Volume 5, Issue 1-2

Conceptual metaphor theory (CAIT) is the dominant force in the contemporary world of interdisciplinary metaphor studies. Over the past thirty years, scholars working within the CMT framework have gathered an impressive body of empirical research using a variety of linguistic, psychological, and computational modeling methods drat supports key parts of the theory However, CMT has also been widely been criticized - both as a theory of metaphor use and for its claims about the embodied, metaphorical character of abstract thought. This article describes some of die reasons people dislike CMT and suggests ways that CMT scholars may alter some people’s misunderstandings and address their legitimate concerns about the theory.

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the first cognitive-semantic theory of metaphor - Metaphors We Live By ( 1980) - this paper presents a communication-oriented perspective on the practice of metaphor analysis. Through discussion of contemporary metaphor theories, it identifies a number of unresolved issues. Among these are the notions of domains , mental spaces and binding , the unidirectionality hypothesis, the emergence problem, the significance of pragmatic context, and the philosophical status of representations. The theories discussed are conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual integration theory, the neural theory of language, the attribution model of metaphor, semiotic integration theory, and relevance theoretic approaches to metaphor including the hybrid theory of metaphor. Comparing analyses and explanatory frameworks, the paper offers a theoretical and methodological critique of these approaches - as food for thought and fuel for prospective future research projects in cognitive linguistics and beyond.

The paper focuses, on the one hand, on two theoretical problems of Conceptual Metaphor Theory: namely, the cognitive status and the creative dimension of the conceptual metaphors; on the other, it aims at approaching some descriptive findings from Conceptual Metaphor Theory within the perspective of Coseriu’s semantics. Over the past years, the universalist claim of pre-linguistic embodiment via image schemas has been subject to much criticism. Recent attempts to simply situate conceptual metaphors within a social and cultural context did not bring the expected results. Therefore, the need for a radical breakthrough from the old conceptual and theoretical framework of Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory became urgent. The reconstruction of cognitive science on phenomenological and hermeneutical bases is on the way to being pursued within the rising of the third generation of cognitive science. It will certainly represent a major advance for bridging the gap between cognitive science and other traditions of research, such as integral semantics.

In the thirty years since the appearance of Metaphors We Live By , cognitive linguistics has developed into a flourishing autonomous branch of inquiry. Interdisciplinary contacts, however, have largely been restricted to literary studies and the cognitive sciences and hardly extended towards the social sciences. This is the more surprising as, in 1970s anthropology, metaphor was seen as a key notion for the study of symbolism more generally. This contribution explores the cognitive linguistic view of social and cultural factors. Lakoff and Johnson appear ambivalent regarding the relation between culture and cognition; but they share the belief, elaborated in detail by Gibbs and Turner (2002), that cultural factors can be accounted for in terms of cognitive processes. This view runs into both methodological and philosophical difficulties. Methodologically, it assumes that cultural factors can be reduced to cognitive processes; philosophically, it boils down to a Cartesian emphasis on inner experience explaining outer phenomena. There are substantial anti-Cartesian strains both in contemporary philosophy and in a major current of Eighteenth- Century philosophy. The latter, in particular, emphasized the importance of embodiment and metaphor in cognition. As an alternative, I will sketch a more consistently semiotic- and practice-oriented approach that proceeds from linguistic practices to cognitive processes rather than the other way around. It takes practices as irreducibly public and normative; on this approach, so-called linguistic ideologies (Silverstein 1979) play a constitutive role in both linguistic practice and language structure. This alternative builds on recent developments in linguistic anthropology and the work of Peirce and Bakhtin. It suggests a different look at the relation between cognition, language, and social practice from that suggested in cognitive linguistics.

I propose to show that, in their Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), Lakoff and his collaborators do not offer a new account of metaphor but rather a wide-ranging representation of analogies, reconstructed on the basis of selected linguistic material (primarily collocations and idioms). Consequently, CMT is valuable not as an explanation of metaphorical language in use, nor a hypothesis about the genesis and development of concepts in individual minds, but primarily as a way to represent the results of unexplored social processes of lexicalization involving metaphor. If one adopts a more 'ecological', situated perspective, this global, post hoc approach may perhaps provide useful material to speculate on the forces that drive meaning extension in history.

Contrary to what is assumed in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the conceptual power of metaphor may not lie in its widespread unconscious use but in its more limited and targeted deliberate use, which may or may not give rise to conscious metaphorical cognition. Deliberate and conscious metaphorical thought is connected to the general functions of all conscious thought as described by Baumeister and Masicampo (2010). Their theory provides a basis for demonstrating how deliberate and conscious metaphorical cognition facilitate social and cultural interactions, by reconsidering Musolff’s (2004) analysis of metaphor in political discourse on European integration. The paper concludes by formulating some implications of CMT’s neglect of conscious metaphor and of deliberate metaphor more generally. If the power of metaphor lies in thought, as has been held by CMT for thirty years, it may be that conscious rather than unconscious cognition - or, more generally, deliberate rather than non-deliberate metaphor use - enables that power. Given the relative infrequency of deliberate and conscious metaphor use, this, in turn, may entail that the online effect of metaphor is more restricted than has been assumed over the past three decades.

One of the most broadly investigated topics in the conceptual metaphor literature is the importance of spatial construals for thinking and talking about time. We address the relationship between conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and conceptual integration theory (CIT) by exploring how people understand timelines - both as graphical objects, in discourse about timelines taken from newspapers and the web, and in poetic examples. The inferential structure of the timeline is well captured by the conceptual metaphors TIME IS SPACE and EVENTS ARE OBJECTS. Instantiated graphically, the timeline serves as a material anchor for a conceptual integration network representing partial cognitive models of time, lines, objects, and a hybrid model known as a ‘blend’. Understood in respect to this network, the analogue properties of the line give it novel computational properties facilitating inferences about the events that the timeline represents. The history of the modern timeline suggests that it reflects a distributed cognitive process, involving multiple individuals over a large span of time and illustrating the importance of cultural evolution in the development of conceptual integration networks. Analysis of both poetry and everyday discourse about timelines suggests that conventional mapping schemas are best viewed not as determining the interpretation of timelines but as providing soft constraints that help guide interpretation. Future metaphor research will best proceed via a merger of techniques from CMT and CIT, characterizing metaphor as involving complex networks of mappings that can be updated flexibly as a function of context and goals.

Cognitive metaphor theorists have identified a number of mappings that, it has been claimed, are both central to thinking and productive of linguistic metaphors. One of these is UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING. In this article, we re-examine UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING using two sources of naturally occurring data. Our first source is the Oxford English Corpus: a two-billion-word corpus of authentic contemporary English texts, from which we extracted a 1,000-citation concordance of the lemma SEE. We analyzed this into major sense groups and identified the most frequent lexico-grammatical patterns. Our second source of data is transcribed spoken English from focus-group discussions. We analyzed this dataset, using detailed discourse analysis, to identify the meanings of SEE and its most frequent phraseologies. Both analyses lead us to conclude that SEE is, indeed, used to talk about understanding, as claimed by Conceptual Metaphor theorists, but that the metaphor usually describes difficulties with understanding another speaker’s point of view or, more generally, the process of reaching an understanding: that is, it is used to talk about understanding or not understanding as processes, not states. Our findings are consistent with the construal of language and thought as a dynamic system.

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) is one of the most prolific frameworks in the study of emotion concepts. Following the seminal work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and subsequent work by Kövecses (1986, 1990) and Kövecses and Lakoff (1987), an impressive number of studies in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics have sought to document and confirm the claim that conceptual metaphor (CM) structures affective concepts. I attempt a brief overview of CMT claims about and CMT-inspired research on emotion concepts. I continue by presenting a study based on data collected in six languages, to assess the role of CM in the structuring of emotion concepts. I introduce the procedure, the corpus, and the analyses that have been carried out, including a detailed discussion of the considerations that informed the coding decisions applied to the corpus in a tentative quantitative analysis. Finally, I highlight a series of difficulties and controversies raised by CMT-driven analysis of emotion concepts that could be employed in hypothesis-driven experiments to test conceptual processing claims made within CMT.

Metaphor in cognitive linguistics is understood as a mapping where properties from one domain - the source - are transferred onto another domain: the target. The conceptual associations between source and target have usually been considered universal, unidirectional, and usage-based. One of the issues generally taken for granted, yet often underexplored, is the critical role of the notion of culture when characterizing conceptual metaphor. In this paper, we revisit and problematize the concepts of universality, unidirectionality, and usage-basedness and argue in favour of a broader-scoped approach to metaphor that brings in the notion of culture as key to metaphor research. By ‘culture’, we mean two, related things: (a) shared beliefs, knowledge, and world view(s) characterizing national, ethnic, and speech communities; and (b) the discourse communities using metaphor: i.e., those subcultures within broader cultural frames that are characterized by specific knowledge schemas, needs, and interests. To do so, we look into metaphors used by non-Western cultures and the architectural community when expressing the ways they perceive and think about their worlds.

In Metaphors We Live By , Lakoff and Johnson famously recast the notion of ‘dead’ metaphor. Rather than accepting conventionality as a criterion for ‘deadness’, they argued that only metaphors which ‘play no particularly interesting role in our conceptual system, and hence are not metaphors we live by... deserve to be called “dead”’ (1980: 55). In later work, Lakoff revisited this definition, suggesting that ‘dead’ was most accurately reserved for cases such as pedigree , a ‘one-shot’ metaphor that is not transparent for English speakers because no ‘literal’ sense exists. This paper examines a number of ‘dead’ or ‘historical’ linguistic metaphors for which no ‘literal’ sense exists in present day English, and considers how and why these ‘died’. Some, like pedigree , do not appear to reflect any system-wide mapping, and it is perhaps unsurprising that their metaphoric nature has become opaque. Others, like ardent and comprehend , demonstrate conceptual mappings that must have been active when their metaphorical senses first emerged, and which are still live in other lexemes. To date, there has been little interrogation of the reasons for the loss of literal senses of metaphorically motivated lexemes. I hope to demonstrate that an examination of the historical evidence for the different stages in the ‘life’ of particular linguistic metaphors can shed light on the nature of metaphor death.

A long line of philosophers and social scientists have defended and extended the curious idea that collective entities - states and societies, cities and corporations - are biological organisms. In this article, I study a few short but spectacular episodes from the history of that metaphor, juxtapose mappings made in one era with correspondences conjured in other epochs, and reflect upon the reasons why they differ. By adopting a historical perspective on the process whereby the notion of a ‘social organism’ evolved from its relatively simple beginnings in ancient philosophy to its rather complex manifestations in the modern social sciences, I hope to show that there are good reasons to reconsider both Lakoff’s decree that metaphors ‘ should not be thought of as processes ’ and his declaration that they should instead be seen as consisting of ‘a fixed pattern of ontological correspondences across domains’ (Lakoff, 1993:210, emphasis added ). Building on ideas about metaphor that emerged during the Nineteenth Century, I argue that what may initially appear to be a fixed pattern of projections is often better understood as a temporary station in a fluid process.

Research on speakers’ gestures 1 supports the basic idea that metaphor is not just a matter of words but a means of thinking of and experiencing, through manual activity, one domain in terms of another. However, gestures as data also raise several theoretical and methodological questions for conceptual metaphor theory, given their dynamic nature, the variability of tiieir symbolic status, and the varying degrees to which speakers are even aware of producing them. The closer examination of these graded qualities that comes with gesture analysis leads to new insights into metaphoricity itself.

The purpose of this paper is, first, to present a systematic cognitive type theory, which we believe can provide a better explanation of the semantic work of iconic signs than the iconic type theory proposed by Groupe μ (1992). The second objective is to present Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and to show its limitations in accounting for visual metaphoric phenomena. We suggest those constraints can be corrected with the cognitive type model. At the end, we attempt to illustrate how the cognitive type notion can explain visual metaphoric phenomena, taking into account the main aspects of CMT.

There is a mistaken perception that ‘metaphor theory’ and ‘conceptual blending’ are competing views, and that there is some argument between us over this. The real situation is this: We have been good friends and colleagues for over forty years, and we remain so. We fully respect, and make use of, each other’s work. We are both scientists, who do both empirical research and theorizing. We see the research programs developed for metaphor and blending as mutually reinforcing and often deeply intertwined, rather than at odds with each other. So why do some see discord where we find remarkable convergence? The short answer is that over the years, we focused on what we were most interested in, with corresponding differences of emphasis and interpretation. To explain how all this unfolded, and dispel the view that pits metaphor against blending, we need to go over the basic developments over time in the study of conceptual metaphor and blends, and then do a comparison.

This article assesses two objections directed at Conceptual Metaphor Theory: (1) it is circular in that it only provides linguistic evidence for the psychological reality of cross-domain mappings, intended to explain the empirical reality of metaphorical expressions in language; (2) it does not support the conclusion that the massive existence of metaphorical expressions in language reflects the metaphorical structuring of abstract concepts. It is my aim to disentangle these objections. Evidence abounds that makes the first objection obsolete, proving the psychological reality of cross-domain mappings. However, this does not imply that abstract concepts are metaphorically structured: experiments that prove objection (1) wrong cannot be invoked to reject objection (2). Some even tend to justify it.