Metaphor

As an expression in speech or writing, a metaphor directs the mind of the listener or reader to think about some particular thing similar or analogous to that denoted from a literal interpretation of the meaning of the expression, as a mountain of paperwork prompts the listener/reader to think about a large number of papers requiring processing, implying perhaps the difficult job ahead getting on top of stack of papers, or, to use another metaphor, the difficult job of whittling the stack down. Metaphors extend beyond their literal meaning, often into the realm of ideas and action.

Metaphors can serve a variety of functions:

• to add stylistic or poetic flourish to language, as when William Shakespeare, in sonnet XVIII, refers to the sun as the eye of heaven and writes of variations in sunny days in terms of the state of the sun's gold complexion;
• to express what we experience in rich and vivid language, which, through its emotional impact, often promotes the communicative and/or explanatory goals of metaphor described in the following bullets, just one of the miracles of metaphor;
• to underpin the cognitive function of conceptualizing, by expressing a thought in familiar and compact terms that to express literally would require more elaborate, intricate, convoluted, or elusive language, as when scientists refer to DNA as the blueprint of the cell, or as the database the cell uses to construct itself and function in particular ways;
• to underpin the cognitive function of conceptualizing, by enhancing the listener/reader's ability to grasp an abstract, or unfamiliar or difficult-to-grasp concept using a more concrete, familiar, easy-to-grasp concept, as when cognitive scientists refer to the mind as a machine, as a telephone switchboard, or as a network, or to a biological cell as a miniature factory; to time as money; to life as a journey.
• to underpin the cognitive function of conceptualizing, by aggregating with other conceptual metaphors in the unconscious mind, where most thinking and remembering occurs, thereby constructing an individual or community's conceptual system.
• to accomplish metaphor-related pedagogical goals using a constructed fictional, sometimes fantastical, novel concept, as when Kosslyn and Koenig, in their book, Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience, construct a fictional scenario of rows of octopi unknowingly generating information output about local fish density to overhead seagulls through interactions of their tentacles, a metaphor they constructed to explain the nature and operation of a connectionist neural network;
• to influence the frame or cast of mind of the listener/reader regarding something, as when politicians use expressions such as right to life, war on terror, and surge.

Those functions of metaphor are elaborated upon in:     

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish-a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action....We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. — George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

Often the literal meaning of the metaphorical expression gives a concrete or familiar or readily visualized image — the 'source' — whereas often the referent of the metaphor — the 'target' — is more abstract.      When Shakespeare´s depressed Macbeth laments, "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death", he does not refer literally to a lighted pathway leading to a destination of oblivion, but instead refers to something different, something more abstract, something related to the futility of life and the inevitability of death, more specifically perhaps to our past as a journey that we traveled foolishly, futilely, only to arrive at death as our final destination.

Metaphors then require the listener/reader to render an interpretation of the intended comparison, or transfer, of source to target, an interpretation of how the metaphorical expression maps to the intended target. In context, Macbeth's "Out, out brief candle" invites the listener/reader to interpret the brief life of a candle's flame as the brief period the flame of life burns in a human being, as mapping a burning candle to a living (combusting) human.

This article discusses, among other things, the reasons we so frequently employ metaphor in speech and writing, why it is, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson state in the accompanying textbox, "....that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action."

Metaphor as style in speech and writing

Viewed as an aspect of speech and writing, metaphor qualifies as style, in particular, style characterized by a type of analogy. An expression (word, phrase) that by implication suggests the likeness of one entity to another entity gives style to an item of speech or writing, whether the entities consist of objects, events, ideas, activities, attributes, or almost anything expressible in language. For example, in the first sentence of this paragraph, the word ´viewed´ serves as a metaphor for ´thought of´, implying analogy of the process of seeing and the thought process. The phrase, "viewed as an aspect of", projects the properties of seeing (vision) something from a particular perspective onto thinking about something from a particular perspective, that ´something´ in this case referring to ´metaphor´ and that ´perspective´ in this case referring to the characteristics of speech and writing.

As a characteristic of speech and writing, metaphors can serve the poetic imagination, enabling William Shakespeare, in his play "As You Like It", to compare the world to a stage and its human inhabitants players entering and exiting upon that stage; enabling Sylvia Plath, in her poem "Cut", to compare the blood issuing from her cut thumb to the running of a million soldiers, "redcoats, every one"; and, enabling Robert Frost, in "The Road Not Taken", to compare one´s life to a journey.

Viewed also as an aspect of speech and writing, metaphor can serve as a device for persuading the listener or reader of the speaker-writer´s argument or thesis, the so-called rhetorical metaphor....

Metaphor as foundational to our conceptual system

Cognitive linguists emphasize that metaphors serve to facilitate the understanding of one conceptual domain, typically an abstract one like 'life' or 'theories' or 'ideas', through expressions that relate to another, more familiar conceptual domain, typically a more concrete one like 'journey' or 'buildings' or 'food'.   Food for thought: we devour a book of raw facts, try to digest them, stew over them, let them simmer on the back-burner, regurgitate them in discussions, cook up explanations, hoping they do not seem half-baked. Theories as buildings: we establish a foundation for them, a framework, support them with strong arguments, buttressing them with facts, hoping they will stand. Life as journey: some of us travel hopefully, others seem to have no direction, many lose their way.

A convenient short-hand way of capturing this view of metaphor is the following: CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN (A) IS CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN (B), which is what is called a conceptual metaphor. A conceptual metaphor consists of two conceptual domains, in which one domain is understood in terms of another. A conceptual domain is any coherent organization of experience. Thus, for example, we have coherently organized knowledge about journeys that we rely on in understanding life.

A conceptual metaphor reveals a set of correspondences between two conceptual domains. How does that relate to the nature and importance of our conceptual system, and to metaphor as foundational to our conceptual system?

  Nature of our conceptual system

Our conceptual system comprises a system of concepts. The word 'concept' nominalizes a physiological activity, namely that of conceptualizing, a physiological activity performed by the human living organism. Thus our conceptual system comprises the system whereby we perform the physiological activities of conceptualizing. Therefore, we need to understand the nature of the physiological activity of conceptualizing.

Conceptualizing targets things: we conceptualize about things, things fall under the processes whereby we conceptualize them. We conceptualize about material things — books, stars, people — and non-material things — love, beauty, happiness, time. Most of our thinking involves performing the physiological activity of conceptualizing things.

The verb 'to conceptualize' does not reside among the 60 or so pan-language universal semantic primitives, but the verb 'to think' does. We cannot define 'thinking' with terms simpler than 'thinking' itself. We understand 'thinking' on an elemental, intuitive, primitive level, with no description of its meaning expressive in words more simple, more fundamental than 'thinking' itself. As we grow physically and develop cognitively from infancy, we learn what it means to think from the way the community we live in uses it. Defining non-semantic-primitives such as 'conceptualizing' non-circularly requires basing the definition on indefinable semantic primitives, of which only 'to think' fills the bill for defining 'to conceptualize'. We may ask about the details whereby the living human organism performs the physiological activities of thinking, and we find that in many instances we need to know the details whereby the living human organism performs the physiological activity of conceptualizing.

Conceptualizing provides a way of applying thinking to things, of abstracting, or reifying, the performance of the physiological activity of thinking characteristic of conceptualizing. We thereby 'thingify' what we think about in the active process of conceptualizing, thinking that we have discovered a 'thing', specifically a concept. We give concepts a life of their own, speaking of there 'being' concepts and/or of our 'having' concepts. We should keep in mind that concepts have no reality except as abstractions, nominalizations, or reifications of physiological activities performed by human living systems applying thinking to material and non-material things.

  Role of metaphor in conceptualizing

For example, we apply thinking to tangible valuable resources, things like money. We conceptualize money, developing it as a concept in the way described in the previous section. The concept of money as a valuable resource thus becomes a familiar one, a concept that informs the activities of our daily lives. When we come to a point when we want to apply thinking to something less tangible than money, time, say, our experiences with money and time lead to a creative insight, that the two have something in common, both valuable resources. We develop a theme, TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A VALUABLE RESOURCE, often unconsciously. Cognitive linguists refer to such themes as 'conceptual metaphors'. The source, or vehicle, VALUABLE RESOURCE, as a metaphorical linguistic expression, carries or transfers its concept over to the target, or topic, TIME. Whereas the conceptual metaphor — the conceptual metaphorical theme — may remain unconscious, it reveals its presence in the way we conceptualize time:

• "Doing it that way will cost you time."
• "We're wasting time procrastinating like this"
• "We can save time if we take this route."
• "I don't have the time to give you right now."
• "I will pay you for your time."
• "How much time have you invested in the project?"
• "I've spent a lot of time on it."
• "He's living on borrowed time."
• "That turned out to be a profitable expenditure of time."

Note that the conceptual metaphor TIME IS MONEY has transferred the concrete and literal concept of money beyond itself, over to the more abstract concept of time, giving us a way to think about time, at least one way to think about time. onsider it a 'transconceptualization'. In thinking about time in that way, we also organize our lives in relation to time in that way: we regretfully waste time, budget time, do things to save time, spend spend time with our friends and family, lament about how fast time seems to disappear. We cannot view the metaphor as simply giving us a literary base to speak or write about time, but a way to think about time and a particular way to organize our behavior, the actions we take in our daily lives. It defines our concept of time and therefore defines an aspect of our culture. In our culture, many if not most of us regard time, consciously or unconsciously as a treasure, treating it one way or another depending on part played by other conceptual metaphors in determining our attitude toward treasures.

Ihe conceptual metaphor, TIME IS MONEY enables us to conceptualize time in a certain way that actually influences how we act, what decisions we make. Yet, our cognitive abilities are rich enough that we can develop other conceptual metaphors for time, allowing us to conceptualize time in other ways depending on circumstances. For example, we operate sometimes under the conceptual metaphor, TIME IS MOTION. Time flies when you're having fun. Where did the time go? The package arrived just in time. Time and tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of 30. —Robert Frost.

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