The Event Structure MetaphorTarget
Source Domain: Spaceyour
Domain:
memory, recall:Events• States are locations (bounded regions in space).• Changes are movements (into or out of bounded regions).• Causes are forces.• Actions are self-propelled movements.• Purposes are destinations.• Means are paths to destinations.• Difficulties are impediments to motion.• Expected progress is a travel schedule; A schedule is a virtual traveler,
who reaches pre-arranged destinations at pre-arranged times.• External events are large, moving objects.• Longterm, purposeful activities are our culture, life is assumed to be purposeful, that is, we are expected to havegoals in life. In the Event Structure Metaphor, purposes are destinations andpurposeful action is self-propelled motion toward a destination. A purposeful lifeis a longterm, purposeful activity, and hence a journey. Goals in life aredestinations on the journey. The actions one takes in life are self-propelledmovements, and the totality of one’s actions form a path one moves ng a means to achieve a goal is choosing a path to a destination. Difficultiesin life are impediments to motion. External events are large moving objects thatcan impede motion toward one’s life goals. One’s expected progress through life ischarted in terms of a life schedule, which is conceptualized as a virtual travelerthat one is expected to keep up with. In short, the metaphor A PURPOSEFULLIFE IS A JOURNEY makes use of all the structure of the Event StructureMetaphor, since events in a life conceptualized as purposeful are subcases ofevents in general.A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY• Target Domain:Life• Source Domain: Space• The person leading a life is a traveler.• Inherits Event Structure Metaphor, with:• Events = Significant Life Events• Purposes = Life GoalsThus we have expressions like:He got a head start in life. He’s without direction in his life.I’m where I want to be in life.I’m at a crossroads in my ’ll go places in ’s never let anyone get in his ’s gone through a lot in as significant life events are special cases of events, so events in a loverelationship are special cases of life events. Thus, the LOVE IS A JOURNEYmetaphor inherits the structure of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. What isspecial about the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, is that there are two lovers,who are travelers, and that the love relationship is a vehicle. The rest of themapping is a consequence of inheriting the LIFE IS A JOURNEY e the lovers are in the same vehicle, they have common destinations, thatis, common life goals. Relationship difficulties are impediments to IS A JOURNEY
• Target Domain: Love• Source Domain: Space• The lovers are travelers.• The love relationship is a vehicle.• Inherits the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor.A career is another aspect of life that can be conceptualized as a journey. Here,because STATUS IS UP, a career is actually a journey upward. Career goals arespecial cases of life goals.A CAREER IS A JOURNEY• Target Domain: Career• Source Domain: Space• A careerist is a traveler.• Status is up.• Inherits LIFE IS A JOURNEY, with :• Life goals = Career Goals• Ideal: To go as high, far, and fast as es include:He clawed his way to the ’s over the ’s on the fast ’s climbing the corporate ’s moving up in the ranks inheritance hierarchy accounts for a range of generalizations. First, there aregeneralizations about lexical items. Take the word crossroads. It’s central meaningis in the domain of space. But it can be used in a metaphorical sense to speak ofany extended activity, of one’s life, of a love relationship, or of a career. I’m at acrossroads on this project. I’m at a crossroads in life. We’re at a crossroads in ourrelationship. I’m at a crossroads in my career. The hierarchy allows one to state ageneral principal: that crossroads is extended lexically via the submetaphor of theEvent Structure Metaphor that Longterm Purposeful Activities Are Journeys. Allits other uses are automatically generated via the inheritance hierarchy. Thus,separate senses for each level of the hierarchy are not needed. The secondgeneralization is inferential in character. Thus the understanding of difficulties asimpediments to travel occurs not only in events in general, but also in a purposefullife, in a love relationship, and in a career. The inheritance hierarchy guaranteesthat this understanding of difficulties in life, love, and careers is a consequence ofsuch an understanding of difficulties in events in general. The hierarchy alsoallows us to characterize lexical items whose meanings are more restricted: Thus,climbing the ladder refers only to careers, not to love relationships or to life ingeneral. Such hierarchical organization is a very prominent feature of the
metaphor system of English and other languages. So far we have found that themetaphors higher up in the hierarchy tend to be more widespread than thosemappings at lower levels. Thus, the Event Structure Metaphor is very widespread(and may even be universal), while the metaphors for life, love, and careers aremuch more restricted y in the Event Structure SystemIn our discussion of time metaphors, we noted the existence of an object-locationduality. There were two related time metaphors. In both, the passage of time wasunderstood in terms of relative motion between an observer and a time. In theobject-dual, the observer is fixed and times are moving objects. In the location-dual, the opposite is true. The observer moves and times are fixed locations in alandscape. The event structure system that we have seen so far is based wholly onlocation. But there is another event structure system that is the dual of the one wehave just discussed -- a system based on objects rather than locations. In bothsystems, CHANGE IS MOTION and CAUSES ARE FORCES that control difference is this: In the location system, change is the motion of the thing-changing to a new location or from an old one. In the object system, the thing-changing doesn’t necessarily move. Change is instead the motion of an object to,or way from, the thing-changing. In addition, the object in motion isconceptualized as a possession and the thing-changing as a possessor. Change isthus seen as the acquisition or loss of an object. Causation is seen as giving ortaking. Here are some examples:• I have a headache. [The headache is a possession.]• I got a headache. [Change is acquisition -- motion to]• My headache went away. [Change is loss -- motion from]• The noise gave me a headache. [Causation is giving -- motion to]• The aspirin took away my headache. [Causation is taking -- motion from]We can see the duality somewhat more clearly with a word like trouble:• I’m in trouble. [Trouble is a location]• I have trouble. [Trouble is an object that is possessed]In both cases, trouble is being attributed to me, and in both cases, trouble ismetaphorically conceptualized as being in the same place as me (co-location) -- inone case, because I possess the trouble-object and in the other case, because I amin the trouble-location. That is, attribution in both cases is conceptualizedmetaphorically as co-location. In I’m in trouble, trouble is a state. A state is anattribute that that is conceptualized as a location. Attributes (or properties) are likestates, except that they are conceptualized as possessable objects. Thus, STATESARE LOCATIONS and ATTRIBUTES ARE POSSESSIONS are duals, sincepossession and location are special cases of the same thing -- co-location -- andsince states and attributes are also special cases of the same thing -- what can beattributed to someone. Given this, we can see that there is an object-version of theEvent Structure Metaphor:• Attributes are possessions
• Changes are movements (of possessions, namely, acquisitions or losses)• Causes are forces (controlling the movement of possessions, namely,giving or taking away) These are the duals of: -States are locations• Changes are movements (to or from locations)• Causes are forces (controlling movement to or from locations)Similarly, ACTIONS ARE SELF-PROPELLED MOVEMENTS (to or fromlocations) has as its object-dual ACTIONS ARE SELF-CONTROLLEDACQUISITIONS OR LOSSES. Thus, there is a reason why one can take certainactions -- you can take a shower, or take a shot at someone, or take a chance. Thesubmapping PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS also has a dual. Destinations aredesired locations, and so the submapping can be rephrased as PURPOSES AREDESIRED LOCATIONS, and ACHIEVING A PURPOSE IS REACHING ADESIRED LOCATION. Replacing location by object, we get the dual PURPOSESARE DESIRED OBJECTS, and ACHIEVING A PURPOSE IS ACQUIRING ADESIRED OBJECT(or ridding oneself of an undesirable one). Here are someexamples:ACHIEVING A PURPOSE IS ACQUIRING A DESIRED OBJECTThey just handed him the ’s within my eluded for escaped slipped through my is pursuing a for /grab all the gusto you can onto a good the found is also a hierarchical structure in the object version of the Event StructureMetaphor. A special case of getting an object is getting an object to eat. Hence,ACHIEVING A PURPOSE IS GETTING SOMETHING TO EAT All the good jobshave been gobbled ’s hungry for opportunity has me is a mouth-watering ional methods of getting things to eat are hunting, fishing, and of these special cases can be used metaphorically to conceptualize achieving
(or attempting to achieve) a TO ACHIEVE A PURPOSE IS HUNTINGI’m hunting for a job.I bagged a pennant is in the typical way to hunt is to use projectiles (bullets, arrows, etc.)I’m shooting for a promotion.I’m aiming for a career in the movies.I’m afraid I missed my TO ACHIEVE A PURPOSE IS FISHINGHe’s fishing for compliments.I landed a netted a good job.I’ve got a line out on a good used ’s time to fish or cut TO ACHIEVE A PURPOSE IS AGRICULTUREIt’s time I reaped some job is a are the fruits of his contract is ripe for the picking.I will not try to survey all the dualities in the English metaphor system, but it isworth mentioning a few to see how subtle and pervasive dualities are. Take, forexample, the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, in which goals in life aredestinations, that is, desired locations to be reached. Since the dual of PURPOSESARE DESTINATIONS is PURPOSES ARE DESIRED OBJECTS, the dual of LIFEIS A JOURNEY is a metaphor in which life is an activity through which oneacquires desired objects. In this culture, the principle activity of this sort isbusiness, and hence, LIFE IS A BUSINESS is the dual of LIFE IS A JOURNEY.A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A BUSINESSHe has a rich ’s an enriching experience.I want to get a lot of out of ’s going about the business of everyday life.
It’s time to take stock of my thatLOVE IS A JOURNEY is an extension of A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS AJOURNEY. It happens that LOVE IS A JOURNEY has a dual that is an extensionof the dual of A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY, which is APURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A BUSINESS. The dual of LOVE IS JOURNEY is LOVEIS A PARTNERSHIP, that is, a two-person business. Thus, we speak of lovers aspartners; there are marriage contracts, and in a long-term love relationship thepartners are expected to do their jobs and to share in both responsibilities (whatthey contribute to the relationship) and benefits (what they get out of it). Long-term love relationships fail under the same conditions as businesses fail -- whenwhat the partners get out of the relationship is not worth what they put into y is a newly-discovered phenomenon. The person who first discovered it inthe event structure system was Jane Espenson, a graduate student at Berkeley whowho stumbled upon it in the course ofher research on causation metaphors. SinceEspenson’s discovery, other extensive dualities have been found in the the Englishmetaphor system. However, at present, it is not know just how extensive dualitiesare in English, or even whether they are all of the location-object type. At thispoint, I will leave off discussing the metaphor system of English, even thoughhundreds of other mappings have been described to major point to take away from this discussion is that metaphor resides for themost part in this huge, highly structured, fixed system. This system is anything butdead. Because it is conventional, it is used constantly and automatically, withneither effort nor awareness. Novel metaphor uses this system, and builds on it,but only rarely occurs independently of it. But, most interestingly, this system ofmetaphor seems to give rise to abstract reasoning, which appears to be based onspatial ance AgainThe metaphors I have discussed primarily map three kinds of image-schemas:1. containers2. paths3. force-imagesBecause of the complexity of the sub-cases and interactions, the details areintricate, to say the least. However, the Invariance Principle does make claims ineach case as to what image-schemas get mapped onto target domains. I will not gothrough most of the details here, but so far as I can see, the claims made aboutinferential structure are reasonable ones. For example, the logic of force dynamicsdoes seem to map, via the submapping CAUSES ARE FORCES, onto the logic ofcausation. The following are inferences from the logic of forces inherent in forcedynamics:• -A stationary object will move only when force is applied to it; withoutforce, it will not move.• -The application of force requires contact; thus, the applier of the forcemust be in spatial contiguity with the thing it moves.
• -The application of force temporally precedes motion, since inertia must beovercome before motion can take are among the classic inferential conditions on causation: spatial contiguity,temporal precedence, and that A caused B only if B wouldn’t have happenedwithout A. At this point, I would like to take up the question of what else theInvariance Principle would buy us. I will consider two cases that arose while MarkTurner and I were writing More Than Cool Reason (Lakoff & Turner, 1989). Thefirst concerns image-metaphors and the second, generic-level metaphors. Butbefore I move on to those topics, I should point an important consequence ofinvariance. Johnson and I argued in Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson,1980) that a complex propositional structure could be mapped by metaphor ontoanother domain. The main example we gave was ARGUMENT AS WAR. Kovecsesand I, in our analysis of anger metaphors (Lakoff, 1987, case study 1, Kovecses,1990), also argued that metaphors could map complex propositional Invariance Principle does not deny this, but it puts those claims in a verydifferent light. Complex propositional structures involve concepts like time, states,changes, causes, purposes, quantity scales, and categories. If all of these abstractconcepts are characterized metaphorically, then the Invariance Principle claimsthat what we had called propositional structure is really image-schematic other words: So-called propositional inferences arise from the inherenttopological structure of the image-schemas mapped by metaphor onto conceptslike time, states, changes, actions, causes, purposes, means, quantity, andcategories. The reason that I have taken the trouble to discuss all those abstractconcepts is to demonstrate this consequence of the Invariance Principle; namely,that what have been seen in the past as propositional inferences are really image-based inferences. If the Invariance Principle is correct, it has a remarkableconsequence, namely that: Abstract reasoning is a special case of imaged-basedreasoning. Image-based reasoning is fundamental and abstract reasoning isimage-based reasoning under metaphorical projections to abstract look for independent confirmation of the Invariance Principle, let us turn MetaphorsImage MetaphorsThere is a class of metaphors that function to map one conventional mental imageonto another. These contrast with the metaphors I have discussed so far, each ofwhich maps one conceptual domain onto another, often with many concepts in thesource domain mapped onto many corresponding concepts in the target -metaphors, by contrast, are ‘one-shot’ metaphors: they map only one imageonto one other image. Consider, for example, this poem from the Indian tradition:Now women-riversbelted with silver fishmove unhurried as women in loveat dawn after a night with their lovers(Merwin & Masson, 1981, p. 71)Here the image of the slow, sinuous walk of an Indian woman is mapped onto theimage of the slow, sinuous, shimmering flow of a river. The shimmering of aschool of fish is imagined as the shimmering of the belt. Metaphoric image-mappings work in just the same way as all other metaphoric mappings: by
mapping the structure of one domain onto the structure of another. But here, thedomains are conventional mental images. Take, for example, this line from AndreBreton: My wife . . . whose waist is an hourglass. This is a superimposition of theimage of an hourglass onto the image of a woman’s waist by virtue of theircommon shape. As before, the metaphor is conceptual; it is not in the wordsthemselves, but in the mental images. Here, we have a mental image of anhourglass and of a woman, and we map the middle of the hourglass onto the waistof the woman. Note that the words do not tell us which part of the hourglass tomap onto the waist, or even that it is only part of the hourglass shape thatcorresponds to the waist. The words are prompts for us to map from oneconventional image to another. Similarly, consider: His toes were like thekeyboard of a spinet. (Rabelais, ‘The Descriptions of King Lent,’ trans. J. ) Here too, the words do not tell us that an individual toe corresponds to anindividual key on the keyboard. Again, the words are prompts for us to perform aconceptual mapping between conventional mental images. In particular, we mapaspects of the part-whole structure of one image onto aspects of the part-wholestructure of another. Just as individual keys are parts of the whole keyboard, soindividual toes are parts of the whole foot. Image-mapping can involve more thanmapping physical part-whole relationships. For example, the water line of a rivermay drop slowly and that slowness is part of the dynamic image, which may bemapped onto the slow removal of clothing:Slowly slowly rivers in autumn showsand banksbashful in first love womanshowing thighs(Merwin & Masson, p. 69)Other attributes are also mapped: the color of the sand bank onto the color offlesh, the quality of light on a wet sand bank onto the reflectiveness of skin, thelight grazing of the water’s touch receding down the bank onto the light grazing ofthe clothing along the skin. Notice that the words do not tell us that any clothing isinvolved. We get that from a conventional mental image. Part-whole structure isalso mapped in this example. The water covers the hidden part of the bank just asthe clothing covers the hidden part of the body. The proliferation of detail in theimages limits image-mappings to highly specific cases. That is what makes them‘one-shot’ mappings. Such mappings of one image onto another can lead us to mapknowledge about the first image onto knowledge about the second. Consider thefollowing example from the Navaho: My horse with a mane made of shortrainbows. (‘War God’s Horse Song I’ Words by Tall Kia ahni. Interpreted by LouisWatchman.) The structure of a rainbow, its band of curved lines for example, ismapped onto an arc of curved hair, and many rainbows onto many such arcs onthe horse’s mane. Such image-mapping allows us to map our evaluation of thesource domain onto the target. We know that rainbows are beautiful, special,inspiring, larger than life, almost mystic, and that seeing them makes us happy andawe-inspired. This knowledge is mapped onto what we know of the horse: it too isawe-inspiring, beautiful, larger than life, almost mystic. This line comes from apoem containing a series of such image-mappings:My horse with a hoof like a striped agate, with his fetlock like a fine eagle plume:my horse whose legs are like quick lightning whose body is an eagle-plumedarrow:my horse whose tail is like a trailing black cloud.
Image-metaphors raise two major issues for the general theory of metaphor:How do they work?What constrains the mappings?What kind of internal structures do mental images have that permit somemappings to work readily, others only with effort, and others not at all?What is the general theory of metaphor that unifies image-metaphors with all theconventional metaphors that map the propositional structure of one domain ontothe propositional structure of another domain?Turner and I (Lakoff and Turner, 1989) have suggested that the InvariancePrinciple could be an answer to both questions. We suggest that conventionalmental images are structured by image-schemas and that image-metaphorspreserve image-schematic structure, mapping parts onto parts and wholes ontowholes, containers onto containers, paths onto paths, and so on. The generalizationwould be that all metaphors are invariant with respect to their cognitive topology,that is, each metaphorical mapping preserves image-schema c-Level MetaphorsWhen Turner and I were writing More Than Cool Reason, we hypothesized theexistence of what we called ‘generic-level metaphors’ to deal with two problemsthat we faced-first, the problem of personification and second, the problem ofproverbs, which requires an understanding of analogy. I shall discuss each in studying a wide variety of poems about death in English, we found that, inpoem after poem, death was personified in a relatively small number of ways:drivers, coachmen, footmen; reapers, devourers and destroyers; or opponents in astruggle or game (say, a knight or a chess opponent). The question we asked was:Why these? Why isn’t death personified as a teacher or a carpenter or an ice creamsalesman? Somehow, the ones that occur repeatedly seem appropriate. Why? Instudying personifications in general, we found that the overwhelming numberseem to fit a single pattern: events (like death) are understood in terms of actionsby some agent (like reaping). It is that agent that is personified. We thushypothesized a very general metaphor, EVENTS ARE ACTIONS, which combineswith other, independently existing metaphors for life and death. Consider, forexample, the DEATH IS DEPARTURE metaphor. Departure is an event. If weunderstand this event as an action on the part of some causal agent-someone whobrings about, or helps to bring about, departure-then we can account for figureslike drivers, coachmen, footmen, etc. Or take the PEOPLE ARE PLANTSmetaphor. In the natural course of things, plants wither and die. But if we see thatevent as a causal action on the part of some agent, then that agent is a reaper. Sofar, so good. But why destroyers and devourers? And what about the impossiblecases? Destruction and devouring are actions in which an entity ceases to same is true of death. The overall ‘shape’ of the event of death is similar inthis respect to the overall ‘shapes’ of the events of destruction and er, there is a causal aspect to death: the passage of time will eventuallyresult in death. Thus, the overall shape of the event of death has an entity that overtime ceases to exist as the result of some cause. Devouring and destruction have
the same overall ‘event-shape’. That is, it is the same with respect to causalstructure and the persistence of entities over time. Turner (1987) had noticed asimilar case in Death Is The Mother Of Beauty, his classic work on kinshipmetaphor. In expressions like Necessity is the mother of invention, or EdwardTeller was the father of the H-bomb, causation is understood in terms of givingbirth or fathering-what Turner called the CAUSATION IS PROGENERATIONmetaphor. But, as he observed (pp. 145-148), this metaphor could not be used forjust any instance of causation. It could only be used for cases that had the overallevent-shape of progeneration: something must be created out of nothing, and thething created must persist for a long time (as if it had a life). Thus, for example,we can speak of Saussure as the father of modern synchronic linguistics, or ofNew Orleans as giving birth to jazz. But we cannot use this metaphor for a singlecausal action with a short-lived effect. Thus, we could not speak of Jose Cansecoas the father of the home run he just hit, or of that home run as giving birth to theOakland A’s victory in the game. Though, of course, we could speak of Babe Ruthas the father of modern home-run hitting, and of the home runs giving birth to theera of baseball players as superstars. The overall event shape of the target domainlimits the applicability of the metaphor. Recalling Turner’s observation aboutCAUSATION IS PROGENERATION, we therefore hypothesized that EVENTSARE ACTIONS is constrained in the following way: the action must have the sameoverall event-shape as the event. What is preserved across the mapping is thecausal structure, the aspectual structure, and the persistence of entities. Wereferred to this as ‘generic-level structure’. The preservation of generic-levelstructure explained why death is not metaphorized in terms of teaching, or fillingthe bathtub, or sitting on the sofa. They simply do not have the same causal andoverall event structure, that is, they do not share ‘generic-level structure.’ProverbsIn Asian figures --proverbs in the form of short poems-- the question arises as towhat are the limitations on the interpretation of a proverb. Some interpretations arenatural; others seem impossible. Why? Consider the following example fromAsian Figures, translated by William lames the ditchTo get some sense of the possible range of interpretations for such a proverb,consider the following application of the proverb: Suppose a presidentialcandidate knowingly commits some personal impropriety (though not illegal andnot related to political issues) and his candidacy is destroyed by the press’sreporting of the impropriety. He blames the press for reporting it, rather thanhimself for committing it. We think he should have recognized the realities ofpolitical press coverage when he chose to commit the impropriety. We express ourjudgment by saying, ‘Blind / blames the ditch.’ Turner and I (1989) observed thatthe knowledge structure used in comprehending the case of the candidate’simpropriety shared certain things with the knowledge structure used incomprehending the literal interpretation of ‘Blind / blames the ditch’. Thatknowledge structure is the following:• There is a person with an incapacity, namely, blindness.• He encounters a situation, namely a ditch, in which his incapacity, namelyhis inability to see the ditch, results in a negative consequence, namely, his
falling into the ditch.• He blames the situation, rather than his own incapacity.• He should have held himself responsible, not the specific knowledge schema about the blind man and the ditch is an instanceof a general knowledge schema, in which specific information about the blindnessand ditch are absent. Let us refer to it as the generic-level schema that structuresour knowledge of the proverb. That generic-level knowledge schema is:• There is a person with an incapacity.• He encounters a situation in which his incapacity results in a negativeconsequence.• He blames the situation rather than his own incapacity.• He should have held himself responsible, not the is a very general schema characterizing an open-ended category of can think of it as a variable template that can be filled in in many ways. As ithappened, Turner and I were studying this at the time of the Gary Hart scandal,when Hart, a presidential candidate, committed certain sexual improprieties duringa campaign, had his candidacy dashed, and then blamed the press for his / blames the ditch fits this situation. Here’s how:• The person is the presidential candidate.• His incapacity is his inability to understand the consequences of hispersonal improprieties.• The context he encounters is his knowingly committing an impropriety andthe press’s reporting it.• The consequence is having his candidacy dashed.• He blames the press.• We judge him as being foolish for blaming the press instead of we view the generic-level schema as mediating between the proverb ‘Blind /blames the ditch’ and the story of the candidate’s impropriety, we get the followingcorrespondence:• The blind person corresponds to the presidential candidate.• His blindness corresponds to his inability to understand the consequencesof his personal improprieties.• Falling into the ditch corresponds to his committing the impropriety andhaving it reported.• Being in the ditch corresponds to being out of the running as a candidate.• Blaming the ditch corresponds to blaming the press coverage.• Judging the blind man as foolish for blaming the ditch corresponds tojudging the candidate as foolish for blaming the press correspondence defines the metaphorical interpretation of the proverb asapplied to the candidate’s impropriety. Moreover, the class of possible ways offilling in the generic-level schema of the proverb corresponds to the class of
possible interpretations of the proverb. Thus, we can explain why ‘Blind / blamesthe ditch’ does not mean ‘I took a bath’ or ‘My aunt is sitting on the sofa’ or any ofthe myriad of things the proverb cannot mean. All of the proverbs that Turner andI studied turned out to involve this sort of generic-level schema. And the kinds ofthings that turned up in such schemas seemed to be pretty much the same in caseafter case. They include:• Causal structure.• Temporal structure.• Event shape; that is, instantaneous or repeated, completed or open-ended,single or repeating, having fixed stages or not, preserving the existence ofentities or not, and so on.• Purpose structure.• Modal structure.• Linear is not an exhaustive list. But what it includes are most of the major elementsof generic-level structure that we discovered. What is striking to us about this listis that everything on it is, under the Invariance Principle, an aspect of image-schematic structure. In short, if the Invariance Principle is correct, the way toarrive at a generic-level schema for some knowledge structure is to extract itsimage-schematic structure. The metaphoric interpretation of such discourse formsas proverbs, fables, allegories, and so on seems to depend on our ability to extractgeneric-level structure. Turner and I have called the relation between a specificknowledge structure and its generic-level structure the GENERIC IS SPECIFICmetaphor. It is an extremely common mechanism for comprehending the generalin terms of the specific. If the Invariance Principle is correct, then the GENERICIS SPECIFIC metaphor is a minimal metaphor that maps what the InvariancePrinciple requires it to and nothing more. Should it turn out to be the case thatgeneric-level structure is exactly image-schematic structure, then the InvariancePrinciple would have enormous explanatory value. It would obviate the need for aseparate characterization of generic-level structure. Instead, it would itselfcharacterize generic-level structure-explaining possible personifications and thepossible interpretations for yThe GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor is used for more than just theinterpretation of proverbs. Turner (1991) has suggested that it is also the generalmechanism at work in analogic reasoning, and that the Invariance Principlecharacterizes the class of possible analogies. We can see how this works with theGary Hart example cited above. We can convert that example into an analogy withthe following sentence: Gary Hart was like a blind man who fell into a ditch andblamed the ditch. The mechanism for understanding this analogy makes use of:• a knowledge schema for the blind man and the ditch• a knowledge schema concerning Gary Hart• the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor The GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphormaps the knowledge schema for the blind man and the ditch into its generic-levelschema. The generic-level schema defines an open-ended category of knowledge
schemas. The Gary Hart schema is a member of that category, since it fits thegeneric-level schema given the correspondences stated above. It appears at presentthat such analogies use this metaphorical mechanism. But it is common foranalogies to use other metaphorical mechanisms as well, for instance, the GreatChain Metaphor and the full range of conventional mappings in the conceptualsystem. Sentences like John is a wolf or Harry is a pig use the Great Chainmetaphor (see Lakoff & Turner, 1989, ch. 4). A good example of how the rest ofthe metaphor system interacts with GENERIC IS SPECIFIC is the well-knownexample of Glucksberg and Keysar (this volume), My job is a jail. First, theknowledge schema for a jail includes the knowledge that a jail imposes extremephysical constraints on a prisoner’s movements. The GENERIC IS SPECIFICmetaphor preserves the image-schematic structure of the knowledge schema,factoring out the specific details of the prisoner and the jail: X imposes extremephysical constraints on Y’s movements. But now two additional conventionalmetaphors apply to this generic-level schema: The Event Structure Metaphor, withthe submetaphor ACTIONS ARE SELF-PROPELLED MOVEMENTS, andPSYCHOLOGICAL FORCE IS PHYSICAL FORCE. These metaphors map Ximposes extreme physical constraints on Y’s movements into X imposes extremepsychological constraints on Y’s actions. The statement My job is a jail imposesan interpretation in which X = my job and Y = me, and hence yields theknowledge that My job imposes extreme psychological constraints on my , the mechanism for understanding My job is a jail uses very common,independently existing metaphors: GENERIC IS SPECIFIC, PSYCHOLOGICALFORCE IS PHYSICAL FORCE, and The Event Structure Glucksberg-Keysar ClaimI mention this example because of the claim by Glucksberg and Keysar (thisvolume) that metaphor is simply a matter of categorization. However, in personalcorrespondence Glucksberg has written, We assume that people can judge and canalso infer that certain basic level entities, such as ‘jails’ typify or are emblematicof a metaphoric attributive category such as "situations that are confining,unpleasant, etc." Glucksberg and Keysar give no theory of how it is possible tohave such a metaphoric attributive category -- that is, how it possible for one kindof thing (a general situation) to be metaphorically categorized in terms of afundamentally spatial notion like ‘confining.’ Since Glucksberg is not in thebusiness of describing the nature of conceptual systems, he does not see it as hisjob to give such an account. I have argued in this paper that the general principlegoverning such cases is the Event Structure Metaphor. If such a metaphor exists inour conceptual system, then Glucksberg’s ‘jail’ example is accounted forautomatically and his categorization theory is not needed. Indeed, the category heneeds -- situations that are confining, unpleasant, etc. -- is a metaphoricattributive category. That is, to get the appropriate categories in theircategorization theory of metaphor he needs an account of metaphor. But givensuch an account of metaphor, their metaphor-as-categorization theory becomesunnecessary. Even worse for the Glucksberg-Keysar theory, it cannot account foreither everyday conceptual metaphor of the sort we have been discussing or forreally rich poetic metaphor, such as one finds in the works of, say, Dylan Thomas,or for image-metaphor of the sort common in the examples cited above from theSanskrit, Navaho and surrealist traditions. Since it does not even attempt to dealwith most of the data covered by the contemporary theory of metaphor, it cannot
account for how metaphor On Novel MetaphorAt the time most of the papers in this volume were written (the late 1970’s),metaphor was taken to mean novel metaphor, since the huge system ofconventional metaphor had barely been noticed. For that reason, the authors nevertook up the question of how the system of conventional metaphor functions in theinterpretation of novel metaphor. We have just seen one such example. Let usconsider some others. As common as novel metaphor is, its occurrence is rare bycomparison with conventional metaphor, which occurs in most of the sentenceswe utter. Our everyday metaphor system, which we use to understand concepts ascommonplace as TIME, STATE, CHANGE, CAUSATION, PURPOSE, etc. isconstantly active, and is used maximally in interpreting novel metaphorical uses oflanguage. The problem with all the older research on novel metaphor is that itcompletely missed the major contribution played by the conventional system. AsTurner and I discussed in detail (Lakoff & Turner, 1989), there are three basicmechanisms for interpreting linguistic expressions as novel metaphors: Extensionsof conventional metaphors; Generic-level metaphors; Image-metaphors. Mostinteresting poetic metaphor uses all of these superimposed on one another. Let usbegin with examples of extensions of conventional metaphors. Dante begins theDivine Comedy: In the middle of life’s road I found myself in a dark wood. Life’sroad evokes the domain of life and the domain of travel, and hence theconventional LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor that links them. I found myself in adark wood evokes the knowledge that if it’s dark you cannot see which way to evokes the domain of seeing, and thus the conventional metaphor thatKNOWING IS SEEING, as in expressions like I see what you’re getting at, Hisclaims aren’t clear, The passage is opaque, etc. This entails that the speakerdoesn’t know which way to go. Since the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor specifiesdestinations are life goals, it is entailed that the speaker does not know what lifegoals to pursue, that is, he is without direction in his life. All of this uses nothingbut the system of conventional metaphor, ordinary knowledge structure evoked bythe conventional meaning of the sentence, and metaphorical inferences based onthat knowledge structure. Another equally simple case of the use of theconventional system is Robert Frost’sTwo roads diverged in
I took the one
And that has made all the difference.a
less
wood, and
traveled
Iby,Since Frost’s language often does not overtly signal that the poem is to be takenmetaphorically, incompetent English teachers occasionally teach Frost as if hewere a nature poet, simply describing scenes. (I have actually had students whosehigh school teachers taught them that!) Thus, this passage could be readnonmetaphorically as being just about a trip on which one encounters a is nothing in the sentences themselves that forces one to a metaphoricalinterpretation. But, since it is about travel and encountering crossroads, it evokes aknowledge of journeys. This activates the system of conventional metaphor wehave just discussed, in which longterm, purposeful activities are understood asjourneys, and further, how life and careers can also be understood as one-personjourneys (love relationships, involving two travelers, are ruled out here). Thepoem is typically taken as being about life and a choice of life goals, though itmight also be interpreted as being about careers and careers paths, or about some
longterm, purposeful activity. All that is needed to get the requisite range ofinterpretations is the structure of conventional metaphors discussed above, and theknowledge structure evoked by the poem. The conventional mapping will apply tothe knowledge structure yielding the appropriate inferences. No specialmechanisms are ’s TheoryAt this point I will leave off discussion of other more complex poetic examples,since they require lengthy discussion and since such discussion can be found inLakoff and Turner (1989), Turner (1987), and Turner (1991). Instead, I willconfine myself to discussing three examples from John Searle’s Chapter (thisvolume). Consider first Disraeli’s remark, I have climbed to the top of the greasypole. Certainly, this could be taken nonmetaphorically, but its most likelymetaphorical interpretation is via the CAREER IS A JOURNEY metaphor. Thismetaphor is evoked jointly by source domain knowledge about pole-climbing(which is effortful, self-propelled, destination-oriented motion upward) andknowledge that the metaphor involves effortful, self-propelled, destination-oriented motion upward. Part of the knowledge evoked is that the speaker is ashigh as he can get on that particular pole, that the pole was difficult to climb, thatthe climb probably involved backwards motion, that it is difficult for someone tostay at the top of a greasy pole, and that he will most likely slide down again. TheCAREER IS A JOURNEY metaphor maps this knowledge onto correspondingknowledge about the speaker’s career: the speaker has as much status as he or shecan get in that particular career, that is was difficult to get to that point in thecareer, that it probably involved some temporary loss of status along the way, thatit is difficult to maintain this position, and that he or she will probably lose statusbefore long. All this follows with nothing more that the conventional career-as-journey mapping, which we all share as part of our metaphorical systems, plusknowledge about climbing greasy poles. The second example of Searle’s I willconsider is Sally is a block of ice. Here there is a conventional metaphor thatAFFECTION IS WARMTH, as in ordinary sentences like She’s a warm person, Hewas cool to me, etc. A block of ice evokes the domain of temperature, and, since itis predicated of a person, it also evokes knowledge of what a person can y, both kinds of knowledge activate AFFECTION IS WARMTH. Since ablock of ice is something that is very cold and not able to become warm quickly oreasily, this knowledge is mapped onto Sally’s being very unaffectionate and notbeing able to become affectionate quickly or easily. Again, common knowledgeand a conventional metaphor that we all have is all that is needed. Finally, Searlediscusses The hours crept by as we waited for the plane. Here we have a verb ofmotion predicated of a time expression; the former activates the knowledge aboutmotion through space and the latter activates the time domain. Jointly, theyactivate the time-as-moving-object mapping. Again the meaning of the sentencefollows only from everyday knowledge and the everyday system of metaphoricalmappings. Searle accounts for such cases by his Principle 4, which says that wejust do perceive a connection which is the basis of the interpretation. This is vagueand doesn’t say what the perceived connection is or why we just do perceive we spell out the details of all such perceived connections, they turn out tobe the system of conceptual metaphors that I have been describing. But given thatsystem, Searle’s theory and his principles become unnecessary. In addition,Searle’s account of literal meaning makes most of the usual false assumptions that
accompany that term. Searle assumes that all everyday, conventional language isliteral and not metaphorical. He would thus rule out every example ofconventional metaphor that is described not only in this paper, but in the wholeliterature of the field. The study of the metaphorical subsystem of our conceptualsystem is a central part of synchronic linguistics. The reason is that much of oursemantic system, that is, our system of concepts, is metaphorical, as we sawabove. It is because this huge system went unnoticed prior to 1980 that authorslike Searle, Sadock, and Morgan could claim that metaphor was outside ofsynchronic linguistics and in the domain of principles of language Experiential Basis Of MetaphorThe conceptual system underlying a language contains thousands of conceptualmetaphors -- conventional mappings from one domain to another, such as theEvent Structure Metaphor. The novel metaphors of a language are, except forimage metaphors, extensions of this large conventional system. Perhaps thedeepest question that any theory of metaphor must answer is this: Why do we havethe conventional metaphors that we have? Or alternatively: Is there any reasonwhy conceptual systems contain one set of metaphorical mappings rather thananother? There do appear to be answers to these questions for many of themappings found so far, though they are in the realm of plausible accounts, ratherthan in the realm of scientific results. Take a simple case: the MORE IS UPmetaphor, as seen in expressions like: Prices rose. His income went oyment is up. Exports are down. The number of homeless people is veryhigh. There are other languages in which MORE IS UP and LESS IS DOWN, butnone in which the reverse is true, where MORE IS DOWN and LESS IS UP. Whynot? The answer given in the contemporary theory is that the MORE IS UPmetaphor is grounded in experience-in the common experiences of pouring morefluid into a container and seeing the level go up, or adding more things to a pileand seeing the pile get higher. These are thoroughly pervasive experiences; weexperience them every day of our lives. They are experiences with a structure-acorrespondence between the conceptual domain of quantity and the conceptualdomain of verticality: MORE corresponds in such experiences to UP and LESScorresponds to DOWN. These correspondences in real experience form the basisfor the correspondence in the metaphorical cases, which go beyond the cases inreal experience: in Prices rose there is no correspondence in real experiencebetween quantity and verticality, but understanding quantity in terms of verticalitymakes sense because of the existence of a regular correspondence in so manyother cases. Consider another case: What is the basis of the widespreadKNOWING IS SEEING metaphor, as in expressions like: I see what your answer was clear. This paragraph is murky. He was so blinded by ambitionthat he never noticed his limitations. The experiential basis, in this case, is the factthat most of what we know comes through vision, and that in the overwhelmingmajority of cases, if we see something, then we know it is true. Consider stillanother case: Why, in the Event Structure Metaphor, is achieving a purposeunderstood as reaching a destination (in the location subsystem) and as acquiring adesired object (in the object subsystem)? The answer again seems to becorrespondences in everyday experience. To achieve most of our everydaypurposes, we either have to move to some destination or acquire some object. Ifyou want a drink of water, you’ve got to go to the water fountain. If you want to bein the sunshine, you have to move to where the sunshine is. And if you want to
write down a note, you got to get a pen or pencil. The correspondences betweenachieving purposes and either reaching destinations or acquiring objects is soutterly common in our everyday existence, that the resulting metaphor iscompletely natural. But what about the experiential basis of A PURPOSEFULLIFE IS A JOURNEY? Recall that that mapping is in an inheritance hierarchy,where life goals are special cases of purposes, which are destinations in the eventstructure metaphor. Thus, A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY inherits theexperiential basis of PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS. Thus, inheritancehierarchies provide indirect experiential bases, in that a metaphorical mappinglower in a hierarchy can inherit its experiential basis indirectly from a mappinghigher in the hierarchy. Experiential bases motivate metaphors, they do not predictthem. Thus, not every language has a MORE IS UP metaphor, though all humanbeings experience a correspondence between MORE and UP in their this experiential basis does predict is that no language will have the oppositemetaphor LESS IS UP. It also predicts that a speaker of language that does nothave that metaphor will be able to learn that metaphor much more easily than theopposite ations of MetaphorConsider objects like thermometers and stock market graphs, where increases intemperature and prices are represented as being up and decreases as being are real man-made objects created to accord with the MORE IS UPmetaphor. They are objects in which there is a correlation between MORE and objects are a lot easier to read and understand than if they contradicted themetaphor, say, if increases were represented as down and decreases as up. Suchobjects are ways in which metaphors impose a structure on real life, through thecreation of new correspondences in experience. And of course, once such realobjects are created in one generation, those objects serve as an experiential basisfor that metaphor in the next generation. There are a great many ways in whichconventional metaphors can be made real. Metaphors can be realized in obviousimaginative products such as cartoons, literary works, dreams, visions, and metaphors can be made real in less obvious ways as well, in physicalsymptoms, social institutions, social practices, laws, and even foreign policy andforms of discourse and of history. Let us consider some examples:Cartoons:Conventional metaphors are made real in cartoons. A common example is therealization of the ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER metaphor, inwhich one can be boiling mad or letting off steam. In cartoons, anger iscommonly depicted by having steam coming out the character’s rly, social clumsiness is indicated by having a cartoon character fall onhis ry works:It is common for the plot of novel to be a realization of the PURPOSEFULLIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, where the course of a life takes the form of anactual journey. Pilgrim’s Progress is a classical s:
Consider the cultural ritual in which a newborn baby is carried upstairs toinsure his or her success. The metaphor realized in this ritual is STATUS ISUP, exemplified by sentences such as: He clawed his way to the top. Heclimbed the ladder of success. You’ll rise in the Interpretation:Conceptual metaphors consitute the vocabulary of dream interpretation. It isthe collection of our everyday conceptual metaphors that make dreaminterpretations possible. Consider one of the most celebrated of all dreaminterpretations: Joseph’s interpretation of Pharoah’s dream from Genesis. InPharoah’s dream, he is standing on the river bank, when seven fat cows comeout of the river, followed by seven lean cows that eat the seven fat ones andstill remain lean. Then Pharoah dreams again. This time he sees seven full andgood ears of corn growing, and then seven withered ears growing after withered ears devour the good ears. Joseph interprets the two dreams as asingle dream. The seven fat cows and full ears are good years and the sevenlean cows and withered ears are famine years that follow the good years. Thefamine years devour what the good years produce. This interpretation makessense to us because of a collection of conceptual metaphors in our conceptualsystem -- metaphors that have been with us since Biblical times.• The first metaphor used is: TIMES ARE MOVING ENTITIES. Ariver is a common metaphor for the flow of time; the cows areindividual entities (years) emerging from the flow of time andmoving past the observer; the ears of corn are also entities thatcome into the scene.• The second metaphor used is ACHIEVING A PURPOSE ISEATING, where being fat indicates success being lean indicatesfailure. This metaphor is combined with the most common ofmetonymies: A PART STANDS FOR THE WHOLE. Since cowsand corn were typical of meat and grain eaten, each single cowstands for all the cows raised in a year and each ear of corn forall the corn grown in a year.• The final metaphor used is: RESOURCES ARE FOOD, whereusing up resources is eating food. The devouring of the goodyears by the famine years is interpreted as indicating that all thesurplus resources of the good years will be used up by thefamine interpretation of the whole dream is thus a composition of three conventionalmetaphors and one metonymy. The metaphoric and metonymic sources arecombined to form the reality of the :In the Event Structure metaphor, there is a submapping EXTERNAL EVENTSARE LARGE, MOVING OBJECTS that can exerted a force upon you andthereby effect whether you achieve your goals. In English the special cases ofsuch objects are things, fluids, and horses. Pamela Morgan (in unpublishedwork) has observed that in Greek Mythology, Poseidon is the god of the sea,
earthquakes, horses and bulls. The list might seem arbitrary, but Morganobserves that these are all large moving objects that can exert a force on surmises that this is not an obvious list. The sea, earthquakes, horses,and bulls are all large moving objects that can exert a significant on, she surmises, should really be seen as the god of external al symptoms:The unconscious mind makes use our unconscious system of conventionalmetaphor, sometimes to express psychological states in terms of physicalsymptoms. For example, in the Event Structure metaphor, there is asubmapping DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO MOTION which has,as a special case, DIFFICULTIES ARE BURDENS. It is fairly common forsomeone encountering difficulties to walk with his shoulders stooped, as ifcarrying a heavy weight that is burdening institutions:We have a TIME IS MONEY metaphor, shown by expressions like:He’s wasting time.I have to budget my will save you time.I’ve invested a lot of time in doesn’t use his time metaphor came into English about the time of the industrial revolution,when people started to be paid for work by the amount of time they , the factory led to the institutional pairing of periods of time withamounts of money, which formed the experiential basis of this then, the metaphor has been realized in many other ways. The budgetingof time has spread throughout American practices:There is conceptual metaphor that SEEING IS TOUCHING, where the eyes arelimbs and vision is achieved when the object seen is es are:My eyes picked out every detail of the ran his eyes over the couldn’t take his eyes off of eyes eyes are glued to the metaphor is made real in the social practice of avoiding eye contact on thestreet, and in the social prohibition against undressing someone with your eyes.
Laws:Law is major area where metaphor is made real. For example,CORPORATIONS ARE PERSONS is a tenet of American law, which not onlyenables corporations to be harmed and assigned responsibility so that they canbe sued when liable, but also gives corporations certain First n policy:A STATE IS A PERSON is one of the major metaphors underlying foreignpolicy concepts. Thus, there are friendly states, hostile states, etc. Health for astate is economic health and strength is military strength. Thus a threat toeconomic health can be seen as a death threat, as when Iraq was seen to have astanglehold on the economic lifeline of the U.S. Strong states are seen as male,and weak states as female, so that an attack by a strong state on a weak statecan be seen as a rape, as in the rape of Kuwait by Iraq. A just war isconceptualized as a fairy tale with villain, victim, and hero, where the villainattacks the victim and the hero rescues the victim. Thus, the U.S. in the GulfWar was portrayed as having rescued Kuwait. As President Bush said in hisaddress to Congress, The issues couldn’t have been clearer: Iraq was thevillain and Kuwait, the of discourse:Common metaphors are often made real in discourse forms. Consider fourcommon academic discourse forms: the Guided Tour, the Heroic Battle, andthe Heroic Guided Tour is based on the metaphor that THOUGHT IS MOTION,where ideas are locations and one reasons step-by-step, reaches conclusions,or you fail to reach a conclusion if you are engaged in circular ication in this metaphor is giving someone a guided tour of somerational argument or of some intellectual terrain. The present paper is anexample of such a guided tour, where I, the author, am the tour guide who isassumed to be thoroughly familiar with the terrain, and where the terrainsurveyed is taken as objectively discourse form of the Heroic Battle is based on the metaphor thatARGUMENT IS WAR. The author’s theory is the hero, the opposing theory isthe villain, and words are weapons. The battle is in the form of an argumentdefending the hero’s position and demolishing the villain’s Heroic Quest discourse form is based on the metaphor that knowledge is avaluable but elusive object that can be discovered if one perseveres. Thescientist is the hero on a quest for knowledge, and the discourse form is anaccount of his difficult journey of discovery. What is discovered is, of course,a real entity. What makes all of these cases realizations of metaphors is that ineach case there is something real structured by conventional metaphor, andwhich is made comprehensible, or even natural, by those everyday is real differs in each case: an object like a thermometer or graph, anexperience like a dream, an action like a ritual, a form of discourse, these examples reveal is that a lot of what is real in a society or in the
experience of an individual is structured and made sense of via conventionalmetaphor. Experiential bases and realizations of metaphors are two sides of thesame coin: they are both correlations in real experience that have the samestructure as the correlations in metaphors. The difference is that experiential basesprecede, ground, and make sense of conventional metaphorical mappings, whilerealizations follow, and are made sense of, via the conventional metaphors. And aswe noted above, one generation’s realizations of a metaphor can become part ofthe next generation’s experiential basis for that y of ResultsAs we have seen, the contemporary theory of metaphor is revolutionary in manyrespects. To give you some idea how revolutionary, here is a list of the basicresults that differ from most previous Nature of Metaphor• Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstractconcepts and perform abstract reasoning.• Much subject matter, from the most mundane to the most abstrusescientific theories, can only be comprehended via metaphor.• Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature.• Metaphorical language is a surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor.• Though much of our conceptual system is metaphorical, a significant partof it is nonmetaphorical. Metaphorical understanding is grounded innonmetaphorical understanding.• Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherentlyunstructured subject matter in terms of a more concrete, or at least a morehighly structured subject Structure of Metaphor• Metaphors are mappings across conceptual domains.• Such mappings are asymmetric and partial.• Each mapping is a fixed set of ontological correspondences betweenentities in a source domain and entities in a target domain.• When those fixed correspondences are activated, mappings can projectsource domain inference patterns onto target domain inference patterns.• Metaphorical mappings obey the Invariance Principle: The image-schemastructure of the source domain is projected onto the target domain in a waythat is consistent with inherent target domain structure.• Mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in everydayexperience and knowledge.• A conceptual system contains thousands of conventional metaphoricalmappings, which form a highly structured subsystem of the conceptualsystem.
• There are two types of mappings: conceptual mappings and image-mappings; both obey the Invariance Aspects of Metaphor• The system of conventional conceptual metaphor is mostly unconscious,automatic, and is used with no noticeable effort, just like our linguisticsystem and the rest of our conceptual system.• Our system of conventional metaphor is alive in the same sense that oursystem of grammatical and phonological rules is alive; namely, it isconstantly in use, automatically and below the level of consciousness.• Our metaphor system is central to our understanding of experience and tothe way we act on that understanding.• Conventional mappings are static correspondences, and are not, inthemselves, algorithmic in nature. However, this by no means rules out thepossibility that such static correspondences might be used in languageprocessing that involves sequential steps.• Metaphor is mostly based on correspondences in our experiences, ratherthan on similarity.• The metaphor system plays a major role in both the grammar and lexiconof a language.• Metaphorical mappings vary in universality; some seem to be universal,others are widespread, and some seem to be culture- specific.• Poetic metaphor is, for the most part, an extension of our everyday,conventional system of metaphorical are the conclusions that best fit the empirical studies of metaphor conductedover the past decade or so. Though much of it is inconsistent with traditionalviews, it is by no means all new, and , that abstract concepts arecomprehended in terms of concrete concepts-have a long ding RemarksThe evidence supporting the contemporary theory of metaphor is voluminous andgrows larger each year as more research in the field is done. The evidence, as wesaw above, comes from five domains:• Generalizations over polysemy• Generalization over inference patterns• Generalizations over extensions to poetic cases• Generalizations over semantic change• Psycholinguistic experimentsI have discussed only a handful of examples of the first three of these, hopefullyenough to make the reader curious about the field. But evidence is convincingonly if it can count as evidence. When does evidence fail to be evidence?Unfortunately, all too often. It is commonly the case that certain fields of inquiryare defined by assumptions that rule out the possibility of counterevidence. When
a defining assumption of a field comes up against evidence, the evidence usuallyloses: the practitioners of the field must ignore the evidence if they want to keepthe assumptions that define the field they are committed to. Part of what makes thecontemporary theory of metaphor so interesting is that the evidence for itcontradicts the defining assumptions of so many academic disciplines. In myopinion, this should make one doubt the defining assumptions of all thosedisciplines. The reason is this: The defining assumptions of the contemporarytheory of metaphor are minimal. There are only two. The GeneralizationCommitment: To seek generalizations in all areas of language, includingpolysemy, patterns of inference, novel metaphor, and semantic change. TheCognitive Commitment: To take experimental evidence seriously. But these arenothing more than commitments to the scientific study of language and the initial commitment is made as to the form of an answer to the question of whatis metaphor. However, the defining assumptions of other fields do often entail acommitment about the form of an answer to that question. It is useful, in aninterdisciplinary volume of this sort, to spell out exactly what those definingassumptions are, since they will often explain why different authors reach suchdifferent conclusions about the nature of l Meaning CommitmentsI started this Chapter with a list of the false assumptions about literal meaning thatare commonly made. These assumptions are, of course, false only relative to thekinds of evidence that supports the contemporary theory of metaphor. If oneignores all such evidence, then the assumptions can be maintained withoutcontradiction. Assumptions about literality are the locus of many of thecontradictions between the contemporary theory of metaphor and variousacademic disciplines. Let us review those assumptions. In the discussion of literalmeaning given above, I observed that it is taken as definitional that: What is literalis not metaphorical. The false assumptions and conclusions that usuallyaccompany the word literal are:• All everyday conventional language is literal, and none is metaphorical.• All subject matter can be comprehended literally, without metaphor.• Only literal language can be contingently true or false.• All definitions given in the lexicon of a language are literal, notmetaphorical.• The concepts used in the grammar of a language are all literal; none will begin with the philosophy of language. The Generalization Commitmentand the Cognitive Commitment are not definitional to the philosophy of , most philosophers of language would feel no need to abide by them, for avery good reason. The philosophy of language is typically not seen as an empiricaldiscipline, constrained by empirical results, such as those that arise by theapplication of the Generalization and Cognitive Commitments. Instead, thephilosophy of language is usually seen as an a priori discipline, one which can bepursued using the tools of philosophical analysis alone, rather than the tools ofempirical research. Therefore, all the evidence that has been brought forth for thecontemporary theory of metaphor simply will not matter for most philosophers oflanguage. In addition, the philosophy of language comes with its own set of
defining assumptions, which entail many of the false assumptions usuallyassociated with the word literal. Most practitioners of the philosophy of languageusually make one or more of the following assumptions.• The correspondence theory of truth.• Meaning is defined in terms of reference and truth.• Natural language semantics is to be characterized by the mechanisms ofmathematical logic, including model assumptions entail the traditional false assumptions associated with theword literal. Thus the very field of philosophy of language comes with definingassumptions that contradict the main conclusions of the contemporary theory ofmetaphor. Consequently, we can see why most philosophers of language have therange of views on metaphor that they have: They accept the traditional literal-figurative distinction. They may, like Davidson (1981), say that there is nometaphorical meaning, and that most metaphorical utterances are either triviallytrue or trivially false. Or, like Grice (1989, p. 34) and Searle (this volume), theywill assume that metaphor is in the realm of pragmatics, that is, that ametaphorical meaning is no more than the literal meaning of some other sentencewhich can be arrived at by some pragmatic principle. This is required, since theonly real meaning for them is literal meaning, and pragmatic principles are thoseprinciples that allow one to say one thing (with a literal meaning) and meansomething else (with a different, but nonetheless literal, meaning). Much ofgenerative linguistics accepts one or more of these assumptions from thephilosophy of language. The field of formal semantics accepts them all, and thusformal semantics, by its defining assumptions, is at odds with the contemporarytheory of metaphor. Formal semantics simply does not see it as its job> to accountfor the generalizations discussed in this paper. From the perspective of formalsemantics, the phenomena that the contemporary theory of metaphor is concernedwith are either nonexistent or uninteresting, since they lie outside the purview ofthe discipline. That is why Jerrold Sadock in his chapter in this volume claims thatmetaphor lies outside of synchronic linguistics. Since he accepts mathematicallogic as the correct approach to natural language semantics, Sadock must seemetaphor as being outside of semantics proper. He must, therefore, also reject theentire enterprise of the contemporary theory of metaphor. And Morgan (thisvolume), also accepting those defining assumptions of the philosophy of language,agrees with Grice and Searle that metaphor is a matter of y’s theory of government and binding also accepts crucial assumptionsfrom the philosophy of language that are inconsistent with the contemporarytheory of metaphor. Government and binding, following my early theory ofgenerative semantics, assumes that semantics is to be represented in terms oflogical form. Government and binding, like generative semantics, thus rules outthe very possibility that metaphor might be part of natural language semantics as itenters into grammar. Because of this defining assumption, I would not expectgovernment and binding theorists to become concerned with the phenomenacovered by the contemporary theory of stingly, much of continental philosophy and deconstructionism is alsocharacterized by defining assumptions that are at odds with the contemporarytheory of metaphor. Nietzsche (see, Johnson, 1981) held that all language ismetaphorical, which is at odds with those results that indicate that a significant
amount of everyday language is not metaphorical. Much of continentalphilosophy, observing that conceptual systems change through time, assumes thatconceptual systems are purely historically contingent-that there are no conceptualuniversals. Though conceptual systems do change through time, there do,however, appear to be universal, or at least very widespread, conceptualmetaphors. The event structure metaphor is my present candidate for ametaphorical universal. Continental philosophy also comes with a distinctionbetween the study of the physical world, which can be scientific, and the study ofhuman beings, which it says cannot be scientific. This is very much at odds withthe conceptual theory of metaphor, which is very much a scientific y, the contemporary theory of metaphor is at odds with certain traditions insymbolic artificial intelligence and information processing psychology. Thosefields assume that thought is a matter of algorithmic symbol manipulation, of thesort done by a traditional computer program. This defining assumption puts it atodds with the contemporary theory of metaphor in two respects: First, thecontemporary theory has an image-schematic basis: The invariance hypothesisapplies both to image-metaphors and characterizes constraints on novel symbol-manipulation systems cannot handle image-schemas, they cannotdeal with image-metaphors or imagable idioms. Second, those traditions mustcharacterize metaphorical mapping as an algorithmic process, which typicallytakes literal meanings as input and gives a metaphorical reading as output. This isat odds with cases where there are multiple, overlapping metaphors in a singlesentence, and which require the simultaneous activation of a number ofmetaphorical contemporary theory of metaphor is thus not only interesting for its own is especially interesting for the challenge it brings to other disciplines. For, if theresults of the contemporary theory are accepted, then the defining assumptions ofwhole disciplines are brought into his research was supported in part by grants from the Sloan Foundation and theNational Science Foundation (IRI-8703202) to the University of California atBerkeley. The following colleagues and students helped with this paper in avariety of ways, from useful comments to allowing me to cite their research: KenBaldwin, Claudia Brugman, Jane Espenson, Sharon Fischler, Ray Gibbs, AdeleGoldberg, Mark Johnson, Karin Myhre, Eve Sweetser, and Mark ix: An Annotated BibliographyMost of the papers in this edition also appeared in the first edition of 1979 andthus predate the contemporary theory of metaphor. Because of this, I thoughtmight be a service to readers to provide a short annotated bibliography offundamental books and papers on the contemporary theory written since the firstedition of this volume , Raymond W., Jr. 1990. Psycholinguistic studies on the conceptual basis ofidiomaticity. Cognitive Linguistics, 1-4: 417-462.A survey of psycholinguistic results demonstrating the cognitive reality ofconceptual metaphor and imagable idioms.
Johnson, Mark. 1981. Philosphical Perspectives on Metaphor Minneapolis:University of Minnesota best collection of papers by philosophers on metaphor. Thae author’sintroduction is the best short historical survey of the history of metaphor n, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: the Bodily Basis of Meaning,Reason and Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.A discussion of philosophical issues arising from the discovery of the systemof conceptual es, Zoltan. 1990. Emotion Concepts. Springer-Verlag.A thorough and voluminously documented demonstration that emotion isconceptualized , George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What CategoriesReveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.A survey of contemporary literature on categorization, including the role ofmetaphor in forming categories categories. Includes a general theory ofmeaning assimilating conceptual metaphor and other aspects of , George. 1989. Philosophical Speculation and Cognitive Science. InPhilosophical Psychology: 2,1.A discussion of the differing assumptions behind generative semantics andgenerative , George. 1991. Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used To JustifyWar in the buted via electronic bulletin boards, January, 1991. Reprinted in BrienHallet (ed.), Engulfed in War: Just War and the Persian Gulf, Honolulu:Matsunaga Institute for Peace, 1991. Also in: Journal of Urban and CulturalStudies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1991. Also in: Vietnam Generation Newsletter, vol. 3,no. 2, No vember 1991. Also in: The East Bay Express, February, 1991. Ananalysis of the metaphorical system used in the public discourse and expertpolicy deliberations on the Gulf War, together with what the metaphors hid,and a critique of the war based on this , George and Claudia Brugman. 1986. Argument Forms in LexicalSemantics. In Nikiforidou et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meetingof the Berkeley Linguistics Society: 442-454.A survey of the argument forms used in justifying metaphorical analysis and acomparison with corresponding argument forms in syntax and , George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:University of Chicago first book outlining the con temporary theory of metaphor.
Lakoff, George and Turner, Mark. 1989. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guideto Poetic Metaphor Chicago: University of Chicago Press.A survey of the mechanisms of poetic metaphor, replete with er, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: The Mind-as-BodyMetaphor in Semantic Structure and Semantic Change. Cambridge: CambridgeUniver sity best work to date on the role of metaphor in semantic change, and themetaphorical basis of , Leonard. 1985. Force Dynamics in Language and Thought. In Papers fromthe Parasession on Causatives and Agentivity. Chicago: Chicago analysis that led to the study of the metaphorical basis of modality , Mark. 1987. Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, o: University of Chicago Press.A study of the regularities behind all the kinship metaphors from Chaucer toWallace Stevens, including the role of metaphor in allegory. Turner alsonoticed the prevalence of the CAUSATION IS PROGENERATION metaphorand the constraint that was the precursor to the Invariance , Mark 1991. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of CognitiveScience. Princeton: Princeton University Press.A reevaluation of the profession of English and the study of the Englishlanguage in the light of recent results on the nature of metaphor and otherresults in the cognitive , Steven L. 1989. Transcendental Nonsense, Metaphoric Reasoning, and theCognitive Stakes for Law, 137 University of Pennsylvania Law most comprehensive of Winter’s many articles discussing the role ofmetaphor in nces• Auster, Paul, ed. 1984. The Random House Book of Twentieth CenturyFrench Poetry. New York: Random House.• Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1990. Psycholinguistics studies on the conceptualbasis of idiomaticity. Cognitive Linguistics, 1-4: 417-462.• Grice, Paul 1989. Studies in the Way of Words Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press. Johnson, Mark. 1981. Philosphical Perspectiveson Metaphor Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.• Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: the Bodily Basis of Meaning,Reason and Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.• Kovecses, Zoltan. 1990. Emotion Concepts. Springer- Verlag.
• Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: WhatCategories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.• Lakoff, George. 1989. Philosophical Speculation and Cognitive Science. InPhilosophical Psychology: 2,1.• Lakoff, George and Claudia Brugman. 1986. Argument Forms in LexicalSemantics. In Nikiforidou et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Twelfth AnnualMeeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: 442-454.• Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live o: University of Chicago Press.• Lakoff, George and Turner, Mark. 1989. More Than Cool Reason: A FieldGuide to Poetic Metaphor Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merwin,W. S. 1973. Asian Figures. New York: Atheneum.• Merwin, W. S., and Masson, J. Moussaieff, trs. 1981. The Peacock’s Francisco: North Point Press.• Rothenberg, Jerome, ed. 1985. Technicians of the Sacred. Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press.• Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: The Mind-as-BodyMetaphor in Semantic Structure and Semantic Change. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.• Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Force Dynamics in Language and Thought. InPapers from the Parasession on Causatives and Agentivity. Chicago:Chicago Linguistic Society.• Turner, Mark. 1987. Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor,Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.• Turner, Mark 1991. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age ofCognitive Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press.