The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language

Elena Semino, Zsófia Demjén, Elena Semino, Zsófia Demjén

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317374701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research on metaphor and language. Featuring 35 chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume takes a broad view of the field of metaphor and language, and brings together diverse and distinct theoretical and applied perspectives to cover six key areas:

• Theoretical approaches to metaphor and language, covering Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Relevance Theory, Blending Theory and Dynamical Systems Theory;
• Methodological approaches to metaphor and language, discussing ways of identifying metaphors in verbal texts, images and gestures, as well as the use of corpus linguistics;
• Formal variation in patterns of metaphor use across text types, historical periods and languages;
• Functional variation of metaphor, in contexts including educational, commercial, scientific and political discourse, as well as online trolling;
• The applications of metaphor for problem solving, in business, education, healthcare and conflict situations;
• Language, metaphor, and cognitive development, examining the processing and comprehension of metaphors.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Metaphor is a must-have survey of this key field, and is essential reading for those interested in language and metaphor.

Part I

Theoretical approaches to metaphor and language

1

Conceptual metaphor theory

Zoltán Kövecses

Introduction and a definition

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) started with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By (1980). The theory goes back a long way and builds on centuries of scholarship that takes metaphor not simply as an ornamental device in language but as a conceptual tool for structuring, restructuring and even creating reality. Notable philosophers in this history include, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche and, more recently, Max Black. A recent overview of theories of metaphor can be found in Gibbs (2008), and one of CMT in particular in Kövecses (2010a).

Since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) work, a large amount of research has been conducted that has confirmed, added to and also modified their original ideas. Often, the sources of the new ideas were Lakoff and Johnson themselves. Given this situation, it is obvious that what we know as conceptual metaphor theory today is not equivalent to the theory of metaphor proposed in Metaphors We Live By. Many of the critics of CMT assume, incorrectly, that CMT equals Metaphors We Live By. For this reason, I will not deal with this kind of criticism in this introduction to CMT.

The standard definition of conceptual metaphors is this: A conceptual metaphor is understanding one domain of experience (that is typically abstract) in terms of another (that is typically concrete). This definition captures conceptual metaphors both as a process and as a product. The cognitive process of understanding a domain is the process aspect of metaphor, while the resulting conceptual pattern is the product aspect. In this survey of the theory, I will not distinguish between the two aspects.

Overview of main concepts and development of CMT

In this section, I attempt to spell out the main features of CMT, as I see them. Other researchers might emphasize different properties of the theory. At the same time, I try to select those features on which there is some agreement among practitioners of CMT.

Metaphors are all-pervasive

In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggested that metaphors are pervasive not only in certain genres striving to create some artistic effect (such as literature) but also in the most neutral, i.e., most non-deliberately used, forms of language. CMT researchers, especially in the early stages of work on conceptual metaphors, collected linguistic metaphors from a variety of different sources: TV and radio broadcasts, dictionaries, newspapers and magazines, conversations, their own linguistic repertoires and several others. They found an abundance of metaphorical examples, such as “defending an argument”, “exploding with anger”, “building a theory”, “fire in someone’s eyes”, “foundering relationship”, “a cold personality”, “a step-by-step process”, “digesting an idea”, “people passing away”, “wandering aimlessly in life” and literally thousands of others. Most, if not all, of such linguistic metaphors are part of native speakers’ mental lexicon. They derive from more basic senses of words and reflect a high degree of polysemy and idiomaticity in the structure of the mental lexicon. The magnitude of such cases of polysemy and idiomaticity in the lexicon was taken to be evidence of the pervasiveness of metaphor. Based on such examples, Lakoff and Johnson proposed what came to be known as “conceptual metaphors”. However, CMT does not claim that each and every metaphor we find in discourse belongs to a particular conceptual metaphor.

Other researchers, however, find the presence of metaphor in real discourse less pervasive. As noted by Gibbs (2009), different methods produce different results in frequency counts of metaphors.

Systematic mappings between two conceptual domains

The standard definition of conceptual metaphors we saw earlier can be reformulated somewhat more technically as follows: A conceptual metaphor is a systematic set of correspondences between two domains of experience. This is what “understanding one domain in terms of another” means. Another term that is frequently used in the literature for “correspondence” is “mapping”. This is because certain elements and the relations between them are said to be mapped from one domain, the “source domain”, onto the other domain, the “target”. Let us illustrate how the correspondences, or mappings, work with the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS FIRE. Before I provide the systematic conceptual mappings that constitute this metaphor, let us see some linguistic metaphors, as derived by the lexical method, that make the conceptual metaphor manifest in English:

That kindled my ire.

Those were inflammatory remarks.

Smoke was coming out of his ears.

She was burning with anger.

He was spitting fire.

The incident set the people ablaze with anger.

Given such examples, the following set of correspondences, or mappings, can be proposed:

the cause of fire → the cause of anger

causing the fire → causing the anger

the thing on fire → the angry person

the fire → the anger

the intensity of fire → the intensity of anger

With the help of these mappings, we can explain why the metaphorical expressions listed above mean what they do: why, for instance, kindle and inflammatory mean causing anger, and why burning, spitting fire, and being ablaze with anger indicate a high intensity of anger, with probably fine distinctions of intensity between them.

This set of mappings is systematic in the sense that it captures a coherent view of fire that is mapped onto anger: There is a thing that is not burning. An event happens (cause of fire) that causes the fire to come into existence. Now the thing is burning. The fire can burn at various degrees of intensity.

Similarly for anger: There is a person who is not angry. An event happens that causes the person to become angry. The person is now in the state of anger. The intensity of the anger is variable.

The mappings bring into correspondence the elements and the relations between the elements in the FIRE domain (source) with the elements and the relations between the elements in the ANGER domain (target). Indeed, it seems reasonable to suggest that, in a sense, the mappings from the FIRE domain actually bring about or create a particular conception of anger relative to the view of fire we have just seen. This is what it means that a particular source domain is used to conceptualize a particular target domain. (I will come back to this issue later.)

In many cases, however, the two-domain account does not work and must be supplemented by a model of explanation that relies on four domains, or spaces (see Chapter 2 on conceptual integration and metaphor).

Given the metaphorically used set of elements in a domain, we can derive further knowledge about these elements, and can also map this additional knowledge onto the target. This additional kind of source-domain knowledge is often called “metaphorical inference”, or “metaphorical entailment”. For example, to stay with the metaphor above, in somewhat formal and old-fashioned English we can find sentences like “He took revenge, and that quenched his anger”. Quenching anger can be regarded as a metaphorical inference, given the ANGER IS FIRE metaphor. If anger is metaphorically viewed as fire, then we can make use of our further knowledge of anger-as-fire; namely, that the fire can be quenched. CMT provides an elegant explanation of such cases of extending conceptual metaphors.

At this point, an important question may arise: Can everything be mapped from one domain to another? Obviously not. Given a particular conceptual metaphor, there are many things that cannot be mapped, or carried over, from the source to the target. For example, given that THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, the number of rooms or whether the building has a cellar or an attic is not mapped. Several explanations have been offered to delimit the amount of knowledge that can be transferred from the source. One of them is the “invariance hypothesis” developed by Lakoff (1990). It suggests that everything from the source can be mapped onto the target that does not conflict with the image-schematic structure of the target. Another is proposed by Grady (1997a, 1997b), who claims, in essence, that those parts of the source domain can be mapped that are based on “primary metaphors” (see below). Finally, Kövecses (2000a, 2002) proposed that the source maps conceptual materials that belong to its main meaning focus or foci. It should be noted that the three suggestions differ with respect to which part of a conceptual metaphor they rely on in their predictions concerning what is mapped. The first relies primarily on the target, the second on the connection between source and target, and the third on properties of the source. None of these is entirely satisfactory.

From concrete domain to abstract domain

As we just saw, CMT makes a distinction between a “source domain” and a “target domain”. The source domain is a concrete domain, while the target is an abstract one. In the example conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, the domain of JOURNEY is much more concrete than the target domain of LIFE (which is much more abstract); hence, JOURNEY is the source (domain). In general, CMT proposes that more-physical domains typically serve as source domains for more-abstract targets, as in the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor.

This observation is based on the examination of hundreds of conceptual metaphors that have been discovered and analysed in the literature so far (such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, ANGER IS FIRE, THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS). The assumption that most conceptual metaphors involve more-physical domains as sources and more-abstract domains as targets makes a lot of intuitive sense. For example, the notion of life is hard to pin down because of its complexity; that of anger is an internal feeling that remains largely hidden from us; that of theory is a sophisticated mental construct; and so on for other cases. In all of them, a less tangible and thus less easily accessible target concept is conceptualized as and from the perspective of a more tangible and thus a more easily accessible source concept.

In our effort to understand the world, it makes a lot more sense to move conceptually in this particular direction: that is, to conceptualize the cognitively less easily accessible domains in terms of the more easily accessible ones. Notice how odd and unintuitive it would be to attempt to conceptualize journeys metaphorically as life, fire as anger or buildings as theories. We would not find this way of understanding journey, fire or building helpful or revealing, simply because we know a lot more about them than about such concepts as life, anger and theory. This is not to say that the reverse direction of conceptualization never occurs. It may occur, but when it does, there is always some special poetic, stylistic, aesthetic or similar purpose or effect involved. The default direction of metaphorical conceptualization from more tangible to less tangible applies to the everyday and unmarked cases.

Metaphors occur primarily in thought

According to CMT, metaphor resides not only in language but also in thought. We use metaphors not only to speak about certain aspects of the world but also to think about them. As we saw above, CMT makes a distinction between linguistic metaphors, i.e. linguistic expressions used metaphorically, and conceptual metaphors, i.e. certain conceptual patterns we rely on in our daily living to think about aspects of the world. For example, metaphors such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY can actually govern the way we think about life: We can set goals we want to reach, we do our best to reach those goals, we can make careful plans for the journey, we can prepare ourselves for facing obstacles along the way, we can draw up alternative plans in the form of choosing a variety of different paths, we can prefer certain paths to others and so on. When we entertain such and similar ideas, we actually think about life in terms of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor. And, consequently, we can use the language of journeys to also talk about life.

The idea that we think about a domain in terms of another can actually mean several different things. In one sense, as above, people may be guided by a particular conceptual metaphor in how they conceive of a domain, such as LIFE. In another, given a conceptual metaphor, they may utilize some of the implications of a particular domain they rely on (such as JOURNEY) in a conceptual metaphor and apply those implications to the other domain (such as LIFE) in their...