Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics

Ben Bergen

Meeting 5: Conceptual Metaphor

September 9, 2008

Preliminaries

· Questions about Homework 1?

· Others?

Conceptual metaphor

Lots of language has meanings that extend beyond concrete senses.

· Consider the word side which has not only a physical but also an opponency meaning. Or bubble, which can refer to a physical object or an increase in prices.

· What determines how words like these have the varied meanings they have, crossing domains as they do?

· More broadly, how do we understand language about abstract concepts, and how are these concepts themselves defined?

To answer this, we turn to the study of conceptual metaphor.

The classical theory:

· metaphor is a purely literary device, mostly absent in conventional language

· metaphor, when used in conventional language, is inherently untrue and misleading

two roads diverge in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by·

The contemporary (conceptual) theory:

· metaphor is pervasive in both conventional and poetic language

· conceptual metaphors are mappings across domains of knowledge, not language

· one domain is thought of in terms of the other - they are asymmetrical

Consider Love is a Journey

Examples (metaphorical expressions)

Our relationship has hit a dead-end street.

Look how far we’ve come.

It’s been a long, bumpy road.

We can’t turn back now.

We’re at a crossroads.

We may have to go our separate ways.

We’re spinning our wheels.

Our relationship is off track.

Mapping (captures the correspondences between elements in the two domains):

Source Domain	Target Domain
Travel	Relationships
Travelers	Lovers
Vehicle	relationship
common destination	common goals
impediments to travel	difficulties in the relationship

Evidence that the mapping is conceptual, and not simply linguistic, comes from epistemic correspondences (the alignment of reasoning about the two domains)

· We’re spinning our wheels can refer literally to the domain of travel - and includes a particular inferential structure.

· When used metaphorically, the expression evokes the same scenario and reasoning, but now it pertains to relationships.

Further evidence of the conceptual status of metaphor comes from the existence of and interpretability of novel extensions

We’re driving in the fast lane on the freeway of love.

We reason about this example that when you drive in the fast lane, you go a long way in a short time, and it can therefore be exciting but is also dangerous.

My latest relationship got waylaid at the on-ramp.

Metaphor seems to be a matter of thought, because if it were just a matter of language:

· We couldn’t systematically map inferences from one domain to another

· We couldn't unidirectionally and systematically use language from one domain for another

· We couldn't use novel metaphorical expressions and expect them to be understood.

Other types of evidence on conceptual metaphor

· Polysemy patterns

· Patterns of semantic change

· Psycholinguistic experimentation

· Patterns of language acquisition

Group work

Consider the following linguistic expressions.

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticisms were right on target.

That dish is an assault on my good taste.

I demolished his argument.

I’ve never won an argument with him.

You disagree? OK, shoot!

The professor punched the robber.

If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.

His claims were unconvincing.

He shot down all of my arguments.

Some of them seem to instantiate the same conceptual metaphor

· They describe the same Target Domain

· They use language drawn from the same Source Domain

· They map the same parts of the Source to the Target Domain – systematically

Some questions for you to discuss in groups:

· Which linguistic expressions instantiate the same conceptual metaphor (and for the ones that do not, why not)?

· What are the source and target domains?

· What is the mapping – the correspondances between the domains?