The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor
The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor George Lakoff
(c) Copyright George Lakoff, 1992 To Appear in Ortony, Andrew (ed.) Metaphor and Thought (2nd edition), Cambridge University Press. Do not go gentle into that good night. -Dylan Thomas Death is the mother of beauty . . . -Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning
Introduction
These famous lines by Thomas and Stevens are examples of what classical theorists, at least since Aristotle, have referred to as metaphor: instances of novel poetic language in which words like mother, go, and night are not used in their normal everyday senses. In classical theories of language, metaphor was seen as a matter of language not thought. Metaphorical expressions were assumed to be mutually exclusive with the realm of ordinary everyday language: everyday language had no metaphor, and metaphor used mechanisms outside the realm of everyday conventional language. The classical theory was taken so much for granted over the centuries that many people didn’t realize that it was just a theory. The theory was not merely taken to be true, but came to be taken as definitional. The word metaphor was defined as a novel or poetic linguistic expression where one or more words for a concept are used outside of its normal conventional meaning to express a similar concept. But such issues are not matters for definitions; they are empirical questions. As a cognitive scientist and a linguist, one asks: What are the generalizations governing the linguistic expressions re ferred to classically as poetic metaphors? When this question is answered rigorously, the classical theory turns out to be false. The generalizations governing poetic metaphorical expressions are not in language, but in thought: They are general map pings across conceptual domains. Moreover, these general princi ples which take the form of conceptual mappings, apply not just to novel poetic expressions, but to much of ordinary everyday language. In short, the locus of metaphor is not in
(c) Copyright George Lakoff, 1992 To Appear in Ortony, Andrew (ed.) Metaphor and Thought (2nd edition), Cambridge University Press. Do not go gentle into that good night. -Dylan Thomas Death is the mother of beauty . . . -Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning
Introduction
These famous lines by Thomas and Stevens are examples of what classical theorists, at least since Aristotle, have referred to as metaphor: instances of novel poetic language in which words like mother, go, and night are not used in their normal everyday senses. In classical theories of language, metaphor was seen as a matter of language not thought. Metaphorical expressions were assumed to be mutually exclusive with the realm of ordinary everyday language: everyday language had no metaphor, and metaphor used mechanisms outside the realm of everyday conventional language. The classical theory was taken so much for granted over the centuries that many people didn’t realize that it was just a theory. The theory was not merely taken to be true, but came to be taken as definitional. The word metaphor was defined as a novel or poetic linguistic expression where one or more words for a concept are used outside of its normal conventional meaning to express a similar concept. But such issues are not matters for definitions; they are empirical questions. As a cognitive scientist and a linguist, one asks: What are the generalizations governing the linguistic expressions re ferred to classically as poetic metaphors? When this question is answered rigorously, the classical theory turns out to be false. The generalizations governing poetic metaphorical expressions are not in language, but in thought: They are general map pings across conceptual domains. Moreover, these general princi ples which take the form of conceptual mappings, apply not just to novel poetic expressions, but to much of ordinary everyday language. In short, the locus of metaphor is not in
References: • • • Auster, Paul, ed. 1984. The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry. New York: Random House. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1990. Psycholinguistics studies on the conceptual basis 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 Perspectives on 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: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George. 1989. Philosophical Speculation and Cognitive Science. In Philosophical Psychology: 2,1. Lakoff, George and Claudia Brugman. 1986. Argument Forms in Lexical Semantics. In Nikiforidou et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: 442-454. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Turner, Mark. 1989. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide 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 Egg. San Francisco: North Point Press. Rothenberg, Jerome, ed. 1985. Technicians of the Sacred. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: The Mind-as-Body Metaphor in Semantic Structure and Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Force Dynamics in Language and Thought. In Papers 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 of Cognitive Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. • • • • • • • •