In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, is the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the price of peace is rising") or the understanding of time in terms of money (e.g. "I spent time at work today").
A conceptual domain can be any mental organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, often perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain.e.g. Feldman, J. and Narayanan, S. (2004). "Embodied meaning in a neural theory of language". Brain and Language, 89(2):385–392 This theory gained wide attention in the 1990s and early 2000s, although some researchers question its empirical accuracy.
The conceptual metaphor theory proposed by George Lakoff and his colleagues arose from linguistics but became of interest to cognitive scientists due to its claims about the mind, the brain and their connections to the body. There is empirical evidence supporting the claim that at least some metaphors are conceptual. However, the empirical evidence for some aspects of the theory has been mixed. It is generally agreed that metaphors form an important part of human verbal conceptualization, but there is disagreement about the more specific claims conceptual metaphor theory makes about metaphor comprehension. For instance, metaphoric expressions of the form X is a Y (e.g. My job is a jail) may not activate conceptual mappings in the same way that other metaphoric expressions do. Furthermore, evidence suggests that the links between the body and conceptual metaphor, while present, may not be as extreme as some conceptual metaphor theorists have suggested.
Furthermore, certain claims from early conceptual metaphor theory have not been borne out. For instance, Lakoff asserted that human metaphorical thinking seems to work effortlessly, but psychological research on comprehension (as opposed, for example, to invention) has found that metaphors are actually more difficult to process than non-metaphoric expressions. Furthermore, when metaphors lose their novelty and become conventionalized, they eventually lose their status as metaphors and become processed like ordinary words (an instance of grammaticalization). Therefore, the role of the conceptual metaphor in processing human thinking is more limited than what was claimed by some linguistic theories.
Background The idea of conceptual metaphors as being the basis of rational thinking, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By in 1980. Since then, the field of metaphor studies within the larger discipline of cognitive linguistics has increasingly developed, with several annual academic conferences, scholarly societies, and research labs contributing to the subject area. Some researchers, such as Gerard Steen, have worked to develop empirical investigative tools for metaphor research, including the Metaphor Identification Procedure, or MIP. In Psychology, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., has investigated conceptual metaphor and embodiment through a number of psychological experiments. Other cognitive scientists, for example Gilles Fauconnier, study subjects similar to conceptual metaphor under the labels "analogy", "conceptual blending" and "ideasthesia".
Conceptual metaphors are useful for understanding complex ideas in simple terms and therefore are frequently used to give insight to abstract theories and models. For example, the conceptual metaphor of viewing communication as a conduit is one large theory explained with a metaphor. So not only is our everyday communication shaped by the language of conceptual metaphors, but so is the very way we understand scholarly theories. These metaphors are prevalent in communication and we do not just use them in language; we actually perceive and act in accordance with the metaphors.
Criticism and perspectives Historical In the Western philosophical tradition, Aristotle is often situated as the first commentator on the nature of metaphor, writing in the Poetics, "A 'metaphorical term' involves the transferred use of a term that properly belongs to something else,"Aristotle. Poetics.English text: D.A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (eds.), in Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972. and elsewhere in the Rhetoric he says that metaphors make learning pleasant; "To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest."Aristotle, W. Rhys Roberts, Ingram Bywater, and Friedrich Solmsen. Rhetoric. New York: Modern Library, 1954. Print. Aristotle's writings on metaphor constitute a "substitution view" of metaphor, wherein a metaphor is simply a decorative word or phrase substituted for a more ordinary one. This has been sometimes called the "Traditional View of Metaphor"Soskice, Janet. Metaphor and Religious Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. and at other times the "Classical Theory of Metaphor".Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980. Later in the first century A.D., the Roman rhetorician Quintilian builds upon Aristotle's earlier work of metaphor by focusing more on the comparative function of metaphorical language. In his work Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian states," In totum autem metaphora brevior est similitudo" or "on the whole, metaphor is a shorter form of simile".Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Trans. H.E. Butler. London: William Heinemann, 1921. Vol. III. Other philosophers throughout history have lent their perspectives to the discussion of metaphor as well. Friedrich Nietzsche for example, claimed that language as a whole did not portray reality but instead made a series of bold metaphors. Nietzsche believed that each step of cognition, the transfer of real world information to nerve stimuli, the culmination of nerve stimuli into mental images, the translation of mental images to words, was metaphorical. Modern interpretations of these early theories have also been intensely debated. Janet Soskice, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge, writes in summary that "it is certain that we shall taste the freshness of their insights only if we free them from the obligation to answer questions that were never theirs to ask". George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, although originally taking a hard-line interpretation of these early authorsWood, Matthew S. "Aristotle's Theory of Metaphor Revisited." Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada, 14.1 (2017): 63-90. Print. later concede that Aristotle was working within a different philosophical framework from what we engage with today and that critical interpretations should take this in to account.Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Philosophy. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Modern In his 2007 book The Stuff of Thought, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker lays out several useful classifications for the study of conceptual metaphor. Pinker first contrasts two perspectives on metaphor, what he calls the killjoy theory and the messianic theory. The killjoy theory categorizes metaphors as "dead", that is it asserts that modern day speakers are not aware of the comparison made between source and target domains in the everyday metaphors they use. For example, many are not cognizant that the phrase "to come to a head" refers to the accumulation of pus in a pimple. In contrast, the messianic theory correlates more closely with Lakoff and Johnson's idea of a conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson indeed do however recognize "dead metaphors"). This view states that users of metaphors are aware of how the metaphor maps onto the domains and use them to relate shared perceptual experiences to more complex thoughts.
Another important distinction made by Pinker is that between literary, or poetic metaphors, and conceptual, or generative metaphors. Poetic metaphors are used for a variety of reasons but ultimately highlight similarities or incongruencies in an expressive manner. Pinker's example of this being the classic Shakespearian line "Juliet is the sun". These metaphors can often appear convoluted or unclear without deeper context. Conceptual metaphors result from some inherent relation between two domains. These metaphors, so innate they are considered cliche, are interestingly able to generate infinite new metaphors. For example, thinking back on the conceptual metaphor , one can build many new metaphors such as "I shot him down" or "he blew my argument to pieces".
Pinker himself settles on a moderate view that falls in between the messianic and killjoy theories on metaphor. Perhaps most interestingly, while Pinker concedes that metaphor is a useful way to combat the limited ability of language to express thought, he postulates that a higher level of abstract thought must still be present. Otherwise, Pinker points out, how could we engage in critique of metaphors or employ metaphors for comedic effect?
Major criticisms of work done on conceptual metaphor stem from the way many researchers conduct their research. Many study metaphors in a "top-down" direction, looking first at a few examples to suggest conceptual metaphors, then examining the structure of those metaphors. Researchers would look at their own lexicon, dictionaries, thesauri, and other corpora to study metaphors in language. Critics say this ignored the way language was actually used and focused too much on the hypothetical metaphors, so many irregularities were overlooked in favor of postulating universal conceptual metaphors. In 2007, Pragglejaz Group came up with a methodology for identifying metaphorical expressions as a response to these criticisms.
Mappings There are two main roles for the conceptual domains posited in conceptual metaphors: Source domain: the conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions (e.g., love is a journey). Target domain: the conceptual domain that we try to understand (e.g., love is a journey).
A mapping is the way in which a source domain tracks onto and describes aspects of the target domain. Mappings describe the mental organization of information in domains, the underlying phenomenon that drives metaphorical usage in language. This conceptualization relates closely to image schemas, mental representations used in reasoning, through the extension of spatial and physical laws to more complex situations.Kövecses, Zoltan (2010) Metaphor: A Practical Introduction
A primary tenet of this theory is that metaphors are matter of thought and not merely of language: hence, the term conceptual metaphor. The metaphor may seem to consist of words or other linguistic expressions that come from the terminology of the more concrete conceptual domain, but conceptual metaphors underlie a system of related metaphorical expressions that appear on the linguistic surface. Similarly, the mappings of a conceptual metaphor are themselves motivated by image schemas which are pre-linguistic schemas concerning space, time, moving, controlling, and other core elements of embodied human experience.