Three kinds of metaphor in discourse: A linguistic taxonomy

Abstract

The study of metaphor has been revolutionized by the Cognitive Linguistic approach advocated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999; for a good introduction, see Kövecses, 2002). They have shown how the structure of language is replete with metaphor, for instance in conventional expressions for talk about argument in terms of war (Lotte defended her thesis; Sam attacked George with mild irony; Bush has proposed another untenable position) or (un)happiness in terms of a vertical scale (I feel in high spirits today; don’t let it bring you down). But they have also widened the scope of the analysis of metaphor beyond its linguistic form and meaning. The Cognitive Linguistic claim is that these conventional linguistic metaphors are reflections of underlying conventional mappings between distinct conceptual domains, or metaphor ‘in thought’, to the effect that we think of ARGUMENT AS WAR or HAPPINESS AS UP. Such conceptual cross-domain mappings are held to be part of people’s enduring knowledge structures and to be a constitutive factor of all kinds of cognitive processes, including language use, reasoning, and the exercise of the imagination in literature, the arts, and other domains of human performance. The empirical evidence for the Cognitive Linguistic (CL) view of metaphor as a conceptual phenomenon is mainly linguistic, and has been criticized as such for what it can tell us about the role in knowledge and cognitive processing by cognitive psychologists like Greg Murphy (1996, 1997), and in language processing by discourse analysts such as Cameron and Low (1999; for a comprehensive review, see Steen, 2007). Still, the CL view of metaphor has kept inspiring much innovative research and debate in a range of disciplines.