaphorical language employed and encountered, and the specific, adaptive challenges they all face when a metaphor arises. Metaphor wars have too often been a fight over whether conceptual metaphors are necessarily always present or completely absent in various moments of thought, language, and other human expressions. These dichotomous arguments should diminish once scholars embrace a more nuanced, dynamic vision of how metaphor actually contributes to real-world meaningful experience. Finally, conceptual metaphors do not dictate all aspects of thought and language, but should be properly understood as significant, but not exclusive, constraints on how we create metaphorical experience in human life. For example, CMT is not a complete theory of how language is understood, because conceptual metaphorical knowledge must be complemented by a diversity of other linguistic, cognitive, and social-cultural processes. CMT proponents would do well to explore the ways that enduring conceptual metaphors interact with social, pragmatic information within the constraints of real-time cognitive processing to offer more comprehensive, and psychologically real, models of metaphorical language use. Similarly, conceptual metaphors may not be a motivating or an emerging force for every instance of verbal metaphor understanding. Champions of CMT need to explicitly describe what the theory can and cannot explain, and
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not simply present isolated analyses that are always consistent with the theory. Let me briefly summarize some of my personal thoughts about conceptual metaphors. My claim is that conceptual metaphors are best understood in the following five broad ways: 1. Conceptual metaphors are emergent in context from the interaction of many cultural, social, linguistic, cognitive, and neural forces. No single force, or level of experience, entirely explains where metaphorical ideas come from or continue to shape everyday metaphorical experience. 2. Conceptual metaphors are important constraints on metaphorical experience, but do not completely define all aspects of how people create metaphorical meaning. 3. Conceptual metaphors are not fully activated, one-by-one, in every instance of their application within human life. People often experience conceptual metaphors in partial, probabilistic ways depending on their past experiences, the languages they speak and types of verbal metaphors they use, their bodily actions, and adaptive challenges (e.g., their personal and social goals, the contexts they inhabit, the physical world etc.). 4. Conceptual metaphors often have source domains that are themselves understood in symbolic, metaphorical ways. 5. Conceptual metaphors, because they are emergent, are always dynamic and exquisitely particular within each context. They are sensuous, multimodal, often arise in non-linguistic experience, and are much more embodied, communicative articulations than small recipes or linguistic symbols inside people’s heads/brains. Wars can be terrible to be part of, and I admit frustration with the ways the wars over conceptual metaphors have sometimes been waged in scholarly circles. Nonetheless, certain long-time struggles about important intellectual ideas can be instructive and beneficial to all participating combatants. The theory of conceptual metaphor represents a paradigm shift in the study of metaphor and mind. We have learned a great deal about the diversity of metaphorical experience as a result of CMT. There is still much to be discovered. My desire is that this book may provide a new starting point for metaphor research, one that leads forward to a less contentious journey than has been travelled in the recent past. Let us all take great pleasures in our scholarly studies of metaphor as we move toward a more nuanced, sophisticated theory of the ways that conceptual metaphor helps create meaning in human life.
Notes
d e d i c at i o n 1. Pragglejaz Group (2007)
chapter 1 1. http://hardballblog.msnbc.com/_nv/more/section/archive?author=chrismatt hews. 2. Ortony (1975). 3. Gibbs (1994); Lakoff & Johnson (1980, 1999). 4. Lakoff & Johnson (1980: p. 4). 5. Booth (1978). 6. Lakoff & Johnson (1999). 7. Vervaeke & Kennedy (1996); Murphy (1996). 8. Jackendoff & Aaron (1991); Pinker (2007). 9. See Black (1954); Gentner & Bowdle (2008); Glucksberg (2001); Sperber & Wilson (2008). 10. Fauconnier & Turner (2002, 2008). 11. Parker (1998). 12. See Gibbs (2011a) for discussion. 13. Howe (2007); Quinn (1992). 14. See Gibbs (2011a); Gibbs & Colston (2012) for reviews. 15. Keysar et al. (2000). 16. Feldman (2006); Gibbs (2006b); Lakoff (2008); Lakoff & Johnson (1999); Johnson (1987). 17. Haser (2005). 18. Wierzbicka (1986: p. 307). 19. Rakova (2002: p. 215); Lakoff & Johnson (2002: p. 260, p. 251, p. 261). 20. Rakova (2003: pp. 178–179). 21. www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/timmcgraw/shesmykindofrain.html. 22. Evans (2003: p. 75). 23. Zinken (2007: p. 461). 24. Hogan (2002: p. xx).
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270 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.
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Haser (2005: p. 190). Parker (1998; p. 430). Leezenberg (2001: p. xx). Ibid. p. 144. Pinker (2007: p. 276). Crisp (2002: p. 11). McGlone (2007: p. 122). McGlone (2011: p. 572 and p. 566). http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2006/09/. Cameron (in press). Swan (2002; p. 447). Quinn (1992: p. 57 and p. 60, respectively). Gibbs (1994, 2006b, 2011a); Gibbs & Colston (2012).
chapter 2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
Kövecses (2010). Kövecses (2010: p. 23). Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 98. Lakoff & Johnson (2003: p. 92). Ibid. p. 95. Johnson (1987). Ibid. One proposal in cognitive linguistics argues that there may be a diversity of projections that constitute metaphorical meaning. Conceptual projection may follow from different routes (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & Pérez Hernández, 2011): (1) interaction based on image schemas, (2) interaction between propositional cognitive models, (3) interaction involving metonymic models such as double metonymy, and (4) interaction between metaphor and metonymy. There are continuing discussions and debates over the very nature of image schemas and how best to characterize their psychological reality (see Hampe, 2005). Lakoff & Turner (1989). Also see Lakoff (1993). Lakoff (1993: p. 215). Also see Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & Pérez Hernández (2011) for criticisms of the invariance principle. Lakoff (1987: p. 387). Kövecses (2010). Ibid. Lakoff (1990). Lakoff (1993). Ibid. p. 222. Lakoff & Johnson (1980). Grady (1997, 1999). See Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & Pérez Hernández (2011) for an alternative account of complex metaphors.
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23. See Kövecses, (2010); and Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal (2007) for how metonymy also limits metaphorical mappings within CMT. 24. Lakoff (2008, 2014); Feldman (2006). 25. Lakoff & Johnson (2003: p. 255). 26. Rizzolatti & Craihhero (2004). 27. Ibid. 28. Narayanan (2007); KARMA is a story understanding system. A different computational system, ATT-Meta, reasons about verbal metaphors within a question answering system, and also makes reference to conceptual metaphorical ideas and beliefs in drawing various inferences. See Barnden (2008). 29. See http://georgelakoff.com/tag/cascades/. 30. Flusberg et al. (2010). 31. Ibid. p. 9. 32. http://araw.mede.uic.edu/~alansz/metaphor/METAPHORLIST.pdf. 33. One discussion of computational models of metaphor noted that “a critical problem with the Berkeley Metaphor List is that the mapping ontology is noncompositional in that there is no easy way to combine the existing mappings to create more complex ones” (Loenneker-Rodman & Narayanan, 2012: p. 497). 34. Also see the Hamburg Metaphor Database that lists conceptual metaphors underlying metaphorical expressions in German and French (LonnekerRodman, 2008). Also see the data base created by Andrew Goatly, titled “metalude,” at www.ln.edu.hk/lle/cwd/project01/web/introduction.html. 35. Kövecses (2010). 36. Kövecses (2005). 37. Alverson (1994). 38. Kövecses (2005). 39. Sweetser (1990). 40. Ibid. 41. Yu (2003). 42. Psomadakis (2007). 43. Kövecses (2005); Yu (2003). 44. Kövecses (2003: pp. 315–316). 45. Yu (2008). 46. Ibid. p. 375. 47. Gibbs (1994). 48. Gibbs (1994); Lakoff & Johnson (1980). 49. Gibbs (1994). 50. Gibbs (1994); Gibbs & Beitel (1995); Lakoff & Turner (1989); Naciscione (2015). 51. Lakoff & Turner (1989). Also see their book for ideas on the relations between poetic proverbs and the Great Chain of Being. 52. Naciscione (2015). 53. Many cognitive linguists now explicitly discuss the cline between alive and dead, and sleeping and waking, to highlight the degree of metaphorical activation within verbal and gestural metaphors. See Müller (2007). 54. Morgan (1997). 55. For example, Lakoff (1987). 56. Ibid.
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57. See, for example, Croft & Cruse (2004); Cuyckens & Zawada (2001); Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2007). There is much debate over the ultimate utility of network models of polysemy. Ron Langacker argued that network models have provided useful information about the motivation for polysemy, yet still acknowledges that this approach is “misleading by virtue of being overly discrete” (Langacker, 2006: p. 146). Determining the varied distinct sense of a polysemous word is challenging, and Langacker drives home this point using the following analogy: “Counting the sense of a lexical item would then be analogous to counting the peaks of a mountain range: how many there are depends on how salient they have to be before we count them, and they appear discrete in the first place only because we ignore how they grade into one another at lower altitudes. The uncertainty we sometimes experience in determining which particular sense of an expression instantiates on a given occasion is then to be expected. The uses in question are like points in the valley between two peaks. It is essentially an arbitrary matter whether we assign such points to one peak, to the other, to both, or to neither” (Langacker, 2006: p. 148). 58. Panther & Radden (1999); Panther & Thornburg (2003, 2007). 59. Gibbs (1994). 60. Panther & Thornburg (2007). 61. Barnden (2010); Barcelona (2000); Croft & Cruse (2004); Dancygier & Sweetser (2014); Radden (2000); Ruiz-Mendoza & Pérez Hernández (2003). 62. See classic works by Freeman (1995); Lakoff & Turner (1989); Turner (1996). 63. Lakoff & Turner (1989: p. 215). 64. Ibid. 65. Several critics suggest that there are many more than these four methods for creating novel metaphors in both literary and non-literary works (Semino & Steen, 2008). 66. Lakoff & Turner (1989). 67. Gibbs & Bogdonovich (1999). 68. Caballero (2003). 69. Musolff (2000: p. 222). 70. Jäkel (2002); Kövecses (2012). Also see Slingerland (2003) for further crosscultural evidence on conceptual metaphor and religious ideas. 71. Kövecses (2012). 72. Gibbs (1994). 73. Musolff (2012: pp. 306–307). 74. I hasten to note that Musolff (2012: p. 307) commented in regard to this extract that “It would be implausible to interpret this text in classic CMT style, as a non-deliberate, ‘automatic’ use of conceptual elements from one source domain. . .” I discuss the issue of the possible deliberate use of metaphor in Chapter 3, and suggest that there is not clear divide between automatic and deliberate metaphor use as supposed by some scholars these days. 75. Ferrara (1994: pp. 139–141). 76. From Lonergan & Gibbs (2016). 77. See Gibbs (2016).
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78. This includes earlier versions of Metaphor and Symbol and Review of Cognitive Linguistics, namely Metaphor and Symbolic Activity and Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics. I have omitted reference to papers published in another metaphor-related journal, which should also be examined, “metaphorik.de.” 79. Koller (2002). 80. Goatly (2002). 81. Yu (2003). 82. O’Brien (2003). 83. Ozcaliskan (2003a). 84. Ritchie (2003). 85. Simó (2009). 86. Johnson & Larsen (2003). 87. Borbely (2004). 88. Boers (2003). 89. Goldwasser (2005). 90. Semino (2005). 91. Talebinejad & Dastjerai (2005). 92. Deignan (2003). 93. Maalej (2004). 94. Musolff (2006). 95. MacArthur (2005). 96. Al-Zahrani (2007). 97. Musolff (2006). 98. Núñez, Motz, & Teuscher (2006). 99. Lu & Chiang (2007). 100. Simó (2008). 101. Pritzker (2007). 102. Wiseman (2007). 103. Peña Cervel (2010). 104. Türker (2013). 105. Samaniego (2011). 106. Theodoropoulou (2012). 107. Johansson-Falck (2010). 108. Ching (1993). 109. Fesmire (1994). 110. Pancake (1993). 111. Kövecses (1993). 112. Howe (1988). 113. Rohrer (1991). 114. Linn (1991). 115. Rohrer (1995). 116. Lackie (1991). 117. Kövecses (1991). 118. Leddy (1995). 119. Yu (1995). 120. Elwood (1995). 121. Winter (1995).
274 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.
Notes on pages 54–55 Romaine (1996). Gibbs, Colston, & Johnson (1996). Schweik (1996). Ptzemyslaw, van der Lans, & Hermans (1998). Markgraf & Pavlik (1998). O’Connor (1998). Nerlich & Jaspal (2012). Li (2010). Schroder (2009). Bochaver & Fenko (2010). Can & Can (2010). Velasco-Sacristán & Fuentes-Olivera (2006). Herrera-Soler (2006). Ozcaliskan (2003b). Marmaridou (2006). Yu (2011). Kövecses (1995). Moore (2006). Wilcox (2004). Cienki (1998). Gibbs (1990). Cienki (2004). Yu (2003). Grady (1997). Odebunmi (2010). Hellsten (2011). Manuel Urena & Faber (2010). Svanlund (2007). Lizardo (2012). Jing-Schmidt (2008). One important development within cognitive linguistics has been the rise of research within conceptual integration, or conceptual blending theory, as guided by the seminal scholarship of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002, 2008). Blending theory differs from CMT in assuming that four spaces, rather than two, operate in the creation of metaphorical mappings. Conceptual blending theorists see their framework as better suited to issues relating to the online processing of metaphor. For example, Seana Coulson claimed that “In conceptual metaphor theory, metaphors are seen as instantiations of entrenched mappings between cognitive domains, while in blending theory; the meaning of a metaphor is constructed on-line in conceptual integration networks” (Coulson, 2001: p. 178). Blending theory also stresses the importance of context for online metaphor processing and, as a result, may be more appropriate for characterizing a wider range of complex cognitive and linguistic phenomenon than is CMT. Many meaning constructions evident in literary works, for instance, have been nicely described within the context of the blending theory framework (Dancygier, 2012; Freeman, 2011; Oakley & Hougaard, 2008). Scholars embracing the “Critical
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Discourse Analysis” perspective also argue that blending theory has various descriptive advantages over CMT in accounting for complexities in discourse (Hart, 2008). For various reasons, conceptual blending theory has simply not attracted the interest of experimental psychologists and neuroscientists in the same way as has CMT. On the surface, this may seem surprising given that blending theory pays more explicit attention to details possibly associated with verbal metaphor processing. My strong impression, though, is that blending theory does not easily translate into testable hypotheses, ones that can be easily distinguished from alternative theories, including CMT. One may expect, for instance, that blending processes should occur during certain moments of metaphor interpretation, and then find evidence for this activity using behavioral or neuroscience techniques. In many cases, however, most other theories of verbal metaphor comprehension make roughly similar claims regarding when certain, perhaps effortful, processing should be noticed. Part of the problem here is that blending theory is not sufficiently developed within a falsification framework. More generally, blending theory has not been as greatly noticed and vigorously attacked by scholars from many academic disciplines as has CMT. Conceptual blending theory is certainly part of the mix in the metaphor wars. My reluctant decision, nonetheless, is to focus primarily on the arguments over conceptual metaphors given its incredible prominence within the multidisciplinary world of metaphor scholarship. Interested readers should also look at papers by Coulson, and Pagán Cánovas (2013) and by Fauconnier and Lakoff (2013) that seeks to find convergences between CMT and conceptual blending theory. Also see one response to this by Per Aage Brandt. www.cogsci .ucsd.edu/~coulson/spaces/brandt.pdf.
chapter 3 1. From the San Jose Mercury News. www.mercurynews.com/music/ci_23518560/ review-san-francisco-symphony-triumphs-stravinsky. 2. Lakoff & Johnson (1980: p. 5). 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potter_Stewart. 4. Lowenberg (1975: p. 316). 5. Gibbs (1994); Gibbs & Colston (2012). 6. “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor” (Stevens, 1965). 7. Johnson (1981: p. 23). 8. Kövecses (2010: p. 10). 9. Hogan (2002: p. 496). 10. See Gibbs (1994); Gibbs & Colston (2012). 11. Hogan (2002: p. 497). 12. Ibid. 13. Steen (2008). 14. McGlone (2001: p. 107). 15. Gibbs et al. (1993). 16. Gibbs & Colston (2012).
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17. Some studies suggest that less than 5 percent of all metaphors in discourse are of the “A is B” type (or the “A is like B” simile form). See Cameron (2003). 18. I admit that my description here is quite general as there was, and continues to be, much discussion about metaphor as reflecting “anomalous” or “pragmatically insincere” uses of language. But these accounts are woefully inadequate in being able to satisfactorily identify metaphor as a unique form of language, one that differs from other types of figurative, indirect, and even non-sensical meaning. See Gibbs (1994) and Gibbs & Colston (2012) for reviews of these proposals. 19. But see articles and books by Grady (1999), Lakoff (1993), Tendahl (2009), Tendahl & Gibbs (2008), and Wilson (2011), among others, for ideas on the complementary nature of resemblance metaphors with those studied within CMT. 20. The phrase “special type of metaphorical processing” can mean very different things to various metaphor scholars. Some assume that a special type of processing refers to ended pragmatic inferences beyond those required for lexical disambiguation, while others suggest that these processes relate to the production of cross-domain mappings, or even complex conceptual blending processes. 21. McGlone (2001); Murphy (1996); Rakova (2003). 22. Müller (2007). 23. Lakoff & Turner (1989). 24. See for example Steen (2008). 25. Keysar et al. (2000). 26. Deignan (2006). 27. Pragglejaz Group (2007). 28. Ibid. 29. Wear (2015). 30. Ibid. 31. MIP does not identify historical metaphors, such as “ardent love,” because these is no contrast between the contextual meaning, in this case referring to an emotional state, and the basic, historical meaning referring to temperature. See Steen et al. (2010). 32. Steen et al. (2010). 33. MIPVU covers words whose meaning in context are conveyed directly, but still express cross-domain mappings. For example, the expression “The campsite was like a holiday village” does not contain any metaphorically used words, but the phrase as a whole refers to the contrast between two distinct domains. MIPVU also aims to detect metaphor in cases where the metaphorical meaning is conveyed through substitution or ellipsis, and can be explained through cross-domain mappings. For instance, the phrase “but he is” can be an ellipsis for the inferred message that “but he is an ignorant pig” in reference to a male colleague, such that “is” may be deemed to be an implicit metaphor. A third difference with MIPVU is its acknowledgment of cases where a word formation suggests a cross-domain mapping, such as the use of “like,” “as,” “compare,” “analogy,” or “as if.” All of these lexical units should be marked as potentially metaphorical. Finally, MIPVU aims to include novel formations such as “honey hunting” in which one of the parts may indicate metaphorical
Notes on pages 71–80
34. 35. 36.
37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.
46.
47. 48. 49. 50. 51.
52. 53.
54.
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meaning. Most generally, MIPVU captures a broader range of cross-domain metaphorical meanings than does MIP. Gibbs (1994). Pérez-Sobrino & Julich (2014). I must add a note here to again emphasize that MIP and MIPVU are analytic procedures and not characterizations of the mental status of words or word meanings. For example, cognitive linguistic research has shown that word meanings are not always clearly individuated, they often exhibit different degrees of attraction and repulsion from one another, are typically tied to particular constructions (see for instance Gries, 2006). Of course, dictionaries rarely incorporate these information sources into their attempts to define the meanings, often quite related senses, of words, which make their use in determining the “basic” sense of any word somewhat problematic. Corpus linguistics may offer tools for obtaining more detailed information about the meanings of words and relations to other lexical items, although doing extensive corpus studies for each word in any text may be impractical. Semino (2008: p. 15). Dorst, Reijnierse, & Venhuizen (2013); Krennmayr (2011); MacArthur (2015). Dunn (2013). Ibid. Ibid. p. 42. Levin et al. (2014). It is unclear on what bases these determinations were made. Stefanowitsch (2006). Subsequent identification procedures such as MIP and MIPVU offer standard ways of conducting manual searches, although both methods are still difficult to apply in the analysis of very large databases. Stefanowitsch (2006) argues, nonetheless, that this strategy is successful in identifying an almost complete set of metaphorical patterns reflecting basic metaphorical mappings. Goatly (2007). See my discussion below on “deliberate” metaphor. Deignan (2006); Stefanowitsch (2006). Deignan (2006). Stefanowitsch & Gries (2006). See Sullivan (2013) for an in-depth look at the relations between metaphorical language and grammatical constructions. Of course, Rose-Brooks (1958) first outlined some of the particular grammatical forms in which metaphor is found. Neuman et al. (2013). This removal of idiomatic phrase is unfortunate because it ignores a substantial source of metaphoricity in language given that many idioms retain their enduring, and sometimes embodied, metaphorical roots. Neuman et al. argue that their automated system would have performed even better if candidate expressions could be more reliably selected by the dependency parser, and that decisions about a word’s abstractness would have been more reliably performed with a dictionary that explicitly linked a word’s embodied meanings with its metaphorical extensions.
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55. Dunn (2013). 56. The systems also differed in the degree to which they falsely identified utterances as metaphorical. 57. Dunn (2013). 58. There are critics of this entire project, given its eventual aim to conduct foreign policy based on metaphorical readings of how other cultures talk. For instance, one anthropologist wrote that the project is “reminiscent of a Cold War era fascination with American, Russian or German ‘modal personality types.’ For many anthropologists, research scenarios like these are troubling because they raise a Levy-Bruhl-like specter of ‘how natives think.’ . . . A cynic might go even farther to suggest programs such as this one are developing technologies for ‘enemy-making.’” This same critique notes that “Ignored or sidelined in IARPA’s efforts are competing conceptions of metaphor,” research and theories as exemplified by philosophers Paul Ricouer, Max Black, and Donald Davison, which “foreground the properties of metaphor as extensive rather than conventional, and as emergent rather than underlying.” See www.ethnog raphy.com/2014/01/troping-the-enemy-culture-metaphor-programs-and-notio nal-publics-of-national-security/. 59. www.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsi/gazette/2012/05/metanet-project. 60. Shutova (2013). 61. Shutova (2015: p. xx). 62. Steen (2008). 63. Ibid. p. 222. 64. Gibbs (1994); Gibbs & Colston (2012). 65. Steen (2008: p. 222). 66. Steen (2013: p. 193). 67. Advocates of the idea of “deliberate metaphor” differ over whether conventional metaphors may also be judged as deliberate in some cases. For example, Cameron distinguished between “deliberate” and “conventionalized” metaphor, and presumes that conventional metaphors are “part of participants’ shared knowledge resources for talking about a particular topic.” Krennmayr, on the other hand, argued that at least some metaphors can be both deliberate and conventional. Also see Charteris-Black (2012) for his proposal on “purposeful” metaphor. 68. Steen (2008: p. 223). 69. Indeed, Shakespeare’s wonderful metaphor about Juliet comes across quite differently if it were surrounded by any of the above signaling devices. Juliet is like the sun. Juliet is sort of the sun. Juliet is metaphorically the sun. Juliet is actually the sun. Juliet is the sun, so to speak. Shakespeare, thankfully, did not choose to signal his possible metaphorical intention when writing “Juliet is the sun.” 70. Gibbs (2015a), and also see Steen (2015) and Gibbs (2015b). 71. Krennmayr (2011: pp. 154–155). 72. Beger (2011: p. 53).
Notes on pages 87–107 73. 74. 75. 76.
77. 78. 79. 80.
81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.
Ibid p. 39. Steen (in press). Lakoff & Johnson (1980: p. 43 and p. 4, respectively). I can’t help but noting that scientists, in particular, often hate to be told that their theories and writings are infused with metaphor. As they often like to argue, “I never use metaphor. I don’t like to beat around the bush.” Gibbs (2013). Lakoff (1996). Also see Lakoff (2009). Ibid. p. 292. Metaphor identification methods, such as MIP and MIPVU, would generally be able to detect the potential metaphoricity of individual words in allegorical texts, assuming that an analyst has first read a text, understood its overall meaning, and presumably inferred the implied target which is the primary focus of the narrative. After this has been done, certain words in the text may be marked as “metaphorical” given the already determined allegorical meaning and context for the work. Of course, ordinary readers must infer the allegorical messages from some texts in an incremental, online manner, and may read a sizeable portion of a narrative before recognizing the larger symbolic content. See Chapter 5 for more on how people typically interpret allegorical speech and writing. Cameron (2011). Ibid. p. 82. Ibid. p. 35. Cameron et al. (2009: p. 84). Semino et al. (2013). Ibid. p. 47. Ibid. p. 47. Ibid. p. 48 Ibid. p. 49. Pauwels (2013: p. 523). Ibid. p. 524. Ibid. Ibid. Hellsten & Nerlich (2011). Ibid. p. 388. Ibid. p. 389. Breeding Supergods. Daily Mail. January 29, 1998. p. 35. Hellsten & Nerlich (2011). Ibid. p. 304.
chapter 4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
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https://mog.com/fairportfan/blog/265002. Stefanowitsch (2011: p. 301). Gineste et al. (2000); Utsumi (2005). Black (1954). Gentner, Bowdle, Wolff, & Boronat (2001).
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Notes on pages 107–116
6. Tourangeau & Rips (1991). 7. Structure mapping theory does not assume, like CMT, that people project information from the source to the target domain, only that there is alignment of the two in terms of their relational properties. 8. Sperber & Wilson, (2008); Wilson & Sperber (2002). 9. Sperber & Wilson (2008: pp. 84–85). 10. Glucksberg (2001); Glucksberg & Keysar (1990). 11. Bowdle & Gentner (2005); Gentner & Bowdle (2008). 12. Glucksberg & Haught (2006). 13. Haught (2013). 14. Lakoff (1993, 2008). 15. For example, see Grady et al. (1999). 16. See Steen (2015) for example. 17. Lakoff & Johnson (1999). 18. Still, the study of various languages also shows that claims for universality of these time metaphors may be somewhat more limited. See Moore (2006). 19. Evans (2003). 20. Vervaeke & Kennedy (1996). 21. Eubanks (2000). 22. Graham Low and Zazie Todd (2010) explicitly acknowledged this problem and urge scholars to embrace several “good practices” when doing metaphor analysis research. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
32. 33. 34. 35.
Recognize that metaphoricity can be complex, indeterminate, and unstable. Admit the problem and treat one’s solutions as compromises. Know what these compromises may entail. Tell readers how one has arrived at particular conclusions. Admit the limitations of one’s conclusions.
Ritchie (2003). Lakoff & Johnson (2003: p. 265). Vervaeke & Kennedy (1996). Sanford (2012). Ibid. Vervaeke & Kennedy (1996: p. 274). Ritchie (2003). Eubanks (2000). Other forms of figurative language also play a role, such as using understatement to metaphorically transfer terms from fencing, chess, and boxing to speak of an army in actual warfare (e.g., “parrying the thrust,” “countering the move,” or “blocking the punch” of another army); or using overstatement to metaphorically transfer terms from actual warfare to speak of a quarterback’s “throwing the long bomb” or an orator “overwhelming his opponent’s defenses.” Ritchie (2003). Eubanks (2000). Howe (2007: p. 13). Kövecses (2000); Lakoff (1987); Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez (2003); Tendahl & Gibbs (2008).
Notes on pages 116–137 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.
75. 76. 77. 78. 79.
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Yu (2008: p. 252). See Lakoff (1987). Stefanowitsch (2006). Ibid. p. 67. Ibid. p. 69. Kövecses (1998: p. 129). Ortony (1988). Svanlund (2007). Sullivan (2013). Lakoff (1993: p. 215). Ibid. Ibid. p. 80. Ibid. p. 85. Lakoff & Johnson (1980: p. 156). Rakova (2002: p. 238). Kövecses (2010: p. 217). Goatly (2007); Koller (2004); Musolff (2004). Koller (2004). Ibid. p. 198. Ibid. El Refaie (2014). Kövecses (2005); Sharifian et al. (2008). Kövecses (2005); Yu (2003). Zinken et al. (2008: p. 374). Zinken (2007). Ibid. p. 452. Johansson-Falck & Gibbs (2012). Lakoff & Turner (1989). Ibid. p. 116. Semino & Steen (2008: p. 244). Fludernik (2011: p. 6). Swan (2002: p. 447). www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174268. Gibbs (1994: p. 209). See www.poetry-archive.com/r/uphill.html#vdLv6r4Sw3C5X98h.99. Ibid. p. 451. Lakoff & Kövecses (1987). Kövecses (2005). The emergence of cultural models is not accomplished in a serial manner, going from experiential basis to cultural model, as the different factors likely interact, such that culture, for instance, can influence people’s bodily experiences. Quinn (1992: p. 73). Ibid. p. 218. Ibid. p. 84. Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2008). Geeraerts & Gevaert (2008).
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Notes on pages 138–151
80. Geeraerts & Gevaert (2008: p. 343). 81. Kövecses (2005). 82. Emanation (1995); Gibbs (1999); Kövecses (2005); Maalej (2004); Sharifian (2011); Yu (1999); Zlatev et al. (2008). 83. Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2013: p. 324). Also see Caballero & Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2014). 84. Lakoff & Núñez (2002). 85. Auslander (2001). 86. Danesi (2003, 2007); Devlin (2005); Johansen (2009); Soto-Andrade (2014). 87. Jeppsson, Haglund, & Amin (2015). 88. Research also shows that the most effective instructional analogies and metaphor in science texts are those that use students’ embodied experiences are the main source domains. See Niebert & Gropengiesser (2015). 89. Wilson (2011: p. 192). 90. Edwards (1991), Steen (2008); Wilson (2011). One study of adolescents’ spontaneous discussions of time can be explained entirely in terms of their communicative practices. Metaphoric talk of time, requires “no cognitive detour to the underlying structural mappings in the source domain” (Graf, 2011: p. 732 91. Some computational models of metaphor has demonstrated the possibility that certain higher-order metaphoric schemata can be inferred given exposure to different conventional metaphoric expressions, at least within certain selected domains such as economics (see Mason, 2004). 92. http://still4hill.com/2015/09/13/bridge-the-hillary-clinton-metaphor/. 93. Lakoff (1993). 94. Lakoff (1996). 95. Pinker (2007: p. 246). 96. Ibid. p. 248. 97. Ibid. p. 259. 98. Ibid. p. 261. 99. Ibid. p. 280. 100. From Eubank (1999: p. 190). 101. Ibid. p. 190. 102. Marshak (2009). Other examinations of organizational thinking suggest that there are anywhere between eight and twenty-two different conceptual metaphors for organization (e.g., machines, organisms, brains, cultures, political systems, psychic prisons, flux and transformation, and instruments of domination. Each metaphor underlies distinctive, but still partial, ways of understanding and managing organizations. 103. Vignone (2012). 104. Ryan & Ryan (1981: p. 121). 105. Sontag (1991: p. 34). 106. Ibid. p. 102. 107. Martin J. A monumental victory: Talk of the gown. Northeastern University Online Magazine. www.numag.neu.edu/9911/tog.html. 108. Reisfield & Wilson (2004). 109. Sherman (2001).
Notes on pages 152–166
283
110. Phil Eubanks made the argument, though, that different metaphors are not simply independent views about a contested topic, but are inextricably linked. He correctly observed: “Most metaphors respond to other metaphor and concepts. That is, particular metaphors are usually instances of larger conceptual metaphors, and conceptual metaphors almost always compete and converse with other conceptual metaphors.” See Eubanks (2010: p. 197). 111. Ibid. p. 250. 112. Ibid. p. 259. 113. Johnson (1991). 114. Steen (1999). 115. Semino et al. (2004). 116. Ibid. p. 1281. 117. Also note that the five-step procedure assumes that metaphorical mappings can be readily captured through a propositional analysis of meaning. I find this view to be rather antiquated, especially given the image-schematic nature of many conceptual metaphors and the fact that few cognitive scientists still assume linguistic meaning, or conceptual knowledge, to be simply a matter of propositional representations. 118. Musolff (2006: p. 28). 119. Musolff (2004: p. 26). 120. Ibid. p. 29. 121. Ibid. p. 23 122. Barnden (2008). 123. Hornsby (1995: p. 12). 124. Barnden, (2009: pp. 92–93.) 125. Charteris-Black (2004: p. 35). 126. Cameron also comments in regard to metaphor analysis that “the researcher does not come entirely cold to vehicle group since through working with the data to identify metaphor they will have some knowledge of the data structure and themes, its rhetorical highlights in some of the metaphors used.” Ibid. p. 118. Also, “although we strive for as much rigor as possible, the process is unavoidably hermeneutic and its success depends upon the imagination and creativity combined with as much trustworthiness as is possible” Ibid. p. 120. 127. Gibbs (2016). 128. El Refaie (2014: p. 109). 129. Ibid. p. 110. 130. Vidali (2010: p. 39). 131. Camus (2009: p. 475). http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrTcdGyaT5WcLIA6 GYnnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTByb2lvbXVuBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aW QDBHNlYwNzcg–/RV=2/RE=1446959666/RO=10/RU=http%3a%2f%2fucrel .lancs.ac.uk%2fpublications%2fCL2009%2f468_FullPaper.doc/RK=0/RS=4N 3xKwBEXsseD72rxM33XzVSnvc-. 132. El Refaie (2014: p. 118). 133. Ibid. p. 119. 134. Cameron (1999: p. 6).
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Notes on pages 166–180
135. Kövecses (2010: p. 305). 136. Ibid. p. 311. 137. Steen (2014: p. 129). Steen cites one scholar often identified with each approach.
chapter 5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
6. 7. 8.
9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
McMullen (1989: p. 210). Sandra & Rice (1995). Ferrara, (1994: p. 130). Ibid. pp. 135–136. Note here how the use of a non-metaphorical phrase can lead to our understanding that something said earlier was intended to express metaphorical meaning. Becker (1997: pp. 66–67). Ibid. p. 67. Asking people to describe what they were thinking does not, by any means, provide a direct reflection of how their minds were actually working. Psychological studies, across a wide range of subfields within the discipline, demonstrate that people typically have very poor insights into the underlying cognitive processes at work when they perceive, learn, solve problems, use language, and, most interestingly, have different emotional reactions to their own predicaments and to other people. The fact that we think we can introspect about the inner workings of our minds does not mean that such intuitions, even if trained, are either consistent or accurate. Boers & Littlemore (2000). See Gibbs & Beitel (1995) for a review of this literature. White (1987). Gibbs & Beitel (1995). It is possible to expand on standard explication tasks to more extensively study people’s possible metaphorical ideas, and their abilities to map these onto diverse contexts (Gibbs, Strom, & Knowlton-Spivey, 1997). For example, people can be asked more detailed questions about the source-to-target domain mappings in verbal metaphors to reveal many aspects of their complex embodied metaphorical understandings of what different verbal metaphors mean. Thus, despite the difficulties in drawing firm conclusions about metaphorical thought from explaining verbal metaphors, future research may more systematically explore via questionnaires people’s tacit metaphorical abilities. Gibbs & Nascimento (1996). Ibid. p. 299. Zaltman & Zaltman (2008). Brown (2003). Robins & Mayer (2000: p. 58). Other studies in this series provide evidence that under certain conditions metaphor processing will be quickly terminated during people’s reading, and reasoning about, the short vignettes. Thus, in some situations, a metaphor was unnecessary and may interfere with a person’s reasoning process, especially when the reader can use existing domain general knowledge to understand the situation.
Notes on pages 181–192 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
32. 33. 34. 35. 36.
37. 38. 39. 40.
41. 42.
43. 44.
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Keefer et al. (2014: pp. 12–13). Thibideau & Boroditsky (2011). Barry et al. (2009). Ibid: pp. 20–21. People’s political attitudes and party affiliations were not nearly as strong predictors of participants’ social policy recommendations as was their embrace of certain metaphors for obesity. Similarly, people’s self-reported health states and their social demographics also did not explain their preferred policy endorsements as did their metaphorical conceptions of obesity. Boroditsky (2001). Lakoff (1987). Gibbs & O’Brien (1990). Reddy (1979). Gibbs, Gould, & Andric (2006). Katz & Taylor (2008). Katz and Taylor readily acknowledge that many cultures do not organize life events in a simple, linear ways so that the LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor may imply different spatial structures in different cultural settings. Katz & Law (2010). Ibid. p. 269. Glucksberg, Brown, & McGlone (1993). Nayak & Gibbs (1990). One alternative explanation of the above findings is that people’s judgments about the contextual appropriateness of idioms are mostly determined by the overlap between the words in the context and the words in the idiomatic phrases. Under this view, people are not making their appropriateness judgments based on the connections between the conceptual metaphors in the contexts and those that motivate the meanings of the idioms. Instead, people simply find that some idioms have words that are semantically related to words in the stories, thus making some idioms more appropriate to use than others. However, a study that analyzed the stimuli from Nayak and Gibbs (1990) discovered that this alternative explanation was not plausible given the lack of semantic overlap between the words in the story contexts and those in the idioms (Glucksberg, McGlone, & Brown, 1993). Pfaff, Gibbs, & Johnson (1997). Soriano & Valenzuela (2009). Allbritton et al. (1994). Quite importantly, follow-up studies demonstrate that the above priming results are not due to overlap in the lexical items between the priming sentences and the test words. Thibodeau & Durgin (2008). One should note here that Thibodeau and Durgin only talk of “families of conventional metaphors,” and do not explicitly endorse the idea that these verbal metaphors are necessarily reflective of underlying conceptual metaphors. Golshaie & Golfam (2014). Gibbs (1992).
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Notes on pages 194–206
45. Gibbs et al. (1997). 46. Similar findings have been reported for Spanish with the ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER metaphors. See Valenzuela & Soriano (2007). 47. Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky (2002). 48. Related research shows that texts describing arrangements that are inconsistent with standard orientational metaphors (e.g., MORE IS UP, THE FUTURE IS FORWARD) are more difficult to process than are texts consistent with these metaphors (Langston, 2002). Interestingly, Langston resists interpreting these findings as indicating that conceptual metaphors are automatically accessed in discourse comprehension. He suggests alternatively that people may sometimes strategically apply conceptual metaphors as just one of many comprehension tools readers have at their disposal. In this way, the issue of whether conceptual metaphors are automatically recruited during discourse processing remains open to many psychologists, despite the wealth of findings reported above and below. 49. Matlock et al. (2005). 50. Richardson & Matlock (2007). 51. Santiago et al. (2007). 52. Ibid, p. 515. 53. Sato et al. (2014). 54. Follow-up analysis showed that these effects could not be explained by mere lexical priming processes. 55. Gibbs & Ferriera (2011). 56. Gibbs (1994, 2006); Lakoff & Johnson (1999). 57. Gibbs et al. (2004). 58. Ibid. 59. Boroditsky & Ramscar (2002). 60. A visual priming study specifically demonstrated that people’s responses to the ambiguous time question (“Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward by two days. What day will the meeting now be held?”) is structured in terms of a specific conceptual metaphor in which events that are in front are earlier, and those that are behind being seen as later (i.e. a TIME-Reference-Point metaphor), rather than in terms of an ego or time moving metaphor (i.e., a TIMEEgo metaphor) (Núñez, Motz, & Teuscher, 2006). 61. Wilson & Gibbs (2007). 62. Horchak et al. (2014). 63. Gibbs (2013). 64. Slepian & Ambody (2014). 65. Perlman et al. (2015). 66. Ritchie (2008, 2009). Also see Semino (2010). 67. Lacey et al. (2012). 68. Citron & Goldberg (2014). 69. Desai et al. (2011). 70. Boulenger et al. (2009); Cacciari et al. (2011); Desai et al. (2011). 71. Schmidt-Snoek et al. (2015). 72. This study, similar to others, showed some differences in brain activations between literal and metaphorical sentences, some of which may be due to
Notes on pages 206–223
73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.
85. 86. 87.
88.
89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.
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differences in the imageability and familiarity with the metaphorical and literal statements. Aziz-Zadeh & Damasio (2008); Cardillo et al. (2012). Bardolph & Coulson (2014). Cacciari et al. (2013). Casasanto & Gijssels (2015: p. xx). Also see Mahon & Caramazza (2008) for other issues regarding the interpretation of cognitive neuroscience data on embodied language processing. See Gibbs (2005). Lachaud (2013). Gibbs & O’Brien (1990); Cacciari & Glucksberg (1995). Keysar & Bly (1995). Skoufaki (2009). Ibid. p. 32. Just as important, though, various experiments have demonstrated that first language learners acquire the meanings of idioms motivated by conceptual metaphors before they do other idioms (Gibbs, 1991), and that second language learners learn idiomatic phrases more readily when they explicitly attend to these expressions’ conceptual metaphorical motivations (Boers, 2003; Boers & Littlemore (2000). McGlone (1996). See Gibbs et al. (2011). Finally, Keysar et al. (2000) present reading time data that appeared to contradict the claim that conceptual metaphors are relevant to understanding various conventional metaphorical phrases. As described above, there is other evidence that suggests various reasons for the failure to detect conceptual metaphors in the Keysar et al. (2000) study (see Thibodeau & Durgin, 2008). See Bowdle & Gentner (2008); Glucksberg & Keysar (1990); Glucksberg et al., (1992); Glucksberg (2008). Also see Lakoff (1993) for one attempt to explain interpretation of resemblance metaphors in terms of CMT. Sperber & Wilson (2008; 2012). Tendahl (2009): Tendahl & Gibbs (2007). Gibbs et al. (2011). McGlone (2007); Steen (2015). Allbritton, Gerrig, & McKoon (1994); Gong & Ahrens (2007); Pfaff et al. (1997). Kintsch (2008); Louwerse (2008). Gibbs & Colston (2012). See especially the work of Sarah Duffy and colleagues (Duffy, 2014; Duffy & Feist, 2014; Duffy et al., 2014). Gibbs & Santa Cruz (2012).
chapter 6 1. www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/03/29/visitor-viewpoint-marina-abra movic/. 2. http://unknownhipster.com/.
288 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
Notes on pages 224–231 Forceville (2009: p. 73). Murphy (1996: p. 200). Boot & Pecher (2011). Casasanto (2008). Casasanto (2008). Casasanto & Jasmin (2010). Casasanto (2009). Cassasanto & Jasmin (2010). Casasanto & Chrysikou (2011). Leung et al. (2011). Some scholars argue that amodal representations may be necessary for tasks that involve more abstract reasoning. For example, Mahon and Caramazza (2008) suggest that concepts consist of both amodal symbolic and sensorimotor information. Under this view, the core of a concept is formed by amodal symbolic information while sensorimotor information enriches conceptual processing and provides it with a relational context. A related proposal, called LASS (language and situated simulation), assumes that concepts are represented in two distinct ways: linguistic representations and sensorimotor simulations (see Barsalou, 2008). Meier & Robinson (2004). Schubert (2005). Crawford et al.(2006). Meier & Robinson (2006). Horstmann & Ansorge (2011). Williams & Bargh (2008). Kang et al. (2011). Citron & Goldberg (2014). Schnall et al. (2008). Zhong & Liljenquist (2006). Bilz (2012). Storbeck & Clore (2008). Schnall (2011). Banergee et al. (2012). Zhong et al. (2010). These effects may be modality specific, because lying by speaking can prompt people to select a gift of mouthwash rather hand sanitizer, but they pick the hand sanitizer over the mouthwash when they lie with their hands (Lee & Schwarz, 2010). Ackerman et al. (2010). Cherkasskiy et al. (2012). Meier et al. (2012). Lee & Schwarz (2012). Liljenquist et al. (2010). Lee & Schwarz (2012). Hellman et al. (2013). Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel (2007). Wilkowski et al. (2009).
Notes on pages 231–239
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39. Zanolie et al. (2012). 40. Also see work on the “metaphor congruency effect” showing that judgments about “black” and “white” are not totally symmetrical. Thus, black is consistently seen as representing bad but white is seen as positive only when black is also present (Lakens, Semin, & Foroni, 2011). 41. Miles et al. (2010). 42. Casasanto & Dijkstra (2010). 43. Schnall (2014) proposes, based on the results of many experiments within social psychology, that some metaphorical concepts are more basic than others, especially those relevant to the source domains of verticality, container, and distance. 44. A second issue with the social psychology research focuses on the causal basis for the catalogue of experimental effects noted between sensory experiences and different social judgments. These findings could be due to people activating a previously encoded primary metaphor once they have felt some specific sensorimotor activity (e.g., warmth, moving forward, dirt). But people may only enact the primary metaphor as a full-bodied action given the presences of both (a) a sensory experience and (b) the requirement to make a certain social judgment. This alternative perspective sees embodied metaphors as unfolding in bodily expressive actions rather than being activated from memory to shape people’s social perceptions. 45. Calbris (1990: p. 194). 46. Mittelberg and Wagner also noted how metaphorical gestures illustrate how we “externalize cognition, structures and practices through the use of both space and the body” (Mittelberg & Waugh, 2009). 47. Casasanto (2008). 48. Ibid. 49. Núñez (2005, 2008). 50. Alibali et al. (2011). 51. Müller (2007). 52. Ibid. p. 102. 53. Cienki (1998). 54. Cienki & Müller (2008). 55. Cienki & Müller (2008). 56. Ibid. 57. Mittelberg & Wagner (2009). 58. Mittelberg (2010). 59. Kimmel (2013). 60. Núñez & Sweetser (2006). 61. Bos & Cienki (2011). 62. http://unknownhipster.com/. 63. Kennedy (1982). 64. Forceville (2005). 65. Shinohara & Matsunaka (2009). 66. Koller (2009). 67. Ibid. p. 58. 68. Coegnarts and Kravanja (2012a).
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Notes on pages 239–253
69. The left-is-past and right-is-present schema is also widely employed in animation films (Forceville & Jeulink, 2011). Another device for evoking different time perspectives is moving the camera toward the protagonist’s face to suggest an impending flashback. Focusing close up on the face indicates a movement inward within the protagonist’s mind and memory. Movement away from the face represents a return to the present. 70. Coegnarts & Kravanja (2012a). Also see the edited collection of Coegnarts & Kravanja (2015). 71. Forceville (2009). 72. Ortiz (2014). 73. Ibid. 74. Yu (2011). 75. Ibid. p. 250. 76. Coegnarts & Kravanja (2012b). 77. Kappelhoff & Müller (2011: 122). Also see Müller & Schmitt (2015), and Schmitt, Greifenstein, & Kappelhoff (2014). 78. Müller & Schmitt (2015). 79. Müller & Schmitt (2015: 336). 80. Forceville (2011: pp. 291–292). 81. Charlton (1989: pp. 238–239). 82. Wilkie et al. (2010). 83. Spitzer (2004: p. 77). 84. Ibid. p. 363. 85. Recall from Chapter 4 that musical language may have one of the highest proportions of metaphorically used words, compared to other language genres. See Pérez-Sobriano & Julich (2014). 86. Johnson & Larsen (2003). 87. Larson (2013). 88. Antović (2009). 89. Antović et al. (2013). 90. Wolter et al. (2015). 91. Brower (1999). 92. Antle et al. (2009). 93. Ibid. p. 74. 94. Zbikowski (2013: p. 113). 95. Zbikowski (2009: p. 379). 96. Maglio & Matlock (1999). 97. Matlock et al. (2014). 98. Pusschmann & Burgess (2014). 99. Ibid. p. 1698. 100. Ibid. p. 1700. 101. Van Camp (1996). 102. Ibid. p. 177. 103. Kittay (1987: pp. 14–15). 104. Kappelhoff & Müller (2011). 105. Ibid. pp. 132–133. 106. Gibbs (2003).
Notes on pages 254–267 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.
116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.
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Schaffman (2003). All quotes below are from pp. 198–199. Ibid. p. 199. Sullivan (2006, 2009). See Sullivan (2006: p. 6). Ibid. p. 7. Tilley (1999). Ibid. p. 268. Wiseman (2014). See Wiseman (2014) for a further discussion of differences between cultures that affect the enactment of the metaphor SOCIAL DISTANCE IS PHYSICAL DISTANCE. Otman (2000). Caballero (2006). Caballero (2014: p. 159). Ibid. Ibid. p. 163. Stec & Sweetser (2013: p. 265). Ibid. p. 273. Ibid. p. 276. Ibid. p. 284. See Kertész & Rákosi (2009) for an argument on why circularity is less of a problem for CMT than many believe.
chapter 7 1. Johnson (2007: p. 151). 2. This viewpoint on the distributed nature of human cognition has been widely discussed within the cognitive sciences. See Clark (1997); Gibbs (2006b); Hutchins (1995), for example. 3. Lakoff & Johnson (2003: p. 273). 4. Ibid. p. 273. 5. A close examination of the psycholinguistic findings, for example, clearly indicates that not every person always recruits each and every relevant conceptual metaphor when understanding all instances of verbal metaphors. The recruitment of conceptual metaphors may, once more, be quite task, and person, dependent and more generally is a matter of degree than all or none.
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Index
allegory, 49, 93–94, 162–163 ANGER, 25–26, 118–120, 131–138, 189–195, 230–231, 237–238
critical discourse analysis/CDA, 123–124, 159 culture, 9–11, 14, 123–126, 131–138, 241, 254–256, 259–260
Bible, 48–50 bodily experience, 6–7, 105, 113–117, 126–128, 139–141, 143–144, 152, 163–165, 185–186, 199–204, 206–207, 215–216, 226–232, 242–244, 254–256, 258, 266 bodily specificity hypothesis, 226 bottom-up, 58, 153–155
discourse analysis, 44–54, 94–100, 123–128, 146–153, 156–157, 160–161 dynamical system view, 216–221, 265 emergence, 15–16, 23–24, 30–34, 96, 106–107, 109, 162–167, 212, 216–221, 242–243, 264–265, 268 emerging metaphor theory/EMT, 142–143 enactment, 33, 220, 233–236, 251–254, 256–260, 261 episodic memory, 187–189 EVENT STRUCTURE, 26–28, 118–119 event-related potentials/ERPs, 206
career of metpaphor theory, 108–109 cascades, 33–34 categorization, 108–111, 224–227 circular reasoning, 114 cognitive topology, 122 computational modeling, 31–34 conceptual blending theory, 109 conceptual metaphor theory/CMT, criticism of, 7–14, 58, 109, 113–115, 120–121, 123, 129–130, 133, 263 cross cultural, 37–39, 123–126, 131–138 experimental evidence contrary to, 208–211 impact of, 5–7, 14–16, 262–263 psychological validity of, 8, 12–13, 88–89, 170–198, 211–213 scope of studies, 53–55 concret overlap algoritm/COO, 80–81 Contact Improvisation, 253–255 CONTAINER/CONTAINMENT, 22, 23–24, 185, 198, 225 contextualization, 46 corpus study, 12, 67–69, 77–83, 96–101, 114–115, 117–120, 121, 126–128, 191–192 correspondences, epistemic, 26 ontological, 25
fMRI, 205 gesture, 232–236 idioms, 39–40, 184–187, 189–190, 192–195, 208–209 idioms, 39–40, 184–187, 189–190, 192–195, 208–210 analyzability of, 40 image schema, 152, 234–235 image schema, 23–28, 206–207, 245 inderect request, 44 individual differences, 173–174 intuitionist analysis, 15, 77, 118–120 invariance hypothesis/principle, 25–26, 122 JOURNEY, 17–18, 21, 25, 37–38, 48–52, 91–92, 128–129, 160–161, 177–178, 187–188, 239–241, 253 KARMA, 32–33
319
320
Index
latent semantic analysis/LSA, 215–216 lexical diaambiguation, 214–215 lexical priming, 194–195 mappings, non-parallel, 157–158 neural, 32–33 cross-domain, 12, 24–26, 30, 65, 86, 92–93, 106–111, 116–117, 124, 132–133, 176–179, 242 Master Metaphor List, 34–36 mathematics, 138–142, 233 meaning, contexutual, 72–73 literal, 62–65 mental imagery, 184–187 mental simulation, 33, 202–204 MetaNet, 81–82 metaphor identification procedure/MIP, 69–75 metaphor, XYZ, 210 usage based account of, 142–145 traditional view of, 6, 8–9, 262 systematic, 160–162 structure-mapping theory of, 107 spacial, 32–33, 123, 183–184, 190, 197–198, 215–216, 225–228, 232–233, 235–236, 246–247, 248–250, 253–255 signaling device, 85–87, 89 propositional analysis of, 153–155 primanry/complex, 28–30, 37, 109, 125, 137 poetic, 1, 12, 129–130, 177–178 novel, 44–47, 64, 67–69, 108–109, 191–192, 204, 210 neural theory of, 30–34 mixed, 52–53, 87–88 in static images, 236–239 in political discourse, 1–4, 8–9, 51, 145–149, 156–157, 159, 162–163, 226 in moving images, 239in material artifacts, 256–260 in health communication, 150–151, 154–155, 164–165, 181–183 in economic/business discourse, 32–33, 124–125, 149–150, 180 in dance, 251–255 in computing experience, 248–251 in artistic process, 255–256 image, 46, 67, 237–244 identifying, 9, 57–103, 153–154 grammatical, 75 extended, 47–52 discourse dynamics of, 94–96 deliberate, 83–90, 102 deep, 178–179 dead/alive, 12, 61 conventional, 9–10, 18, 61, 64–69, 74, 168–169, 175–176, 190–192, 208–209, 233
audio-visual, 243 aptness of, 107–109 “A is B”, 9, 63, 106–107 “metaphor in thought”, 4–5, 7, 90–94, 264 metaphorical creativity, context-induced, 46 target-induced, 45–47 metaphorical entailment, 22–23, 198–199 metaphorical experience, 222–224, 247–248 metaphorical fit hypothesis, 180–181 Metaphorical Pattern Analysis/MPA, 117–120 metaphorical scenario, 155–157 metaphorical strength, 121 metonymy, 43–44, 109–110, 235, 241 mirror neurons, 32 music, 11, 244–248 polysemy, 41–43, 65 post hoc category/concept, 12, 88 presidential contest/debate, 1–3, 8–9, 92–93, 146, 148–149, 162–163 proactive interference/PI, 188–189 problem soloving, 179–184, 226–227 proverbs, 40–41, 174–175 reasoning, 179–184 reductionism, 13, 263 relevance theory, 107–108, 204 Remote Associates Test/RAT, 227 Researching and Appplying Metaphor/ RaAM, 5 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 6 script, 44 semantic congruity, 62 sensory activation, 205–207 Shakespear, 1, 45, 59, 83, 90 simily, 108–109 social cogniton, 228–232 source domain, 20–21 source domain, 20–22 metaphorical, 24–25, 49–50, 163, 214–215, 233–234, 266–267 SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, 24, 239 target domian, 18–20 TIME, 111–112, 188–189, 195–197, 201, 210–211, 239 top-down, 82, 153 value neatral mapping adjuncts/VNMA, 158 WAR, 2–4, 8–9, 113–117, 180 x-schemas, 33 Zaltman Metpahor Elicitation Technique/ ZMET, 178–179
