Mixing Metaphor

Mixing metaphors in speech, writing, and even gesture, is traditionally viewed as a sign of inconsistency in thought and language. Despite the prominence of mixed metaphors, there have been surprisingly few attempts to comprehensively explain why people mix their metaphors so frequently and in the particular ways they do. This volume brings together a distinguished group of linguists, psychologists and computer scientists, who tackle the issue of how and why mixed metaphors arise and what communicative purposes they may serve. These scholars, almost unanimously, argue that mixing metaphors is a natural consequence of common metaphorical thought processes, highlighting important complexities of the metaphorical mind. Mixing Metaphor, for the first time, offers new, critical empirical and theoretical insights on a topic that has long been ignored within interdisciplinary metaphor studies.

Yi Sun and Yang Bai, Xi’an International Studies University, in Review of Cognitive Linguistics 16:1 (2018):
Overall, we found the engaging and thought-provoking book has provided a plethora of fertile starting points for future research in this emergent interdisciplinary area of metaphor studies. It has remarkably input food for thought to prompt and facilitate new tasks and discussions on mixed metaphors that otherwise would have remained blurred and indistinct and opened an inviting and intriguing pathway for dominant but often bombarded CMT as an outlet.