A Re-examination of UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING

Abstract

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