Metafor

	Metafor

En metafor är en retoriskt figur där en liknelse görs mellan två olikartade begrepp eller fenomen genom att påstå att de är lika varandra. I en metafor används vanligtvis ett ord eller en fras för att beskriva något på ett sätt som inte är bokstavligt, för att skapa en bildlig liknelse. Metaforer används ofta för att överföra egenskaper, känslor eller karaktäristika från ett objekt till ett annat och därigenom skapa en mer levande eller bildlig beskrivning.

Metaforen är alltså ett bildligt uttryckssätt och kommer ofta till genom att man blandar uttryck från olika genrer. Man skapar uttryck som egentligen, i strikt mening är omöjliga, men som i stället talar till vår fantasi. Det är till exempel mycket vanligt att politiken lånar uttryck från sportens eller från hushållets värld. Så kunde Mona Sahlin ta time out (här finns ett ljudexempel från det talet) eller så kunde Carl Bildt ta oss med på den enda vägen.

Det har sagts att makten dessa bilder utövar över oss är påtaglig. I den svenska maktutredningen från 1980-talet heter en av böckerna i serien just Metaforernas makt. Låt oss ta metaforen storm på aktiemarknaden som ett exempel. Vad ger oss denna storm för implikationer? Kanske känner vi känslan av naturkraft, av något utanför människors kontroll. Jämför detta med verkligheten bakom: finansmannen Soros sålde svenska aktier för en halv miljard. Intrycket blir onekligen ett annat.

Exempel på metaforer inkluderar uttryck som "tiden är en stöld" eller "hans hjärta är av sten". I dessa fall används orden "stöld" och "sten" inte bokstavligt, utan de representerar snarare egenskaper eller tillstånd som associeras med dem för att beskriva något annat.

Bildspråk där ord/uttryck får en annan betydelse än rent bokstavligt.
Inget jämförelseord: "Du är en ros", "haven är jordens blod"

- Man talar i språkliga bilder.

Metaforen är alltså ett bildligt uttryckssätt där ett begrepp tillfälligt byts ut mot ett begrepp som liknar det ursprungliga. Likheten är beroende av sammanhanget och metaforer fungerar därför endast då lyssnaren har tillgång till sammanhanget.

En av metaforens viktigaste funktion är att den främjar språkets nyskapande och spelar en roll för tänkande och begreppsbildning. Metaforer vidgar språkets uttryckssregister. Uttryck som exempelvis "stolens rygg" och "bergets fot" är från början metaforer, men har inkorporerats [införts] i språket till den grad att de längre inte ses som metaforer. Dessa kan betecknas som döda, stelnade eller historiska metaforer, men kallas också för dolda. De ingår i språkets lexikon och är alltså lexikaliserade.

De dolda metaforernas motsats är öppna metaforer. De är synliga som en bild eller liknelse: "Smärtan vrålade inom henne". I dessa öppna metaforer finns en tydlig skillnad mellan bildled och sakled, som skapar en dialog mellan dem.

Metaforen skiljer sig från liknelsen på så vis att den enbart består av en bild och det som bilden betecknar, utan något jämförelseled (till exempel ordet "som"). I liknelser finns alltså både sakledet och bildledet utsatta.

"Livet är (som) en sjöresa".

Om liknelsen utvidgas så att bildledet blir en berättelse får vi en allegori, som alltså är en förlängd metafor där man säger ett men menar något annat.

"Vårt liv rör sig mot ett fjärran mål genom storm och stiltje. För att hålla det på rätt kurs krävs ett fast grepp om rorkulten".

I den rena metaforen (bilden) finns bara bildledet utsatt.

"Livets höst".

Sakledet får vi själva sluta oss till genom sammanhanget.

Metaforen används bland annat för att åskådliggöra något; för att förkorta uttryckssättet; för att undvika anstötlighet; för att ge extra eftertryck; för att förringa något, samt för den språkliga utsmyckningens skull.[1] Inte minst i massmedia är metaforer vanliga, till exempel 'IT-bubbla', 'börskrasch' och 'fotbollsfeber' har använts på slagkraftiga löpsedlar. Det mest kända användningsområdet är annars inom poesin.

Även förolämpningar så som mansgris, skata, skräcködla, luspudel, stolpskott, snedseglare med flera.

Källa

Metafor / Obearbetat material

Metaphor: How We Speak

(These are excerpts from, or extensions to, the material published in my book "The Nature of Consciousness")

Standing for Something Else

Metaphor is not just a poet's tool to express touching feelings. Metaphor is pervasive in our language. "Her marriage is a nightmare", "My room is a jungle", "She is a snake", "This job is a piece of cake", etc.: we communicate all the time metaphorically.

The reason metaphor is so convenient is that it allows us to express a lot starting with very little: metaphor is a linguistic device to transfer properties from one concept to another.

Metaphor is so pervasive that every single word of our language may have originated from a metaphor. All language may be metaphorical. Given the importance of language among our mental faculties, metaphor is likely a key element of reasoning and thinking in general. In other words, being able to construct and understand metaphors (to transfer properties from a "source" to a "destination", from "nightmare" to "marriage", from "jungle" to "room", etc.) may be an essential part of being a mind.

Founding his theory on archeology, i.e. on evidence from prehistory, the British archeologist Steven became convinced that metaphor was pivotal for the development of the human mind.

A special case of metaphor is metonymy, which occurs when a term is used to indicate something else, e.g. "the White House" to mean "the president of the United States" rather than the building itself (as in "the White House pledged not to increase taxes"). Metonymy differs from metaphor in that metaphor is a way to conceive something in terms of another thing, whereas metonymy is a way to use something to stand for something else (i.e., it also has a "referential" function).

The study of metaphor presents a number of obvious problems: how to determine its truth value (taken literally, metaphors are almost always false) and how to recognize an expression as a metaphor (metaphors have no consistent syntactic form).

It is also intriguing that metaphor seems to violate so blatantly Paul Grice's conversational rules: if the speaker tries to make communication as "rational" as possible, why would she construct a metaphor instead of just being literal? The answer lies in the true nature of metaphor.

The Dynamics of Language

Early studies on metaphor focused on the analogical reasoning that any metaphor implies.

The British mathematician Max Black was influential in moving metaphor from the level of words to the level of concepts. His "interactionist" theory of metaphor (dating from the 1960s, and inspired by the pioneering work of the British literary critic Ivor Richards in the 1930s) views metaphor not as a game of words, but as a cognitive phenomenon that involves concepts. In literal language, two concepts can be combined to obtain another concept without changing the original concepts (e.g., "good" and "marriage" form "good marriage"). In metaphorical language, two concepts are combined so that they form a new concept (e.g., marriage as a nightmare), and additionally they change each other (both "marriage" and "nightmare" acquire a different meaning, one reflecting the nightmarish aspects of marriage and the other one reflecting the marriage-like quality of a nightmare). They trade meaning. Predications that are normally applied to one are now also possible on the other, and vice versa. A metaphor consists in a transaction between two concepts. The interpretation of both concepts is altered.

Black viewed metaphor as a means to reorganize the properties of the destination. First of all, a metaphor is not an isolated term, but a sentence. A metaphorical sentence (e.g., "marriage is a nightmare") involves two subjects. The secondary subject (e.g., "nightmare") comes with a system of associated stereotyped information (or "predication"). That stereotyped information is used as a filter on the principal subject (e.g., "marriage"). There arises a "tension" between the two subjects of the metaphor. That tension is also reflected back to the secondary subject.

Black emphasized that metaphorizing is related to categorizing (the choice of a category in which to place an object is a choice of perspective), but is distinguished from it by an incongruity which causes a reordering and a new perspective.

A crucial point is that metaphor does not express similarities: it creates similarity.

Metaphors act on the organization of the lexicon and the model of the world.

Finally, Black argued that language is dynamic: over time, what is literal may become metaphoric and viceversa.

The Australian mathematician Michael Arbib, one of the many who have argued that all language is metaphorical, based his theory of language on Black's interactionist model.

At the other extreme, the USA computer scientist James Martin does not believe that the process of comprehending a metaphor is a process of reasoning by analogy. A metaphor is simply a linguistic convention within a linguistic community, an "abbreviation" for a concept that would otherwise require too many words. There is no need for transfer of properties from one concept to another. In his theory, a number of primitive classes of metaphors (metaphors that are part of the knowledge of language) are used to build all the others. A metaphor is therefore built and comprehended just like any other lexical entity. Martin's is a purely "syntactic" model of metaphor.

Metaphorical Thought

As the French philologist Michel Breal had already pointed out at the end of the 19th century, metaphor is often indispensable to express a concept for which words just do not exist in the language. Entire domains are mapped in other domains for lack of appropriate words. For example, the domain of character is mapped into the domain of temperature: a hot temper, a cold behavior, a warm person, etc. Breal realized that metaphors literally shape language.

A cognitive analysis of metaphor was carried out during the 1970s and 1980s by the USA linguist George Lakoff. He reached two fundamental conclusions: (1) all language is metaphorical and (2) all metaphors are ultimately based on our bodily experience.

Metaphor shapes our language as well as our thought, and it does so by grounding concepts in our body. It provides an experiential framework in which we can accommodate abstract concepts. Thanks to metaphor, we can reduce (and therefore understand) abstract concepts to our physical experiences and to our relationship with the external world. Metaphor is therefore an intermediary between our conceptual representation of the world and our sensory experience of the world (an approach reminiscent of Immanuel Kant's schema).

Metaphor is not only ubiquitous in our language, it is also organized in conceptual systems: concepts of love are related to concepts of voyage, concepts of argument are related to concepts of war, and so forth. It is not only one word that relates to another word: it is an entire conceptual system that is related to another conceptual system.

This organization of conceptual systems forms a "cognitive map". Metaphor projects the cognitive map of a domain (the "vehicle") onto another domain (the "tenor") for the purpose of grounding the latter to sensory experience via the cognitive map of the former.

The entire conceptual castle of our mind relies on this creation of abstractions by metaphor from the foundations of our bodily experience in the world.

Lakoff grew up at a time when there was solid agreement about what metaphors are. Metaphor was merely considered a linguistic expression favored by poets that is not used in the literal sense and expresses a similarity. But he quickly started realizing that we use metaphors all the time, and that we use them in a far more encompassing manner. For example, we express love in terms of a journey (as in "our marriage isn't going anywhere"), or time in terms of money (as in "a waste of time"). Love is not similar to a journey, and time is not similar to money. Furthermore, abstract concepts (such as "love") are defined by metaphors. If we take the metaphors away all is left is the roles (e.g., the lovers and the type of relationship). The system of metaphors built around an abstraction (e.g., all the metaphors that we use about love) tells us how to reason about that abstraction.

This led Lakoff to reason that: metaphor is not in the words, it is in the ideas; it is part of ordinary language, not only of poetry; it is used for reasoning.

Once metaphor is defined as the process of experiencing something in terms of something else, metaphor turns out to be pervasive, and not only in language but also in action and thought. The human conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature, as most concepts are understood in terms of other concepts. Language comprehension always consists in comprehending something in terms of something else. All our concepts are of metaphorical nature and are based on our physical experience.

Lakoff analyzed numerous domains of human knowledge and invariably detected the underlying metaphors. Theories, for example, are treated as buildings (a theory has "foundations" and is "supported" by data, theories are "fragile" or "solid"). Mathematics itself is a metaphor (Trigonometry is a metaphor for talking about angles)

We understand the world through metaphors, and we do so without any effort, automatically and unconsciously. It doesn't require us to think, it just happens and it happens all the time. Most of the time we are thinking metaphorically without even knowing it.

Our mind shares with the other minds a conventional system of metaphor. This is a system of "mappings", of referring one domain of experience to another domain, so that one domain can be understood through another domain which is somehow more basic. Normally, a more abstract domain is explained in terms of a more concrete domain. The more concrete the domain, the more "natural" it is for our minds to operate in it.

Metaphors are used to partially structure daily concepts. They are not random, but rather form a coherent system that allows humans to conceptualize their experience. Again, metaphors create similarities.

Lakoff defined three types of metaphor: "orientational" (in which we use our experience with spatial orientation), "ontological" (in which we use our experience with physical objects), "structural" (in which natural types are used to define other concepts). Every metaphor can be reduced to a more primitive metaphor.

Language was probably created to deal only with physical objects, and later extended to non-physical objects by means of metaphors. Conceptual metaphors transport properties from structures of the physical world to non-physical structures.

Reason, in general, is not disembodied, it is shaped by the body.

Our conceptual system is shaped by positive feedback from the environment. As Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf had already argued before him, language reflects the conceptual system of the speaker.

Lakoff emphasized that metaphor is not only a matter of words, but a matter of thought, that metaphor is central to our understanding of the world and the self.

Lakoff showed how a small number of metaphors can define a whole system of thought.

Even ritual was viewed by Lakoff as a crucial process in preserving and propagating cultural metaphors.

The reason that metaphor is so pervasive is that it is biological: our brains are built for metaphorical thought. Our brains evolved with "high-level" cortical areas taking input from "lower level" perceptual and motor areas. As a consequence, spatial and motor concepts are the natural basis for abstract reason. It turns out that "metaphor" refers to a physiological mechanism, to the ability of our brain to employ perceptual and motor inferential processes in creating abstract inferential processes. Metaphorical language is nothing but one aspect of our metaphorical brain.

Blending metaphors

In 1997, a student of Lakoff, Joe Grady, showed how complex metaphors are made of atomic metaphorical parts (or "primary metaphors") and these are, in turn, the product of cross-domain associations both at individual level and at social level (that typically occur during the early stages of life). Atomic metaphorical parts are then "blended" in complex metaphors (as in Gilles Fauconnier's "conventional blending"). A metaphor results in the simultaneous activation of the constituent parts.

Thus we acquire metaphors all the time automatically and unconsciously during our daily life (children often do not separate two elements of an experience that always occur together until later in life). We then employ these metaphors in our daily life.

Primary metaphors include "affection is warm" (as in "a warm smile"), "important is big" ("a big opportunity"), "more is up" (high prices), "time is motion" ("time flies").

Metaphors are Fuzzy

The USA philosopher Earl MacCormac advanced a unified theory of metaphor with broad implications for meaning and truth.

MacCormac rejected both the "tension" theory (which locates the difference between metaphor and analogy in the emotional tension generated by the juxtaposition of anomalous referents) and "controversion" theory pioneered by the USA philosopher Monroe Beardsley (which locates that difference in the falsity produced by a literal reading of the identification of the two referents) and the "deviance" theory (which locates that difference in the ungrammaticality of the juxtaposition of two referents). MacCormac thinks that a metaphor is recognized as a metaphor on the basis of the semantic anomaly produced by the juxtaposition of referents. And this also means that metaphor must be distinct from ordinary language (as opposed to the view that all language is metaphorical).

MacCormac was influenced by the USA philosopher Philip Wheelwright, who had classified metaphors into "epiphors" (metaphors that express the existence of something) and "diaphors" (metaphors that imply the possibility of something). Diaphor and epiphor measure the likeness and the dissimilarity of the attributes of the referents. A diaphor can become an epiphor (when the object is found to really exist) and an epiphor can become a literal expression (when the term has been used for so long that people have forgotten its origin).

Metaphor is a process that exists at three levels: a language process (from ordinary language to diaphor to epiphor back to ordinary language); a semantic and syntactic process (its linguistic explanation); and a cognitive process (to acquire new knowledge). Therefore a theory of metaphor requires three levels: a surface (or literal) level, a semantic level and a cognitive level.

The semantics of metaphor can then be formalized using the mathematical tool of fuzzy logic. Literal truth, figurality and falsity can be viewed as forming a continuum of possibilities rather than a discrete set of possibilities. The figurality of the metaphorical language, in particular, can be viewed as a continuum of "partial" truths that extends from absolute falsehood to absolute truth. These partial truths can be represented by fuzzy values.

This is expressed by a real number on a scale from zero to one: zero is absolute falsehood; the interval from zero to a certain value represents falsehood; the interval from that value to another value represents diaphor; the interval from that value to another value represents epiphor; and the last interval to one represents truth (with one representing absolute truth). Metaphors are born as diaphors and, as they become more and more familiar through commonplace use, slowly mutate into diaphors, thereby losing their "emotive tension".

Language can then be represented mathematically as a hierarchical network in n-dimensional space with each of the nodes of the network a fuzzy set (defining a semantic marker). When unlikely markers are juxtaposed, the degrees of membership of one semantic marker in the fuzzy set representing the other semantic marker can be expressed in a four-valued logic (so that a metaphor is not only true or false).

MacCormac argued that, as cognitive processes, metaphors mediate between culture and mind, influencing both cultural and biological evolution.

Metaphor as Meaning

Drawing from Black's interactionist theory, and its vision of metaphor's dual content (literal and metaphorical, "vehicle" and "topic"), and from Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of signs, the USA philosopher Eva Kittay developed a "relational" theory of meaning for metaphor. Her principle was that the meaning of a word is determined by other words that are related to it by the lexicon. Meaning is not an item: it is a field. A semantic field is a group of words that are semantically related to each other. Metaphor is a process that transfers semantic structures between two semantic fields: some structures of the first field create or reorganize a structure in the second field.

The meaning of a word consists of all the literal senses of that word. A literal sense consists of a conceptual content, a set of conditions, or semantic combination rules (permissible semantic combinations of the word, analogous to Fodor's selection-restriction rules), and a semantic field indicator (relation of the conceptual content to other concepts in a content domain). An interpretation of an utterance is any of the senses of that utterance. Projection rules combine lower-level units into higher-level units according to their semantic combination rules. A first-order interpretation of an utterance is derived from a valid combination of the first-order meanings of its constituents. Second-order interpretation is a function of first-order interpretation and expresses the intuitive fact that what has to be communicated is not what is indicated by the utterance's literal meaning.

Semantic fields help to recognize an utterance as a metaphor. For example, an explicit cue to the metaphorical nature of an utterance is when the first-order and the second-order interpretation point to two distinct semantic fields.

The cognitive force of metaphor comes from a re-conceptualization of information about the world that has already been acquired but possibly not conceptualized.

Ultimately, Kittay thinks that metaphorical meaning is not reducible to literal meaning. Metaphor is, de facto, second-order meaning.

Metaphor as physiological organization

Borrowing from the work of the Hungarian linguist Stevan Harnad, who thinks that sensory experience is recorded as a continuous engram whereas a concept derived from sensory experience is recorded by discrete engrams ("Metaphor and Mental Duality", 1982), the Indian mathematician Bipin Indurkhya thinks that metaphor originated from the interaction between sensory-based and concept-based representations in the brain, which are structurally different.

He focuses on how metaphor creates similarity. This is, in itself, a paradox. By definition, a metaphor implies that there are at least two different ways to represent a situation. At the same time, we assume that these different representations are not arbitrary but they somehow "interact" (are coherent). Indurkhya points out three level of reality. The "God's eye view" of the world is independent of any cognitive being perceiving it. Cognitive beings interact with it via their sensorimotor system. This system creates the second level of reality, whose "ontology" depends on the sensorimotor system (different beings perceive a different reality because they are equipped with different sensorimotor systems) but whose pattern of stimuli depends on the structure of the world.

The third level is the network of concepts created and used by the cognitive agent. This is the place where different representations of the same reality can be created, yielding different cognitive models. As the cognitive being "grows", there are two ways that this can occur while maintaining coherence with the environment: restructuring the network of concepts to better accommodate new data (typically, creating new concepts), or changing the mappings from the network of concepts to the environment in order to account for new sensorimotor data.

The latter process is the one that originates metaphors. A metaphor is the projection of one conceptual network (the source) into the environment of another conceptual network (the target). Some concepts of the source maintain their conventional interpretation (the way the cognitive system usually interprets them) but others will require an unconventional ("metaphorical") interpretation.

Metaphor as conceptual blending

Gilles Fauconnier's theory of mental spaces constitutes a natural generalization of metaphor, in which the number of conceptual spaces that blend is only two: the one described by the metaphor (the "tenor") and the one which provides the description (the "vehicle").

Fauconnier adds two more spaces to deal with metaphors: the "generic" space, which represents all the shared concepts that are required by tenor and vehicle, which are necessary not only to understand the metaphor but to mediate between the tenor and the vehicle; and the "blend" space, which contains the solution, the concept generated by the metaphor. The tenor and the vehicle are reconciled thanks to the generic space and this reconciliation produces the blend space.

Lying helps communication

We cheat children. Every time we tell children a fairy tale, we are lying to them. Those characters do not exist. Santa Claus does not exist. The cartoons on tv do not exist. We tell them lies all the time. And, still, children "learn". What they learn is not the literal meaning of those stories. In fact, they themselves frequently doubt those stories. But children understand that what they are supposed to learn is not the literal meaning. Children somehow understand that their parents are trying to teach them something else. Children somehow understand that parents use fairy tales because it is a more efficient and painless way to teach them what really matters. What matters is not that Little Red Riding Hood met a wolf, but that there are good and bad people. Children's brain are programmed to somehow discard the fairy tale and grasp the "meaning" of the story.

Long after they forgot what Little Red Riding Hood was doing in the woods they will still remember that there are good and bad people.

As we grow up, we assume that we stop lying to each other. As adults, we try to tell it as it is. That might be true for scientists, but it is hardly visible in ordinary lives. Every argument between two people usually involves some kind of exaggeration. Most political discussions start with unreasonable statements (a popular one like "depleted uranium killed one million Iraqi children" is obviously false if one checks the population of Iraq but it was widespread all over the world). And most people routinely exaggerate the details that most matter within a story. The listener, on the other hand, routinely "decodes" those exaggerations. Language lends itself to a level of ambiguity that we use to deliver more than the literal meaning. Thus adult tell each other "fairy tales". It never truly ends. Even scientists, to some extent, exaggerate the implications of their theories when they try to explain them to ordinary people. A distortion of reality seems to be useful, if not essential, to human communication.

Metaphorical ignorance

There is one weakness in the experimental praxis of linguists: they only study people who are fluent in a language. If you want to study chaxipean, you go to Chaxipe and talk to chaxipeans. They are the world experts in chaxipean. Most of our ideas on language, categorization and metaphors come from studying people who are fluent in a language.

But the brain of a person who is not fluent in that language should be working the same way. My "use" of the German language, though, is not the same as a native German's. I stay away from metaphors in a language like German that I barely understand. Using a metaphor in German sounds scary to me. If I am speaking in a foreign language, i stick to simple sentences whose meaning is transparent. I do not say "their marriage is going nowhere": I say "their marriage is not good". I reduce all concepts to elementary concepts of good and bad, ugly and beautiful, etc. My mastery of the foreign language is not such that I can afford to use metaphorical expressions.

This goes against the claim that metaphor is useful to express meaning in a more efficient way. People who do not master a language should use metaphor precisely to compensate that deficiency. Instead, we tend to do the opposite: if we do not master a language, we avoid metaphors. Metaphorical language requires mastering the language skills first, and is proportional to those skills. This is what the traditional theory predicted (metaphor is for poets, language specialists). There was a grain of truth in it.

Further Reading

Arbib Michael: CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY (Cambridge University Press, 1986)

Black Max: MODELS AND METAPHORS (Cornell Univ Press, 1962)

Fauconnier Gilles: MENTAL SPACES (MIT Press, 1994)

Breal Michel: ESSAY DE SEMANTIQUE (1897)

Hintikka Jaakko: ASPECTS OF METAPHOR (Kluwer Academics, 1994)

Kittay Eva: METAPHOR (Clarendon Press, 1987)

Indurkhya Bipin: METAPHOR AND COGNITION (Kluwer Academic, 1992)

Lakoff George: METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (Chicago Univ Press, 1980)

Lakoff George: MORE THAN COOL REASON (University of Chicago Press, 1989)

Lakoff George: WOMEN, FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of Chicago Press, 1987)

Lakoff George: PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH (Basic, 1998)

MacCormac Earl: A COGNITIVE THEORY OF METAPHOR (MIT Press, 1985)

Martin James: A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF METAPHOR INTERPRETATION (Academic Press, 1990)

Mithen Steven: THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson, 1996)

Ortony, Andrew: METAPHOR AND THOUGHT (Cambridge Univ Press, 1979)

Richards, Ivor: THE PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC (Oxford Univ. Press, 1936)

Wheelwright, Philip: METAPHOR AND REALITY (1962)

Källa

Metaphors in Cognitive Linguistics - Eger Journal of English Studies X (2010) 71–81

The first part of the article offers an historical overview of metaphors, starting from Aristotle and the classical definition of metaphor. Chomsky's contribution to cognitive psychology is also mentioned together with Rosch's and Kay and McDaniel's research concerning categorization. The end of the first part contains new theories of metaphor, thus establishing the link to the second part, which presents the last three decades regarding metaphors in cognitive linguistics, trying to highlight the revival of studies on metaphor. The pervasiveness of metaphors cannot be overlooked in human understanding, and the classical debate is also mentioned (dead versus live metaphors). Our conclusion is that they offer an insight into our everyday experience and may help us in exploring the unknown.

Keywords: metaphor, cognitive linguistics, categorization.

Historical Overview

As metaphor has been the subject of various inquiries throughout the centuries, we start by presenting the major thoughts connected to it. The nature of metaphor has been an ardent subject of debate back to Aristotle, who discussed it on the level of noun (name), stating that metaphor typically 'happens' to the noun, and it is presented as motion:
…the application of a strange (alien, allotrios) term either transferred (displaced, epiphora) from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another, or
else by analogy (1982:1447b).

After a name is applied to an alien thing, it may express something much more clearly, which is otherwise difficult to grasp. Aristotle's four possibilities of creating a metaphor are: genus to species, species to genus, species to species, and by analogy or proportion; resemblance is explicitly mentioned. However, in what was probably his later work one can find that the major goal of rhetorical speech is persuasion, which is of less importance from our point of view.

72 Attila Imre

Nevertheless, the virtues of metaphor include clarity, warmth, facility, appropriateness and elegance, and finally "metaphor sets the scene before our eyes" (Aristotle 1954:1410b).

Scholars argued that even the definition of metaphor is itself metaphorical, so the explanation for metaphor is thus circular. For instance, Derrida (1982) realized that any explanation relies heavily on the physical – and in this way on the metaphorical –, as our thinking is basically metaphorical; this led to the conclusion that metaphors could be only explained based on other metaphors. Researchers might have slowed down with their interest in metaphors throughout the centuries, leaving them to thrive 'only' in stylistics, as a basic 'figure of speech', a trope, trimming ordinary language, taking away monotonousness by 'picturesque' replacements. Aristotle's Rhetoric encouraged this approach, and things stayed more or less undisturbed until the twentieth century, when Chomsky directed back the attention of many to linguistics. In his Language and Mind, he states that linguistics is a branch of cognitive
psychology:

I think there is more of a healthy ferment in cognitive psychology – and in the particular branch of cognitive psychology known as linguistics – than there has been for many years…if we are ever to understand how language is used or acquired, then we must abstract for separate and independent study a cognitive system, a system of
knowledge and belief (1972:1-4).

Chomsky admits that "we are as far today as Descartes was three centuries ago from understanding just what enables a human to speak in a way that is innovative, free from stimulus control, and also appropriate and coherent" (1972:12-13), and he turned to the analysis of deep structure. Instead of deep structure and transformations, cognitive linguistics focuses on language in terms of the concepts, and it is interested in meaning and the uncovering of a network with interconnected elements, which may offer explanation about the nature of metaphor. It is to the merit of cognitive linguistics to have the idea of including metaphor within natural language widely accepted, thus pioneering a way of understanding metaphors by tracing their roots back to ordinary, concrete words, reinterpreting resemblance, and explaining the need for metaphors, which were constituents only in stylistics.

The Saussurean classification must have had its merit, whatever nature this classification was, as the idea re-emerged towards the end of the century. Brugman highlights the importance of categories (another type of classification), based on Rosch (1977) and Kay and McDaniel (1978), reaching the verdict: sensory elements in categorising human experience represent a possibility to describe language, although a single word is but a narrow investigation, not revealing great truths about the language itself (1981:1).

Still, by analyzing metaphors, it became obvious that they are grounded in our everyday physical experience and they are not as close to similes as was rooted in the western tradition ('Metaphor is an abbreviated simile'). Instead, cultural stereotypes should be accounted for when metaphors are investigated, for instance, metaphors with snow in Eskimo trigger different associations than in any African language (cf. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and more recently, the neo- Whorfian hypothesis). On the other hand, diachronically viewed, metaphors dating decades or centuries ago might have changed as well, and similarities that were important or easily observed may be forgotten.

The 'seeing as' becomes problematic within cognitive linguistics, as metaphors usually try to shake category boundaries, and this friction cools with continuous usage. Black (1962) took into parts the constituents of metaphors, stating that only the common elements would select each other and 'reconcile'.

This comes close to Rosch's prototype theory of semantic features, where we have marginal members instead of tension, or we can also mention Mac Cormac's fuzzy set theory (1985). Whereas concrete categories are much better defined and relatively wellseparated from others (although boundaries are flexible and they often depend on the point of view, as members have various characteristics), the abstract entities are often made more explicit via metaphors, which make use of the concrete categories (cf. Aristotle). Consequently, metaphors do not describe
reality, but they create one where strange elements intermingle with more familiar ones, thus revealing a part of how we see our surrounding world and ourselves.

Langacker (1999:208) states that we are able to conceive of one situation against the background afforded of another. Regarding new information, previous discourse functions as a background to the current expression, and when speaking of metaphors, the source domain serves as a background for structuring and understanding the target domain. More recently, there are studies in which the theories of metaphor are undermined by theories of metonymy.

According to Barcelona (2003) and Taylor (2003), metonymy is an operation that may be more fundamental to the human conceptual system than metaphor. Barcelona (2003:31) even suggests that 'every metaphorical mapping presupposes a prior metonymic mapping.' The so-called primary metaphors are argued to be motivated by experiential correlation (Evans and Green, 2006:320), but correlation is basically metonymic (Taylor 2003). We could see that an historical account of metaphors already encapsulates a cognitive interpretation as well, as the past three decades contributed significantly to present-day approach to metaphors. Now let us examine recent interpretations.

Metaphors Reloaded

Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) may be considered the first passionate supporters of metaphors, as in their view metaphors are conceptual, as many of the ways in which we think and act are basically metaphorical (Evans and Green, 2006:44). Descartes' rationalist approach is evident in formal approaches, such as Chomsky's generative grammar or Montague's framework, according to which language can be studied as a formal or computational system, irrespective of human experience or the nature of the human bodies. The Lakoffian (empiricist) concept is based on the importance of human experience, the centrality of the human body without which the human mind and language "cannot be investigated in isolation from human embodiment" (Evans and Green 2006:44).

According to Moran (1997), issues regarding metaphor in poetics, rhetoric, aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and cognitive studies cannot be wholly isolated from each other. So far we have tried to present metaphors starting from their beginnings, and we have to accept that the sparkle to recent studies on metaphor belongs to Brugman, who based her work on Rosch's findings. Ever since cognitive linguists have been arguing that metaphor is central to human language (cf. Evans and Green 2006). The basic idea is that metaphors (metaphorical expressions) are based on our physical experience, and offer a background to the analysis of metaphors in a synchronic frame. The comprehension of figurative language is dependent on the literal understanding of the words used, unlike in the case of idiomatic expressions: Literal language is precise and lucid, figurative language is imprecise, and is largely the domain of poets and novelists. While literal language is the conventional 'ordinary' or 'everyday' way we have of talking about things, figurative language is 'exotic' or 'literary' and only need concern creative writers (Moran 1997:249).

According to this view, most ordinary language is literal. However, on a closer inspection, much of our ordinary everyday language turns out to be figurative in nature (Evans and Green 2006:287). Gibbs contradicts this ancient distinction (1994:75), as he differentiates conventional literality, non-metaphorical literality, truth condition literality and context-free literality. He also adds that certain concepts are impossible to describe non-metaphorically; for instance, time without recourse to space and motion is hard to describe. We will not enter another debate regarding the differences between metaphors and iconicity, but it may be interesting to mention Gentner and Bowdle's experiment (2001) presented by Hasson and Giora (2007). They studied the differences between metaphors and similes (cf. Johnson's 1996 research: comprehension times for metaphors and similes), and concluded that when the sources are novel, similes can be more quickly understood than Metaphors in Cognitive Linguistics 75 metaphors, but when we face conventionalized sources, the comprehension of metaphors is quicker. These findings are completed by Kövecses's preface (2002) where the author contradicts five traditional concepts regarding metaphor, e.g. one must have a special talent to be able to use metaphors; in fact, they are used effortlessly in everyday life by ordinary people, as they are an inevitable process of human thought and reasoning.

More recently, Gibbs (2007:16) discusses metaphoric understanding based on research conducted in 2006 by Wilson and Gibbs, and his conclusion is that "people were faster in responding to the metaphor phrases having performed a relevant body moment than when they did not move at all". Another finding was that "real movement is not required to facilitate metaphor comprehension, only that people mentally simulate such action", as generally speaking, people do not understand the non-literal meanings of metaphorical expressions as a matter of convention.

Kövecses's forerunners, Lakoff and Johnson, also mention persistent fallacies (1980:244-245), stating that metaphor is a matter of words not concepts; but the locus of metaphor is in concepts not words. Moran states (1997:251) that in metaphor we interpret an utterance as meaning something different from what the words would mean, if we took them literally. This means, that the same words or utterances change their meaning when taken metaphorically (Moran 1997:251).

Metaphors transport the images, feelings, values, thought patterns, etc. entrenched in our cultures, as Mittelberg (2007:34) states based on Dirven, Wolf, Poltzenhagen; Kövecses (2005) also accepts this view. Furthermore, metaphor is based on similarity; but it is based on cross-domain correlations in our experience, which give rise to the perceived similarities between the two domains within the metaphor. These two domains lead to the many interpretations outlined below; we would only like to mention here Ricoeur's theory of metaphor, which is based on
icons (standing for something) concerning cognitive notions, and he adopts Wittgenstein's proposal (1958), namely "seeing as" (mentioned by Mac Cormac).

Lakoff and Johnson also say that all concepts are literal and none can be metaphorical; but even our deepest concepts (time) are understood and reasoned about via multiple metaphors, so they conclude that, in short, metaphor is a natural phenomenon (1980:247). According to Coulson (2007), many empirical studies have compared reading times for literal and non-literal utterances, and found that when the metaphorical meaning was contextually supported, reading times were roughly similar. Gibbs (1994) notes, parity in reading times need not entail parity in the underlying comprehension processes, and he also mentions that literal and metaphorical meaning might take the same amount of time to comprehend, but that the latter required more effort or processing resources.

On the other hand, classical accounts of metaphor comprehension (cf. Grice 1975 or Searle 1979) describe a two-stage model, in which literal processing is followed by metaphorical processing. The real support in favour of Lakoff and Johnson regarding their theory about the central importance of metaphors comes from Pynte and colleagues, who could not find qualitative differences in brain activity associated with the comprehension of literal and metaphoric language (Coulson 2007:414), which is consistent with Gibbs (1994) or Glucksberg
(1998).

The pervasiveness of metaphors in human understanding can be best characterized by the phenomenon whereby a target domain is structured and understood with reference to another (more basic) source domain (cf. '[P]hysical experience shapes our understanding'). Here we seem to reiterate the idea that physical experience is central, though we cannot say that it is more basic than other (emotions or time), although at a given point Langacker (1999) considers that time is more important than space, as the former is needed to perceive changes in the latter (motion). Anyway, a reasonable conclusion would be that the source domain serves as the background for structuring and understanding the target domain (Langacker 1999:208). At this point we can mention W. Bedell Stanford's summary on metaphors: The essence of metaphor is that a word undergoes a change or extension of meaning. In simile nothing of this kind occurs; every word has its normal meaning and no semantic transference is incurred (cited by Mac Cormac 1985:37).

To Lakoff and Johnson, the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another, and we act according to the way we conceive of things (1980:5). The problem is that one can easily remember those school days when the difference between metaphors and similes were explained with a set of examples:

Her cheeks are like red roses. (simile)
Her rosy cheeks … (metaphor)

The explanation was that metaphor is a shortened or compressed simile, without the like element; we now know, that this is not as simple as it may seem, as the only similarities relevant to metaphor are the ones experienced by people, which differs based on culture and personal previous experience (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980:154), and metaphors force us to wonder, compare, note similarities and dissimilarities, and then seek confirmation or lack of confirmation regarding the suggestions posed by metaphors (Marconi, 1997:76). Mac Cormac completes the picture about metaphors by stating that resemblance and difference are also constituents when metaphor is at stake, together with similarity, as they are all involved in the knowledge process. One of the consequences is that the separation of metaphors from everyday language becomes impossible, and it is worth mentioning that Mac Cormac places the so-called dead metaphors within ordinary language.

We would only say that 'dead metaphors' (which are nevertheless alive by constant usage, cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980) create a fuzzy category in-between figurative and literal language, of course, if we accept this rather controversial dichotomy. Another problematic aspect (under the controversion theory) is that metaphors are meaningful, but false. This falsity comes from semantic contradiction and not from empirical test (folk theory gladly passes them) and, interestingly enough, Mac Cormac offers an approach of degrees. He discusses the relativism of metaphors, and observes that they could be false when taken literally and true when taken figuratively. Hence the truth or falsity of the metaphor is relative to its context of interpretation, as there is a degree to which their referents have similar properties and false to the degree that their referents have dissimilar properties. His fuzzy-set theory (1985:216, 220) is consistent with it, so we have F (false), D (diaphor), E (epiphor), T (truth). In his view, we
have epiphors (metaphors that express more than suggest) and diaphors (metaphors that suggest more than they express). Diaphors can become epiphors as their hypothetical suggestions find confirmation in xperience/experiment, so they turn commonplace.

Although this seems plausible, we cannot really accept his argument, as the case of 'dead' metaphors remains unsolved. Remember that on the one hand we have metaphors we live by (Lakoff), on the other hand we have dead metaphors. Stylistically Mac Cormac is right, but cognitive grammar deals with understanding, motivation, nature and origin; the way Lakoff presents them offers an explanation to these. Dictionaries contain dead metaphors (Mac Cormac), but when reading a dictionary, one can often find explanatory remarks, such as (fig.), standing for figurative, which Mac Cormac omits to mention. So it seems plausible to us when Mac Cormac criticizes Lakoff & Johnson (1985:58- 60), saying that they are adamant when it comes to the status of metaphors: even when figurative metaphors become conventional or literal metaphors, they retain their metaphorical status (otherwise dictionaries could not have identified them as metaphors!).

By considering hundreds of dead metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson succeeded in showing that natural language presumes and expresses many hidden conceptual meanings arising from the use of these metaphors. But they transformed these dead metaphors into live ones by redefining the notion of dead metaphors. For them, metaphors are alive because they are used in ordinary language as parts of the systematic metaphoric expression. So they have no method left for distinguishing between metaphoric and non-metaphoric utterances, they have literal metaphors and figurative metaphors. Moran correctly observes that the meaning of the metaphor in general will be confined to the intentions of the speaker if the meaning of a metaphorical utterance is the speaker's meaning, and the latter is a function of the intentions of the speaker in making the utterance.

Thus the interpretation of the metaphor will be a matter of the recovery of the intentions of the speaker (1997:264). If Moran is right, the so-called 'live' metaphors can be difficult to interpret, as the interpreter is dependent on assumptions about the beliefs and intentions of the speaker (Cooper 1986:73, cited by Moran 1997).

We can only say that once categorising is accepted, there is a degree of membership, including views upon language itself. So Lakoff and Johnson can only embed non-metaphorical concepts in direct experience, which emerges through interaction of the agent with their environment. Kövecses indirectly answers the question of 'dead' metaphors later (2002, Preface):
…dictionary entries are full of that, but there is an important point: they are deeply entrenched, hardly noticed and thus effortlessly used, they are most active in our thought. So they are 'alive'. According to the cognitive approach, both metaphorical language and thought rise from the basic bodily (sensori-motor) experience of human beings, and it is a key instrument in organizing human thought.

Conclusions

Metaphors bring about changes in the ways in which we perceive the world, and these conceptual changes often bring about changes in the ways in which we act in the world, accepts Mac Cormac (1985:149). Metaphors appear to be so common and so regular a part of ordinary language that instead of contending that they deviate from a normative grammar, it is worth considering that any grammar, which cannot account for metaphor, is too limited in comprehension to be useful (Mac Cormac 1985:32). On analysing the relationship between
metaphor and communication, Moran concludes:

...metaphorical speech counts as genuinely communicative (of a content beyond the literal) because, among other things, the figurative interpretation of the utterance is guided by assumptions about the beliefs and intentions of the speaker, intentions which, among other things satisfy the Gricean (1975) formula (1997:261).

The success of metaphor in communication may also be explained by the fact that metaphor is beyond language, as it is to be found primarily in thought and action (e.g. killing wax dolls, Lakoff and Johnson 1980:153). The danger of pervasiveness of metaphor lies in the fact that there are many ways of creating it: extending, elaborating, questioning, combining and personification (Kövecses 2002:47-50). Metaphors produce new insights and new hypotheses internally, whereas externally they act as mediators between the human mind and culture, states Mac Cormac (1985:2). This correlates with Moran's statement (1997:252), according to which the words employed in a metaphor undergo a 'meaningshift', but when an expression is interpreted metaphorically, the literal one is not cancelled or removed from consideration. The constraint that limits the excessive production of metaphors is that there must be a similarity between the two entities compared. In Moran's words: In metaphor...if we are to speak of a new meaning, this meaning will be something reachable only through comprehension of the previously established, literal meanings of the particular words that make it up (1997:253).
Davidson, on the other hand, denies the non-literal meaning regarding metaphors. His famous statement attracted serious criticism: "... metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more"
(1979:246).

Cognitive linguistics breaks away from the notion of predictability of generative grammar, and replaces this notion with motivation. Our remark is that when we have a metaphorical view, we employ only a part of a source domain, not the whole (when needed), in other cases other parts. The mappings that deviate from the widely accepted ones are either considered as bad ones, or literal ones! This partial mapping (only a part of a concept is mapped, and only a part of target is involved) peaks in metaphorical highlighting (Kövecses 2002:67, 75, 79), and the unconventional use is called 'unutilized parts of the source' (e.g. the chimney of a building).

Moreover, many metaphors do map additional knowledge from the source onto the target, and one can pick out distinct pieces of knowledge associated with the source domain of a metaphor, which is already connected to the scope of a metaphor. This means that abstract concepts are characterized by a large number of distinct source domains, and a single concept can characterize many distinct target domains (war is both argument and love, cf. Kövecses 2002:94, 107). The previously mentioned motivation comes into picture again, as truth value is connected to motivation (purpose in mind when dealing with categories, fuzzy sets), which ultimately helps in successful communication to be realized by well-established meaning foci of words (cf. Kövecses 2002). The conclusion is that Plato's and Aristotle's objectivism and subjectivism are only myths (cf. cave and "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of the metaphor", Poetics, 1459a). Lakoff and Johnson conclude that metaphor unites reason and imagination, creating an imaginative reality (although 'virtual reality' is a contradiction in terms, nobody seems to care too much about it, and we all seem to perfectly understand and use the expression).

All in all, we can say that metaphors indeed give an insight into everyday experience; the way we have been brought up to perceive our world is not the only way and it is impossible to see beyond the "truths" of one's particular culture (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:239). These metaphors, after all, contribute to the differences between humans and animals by the systematicity of analogies and disanalogies. Even the unknown is felt closer this way, and major advances in metaphor theory preserve these findings (cf. Joseph Grady's complex, Srinivas Narayanan's metaphors as neural phenomenon. And the subject is not closed, as Mac Cormac's (1985:56) statement leaves the question open: "not all language is metaphorical, only the theories about metaphors are metaphorical".

Källa

Joni Stam (2013)