Chapter 7: Conceptual Metaphors & Culture

Metaphors function by linking two referents: a primary topic (the professor) and a secondary vehicle (a snake), which transfers its cultural connotations to create a ground of new meaning. Historically, thinkers from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas recognized metaphor as a cognitive strategy for grasping abstractions by comparing them to concrete things, while others like Vico and Kant emphasized its origin in sensory experience. Modern research, fueled by the revolutionary work of I. A. Richards and Max Black on semantic interaction, culminated in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) by Lakoff and Johnson. CMT asserts that abstract concepts are derived from concrete ones through overarching unconscious formulas, or conceptual metaphors (e.g., people are animals), which map a generic source domain (animals) onto a target domain (people). Specific verbal instances of this mapping are known as linguistic metaphors. This metaphorical tendency is so deeply ingrained that we are inclined to find meaning in syntactically correct but literally meaningless phrases. The psychological source of these conceptual frameworks lies in image schemas, which convert concrete sensory experiences, such as orientation (happiness is up/sadness is down), into structures for understanding abstractions, creating root metaphors based on modalities like vision or touch (e.g., apprehend, discern). Furthermore, conceptual metaphors structure cultural understanding through Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs), which are complex systems resulting from the constant juxtaposition and blending of multiple source domains (e.g., ideas as geometry, food, or buildings) that allow cultural groups to talk and think about abstract targets. The process of blending describes the neural mechanism where two distinct entities (source and target) are identified as the same entity in a third neural area. Anthropomorphism, where human body parts become a universal source domain for naming external objects (the face of a clock, the leg of a race), is a key example of this concept formation strategy that permeates vocabularies across cultures, from English to Western Apache. Beyond core metaphors, the chapter also addresses related rhetorical devices, noting that most tropes are considered types of metaphor, while metonymy (using a related entity, like the part for the whole) and irony (conveying the opposite of the literal meaning) are treated separately within CMT. Ultimately, metaphorical reasoning is pervasive, influencing everything from cultural rituals and folk wisdom to scientific discovery and nonverbal communication through gesticulants.