Conceptual mappings and neural reuse

Metaphor in cognitive linguistics: selected papers from …, 1999

Acta Linguistica Academica

There can be numerous reasons for change in scientific theories. For example, the elaboration or introduction of new methods may provide new data, but it also makes possible the re-evaluation of previous research results, which may have theoretical consequences and, in the end, the emergence of a new model in the field of research. Yet it is also possible that certain problems lead to a theoretical transformation of certain parts of the dominant theoretical paradigm. The book under review fits into the latter line, when with the past forty years of cognitivist metaphor research in the backpack, the author, Zoltán Kövecses, proposes a partial revision of the previous theoretical model, the standard Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Kövecses' work gives not only a broad and in-depth overview of the developments of contemporary research in the cognitive linguistic metaphor research paradigm in a comprehensible manner. It also develops on the basis of the standard version of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory originated from Lakoff and Johnson's seminal work Metaphors We Live by (Lakoff & Johnson 1980henceforth CMT), an innovative and challenging novel framework, the Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (henceforth ECMT). The book consists of 8 chapters in total, and it is framed by an introductory (Chapter 1) and a summary chapter (Chapter 8). The presentation of CMT in Chapter 1 serves as a stepping stone to the main topic of the book: to the developing the Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory in the next chapters (Chapter 2-6). On the basis of the ideas elaborated in these chapters, in Chapter 7, Kövecses provides a brief summary of the general framework of ECMT. The concluding chapter (Chapter 8) compares ECMT with Ray Gibbs' theory of the dynamic systems view of metaphors (Gibbs 2017). In the introductory chapter, Kövecses presents not only a concise summary of the standard version of CMT, but the basic questions that motivate the need to extend the classical model are briefly summarized as well. For those who are familiar with the work of Zoltán Kövecses, it is also clear that the answers to the questions raised in the Chapter 2 to 6 are the results of a longer research period of about ten years. These issues and related major publications include:

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2017

People think about abstract domains like TIME and GOODNESS metaphorically. This tendency may be universal. Yet the particular mental metaphors that people use can differ dramatically between individuals and groups, and may change from one moment to the next. Where do our mental metaphors come from, and how can they change so quickly in response to new patterns of experience? If mental metaphors are grounded in universal patterns of body-world interaction, how can different people have contrasting (and sometimes contradictory) mental metaphors? Hierarchical Mental Metaphors Theory (HMMT) provides an account of: (a) how mental metaphors are formed and changed, (b) how they can be fundamental to our understanding of abstract domains, yet at the same time remarkably flexible, and (c) how distinctive language-specific, culture-specific, and body-specific mental metaphors can arise from universal patterns of interaction with the physical and social world.

Despite its popularity in and outside cognitive linguistics, cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) has received a wide range of criticisms in the past two decades. Several metaphor researchers have criticized the methodology with which metaphor is studied (emphasizing concepts instead of words), the direction of analysis (emphasizing a top-down instead of a bottom-up approach), the category level of metaphor (claiming its superordinate status instead of basic level), the embodiment of metaphor (emphasizing the universal, mechanical, and monolithic aspects instead of nonuniversal, nonmechanical, and nonmonolithic aspects of embodiment), and its relationship to culture (emphasizing the role of universal bodily experience instead of the interaction of body and context). In the paper, I respond to this criticism largely based on my own research and propose a view on these issues that can successfully meet these challenges and that can be regarded as an alternative to the "standard theory. "

Metaphor is linked to transfer, a useful phenomenon for explaining cognitive processes such as problem solving and memory. However, modern models for metaphor remain unable to produce mechanisms that explain how cognition produces and interprets metaphor. In computational frameworks, including the Structure Mapping Theory and Representation Transformation model, selection problems pervade models, while in the more Gestalt Conceptual Metaphor Theory, vagueness prevents clear operationalization and empirical experimentation. Ultimately, all extant metaphor models rely on meaning extraction to construct mental representation, for which there exists no adequate cognitive mechanism. In addition, some theorists suggest that representation itself is irrelevant to the problem, and clearer explanations may lie in dynamical theory frameworks.

1993

concepts like time, states, change, causation, and pur pose also turn out to be metaphorical. The result is that metaphor (that is, cross-domain mapping) is absolutely central to ordinary natural language semantics, and that the study of literary metaphor is an extension of the study of everyday metaphor. Everyday metaphor is characterized by a huge system of thousands of cross-domain mappings, and this system is made use of in novel metaphor. Because of these empirical results, the word metaphor has come to be used differently in contemporary metaphor research. The word metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system. The term metaphorical expression refers to a linguistic expression (a word, phrase, or sentence) that is the surface realization of such a cross-domain mapping (this is what the word metaphor referred to in the old theory). I will adopt the contemporary usage throughout this chapter. Experimental results demonstrating the cognitive reali ty of the extensive system of metaphorical mappings are discussed by Gibbs (this volume). Mark Turner's 1987 book, Death is the mother of beauty, whose title comes from Stevens' great line, demonstrates in detail how that line uses the ordinary system of everyday mappings. For further examples of how literary metaphor makes use of the ordinary metaphor system, see More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, by Lakoff and Turner (1989) and Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science, by Turner (1991). Since the everyday metaphor system is central to the understanding of poetic metaphor, we will begin with the everyday system and then turn to poetic examples.

This article deals with metaphor from a linguistic perspective. A question arises here as to whether to which field of language study metaphor belongs. How to answer the question is subject to our understanding of metaphorical expressions. When one encounters a situation in which a metaphorical expression is used, they have a kind of construal to conceptualize the expression. Thus, the field of linguistics which is concerned with studying metaphors is cognitive linguistics since people use their cognitive abilities to conceptualize and understand the metaphorical expressions. With respect to this, George Lakoff adopted a theory under the title Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Here I try to shed light on some aspects of this theory. What is taken into consideration in the paper is a detailed account of metaphor as a cognitive device, the three basic types of conceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), namely orientational, ontological, and structural. Also, the characteristic features of conceptual metaphors like asymmetry, systematicity, and conventionality. Additionally, the relationship between conceptual metaphor and image schemas is shown in the last section. One of the conclusions of the article is that conceptual metaphor is an integral part of our everyday lives; we cannot interact normally without using conceptual metaphors.

LFE, 2017

The paper addresses metaphor as a cognitive-semantic device which is able to reveal intuitive mechanisms of the thinking process, thus filling the gaps in the sphere of logically objective human knowledge and opening the possibility to describe abstract concepts of the human mind in terms. This paper substantiates the principal possibility of conceptual modeling of the metaphorization process and describes its baseline algorithm, identifies complex metaphors and establishes the cognitive-semantic features of their functioning. The main conclusion of the reasoning confirms the hypothesis that different image schemes have different strength of heuristic potential, which determines the fullness of metaphorical descriptions of concepts.