Metaphor universals in literature

Abstract

In this article we are concerned with the issue of metaphor universals in poetry. By metaphor universals we mean any (universal or potentially universal) metaphor-related phenomena. Metaphor universals are approached from a conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) perspective here. The majority of our examples are taken from American English, British English and Hungarian poems, including a number of Hungarian folksongs. Since universality assumes non-universality, we are concerned with both universal and non-universal aspects of metaphor in poetry. We attempt to answer two questions: What makes some metaphors universal? And What makes some other conceptual metaphors non-universal in poetry? In answering these questions, we use an extended view of CMT provided by Kövecses (2017, 2015), which has two main components: the multi-level view of metaphor and the contextualist version of CMT. The analysis demonstrates that this complex approach offers several new insights into the study of poetic metaphor.