The Conceptual theory of metaphor

According to this theory metaphor is viewed as the way of conceptualizing the world. Thus, its main assumption is that the locus of metaphor is thought, not language and metaphor is part of our conceptual system. [63; 89].

How metaphor works

The main claim of this theory is that there are various metaphoric (as well as metonymic) models in our conceptual system that underlie the use of many kinds of figurative expressions. Metaphors evoke certain domains and may be understood as a mapping from a source domain to a target domain.

G.Lakoff explains it considering the following example:

Our relationship has hit a dead-end street.

Here love is being conceptualized as a journey, with the implication that the relationship is stalled, that the lovers cannot keep going the way they have been going, that they must turn back, or abandon the relationship altogether. This is not an isolated case in English. There are some other that are based on conceptualization that love is a journey.

Look, how far we have come. It has been a long, bumpy road. We can’t turn back now. We’re at a crossroads. We may have to go our separate ways. We’re spinning our wheels. Our relationship is off the track. The marriage is on the rocks.

So in all the above mentioned examples the metaphor “involves understanding of one domain of experience, love, in terms of a very different domain of experience, journeys” and thus evokes knowledge about travel [63]. As it may be seen that what constitutes the LOVE AS JOURNEY metaphor is not any particular word or expression. It is an ontological mapping across conceptual domains, from the source domain of journeys to the target domain of love.

The generalization in conceptual metaphors is at the superordinate level but not at the basic one. Thus in the love-is-a-journey mapping, a love relationship corresponds to a vehicle. A vehicle is a superordinate category which includes such basic level categories as car, train, boat and plane. In the given examples all these basic categories can be easily traced: car (long bumpy road, spinning our wheels), train (off the track), boat (on the rocks), etc.

The above mentioned example is not the only case. According to G.Lakoff concepts like time, quantity, state, change, action, cause, purpose, means, modality, etc. are normally comprehended via metaphors.

Here are some more similar examples.

Searle’s sentence “Sally is a block of ice” – evokes the source domain of temperature and the target domain of emotions (consider similar cases she is a warm person, he was cool to me).

Anger is a hot liquid in a container – “boiling mad”, “letting off the steam”, “Henry exploded”, etc.

In the following case

In the middle of my life’s road

I found myself in a dark wood

“Life is a road” evokes the domain of life and the domain of travel, and the conventional “life is a journey” metaphor that links them.

Similar cases are “He is without direction in his life”, “I am where I want to be in life”, “I am at a crossroads in my life”, “He will go places in life”, “He has gone through a lot in his life”.

The metaphor “I found myself in a dark wood” is connected with the idea that when it is dark you cannot see which way to go. This evokes the domain of seeing, and thus the conventional metaphor that KNOWING IS SEEING. The same type of metaphor can be traced in “I see what you are getting at”, “his claims aren’t clear”, “the passage is opaque”, “this paragraph is murky”, “he was so blinded by ambition that he never noticed his limitations” etc. [63].

One more conceptual metaphor is Argument is war.

This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions:

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticisms were right on target.

I demolished his argument.

I’ve never won the argument with him.

You disagree? O.K., shoot!

If you use that strategy, he will wipe you out.

He shot down all of my arguments.

G.Lakoff says that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see a person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle and the structure of an argument – attack, defense, counterattack, etc. – reflects this. In a certain sense ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor structures the actions we perform in arguing [64].

Some cases why conceptual systems contain one set of metaphorical mapping rather than another can be explained.

“Knowing is seeing” for example, is based on the fact that most of what we know comes from our vision, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, if we see something then we know it is true.

“A purposeful life is a journey” presupposes that life goals are special cases of purposes or destinations.

There are a great many ways in which conventional metaphors can be made real. They can be realized in obvious imaginative products such as cartoons, literary works, dreams, visions, and myths. But they can be made real in less obvious ways as well, in physical symptoms, social institutions, social practices, laws, and even foreign policy and forms of discourse and history (for more detailed information see [63] ).

Interpretations and Misinterpretations

Having only summarized without presenting any critical analysis different approaches and views on metaphor comprehension, now our focus will be on the possibility of different interpretations and misinterpretations of metaphors.

Speaking about interpretation of metaphor we certainly mean a live metaphor which is a genuine creation and is full of imagery unlike a dead one. The latter is simply an idiom, which was once a live metaphor, but which is now to be treated as a conventionalized form of the language.

Let’s consider the verse by Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

In G.Lakoff’s interpretation the poem is typically about life and choice of life goals, though it might also be interpreted as being about careers and career paths, or about some long term purposeful activity [63].

Why are all the suggested interpretations of this verse both correct and acceptable? Since in metaphor we must necessarily “read behind the words” and decide on the properties of the vehicle ourselves without any clues from speaker’s side, rather often the properties chosen in the vehicle (see Searle’s example about the “pig” p.7 of this paper) may vary with different individuals and thus “ambiguity is a necessary by-product of the metaphor’s suggestiveness” [11].

In the above given example all the mentioned interpretations lie within one domain and are closely interrelated.

More challenging seem to be the cases when possible interpretations are completely different. The related question here is what may influence and determine our possible interpretations? Here I find both interesting and convincing the research on interpretation of novel metaphoric expressions carried out by B. Fraser, where he provides some precise, factual information on the investigation of the following questions: