George Lakoff and Conceptual Metaphor
The most systematic research to date on the nature of metaphor has been
conducted by researchers in a relatively new school of linguistics known as
cognitive linguistics.
The goal of this field is to develop a theory of human
language that is consistent with what is generally known about the mind and
brain from disciplines other than linguistics.
Cognitive linguistics considers
language to be inextricably bound up with broader psychological processes and
focuses more on how people actually understand each other in the context of
natural. Since the acquisition and use of language derives from bodily
experience, and this experience is filtered through nonlinguistic processes,
including perception, imagery, and memory, language should systematically
reflect these broader psychological mechanisms. As a result, cognitive
linguists not only study language but also gain insight into the deeper workings
of an embodied mind.
Three basic findings of cognitive linguistics are important for my study.
First, both language and thought are grounded in mental imagery, or “mental
representations that begin as conceptual analogs of immediate, perceptual
experience,” including vision, touch, taste, smell, hearing, and emotional states
(Palmer 47). Second, the unique human ability for producing, transferring,
and processing meaning occurs through mappings, or structured sets of
correspondences between domains of mental imagery (Fauconnier 118).
Third, although many different mapping mechanisms are known, conceptual
metaphor is the most common and important one (Lakoff and Johnson,
Metaphor 12).
The writings of George Lakoff, with his various collaborators Mark
Johnson, and Mark Turner, stress both the cognitive role of metaphor and its
roots in the human conceptual architecture.
His experientialism places the
human act of cognition in the center and proposes that cognition is vitally
dependent on metaphor. Metaphor, as he defines it, is a mapping of
conceptual structures from one domain onto another.1
Lakoff’s writings call
for a reification of the status of metaphor, from a superficial rhetorical device
that decorates our speech, to the status of a deep, cognitively-realized agency
that organizes our thoughts, shapes our judgments, and structures our language.
Metaphor is shown to pervade, or even saturate our everyday, non-rhetorical
language to such a degree that a deviant view of the trope would leave little, or
no scope for orthodoxy.
Lakoff’s central thesis is that metaphors facilitate thought by providing an
experiential framework in which newly acquired, abstract concepts may be
accommodated. The network of metaphors that underlie thought in this way
form a cognitive map, a web of concepts organized in terms which serve to
ground abstract concepts in the cognitive agent’s physical experiences, and in
the agent’s relation to the external world.
A major component of the human
cognitive map is what Lakoff and Turner call a cognitive topology, essentially
“a mechanism by which we impose structure on space, in a way to give rise to
spatial inferences” (47). The cognitive agent is itself an essential player in
this organization—abstract thoughts are not structured in terms of objective
1
Lakeoff questions both the validity and primacy of a syntactic deep structure in formal
models of language, in an effort to overturn the Chomskyan view that semantics emerges
from an interpretative reading of syntax. Lakoff takes the new generative position that a
deep semantic structure is posited at the core of language comprehension, effectively merging
deep syntactic and semantic structures into a unified whole. This reversal is of little
empirical consequence. to those who consider the central concern of linguistics to be the
study of abstract language competence, rather than actual performance. However, the
generative position does clear the way for a new view of metaphor in linguistics. Meaning is
no longer subservient to syntax, nor is metaphor considered a superficial phenomenon of
language as it was.
spatio-physical properties of the world, but subjective, egocentric properties
that the agent projects onto the world via his cognitive map.
In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson develop a theory of
experiential cognition that approaches what meaning is to the human.
In
contrast to the traditional objectivist view of cognition that sees it as the
algorithmic manipulation of abstract symbols capable of providing internal
representations of an external reality, their experientialism sees cognitive
activity as motivated and constrained by our experiences in the world. In
particular, Lakoff argues that we have an innate capacity to shape such
experience and make it possible.
As a principle, Lakoff opposes what he calls
“objectivism,” which holds that thought is the mechanical manipulation of
abstract symbols and that the mind is an abstract machine manipulating
symbols essentially in the way a computer does. In this case, symbols get their
meaning via correspondences to things in the external world, and thought is
therefore abstract, disembodied, atomistic, and logical in the narrow technical
sense (Lakoff, Women 12-13).
He holds that thought is both embodied and
imaginative, embodied in that the structures used to put together our conceptual
systems grow out of bodily experience, imaginative in that those concepts that
are not directly grounded in experience employ metaphor, metonymy, and
mental imagery.
Moreover, thought has gestalt properties and concepts have
an overall structure that goes beyond merely putting together conceptual
“building blocks” by general rules.
In this case, thought is more than just the
mechanical manipulation of abstract symbols (Lakoff, Women 14-15).
In terms of experientialism, rational thought is the application of the
imaginative processes and basic cognitive processes to the basic concepts and
image schemas that we possess.
Meaningful structures arise from the
structured nature of bodily and social experience and our innate capacity to
imaginatively project from the bodily, social or other interactional experiences
to abstract conceptual structures.
He thinks that we share a common
experience and culture and possess a number of concepts, or categories that are
recognized as “basic level.” Basic-level categories are formed at a level of
abstraction “at which humans interact with their world most effectively”
(Lakoff and Turner 133). In addition to basic-level concepts, we possess
fundamental notions of spatial organization called image schemas.
Image
schemas are again embedded in, and structure, our direct experience of the
world. However, they are more general than basic-level categories.
They
are common experienced relationships that pertain to humans and their
existence in, and movement through, space.
Image schemas are abstract
patterns in our experience and understanding that are central to meaning and to
the inferences we make. Image schemas also have a major role in producing
categories.
To recognize several elements as structured by the same image
schema is to recognize a category.
In addition, Lakoff identifies imaginative processes or imaginative
projections, which act on the basic level concepts and image schemas and
allow us to form abstract conceptual models. There are basically four
imaginative processes: schematization, metaphor, metonymy, and
categorization. It is important to distinguish concepts such as metonymy and
metaphor as used in experientialism from their linguistic use. In
experientialism, these, along with schematization and categorization, are
fundamental to cognition. Thinking and reasoning involve applying the
imaginative processes: linking and transforming the basic-level categories and
image schemas into abstract concepts. The main process that we will be using
is metaphor. Rather than simply a linguistic expression, metaphor is central to
our thinking processes, a cross-domain mapping that conceptualizes one
domain in terms of another.
Lakoff’s experientialism relies heavily on mental spaces as a medium in
which cognitive activities can take place. The concept of mental space refers
to the partial cognitive structures that emerge when we think and talk. It is in
these mental spaces that domains are defined, altered and merged.
Cognitive
models created through imaginative processes structure those spaces, and we
think by connecting different mental spaces.
We may have a space that
structures our experienced reality, the other that structures future situations, and
still another that structures fictional situations. There may be a lot of them
and they are all connected.
A metaphor connects two different mental spaces.
When a connection is established between more than two spaces, it is termed a
blend. Blending—integrating partial structures from different domains— is
another special case of imaginative projection.
Blending receives a partial
structure from two or more input spaces, producing a new space that has
emergent structure of its own.
As shown above, Lakoff’s careful analysis of large numbers of
conventional metaphorical expressions poses an experientialist position and
reveals several general properties of conceptual metaphor.
These properties
will be reviewed with clearer accounts and examples, in an effort to offer a
clearer picture about how metaphor and space are related.
The properties
reviewed in the following refer to metaphor as a cognitive process involving
mental imagery, which is nonlinguistic in nature and thus can be compared to
Lefebvre’s concept of metaphorization and metonymization.
First, conceptual metaphors enforce a cognitive mapping.
Conceptual
metaphors project the cognitive map of a source domain onto a target domain.
The target domain becomes grounded in the spatio-physical experience of the
source domain.2
As a result, the schemas that mediate between conceptual
and sensory levels in the source domain become active also in the target
domain (Lakoff and Turner 133).
In this sense, a metaphoric schema is a
mental representation that grounds the conceptual structure of an abstract
domain in the sensory and sensible basis of another domain, which is spatial
and often more physical.
Numerous everyday expressions in English, as Lakoff and Johnson point
out in their Metaphors We Live By, can offer a clear picture of what conceptual
metaphor is, especially in the terminology of journeys that talk about life
experiences.
These are surface expressions with an underlying, nonlinguistic
metaphorical conceptualization that can be briefly described by the familiar
idiom—”LIFE IS A JOURNEY.”3
People do not normally notice that they are
expressing a metaphorical thought when they say things like “my career has
come a long ways,” “I’m stuck in a terrible situation,” or “I’m now headed in a
new direction.” The same holds true in such vague expressions as “I’ve got to
move forward,” “I’ve gotta go through it,” “I’m finally getting where I want to
be,” etc.
Yet, English speakers immediately understand the meaning of such
statements because they have internalized the metaphorical concept “LIFE IS A
JOURNEY,”
and use it to conceptualize life experiences and communicate about
Lakoff’s notion of metaphor as a mapping from one cognitive domain to another as “one of
the great imaginative triumphs of the human mind” has been echoed by the British
paleo-anthropologist Steven J. Mithen in his The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive
Origins of Art, Religion and Science. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
2
This is Lakoff’s format of showing an analogy as a conceptual metaphor, which will be
followed when conceptual metaphors appear in this study.
3
them using metaphorical expressions. The source domain in this metaphor is
a journey, which suggests a starting point, obstacles to overcome, and a
destination; while the target domain is life, which represents things that are
difficult to conceptualize directly from bodily experience of the lived space.
The conceptual structure of source domain is mapped onto the target domain:
the perceivable properties and relations of the target domain correspond, point
for point, with properties of the source domain.
Second, conceptual metaphors are spatial and directional.
The cognitive
maps that ground our metaphors and provide the conceptual substrate for our
most abstract thoughts are very much influenced by our bodily experiences of
the world.
Such an idea contradicts the view that the world can be objectively
understood, as the properties we perceive are thus contingent upon the way our
bodies interact with the world and on the metaphors we choose to model these
interactions.
The source domains of metaphor are usually grounded in concrete physical
experience, whereas target domains tend to be more abstract. The extent to
which particular spatial metaphors have pervaded our language is
representative of the way our cognitive topologies dissect the world.
For
instance, up/down orientation metaphors (e.g., up is good, down is bad, top is
best, bottom is worst, high is happy, low is sad) are considerably more
productive than front/back metaphors (e.g., forward is future, back is past),
which in turn are more productive than left/right metaphors (e.g., right is good,
left is bad). From an objective stance, each spatial dimension possesses the
same descriptive power. From a subjective position, however, we note that
the paucity of left/right metaphors reflects the general symmetry of the human
body in that direction; because left and right are so topologically
undifferentiated, this dimension is utilized less in an egocentric model of the
world. However, this symmetry does not exist in either the front/back or
up/down dimensions.
The fact that vision operates to the front of the body
and not to the back is reason enough for this dimension to be differentiated, and
thus descriptively useful, while the presence of an active force, gravity, acting
in the vertical dimension justifies the significance we attach to the concepts of
up and down.
Metaphor enables our partial knowledge of a relatively abstract
phenomenon to be organized into a coherent image-schema or gestalt structure
using a more concrete source, which facilitates reasoning and communicating
about that phenomenon (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphor 56-68).
In conceptual
metaphor, these mappings are asymmetrical, which means that abstract
domains are not used to conceptualize domains that are already fairly concrete.
For example, “spring is still a long way off” and “the millennium is finally
behind us” express the conventional metaphor TIME IS SPACE, with physical
space as the source and time as the target. In this way of conceptualizing time,
future events are in front of a person, past events are behind, physical distance
correlates with the “amount” of time between two events, and so on.4
Third, conceptual metaphors are categorical.
In Women, Fire, and
Dangerous Things, Lakoff argues that social, psychological, and cosmological
domains, conceptualized metaphorically, are taken as literally true by
participants in a culture, and structure normal, unreflective thinking.
He
shows that Western philosophers and scientists have traditionally
See “Chapter 10” in Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind
and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
4
conceptualized analytical categories as containers. In this metaphor, the
properties of a container as a bounded, physical entity are used not only to
describe, but also to reason about, the classification of entities in the world. The
world does not necessarily have this structure, but CATEGORIES ARE
CONTAINERS
is so deeply embedded in Western culture that it is often assumed
without introspection to represent objective reality “out there” in the world.
To put this another way, what is implied by conventional metaphors defines
what we can know, and we are thus enabled to reason about a target domain
using the structure of the mapped source domain. Therefore, it is nearly
impossible to think about most of our basic concepts without metaphor. Our
literal understandings of concepts such as life, love, time, communication,
causation, self, and cosmos are actually quite impoverished. Metaphor helps
us flesh out these concepts so we can think about them in more detail (Lakoff
and Johnson, Philosophy 128).
In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Lakoff further demonstrates that
human beings categorize perceptual input into kinds of experience.
Much of
our direct experiential knowledge is organized in mental imagery as basic-level
categories that represent the most inclusive level of abstraction to be
represented by a concrete image in the mind.5 Lakoff and Turner argue that
experience is made possible and structured by preconceptual
structures—“directly meaningful concepts” roughly the same for all human
beings—that thus provide “certain fixed points in the objective evaluation of
5
Basic-level categories maximize the correlational structure of our direct interactions with
the world, and are the first categories to be learned and named by children. See E. Rosch,
C.B. Mervis, W. D. Gray, M Johnson, and P. BayesBraem, “Basic Objects in Natural
Categories,” Cognitive Psychology 8 (1976): 382-439.
situations” (Lakoff and Turner 129). He divides them into basic-level
structures and image-schema structures, and acknowledges there may be other
kinds. Basic-level structures arise as a result of our capacities for gestalt
perception, mental imagery, and motor movement and manifest as basic-level
categories such as hunger and pain, wood and stone, people and cats, and tables
and houses. Image schemas are spatial mappings such as source-path-goal,
center-periphery, and container. It is out of these basic cognitive tools that
more complex cognitive models of reality are constructed.
More complex categorizations that organize a mature person’s knowledge
consist largely of subsets and supersets of basic-level categories. In English,
chairs and birds are basic-level categories because the average person can
conjure up a mental image of a prototype for these concepts. Furniture and
animals, in contrast, are superordinate-level categories because there is no
single prototype for these concepts that can be imagined in the mind.
It turns
out that metaphorical expressions utilize basic-level categories that are easy to
imagine, while the actual metaphorical concepts that generate these varied
expressions occur at the superordinate level.
For example, in linguistic
expressions of LIFE IS A JOURNEY, such as “my plans have been derailed,” the
life is usually described as a car, train, boat, or plane attempting to reach a
destination, but the general mapping from which all these specific expressions
derive involves the superordinate category vehicle. In light of this
contingency, Lakoff argues for a subjective psychology that rejects classic
models and proposes instead a non-reductionist model of natural categorization,
one that replaces such staples of objectivism as necessary and sufficient
conditions with prototypes, hedges, radial categories and idealized cognitive
models.
The basic notion underlying a radial category is that some members of a
category will be more representative than others; taken together, the members
of a category thus form a radial structure, the most representative, or
prototypical, members located at the center, with less representative members
clustered around this hub. For instance, a robin is a bird par excellence, while
a penguin is quite a poor example of the class. Membership of a category is
therefore a gradated notion, rather than an absolute, black-and-white one.
Hedges are a form of category membership that correspond to linguistic
judgments such as “kind of” or “sort of”; for instance, a whale is like a fish
(sort of), and a moped is like a motorbike (kind of), inasmuch as many of the
same common-sense inferences hold about each.
Lakoff suggests that radial categories and prototypical effects arise due to
a tendency in humans to conceptualize the world through partial and idealized
cognitive models.
Each category is defined relative to such a partial model,
which captures the expectations that should hold whenever the category finds
valid application.
The degree to which the background idealized cognitive
models of a category thus fits a real world entity or situation is a measure of the
category representativeness of this entity/situation.
Fourth, both target and source domains are projected into a new “blended
space.”6
“Blending” or “mental binding” are conceptual integration, which is
“is a basic mental operation whose uniform structural and dynamic properties
apply over many areas of thought and action, including metaphor and
metonymy” (Turner and Fauconnier 136).
The two-space model of metaphor
has been the cornerstone of the metaphor field since Aristotle, and has
It is called “middle spaces” in G. Fauconnier and M. Turner, Conceptual Projection and
Middle Spaces (La Jolla: UCSD Department of Cognitive Science, 1994).
6
underpinned a string of conceptual theories from Nietzsche, through Lefebvre,
to Lakoff and Johnson. These theories posit a metaphor to concern the
interaction of two conceptual spaces: the space that is described by the
metaphor and has variously been termed the target, the tenor or the topic, and
the space that provides the description and has been called the vehicle or the
source.
Lakoff’s works have developed into the cognitive foundations of
conceptual integration and blended mental spaces, but Mark Turner and Gilles
Fauconnier’s elaboration provides a unifying umbrella framework for a range
of cognitive “siblings” that have traditionally been studied with relative
independence, especially metaphor, analogy, and concept combination. The
conceptual integration framework of Turner and Fauconnier augment the
traditional input spaces with two additional spaces: a generic space that
captures the common background knowledge that unites the inputs, and an
output blend space that contains the conceptual product of the integration.
Generic space contains the low-level conceptual structures that serve to
mediate between the contents of the input spaces, thus enabling them to be
structurally reconciled. Structural reconciliation involves mapping the
conceptual structure of one input space onto another so as to ascertain a
coherent alignment of elements from each. For instance, we can reconcile the
domains of Baseball Player and Actor by seeing baseball fields as theaters,
sportswear as costumes, and games as plays.
The process of blending can be understood as follows: first, there is a
partial mapping of counterparts between two input spaces; second, a generic
space maps onto each of the inputs; finally, the input spaces are partially
projected onto a fourth space, the blend.
Here, the generic space reflects some
common structure and organization shared by the inputs.
The shared structure
and organization, usually more abstract, defines the core cross-space mapping
between them. On the other hand, the blend has emergent structure not
provided by the inputs and maintains new relationships that did not exist in the
separate inputs.
When set in the context of background cognitive and cultural
models, these new relationships allow the composite structure projected into
the blend to be viewed as part of a larger self-contained structure.
The
structure in the blend can then be elaborated in terms of its own logic.
Turner and Fauconnier find a striking conceptual blend in the metaphorical
expression—“If Clinton were the Titanic, the iceberg would sink”—which was
circulated inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway during February, 1998, when
the movie “Titanic” was popular and when President Clinton seemed to be
surviving political damage from yet another alleged sexual scandal. Obviously,
the blend has two input mental spaces—one with the Titanic and the other with
President Clinton. However, according to the Turner and Fauconnier, “there is
a partial cross-space mapping between these inputs: Clinton is the counterpart
of the Titanic and the scandal is the counterpart of the iceberg” (138).
In this example, there is a blended space where Clinton is the Titanic and
the scandal is the iceberg, with the Titanic scenario as the source and the
Clinton scenario as target. The cross-space mapping between the inputs is
metaphoric.
The organizing frame structure of this blend stems from the
“Titanic” input space—a voyage by a big ship that tragically runs into
something bigger, but the casual and event shape structure does not come from
the source.
Nor does it come from the “Clinton” input space—he seems to be
surviving—the blend takes its causal and event shape structure. The structure
derives from a generic space where the source will be reversed if it happens
and the target shows only some sign of it: Clinton will survive after all.
Contrary to what the source implies and beyond what the target suggests, the
inference is constructed: Clinton will overcome the political iceberg he meets
and will meet.
What deserves our attention is that this inference in the blend
stems neither from the source nor from the target. It is based on the structure
in the generic space—Clinton will survive after all.