Fauconnier: "Generalized integration networks" (2009)

I have quickly skimmed Gilles Fauconniers contribution to New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics (2009).

I still think he is right in pointing out that constructs like My surgeon is a butcher cannot be explained in terms of one-way mappings. I also still think that his theory doesn't have as much to offer as he himself seems to think.

Fairytale Science: Against a "Fallacy"
Somewhere in Fauconnier's mind, there must be a tiny shred of fear that his theory might be closer to psychoanalysis that to cognitive science.

This can be seen in that he explicitly takes on the following "fallacy":

A wide-ranging cognitive operation purports to explain "everything"
Corollary: Such an operation explains "too much" and is unconstrained (p. 149)

Of course, calling something a fallacy doesn't make it so. And indeed, he doesn't have any real argument that can alleviate this worry.

The closest we get is an allusion to "twelve years" of "convergent evidence" which is not followed by any reference (p. 149).

Fairytale Science: "Precise" But Not "Rigorous"
He later reiterates that conceptual integration "is a precise meaning construction operation" (p. 158), but he also admits that the analyses have to be done on a case-by-case basis:

precise analysis of the generalized networks needs to be done for any observed data, just as chemical analysis needs to be done for any unknown chemical, without adding new elements of new principles to chemistry. (p. 158)

Thus, only the skilled analyst can uncover what cognitive operations a reader must perform in order to understand a given piece of surface language.

The consequence is, he adds in a footnote, that

[...] notions like metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and counterfactual, applied to surface products, elude rigorous definition. (p. 158)

On his account, these notions are thus theory terms, embedded in his own theory.

Fairytale Science: "We Have Indeed"
Even more ridiculously, he quotes (p. 150) a single remark Feldman makes in the conclusion of his book (p. 338), calling Fauconnier and Turner's project "a bold attempt to explain much of mental life."

While "bold attempt" does not usually translate into "unqualified success," Fauconnier does not seem to have a problem reinterpreting the remark as a full-fledged endorsement of his theory:

The proper way to understand this comment is that we (Turner and Fauconnier) have indeed shown that conceptual integration plays a necessary role in human mental life as evidenced by the surface products of particular interest to humans. (p. 150)

I'm not kidding -- he actually writes this.

Showcase Semantics: A New Example
In order to demonstrate his theory, Fauconnier considers the a sentence from a news story about a new California law prohibiting smoking in certain bars. The news piece playfully combines the actual cigarette smoke with the cartoon cliché of a "smoking angry" person:

[...] hard-core smokers [...] were so angry that if they had been allowed to light up, the smoke would have been coming out of their ears. (p. 150)

This example contains two of Fauconnier's favorite phenomena: A counterfactual statements and a two-way interaction between the literal and the metaphorical level.

Showcase Semantics: Putting Pieces Together
His analysis is summarized in the figures on pp. 155 and 157. The gist is this:

1. The conventional ANGER image (or "network") is combined with a stereotypical SMOKER situation to combine an ANGRY SMOKER image which include a double (literal/metaphorical) role for the smoke.
2. The NO SMOKING and the SMOKING ALLOWED situations are combined to form a counterfactual smoking situation qualitatively different from the simple SMOKING ALLOWED situation. He calls this counterfactual the SMOKER'S ZOLOFT SPACE.
3. The ANGRY SMOKER and the SMOKER'S ZOLOFT SPACE are combined to produce the hypothetical smoke coming out of the smokers' ears.

After the Smoke Clears: Fauconnier on Fauconnier
He concludes his analysis with, if I may use my own blend, "a Rumsfeld":

Is the newspaper statement contradictory or unintelligible? Clearly, no. [...] Is the piece of data a "blend"? Clearly, yes, and indeed a visible one. (p. 157)

Shortly after that, he also assures us of the psychological reality of his speculative account (by means of a speculative argument):

Is attested data of this kind cognitively significant? Of course. (p. 158)

His argument seems to be that  because we can understand the sentence, and because he can tell a semantic story about this sentence, his story must be true (p. 158).

McGlone: "Concepts as Metaphors" (2001)

The last chapter in Sam Glucksberg's book Understanding Figurative Language is a super-important essay by Matthew McGlone that summarizes much of the psychological evidence against cognitive metaphors theory in a mere 17 pages.

Circularity
McGlone stresses that linguistic evidence alone cannot decide the matter:

How do we know that people think of theories in terms of buildings? Because people often talk about theories using building-related expressions. Why do people often talk about theories using building-related expressions? Because people think about theories in terms of buildings. Clearly, the conceptual metaphor view must go beyond circular reasoning of this sort and seek evidence that is independent of the linguistic evidence. (p. 95)

He also notes that the strong view of metaphor is incoherent because it would imply that we could not distinguish theories from actual buildings (pp. 94 and 105).

Introspection and post hoc analysis
He goes on to discuss the fact that our semantic intuitions may be an unreliable source of knowledge (p. 95-97).

He provides three arguments for this conclusions, Keysar and Bly's quite ingenious false-etymology experiment (pp. 95-96); a new analysis of a legal argument by Steven Winter (pp. 96-97); and the phenomenon of false etymologies (p. 97).

Winter claims, referring explicitly to cognitive metaphor theory, that the only natural reading of "under the color of law" is "under the (false) appearance of legality" (p. 96). McGlone reports that his subjects in fact think the opposite, so the speculative account was in fact quite misleading in this case (p. 97).

McGlone illustrates the concept of false etymologies with the example Martha is the spitting image of her mother (p. 97).

While an analyst may be tempted to conjure up some "cognitive" motivation for the connection between spit and resemblance, the phrase is in fact derived through an abbreviation of spirit and image. Any "cognitive" story would, in other words, just be another slice of the big baloney.

Note that this argument goes very well together with examples of dead metaphors. If metaphors really were so psychologically real as claimed by the cognitive theory, they should all be completely transparent.

The Lack of Support for Analogical Processing
On the following pages (pp. 99-104), McGlone offers a number of arguments that speak for and against the cognitive theory of metaphor based on psychological experiments.

The first list of arguments against the mapping-based account of understanding is based on his 1994 doctoral dissertation and his 1996 article based on it. These are:

• Paraphrases do not respect conceptual mappings Subjects paraphrase the lecture was a three-course meal as, e.g., the lecture was a gold mine (p. 99).
• Similarity judgements are based on content, not mapping Subjects see the lecture was a three-course meal as equally similar to the lecture was a steak for the intellect and the lecture was a goldmine (p. 99).
• Priming effects rest on content, not mapping As in snack => meal vs. goldmine => meal (pp. 99-100).
• Content-based memory cues work better than mapping-based For instance, "large quantity" is better than "food" as a cue for the lecture was a three-course meal (p. 100).

A finding that seems to support the mapping hypothesis is the following, reported by Nandini Nayak and Raymond Gibbs:

• Subjects prefer text continuations that preserve coherence in terms of mappings So if subjects are given a text with three or four ANGER IS HEAT phrases, they prefer continuations that also applies this mapping to one that applies ANGERS IS ANIMAL BEHAVIOR (pp. 100-101).

However:

• Continuations that preserve mappings do not facilitate reading At least not when these mappings are highly conventional. This was shown using Nayak and Gibbs' own stories (pp. 101-102).

McGlone notes that one should also be careful in the interpretation of experiments of these kinds, since priming effects based on surface words might be conflated with priming effects based on mappings (p. 102).

Unfamiliar or Ambiguous Sentences in the Context of Analogies
He goes on to cite evidence in favor of the following claims:

• Ambiguous sentences can be disambiguated by a mapping prime So the sentence the meeting was moved two days forward has different natural interpretations after the deadline has passed and we passed the deadline (pp. 102-103).
• Novel metaphors are facilitated by relevant mapping primes So Sirens will wail every time they meet is more intelligible as a metaphor about arguments if it is preceded by the novel phrase verbal grenades than the conventional phrase shoot down his arguments (p. 104).

He notes that there is probably some analogical reasoning implies when you hear the sentence Rush Limbaugh's bloated ego gobbled up his integrity and used the airwaves as a toilet (p. 104). There certainly seems to be more pictorial "meat" to it than the more anemic stock phrases typically analyzed in the field.

He comments:

As Bowdle and Gentner (1997) have suggested, the processes used to understand any particular metaphoric expression depend on its conventionality. When an expression is completely novel, it requires different kinds of inferential work than when it is familiar. Thus, the conceptual metaphor view is insufficient as a general account of figurative language comprehension, in part because it does not recognize important processing differences between conventional and novel expressions. (pp. 104-105)

This distinction should be seen on the background that the air of poetic strangeness inherent in creative metaphors can also accompany slightly strange formulations of literally true facts.

Consider for instance the following novel metaphors:

• The soul a prison for the body (i.e., not vice versa)
• Her comment really stepped on an emotional landmine.
• Rush Limbaugh uses the airwaves as his toilet.

Compare these to the following true and literal statements:

• My body has 20 nails.
• I ate the food with my mouth.
• Your house is standing on a planet.

I presume that, in both cases, the phenomenological effect is produced by the higher requirements implied by a novel way of seeing an object.

Naomi Quinn: "The Cultural Basis of Metaphor" (1991)

Quinn's contributions to Beyond Metaphor (1991) argues against the claim that metaphor "constitute understanding," and instead proposes that metaphors "are ordinarily selected to fit a preexisting and culturally shared model" (p. 60).

Thought (Mostly) Structures Metaphor
Here are some more elaborate versions of the quotes in which she presents her ideas:

I will be arguing that metaphors, far from constituting understanding, are ordinarily selected to fit a preexisting and culturally shared model. And I will conclude that metaphors do not typically give rise to new, previously unrecognized entailments, although they may well help the reasoner to follow out entailments of the preexisting cultural model and thereby arrive at complex inferences. I do not want to suggest that metaphors never reorganize thinking, supply new entailments, and permit new inferences; but my analysis will argue that such cases are exceptional rather than ordinary. (p. 60)

Metaphors are usually cherry-picked on the basis of prior understanding:

I want to argue further, and I think quite contrary to what Johnson and Lakoff seem to be saying, that metaphorical systems or productive metaphors typically do not structure understandings de novo. Rather, perticular metaphors are selected by speakers, just because they provide satisfying  mappings onto already existing cultural understandings---that is, because elements and relations between elements in the source domain make a good match with elements and relations among them in the cultural model. Selection of a particular metaphor for use in ordinary speech seems to depend upon its aptness for the conceptual task at hand---sometimes, as we shall see, a reasoning task. (p. 65)

If source domains can be considered and rejected, they cannot dictate out thoughts about the target:

I would like to suggest that the metaphor appears to structure inferences in the target domain, carrying these inferences over from entailments in the source domain, only if it be supposed that the selection of this metaphor is unconstrained. Once it is recognized that choice of metaphor is itself highly constrained by the structure of cultural understanding, then it can be seen that reasoners ordinarily select from possible metaphors those that provide them with a felicitous physical-world mapping of the parts of the cultural model---the elements and relations between elements---about which they are intent on reasoning. (p. 76-77)

This can usefully be compared to Gentner et al.'s discussion (1997) of how Kepler systematically tried out different analogies, assessed their suitability, and sought out their limitations (pp. 22-24, 27-29).

Metaphor (Sometimes) Structures Thought
Quinn does not deny that metaphors may sometimes restructure thought and action. She illustrates this with Hans Selye's reconceptualization of hormonal responses as a general systemic "stress," an example taken from Mark Johnson's The Body In the Mind (1987: 127-37).

She further notes that "[a]s the Gentners (1983) demonstrate with the example of electricity, metaphor is especially likely to organize experience and guide reasoning in just those domains for which there is no other available model" (p. 77).Thinking in terms of lemmings or in terms of water in other words makes a difference when you don't know anything about electricity as such (cf. also p. 59).

Some Comments on Lakoff and Johnson
Although Quinn is generally sympathetic to Lakoff and Johnson's project, she has some problems with their style of presentation:

Their argument sometimes takes the form of a semmingly unqualified claim that metaphor underlies and constitutes understanding. (p. 59)

She notes that

readers of Lakoff and Johnson's published works are likely to go away, as I did after what I thought was a careful reading, with a sweeping interpretation of their claim or at least with some confusion about how sweeping their their theory of metaphor is meant to be. (p. 59-60)

She is also very clear about the ambiguous status of "culture" in the theory:

[...] Lakoff and Johnson are not unaware that culture plays some role in understanding: [...] But culturally constituted meaning has no place of its own beside embodied meaning in Johnson's analysis and no systematically developed or well-articulated place in that of Lakoff. (p. 65)

This certainly also applies to Kövecses invocation of "culture" as a dust-bin concept that can account for any piece of data that falls outside of the theory.

What Lakoff, Johnson, And Quinn Should Have Said
I think it is important to realize that much of the confusion about the status of metaphors as mental object go away once we look at them where they belong, that is, in the context of conversation.

Language certainly governs thought and action, if "language" includes assertions such as tomato leaves are toxic or this bridge is solid. This is not obviously because of a Robinson Crusoe-style individualistic cognition, but because we expect utterances to be benevolent manipulations of our actions. This should be true of metaphor as well.

When the Gentners prompt their subjects to see electricity as a pack of lemmings or as a flow of water, they are essentially signalling to the subjects that this analogy should somehow be helpful. The interesting work occurs as the subjects try to unpack this statement and merge the analogy with their own sense of reasonable behavior.

This involves uncertainty and probably some rounding off the edges as the subjects acquire more experience. It would be a mistake to suppose that the analogy contained the instructions for its own implication, or that a "big baby" could not come to use it more loosely, freely, and proficiently with experience.

Gendlin: "How Philosophy Cannot Appeal to Experience, and How It Can" (1997)

I've read Gendlin's opening essay in the anthology dedicated to his philosophy. I find it fascinating, but also quite wrong-headed in some ways.

Gendlin's point is that we have something like a bodily intuition about phenomena that is well articulated by some words and not so well articulated by others. His claim is that by attending closely to this intuition, we can become more acute observers of our life-world, or so I read him, at least.

Looking For Words
His favorite example of this phenomenon is the poet searching for a suitable line to continue a poem (p. 17). He also cites the practice of rephrasing your point when someone doesn't understand you as evidence that there is "a . . . ." that we can succeed or fail at making other people appreciate (p. 13).

In other words, the point seems to be a call to "return to the phenomena themselves," as the phenomenologists said. "Any text or theory," he explains, "becomes more valuable when it is taken experientially in this way" (p. 40).


He illustrates this kind of thinking with an example from Wittgenstein, not about poetry-writing, but about letter-writing:

I surrender to a mood and the expression comes. Or a picture occurs to me and I try to describe it. Or an English expressions occurs to me and I try to hit on the corresponding German one. Or I make a gesture, and I ask myself: What words correspond to this gesture? And so on. (PI 335; quoted by Gendlin on p. 37)

His conclusion is, with explicit reference to the "postmodernism" in general (pp. 3, 6, 9, 19, 34-35), and Derrida (pp. 8, 35-36) in particular:

People's lives include a great deal that they cannot say in the existing language, but can become able to say. As philosophers, let us stop telling people that they cannot possibly have anything to say that is not already in the public language. (p. 34)

Trying To Succeed
I am skeptical about Gendlin's flirtation with the concept of authentic language for the reasons that Richard Rorty has explained in his wonderful essay on Heidegger's mysticism. Even though there truly is some experience of looking for and finding the right words, it is not clear how serious we should take this experience.

A different way to conceptualize the situation would be in terms of skill. Just like looking for a word, the attempt to accomplish some bodily action can be associated with immense frustration and satisfaction. This is obviously not because the action was there all along in some non-realized form, and we should look at linguistic skill and success the same way.

This also clears up another confusion Gendlin's story, namely: Why would we even want to explicate our intuitions in the first place? Is it for the sake of "truth"? "Authenticity"? "Correspondence"? He touches on the answer with his example of rephrasing your explanations: This is an attempt to bring your hearer into a different state, not an attempt to create a good fit.

This communicative purpose could in principle be achieved with the most ridiculous or outlandish effect imaginable; a completely "wrong" word, a gesture, a cartoon. The success criterion is here change in the state of the hearer, not a relation between words and bodily knowledge.

Another way to say the same thing is that a seller who puts a price tag on a commodity chooses a certain "word" that may or may not have the right effect. This is not because it does not "fit" the commodity, but because it would create the wrong effect in the hearer, such as the belief that the commodity was of a cheap quality, or that it is too expensive.

Yet another similar example occurs when you speak a foreign language. In that situation, you have a gold standard for ease of communication---communication in your native language---and that association can produce a whole lot of frustration as you try to achieve as fine-grained distinctions and precise effects with your impoverished skills in the foreign language.

Lakoff and Johnson on Narayanan (1999)

Here's how George Lakoff and Mark Johnson sum up Narayanan's toy model of English verbal aspect in their 1999 book Philosophy in the Flesh:

Narayanan devised an ingenious way to test whether his model of general high-level motor control could handle purely abstract inferences, inferences having nothing to do with bodily movement. He constructed a neural model of conceptual metaphor and then found cases in which body-based metaphors were used in an abstract domain, in this case, international economics. [...] Narayanan then showed that models of the motor schemas for physical action can---under metaphoric projection---perform the appropriate abstract inferences about international economics. (p. 42)

They conclude:

Aspectual concepts that characterize the structure of events can be adequately represented in terms of general motor-control schemas, and abstract reasoning can be carried out using neural motor-control simulation. (p. 42)

Mark Johnson: "Philosophy's Debt to Metaphor" (2008)

Just a couple of quotes from Johnson's contribution to the Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (2008):

Conceptual metaphor is a structure of human understanding, and the source domains of the metaphors come from our bodily, sensory-motor experience, which becomes the basis for abstract conceptualization and reasoning. From this perspective, truth is a matter of how our body-based understanding of a sentence fits, or fails to fit, our body-based understanding of a situation. (p. 45)

Indeed, once you make the links, no specific training is needed:

All theories are based on metaphors because all our abstract concepts are metaphorically defined. Understanding the constitutive metaphors allows you to grasp the logic and entailments of the theory. (p. 51; emphasis in original)

Further, we should recognize the "the crucial role of metaphor in shaping and constraining inference in ordinary mundane thinking" and "the pervasive workings of conceptual metaphor in shaping our conceptual systems" (both p. 28). We are also told that "conceptual metaphors lie at the heart of our abstract conceptualization and reasoning" (p. 51).

Also, "metaphors are based on experiential correlations and not on similarities" (p. 46).

"Cognitive Semantics: In the Heart of Language" (1998)

This is an interview with George Lakoff from the first-ever issue of Brazilian journal Fórum Lingüistico, published by the institute for linguistics at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. It was conducted by Roberta Pires de Oliveira.

The interview is notable for containing both some quite frank and some quite revealing assertions by Lakoff.

It is unfortunately quite badly transcribed. For instance, Pamela Morgan is identified as "Helena Morgan," (p. 106), and Lakoff's paper in Andrew Ortony's book Metaphor and Thought becomes "my paper on Ortony's book" (p. 108, my emphasis).

Below is a collection of some of the more striking quotes from the interview, sorted according to theme.

The Ricoeur connection:

Mark Johnson had studied with Paul Ricoeur. So he knew the Ricoeur tradition and the continental tradition and had come to the conclusion, through working with Ricoeur that metaphor was central to thought. But I wasn't at all influenced by that tradition. What influenced me was the discovery that ordinary, everyday thought and language, and specially ordinary everyday thought, is structured metaphorically. That was the major discovery. (p. 89)

The partial order:

It [= cognitive metaphor theory] says that we have basic concepts that arise from our direct interaction with the world and they are not metaphorical, and then we have metaphorical projections of those to more abstract concepts. (p. 91)

With respect to "big babies" and scaffolding:

Piaget saw that the understanding of, for example, causation came out of a child's dropping things. I think that's correct. But Piaget also thought that if you advance from one stage, then you left behind the other stage. This seems to be false. He thought that there was a higher stage of abstract thinking, and that seems to be false. The details are very unpiagetian when you think of the rest of Piaget's work. (p. 96-97)

The Universal Body:

Yes, there are universal concepts. There are universal metaphors, universal aspects of language, because we all have very similar bodies and our physical experiences in the world are very similar. Those are where universals come from. (p. 98)

Inherent structure:

There's a structure that is independent of any particular metaphor of love. It may not be a very rich one. It may not be a highly structured concept... When you have a lover, a beloved, an emotional relationship, a positive emotional relationship, and lots and lots of types of complex feelings, but it may not be structured enough to reason with then you have lots of metaphors that allow you to conceptualize love in terms of other kinds of experiences. (p. 103)

You have to take into account target domain overrides. [...] The target domain override is a case where the mapping is carried through with contradicting internal structures of the target domain. (p. 107-08)

There's also an extremely embarrassing moment on pp. 106-07, when Lakoff shrugs of a counterexample to one of his claims by saying that a particular set of metaphors is just "linguistic expressions, not mappings," apparently without noticing his own blatant methodological inconsistency. He further goes on to imply that if a metaphor isn't universal, it doesn't really count.

Somers: "On the validity of the complement--adjunct distinction in valency grammar" (1984)

In this article from Linguistics 22(4), Harry Somers surveys various linguistic tests designed to detect the difference between optional sentence adjuncts and obligatory verbal complements. He further proposes to replace this binary distinction by a six-step scale ranging from intergral complements to extraperipherals.

Tests for Argument Type
The most import tests Somers discusses are the elimination test, the back-formation test, and his own "do so" test. Here is an overview of the tests he describes:

• Elimination: If the sentence becomes ungrammatical when an element is eliminated, it is a complement. If it doesn't, then the test makes no conclusion (pp. 509-10).
• Back-formation: If the element can be moved down in an embedded wh-sentence or into a entirely separate sentence, it is an adjunct (p. 511).
• Substitution 1: If the elimination test does not yield a conclusion for a particular verb, but it does for a near-synonym, then we are allowed to transfer the complement status back to the original verb (p. 512).
• Substitution 2: If a change of verbs renders a certain element strange or ungrammatical, then that element is a complement. If it doesn't, no conclusion is guaranteed (pp. 512-13).
• Semantics: If the preposition in a prepositional element cannot be replaced by a near-synonym, then that element is a complement (p. 514).
• for/to status: If an indirect object is most naturally expressed as a to-phrase, it is relatively loosely connected to the verb (although perhaps still a complement); if it is most naturally expressed as a for-phrase, it is a complement (p. 515).
• Questions: If the noun within an element can be referred to with who, whom, or what, it is a complement. If it cannot, it is an adjunct (p. 516).
• "Do so": Whatever elements are semantically included in the referent of the anaphor ...and he did so, too are complements. The rest are adjuncts (p. 516-20).

A Scale of "Complementness"
Somers suggests (p. 524) that we give up the binary distinction between complement and adjunct and instead introduce a six-point scale that measures how intimately connected to the verb any particular element is.

His categories, with examples, are (pp. 524-26):

• Integral complement: put at risk, take care (fundamentally affects the verb).
• Obligatory complement: he wrote me a letter (necessarily implied by the verb).
• Optional complement: Greame caught Steve a salmon (optional, but quite restricted).
• Middle: I gently pushed the button (optional and only weakly thematically restricted).
• Adjunct: I pulled the lever in order to eject (optional and almost unrestricted).
• Extraperipherals: we're all patiently waiting for you, you know. (top-level additions)

Vyvyan Evans: "Semantic representation in LCCM Theory" (2009)

This is a relatively sketchy paper, published in New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Its main point is that we should see linguistic representation (discrete grammatical categories) as a crude, schematic system put on top of an ancient system for conceptual representation (qualitative sensibilities).

Various aspects of sentence and word meaning are put in one box or the other depending on whether the aspect is discrete or not. It is thus near-tautological that the "linguistic system" deals with crude, discrete categories, while everything else is relinquished to the dust bin category of fuzzy "conceptual content."

The psychological or "conceptual" part of the story is inspired by Lawrence Barsalou's ideas about mental representations.

Peter Harder: "Meaning as input" (2009)

This paper by Peter Harder argues---building on William Croft and D. Alan Cruse's Cognitive Linguistics (2004)---that sentences should be thought of as little programs that are run in the head of a hearer.

The main example supporting this view of semantics is the case of the definite article. In sentences like

• The UN condemned the test,

the noun phrase the test can be read as an instruction to find a suitable referent (p. 18).

This invites a view of grammar in which the syntactical structure of a sentence is seen as a chronological structure of a program. The sentence The test happened thus receives the following interpretation (p. 23):

• declarative (past tense (HAPPEN (definite (TEST))))

This should be read as a LISP-style program. Harder illustrates the syntax of this instructional language with the following "recipe" (p. 24):

• serve (sprinkle with lemon (grill (add salt (slice (salmon)))))

It should be quite obvious how this is intended to work. Note the parallel to Montague grammar.

The consequence of adopting such a view seems to be that language becomes a narrow communication channel that only allows for the transmission of code, not of meaning. If this is correct, understanding can be compared to a client-side execution of a server-provided script.

Meaning is thus constrained by the resources of the hearer, but the instruction is designed by the speaker. This may be what Harder means by the following quote, although I'm not entirely sure:

Knowing a language, I suggest, essentially consists of knowing the input properties of the forms you choose [the meaning of the keywords in the scripting language?] -- whereas actual outputs [interpretations, meanings?] can never be known for certain in advance [because you cannot control the settings and properties of the client-side computer?]. (p. 16)

The paper was published in New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics (2009), edited by Vyvyan Evans and Stéphanie Pourcel.

Ortony, Vondruska, Foss, and Jones: "Salience, Similies, and the Asymmetry of Similarity" (1985)

A paper from Journal of Memory and Language 24(5) most notable for its long list of good examples of similies (reproduced in the appendix).

Medin and Ortony: "Psychological essentialism" (1989)

This is a contribution by Douglas Medin and Andrew Ortony to the volume Similarity and Analogical Reasoning (1989) edited by Stella Vosniadou and Ortony. Medin and Ortony argue that entities have two distinct sets of features, a shallow and a deep set, that influence similarity judgments in different contexts.

Superficial Attributes and "Essence Slots"
The paper is called "Psychological essentialism" because Medin and Ortony thinks that the context-dependence of similarity judgment can be explained by supposing that ordinary lay folk are metaphysical essentialists. What this means is that the average test subject believes that entities have deep, perhaps unknown, properties in addition to their superficial attributes.

This is supposed to explain why we categorize dolphins with bats and not with sharks. In other cases, like an airplane, a subject's representation of this "essence" make take the form of a theory like "I don't know, but an experts could tell me."

There is something interesting and original about taking a bad philosophical theory and trying to explain it as a psychological phenomenon. However, think their theory hides as much as it shows, as it takes similarity judgment to be divorced from action. I think most of the paradoxical features of similarity judgments (as described by Lawrence Barsalou) would evaporate if we took "being similar" as explained by "treated similarly" rather than the other way around.

A Note on Gender and Style
When I was reading the paper, I was noticing that Medin and Ortony tend to refer to Linda E. Smith by both her first and last name, while they refer to male authors by their last name only. In order to check whether this was actually true, I counted how many times people were mentioned in the text, and whether their first names were mentioned:

Person	+ first name	– first name
Linda B. Smith	4	2
Lawrence W. Barsalou	1	9
Lance J. Rips	1	12
Ryszard Michalski	2	3
Edward E. Smith	2	8
Daniel N. Osherson	2	8
Ludwig Wittgenstein	0	2
John Locke	0	4

The numbers in the table show how often the respective authors occur with their first name spelled out completely. Last names mentioned in references such as "Smith and Medin (1981)" are not counted, since their form is dictated by more rigid style guides. I have not counted names that only occur once (which exlude Elanor Rosch, who is mentioned with first name).

Note that Linda B. Smith is the only woman referred to in the paper. The fact that her first name is mentioned more frequently than, say, Michalski's, may be attributed to the fact that there is another "Smith" frequently referenced in the paper, but note that he is more frequently referred to by his last name only. However, this may partly be due to the fact that his name is disambiguated by the fact that it occurs next to Osherson's as well as more often. A recent mention of a figure does to some extent make the first name obsolete.

Nevertheless, the numbers are quite striking. It would be interesting to do a more thorough investigation of this phenomenon. It would perhaps also be more interesting to investigate whether there is a significant difference in the distance from last mention that warrants reiterating a first name for men and women, respectively.

Srinivas Sankara Narayanan: "KARMA," an addition

I forgot to include this quote in the previous post, but it strikes me as illuminating:

[...] our focus on narrow set of expressions, our impoverished target domain and the inability of our system to extend existing metaphors are important shortcomings. (p. 217)

Srinivas Sankara Narayanan: "KARMA" (1997)

Srini Narayanan's PhD dissertation is often cited as an exemplary accomplishment of cognitive metaphor theory. However, when you read the small print, it seems less convincing. It has the distinct feel of the Georgetown-IBM system from 1953.

Since I have now made my way through the 300-page dissertation, I'll now do my best to give a clear and short presentation of its results. I'll do that in reverse order, starting with its evaluation methodology and moving towards a more detailed description of the program.

Evaluation
Narayanan's program was evaluated on a "corpus" consisting of 9 short snippets of text amounting to a total of 116 words. This evaluation set was, as far as I can understand, specifically constructed so as to look as much like the training set as possible in terms of vocabulary and theme.

For each sentence to be evaluated, the methodology consisted in the following steps:

1. For each sentence, a feature structure was constructed; thus, the sentence was parsed and partially interpreted by hand before entering the reasoning module.
2. Any "difficult" aspects of the sentences were smoothed out; e.g. the phrase perception of was removed from one of the examples to create a flatter semantics (p. 246).
3. Any knowledge that the system lacked in order to understand the sentence was fed into it; e.g., in one case it was given the information that NAFTA affects Mexico (p. 248).
4. The subject matter was, as far as I understand, always explicitly stated to be economic policy so that the system did not have to infer whether it should read motion verbs metaphorically or not.
5. A feature structure was produced by the system, and Narayanan read the contents of this structure and determined whether he thought it had fit his intuitions (as he mostly did).

It should be quite clear that this evaluation procedure is quite liberal. The line between system design and system evaluation is effectively invisible, as is the line between subject and experimenter.

Input knowledge
The system was equipped with a number of materials which were designed explicitly to deal with a training "corpus" of 20 sentences (roughly 750 words). These were:

• A background model of the domain of economic policies with some very strong and very simplified assumptions (pp. 173-75).
• A set of motion models or "execution schemas" that describe the temporal progression of actions like walking and recovering from illness in a highly idealized fashion.
• A set of highly specific maps that told the system how to link various objects, attributes, and events from the execution schemas to the economic objects, attributes, and events. These were often very specific and tailored to the corpus. For instance, there were mappings telling the system to an IncompetentDoctor object onto a Government object, and a step event onto an implement_policy event.

This background knowledge would obviously not be very robust if applied more widely.

The X-schema model
The target domain in Narayanan's thesis, economic policies, is represented fundamentally different from the source domains, movement and health. The target domain is represented as a Bayesian net in order to allow probabilistic reasoning. The source domain is represented as a kind of highly idiosyncratic simulation tool.

These simulation tools are what he calls "x-schemas" or "execution schemas." They are abstract representations of the causal structure of processes like walking or grasping something.

The x-schemas are connceted to a feature structure that keeps track of the state of whoever the agent performing the action is. The agent's state may influence the structure of the process and vice versa. The x-schemas are mostly structured like a little story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they are run as simulations when the system processes a sentence.

This simulation is a discrete-step process where the value of various parameters at one time (step size, energy level, distance to goal, etc.) combine to produce the parameter settings in the next time step. All parameter values are non-negative integers. The mechanism that produces the state at time t + 1 from the state at time t is designed by hand (and by intuition).

Examples
Narayanan gives a single completely explicit example of the kind of data structures that the system inputs and outputs. His example builds on the newspaper headline Indian Government Stumbling in Implementing Liberalization Plan.

He manually translates this sentences into the following feature structure representation (p. 208):

( (context Economic Policy)

  (type Liberalization)

  (actor IG)

  (event Stumble)
  (aspect Progressive)

  (ut-type Description) )

Fed this data structure, the programs runs a simulation of a walking event and maps the results to the domain of economic policies using maps like ACTOR IS MOVER. The output is the following (p. 215):

( (context Economic Policy)

  (type Liberalization)

  (actor IG)
  (event Stumble)

  (aspect Progressive)

  (status (ongoing 0 1)
  (suspend 1 1))

  (difficulty

    (t 0 .7)

    (t 1 1))

  (outcome (fail 1 .6))
  (goal

    (free-trade 0 1)

    (dereg 0 1)

    (free-trade 1 1)

    (dereg 1 1)))

It is not entirely clear to me what the first argument means in constructions like (dereg 0 1), and the text doesn't seem to help me out.

Narayanan has previously (pp. 55-58) gone through an example simulation of the WALK schema with a set of explicit values on various parameters such as Dist(walked) and Energy. I will not reproduce the tables here, but the schema can roughly be compared to an loop working according to the following rules:

• If walking is enabled, get ready
• If you're ready, check if you can see
• If you can see, take a step
• If you can't see, check your footing
• If your footing is OK, take a step
• If your footing is not OK, change position
• If you've just taken a step and you're not a your destination, get ready

I should be quite obvious that this is a highly idealized model. Whoever, its experiential implausibility does not constitute a problem in Narayanan's dissertation, probably because of the small size of the validation materials.

The Murphy/Gibbs debate

Spread out over three issues of Cognition in 1996 and 1997, Greg Murphy and Ray Gibbs had a very interesting exchange of opinions about cognitive metaphor theory (Murphy 1996, Gibbs 1996, Murphy 1997).

Murphy argued that a prior-similarity-based account of meaning extension is leaner and more precise than cognitive metaphor theory. Gibbs disagreed.

The Strong View and the Weak View
Murphy (1996) makes a distinction between what he calls the "strong" and the "weak" version of cognitive metaphor theory.

The strong view is that target domains have no inherent structure, and so get all their meaning through metaphors. The weak view is that they do have some "skeleton" of structure (1996: 187), perhaps consisting of something like thematic roles and unspecified relations between actors.

Murphy dismisses the strong view on two accounts.

First, all the false inferences predicted by a general metaphor need to be blocked. This can essentially only be done if the target domain has an autonomous structure, and if there is an authority higher than metaphor that can choose to apply or not apply the metaphors.

Second, suppose we have a chain of conceptualization such as

ARGUMENT <<< WAR <<< A WILD ANIMAL <<< A PERSON <<< A PLANT

There are then four links in which noise, wrong inferences, and memory problems may slip in. This seems computationally and psychologically unfortunate.

"Problems of circularity of evidence"
Murphy also notes that one cannot expect the same pool of data to be both explainer and explained. Non-linguistic evidence is needed (1996: 183).

He notes that some of Boaz Keysar and Bridget Bly's (1995) evidence also seems to suggest that metaphor understanding is a post-hoc, backward-looking construction.

That seems to be how our intuitions work. But Murphy warns us that we should not assume that the products of these intuitions reflect anything about the actual mental process (1996: 184).

"Problem of multiple metaphors"
Murphy goes on to note that some super-metaphorical arbiter must choose between metaphors when we have multiple inconsistent options.

As an example, he mentions LOVE, which is conceptualized as a JOURNEY, an OPPONENT, a UNITY, a HIDDEN OBJECT, a VALUABLE COMMODITY, and INSANITY. These various source domains seem to license different inferences.

In his response to Murphy's article, Gibbs rebuts that "concepts are temporary, independent constructions in working memory created on the spot" (Gibbs 1996: 313).

This is in direct conflict with the claim that the conceptual system exists "in long-term memory" which appears elsewhere in the literature (Lakoff 1998: 51; Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 69).

What counts as literal?
According to Murphy, when Lakoff and Johnson state that physical meanings are the only literal meanings, this is

their theory of concepts applied to language; namely, it says that only simple physical experiences can be directly encoded in linguistic meaning, and nonphysical or abstract relations must be expressed via metaphor. Thus, their claim that Inflation is rising is metaphoric is basically an assumption of their theory, rather than evidence for it. (1996; p. 189)

He concludes that "a number of the 'metaphors' that L&J and others identify may well not metaphors at all" (p. 190). He doesn't seem to have a clear account of how one could test "metaphoricity" himself, though.

Quotes from some reviews of Metaphors We Live By (1980)

From Mitchell Silver's review (1982) in Leonardo:

I believe Metaphors We Live By only articulates and details a form of subjectivism. The subjectivism they reject is a naive, caricatured doctrine. It seems to me that their theses are wholly compatible with the more sophisticated subjectivisms of W. V. O. Quine and Nelson Goodman. (Oddly, they categorize Quine as an objectivist.) (p. 323)

From Barbara M. H. Strang's review (1982) in The Modern Language Review:

[...] one of the issues evaded in the book is the curious one of how we know --- for, epigrams apart, we generally agree --- which is the 'literal' and which the 'metaphorical' meaning.  (p. 135)

From a lively, sensible beginning (less revolutionary that [sic] we had been led to expect) the book moves into a series of essays, capable of throwing light, but drawing vast conclusions from casual evidence. (p. 135)

[...] vast conclusions can be drawn from suggestive, carefully chosen instances. (p. 135)

A golden opportunity has been lost by the resort to inflated and sweeping claims, and to huge leaps from particular instances to vast conclusions (p. 136).

From Robert Greene's review (1981) in Comparative Literature:

It all sounds very Deweyan (p. 1178).

But there seems to be some confusion over which part of the tradition they are actually opposing. They may be closer to Aristotle and Plato than they think. (p. 1178)

He also emphasizes that there often is some uncertainty about whether a certain utterance is a metaphor or not (p. 1175).

From Max Black's review (1981) in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism:

[...] a reader cannot fail to be provoked and stimulated. (p. 208)

[...] their reiterated psychological or mentalistic emphasis, does no effective work. (p. 209)

[They refer to "experience":] But we are told nothing about what these "experiences" are: referral to the mental simply serves here to mask the absence of a needed explanation. (p. 209)

[With respect to the ARGUMENT IS WAR data:] one might end just as plausibly, with the alternative formulas, AN ARGUMENT IS A DUEL or, VERBAL DISPUTE IS A BATTLE.  (p. 209)

[About "win and lose arguments":] This argument, if it deserves to be called such, is patently circular. (p. 209)

[...] the copious literature on metaphor is almost completely ignored (p. 210).

From John M. Lawler's review (1983) in Language:

When L&J mention people like Whorf, Sapir, Fillmore, Winograd, Wittgenstein, Malinowski, Levi-Strauss, and Ricoeur as intellectual forebears, and then neglect them in the bibliography, they are doing readers a disservice. It would be a significant improvement in future editions to provide an augmented bibliography. (p. 204)

From Michael K. Smith's review (1982) in American Speech:

Within the limits of current American linguistics, their approach is not only novel but perhaps even revolutionary. Considering the broader fields of Western philosophy and language of the entire twentieth century, however, their critiques of both OBJECTIVISM and SUBJECTIVISM are extremely sketchy and do not use to full advantage the more detailed criticisms of these positions which have been made by much of modern philosophy. (pp. 130-31)

Thus, without a systematic strategy for collecting evidence, Lakoff and Johnson seriously undermine the generality of their own arguments. (p. 131)

These two books [by Ullmann and Stern] are not only broader and better researched discussions of metaphor, but they also emphasize one aspect of metaphor that Lakoff and Johnson don't give full scope to: the importance of the human body in many metaphoric transfers. (p. 132)

As a serious scholarly work, then, this book has shortcomings, with the most important a lack of adequate appreciation for prior research (p. 132).

The review also contains references to a large number of very interesting works in American linguistics that precede Lakoff and Johnson's book.

From Wayne C. Booth's review (1983) in Ethics:

It is written in a style so plain as to suggest labels like "ordinaries," or "linguistish." The sentences plod along like those in bad high school textbooks (p. 621).

When they do hazard metaphors [...] they do not in general turn their analysis back upon themselves. Perhaps if they had done so, they would have recognized something about both the relative poverty of their style and the seriousness of their neglect of traditions of literary and rhetorical theory. (p. 621)

[...] the authors seem unaware of just how badly they oversimplify some issues. (p. 621)

He explicitly mention's Dewey's Art As Experience and Ricoeur as references that lack (p. 621). He also blames it for "limited perspective" and "pedestrian [...] style" (p. 621).

Quotes from some reviews of Philosophy in the Flesh and More Than Cool Reason

Two quotes from Joseph Ulric Neisser's review (2001) of Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) in Language:

They [= Lakoff and Johnson] characterize basic metaphors as unconscious and automatic.A fairly rigid structural determinism ensues. (p. 167)

Like latter-day psychoanalysts, L & J spend several hundred pages unmasking the root metaphors which have dominated the minds of unwitting philosophers. (p. 167)

From Michael O'Donovan-Anderson's review of the same book (2000) in Review of Metaphysics:

Although they spend a great deal of time developing an "embodied realism," it is nothing like acceptable in its current formulation. (p. 943)

... their very strange and programmatic chapters on the history of philosophy do not constitute philosophical attention ...(p. 943)

From Richard Taylor's review (1991) of More Than Cool Reason (1989) in The Modern Language Review:

Next time, however, one can only hope that a style somewhat less irritatingly flat and awkward might be used. [...] Schoolbook strategies are even more out of place in so sophisticated an argument; now boys and girls: 'Let us look at the list of basic conceptual metaphors that we have encountered in this chapter.' (p. 653)

From Thomas Leddy's review of the same book (1990) in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism:

Unfortunately, individual theorists and their specific positions are not discussed. [...] It turns out that in a final chapter titled "More on Traditional Views" the various positions are in fact identified with actual theories of actual authors. [...] Yet in some cases the match is hard to see and in others it is incorrect. (p. 260)

Actually, the similarities between Black's position and Lakoff and Turner's are more striking than the differences. (p. 261)

We are told that death is night draws on the semantically autonomous concept of night which is grounded in what "we experience night to be" (p. 113), i.e., as "dark, cold, foreboding, and so on" (p. 113). Yet although it is difficult to conceive of a night that is not dark it is certainly not the case that nights are always cold and foreboding. The combination of dark, cold and foreboding seems like a fairy-tale, adventure story, or monster movie view of night. In short, although itself without temporal components, it seems to be connected with a type of narrative fiction. (p. 261)

Users of this chapter [ch. 3] should however carefully attend to the authors' cautionary note that this analysis "does not constitute a literary-critical treatment of the poem" and that it is only intended to be "a prerequisite to any such discussion" (p. 159).  (p. 261)

Marina Rakova's debate with Mark Johnson and George Lakoff

In the September 2002 issue of Cognitive Linguistics, Marina Rakova had a short and bloody exchange of ideas with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

She criticized their theory for being "philosophically inconsistent" and "contradicted by empirical evidence" (p. 215), and they accused her of "systematic misreadings" (p. 260).

Rakova's paper is not very well-structured, but it does contain some interesting points that I do find worth mentioning:

1. Consistency with developmental psychology

It seems that there may possibly be some measure of evidence that the developmental story implied by cognitive metaphor theory doesn't quite fit our knowledge of actual child development.

She mentions for instance (p. 220) that children are able quite early to use sentences such as There's a butterfly in the garden even though the theory (perhaps) predicts otherwise.

It is not entirely clear to me how much this argument depends on the claim that one needs abstract thought in order to apply a container schema (cf. pp. 232 and 235).

2. Conflicting motivations

Picking up very small things is exceedingly difficult. So why is there no DIFFICULT IS VERY SMALL metaphor, when such post-hoc analyses can motivate the metaphors IMPORTANT IS BIG and DIFFICULT IS HEAVY? 

3. What governs the governor?

If we can have independent knowledge of a target domain, and if we need not use a metaphor automatically, then exactly can we conclude about the role of metaphor?

If metaphors can be switched on and off depending on whether they are useful in the specific context, is there any real content to the claim that we "think metaphorically"?

This is, as far as I understand, the question Rakova raises on the bottom of p. 227.

See also p. 234 and p. 236, where she seems to hint that a bodily experience doesn't just become a crisp, logical concept without some sort of additional enforcement. Lakoff and Johnson mention this on p. 259.

4. Are primitive really universal or just sort-of, so-far universal?

If some conceptual mappings are universal and others are not, and those that are universal are only partly universal, is there any content to the claim that certain concepts are universal?

If there is no theoretical support for the claim, then it should just have the status of "All swans I have seen so far seem to be white," which is not particularly strong or interesting.

In Rakova's words, the theory badly needs to mark off some "boundaries between significant and nonsignificant cultural variations" (p. 229).

By the way, Johnson and Lakoff refer in their response to "mountains of evidence" and "evidence that fills the pages of our discipline to overflowing" (pp. 251 and 261).

Criticisms of cognitive metaphor theory cited by Yu

By and large, Ning Yu's book on metaphors in Chinese is faithful to cognitive metaphor theory. However, he does cite some critics of the theory (as of 1999) and discusses a few of them in chapter 2.8. He rejects them all on the account that they define metaphor differently than Lakoff and Johnson.

The authors that Yu lists as critics of cognitive metaphor theory are:

• Dorothy Holland: "All is metaphor" (1982), a review of Metaphors We Live By
• Earl R. Mac Cormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (1985)
• Anna Wierzbicka: "Metaphors Linguists Live By" (1986)
• Andrew Ortony: The Cognitive Structure of Emotions (1988), see also these experts
• Jackendoff and Aaron's review of More Than Cool Reason (1991)
• Naomi Quinn: "The cultural basis of metaphor," in James W. Fernandez: Beyond Metaphor (1991)
• Hoyt Alverson: "Metaphor and experience," also in the anthology by Fernandez (1991)
• Bipi Indurkhya: Metaphor and Cognition (1992)
• John M. Kennedy and John Vervaeke: "Metaphor and knowledge atained via the body" (1993)
• Cristina Cacciari and Sam Glucksberg: "Understanding figurative language," in Morton Ann Gernsbacher (ed.): Handbook of Psycholinguistics (1994)
• Gregory Murphy: "On metaphoric representation" (1996) and "Reasons to doubt the present evidence for metaphoric representation" (1997)

Gibbs, Lima, and Francozo: "Metaphor is grounded in embodied experience" (2006)

This is a very interesting paper that reports on an experiment investigating the relation between folk theories of hunger and folk theories of desire. It is written in defense of cognitive metaphor theory but raises a whole array of interesting problems.

Postulates: Embodied primitives and non-embodied compounds
The authors claim that

the poetic value and the communicative expressiveness of metaphoric language partly arises from its roots in people's ordinary, felt sensations of their bodies in action. (p. 1190)

And, in the conclusion, they add that "a significant aspect of metaphoric language is moetivated by embodied experience" (p. 1208).

Following Joe Grady, they also claim that primary metaphors are more likely to be translatable or perhaps universal, since compound metaphors may have different ingredients in different languages:

One implication of our findings is that the ability to translate various linguistic metaphors from one language to another rests on the degree to which these verbal expressions instantiate primary metaphors. (p. 1208)

Method
The authors use a quite interesting experimental paradigm to test their claims with respect to the example metaphor DESIRE IS HUNGER.

Basically, they a group of students to rate a number physical symptoms for relatedness to hunger and another group to rate the same symptoms for relatedness to desire.

This first gives them a list of symptoms seen as typical for hunger in Brazil and in California. Many of these are the same, such as the stomach grumbling or the mouth watering.

The relativity of hunger
But there are also exceptions. Thus, the Brazilian Portuguese speakers generally found that a dry mouth was related to hunger, while being annoyed or depressed isn't. The American English speakers found the opposite.

According to the authors, these differences "reflect something of how cultural experiences shape some of our embodied understandings of hunger," and they speculate a bit about the cultural causes (p. 1204). They repeat this point later:

For instance, the linguistic items She drooled anytime she saw Bob and My stomach aches in anticipation of having sex with Mary were rated as much more acceptable in English than in Portuguese. These differences indicate that the salience of particular, localized bodily experiences of desire as hunger may differ across the two languages. (p. 1207)

Testing for correlation between hunger and desire
After having rated various symptoms with respect to their relation to hunger, the authors are able to see if this relation is mirrored in linguistic items expressing sexual desire, romantic desire, and other desire.

The authors affirm that this is indeed the case, but the details are telling.

For English and Portuguese, the various symptoms are put into two categories, one set strongly correlated with hunger (stomach grumbling) and another only very weakly correlated with hunger (knees swelling). This yields two "weak" sets and two "strong" sets.

The theory is then that this correlation can be rediscovered in the realm of desire. This hypothesis is tested in two ways.

First, some subjects are asked to rate whether certain symptoms are characteristic of desire. For instance, they are asked whether people feel dizzy when they are "deeply in love" (p. 1205). That is the "body questions" experiment.

Second, a number of sentences are produced by the experimenters in which the symptoms are used to talk about desire. For instance, the experimenters ask the subjects to rate the naturalness of the sentence I have a strong headache for you. That is the "language questions" experiment.

Results
In their table of results (p. 1206), the authors have lumped all symptoms in the same block together.

For instance, they have treated all sentences in the cell "English" x "Linguistic" x "Lust" x "Strong" as data points from the same distribution and checked whether that distribution differs significantly from the distribution in the cell "English" x "Linguistic" x "Lust" x "Weak". These contrasts generally do exist.

Critique
Averaging over the symptoms gives a general sense of whether hunger and desire correlates, given the dimensions selected by the experimenters. The authors admit that

our findings on DESIRE IS HUNGER do not imply a complete equivalence between desire and hunger, but only a [sic] strong correlations between them" (p. 1207).

This averaging over all items also smooths out the problem that many sentences are natural in one realm, but not the other.

I would, for instance, like to know how exactly the subjects responded to sentences like My stomach was aching for you. But these interesting differences are blurred because the data is reported without distinctions between various sentences.

It would also have been natural to have a linguistic test for hunger as well as for desire. Consider for instance pairs such as these:

1. ?I'm becoming weak for you. (p. 1205)
2. ?I'm becoming weak for food.

1. ?I have a strong headache for knowledge. (p. 1205)
2. ?I have a strong headache for sugar.

Giving such pairs to different subjects would give a more even experimental paradigm and filter out the effect of the (sometimes quite helpless) prose in the test sentences.


I would also very much like to know if such pairs could indeed produce significant differences. Currently, the paper can't tell me because it only used linguistic stimuli in one part of the study, and doesn't report the responses to individual items.

Sardinha: "Metaphor probabilities in corpora" (2008)

In his contribution to Confronting Metaphor in Use, Tony Sardinha argues that metaphor researchers should care more about the probabilities that a given word will be used metaphorically in a given corpus genre.

To illustrate his ideas, he reports a large number of metaphor probabilities taken from a highly specialized corpus of Brazilian Portuguese.

The article cites three interesting sources that are quite alien to metaphor theory proper:

• The anthology Probabilistic Linguistics (2003), edited by Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, and Stefanie Jannedy.
• A number of articles from the early 1990s by the British linguist Michael A. K. Halliday, a veteran advocate for corpus linguistics.
• Michael Hoey: "The textual priming of lexis" (2004); this paper is interesting for having a bottom-up, construction-grammar style of explanation.

Boers and Stengers: "Adding sound to the picture" (2008)

This paper by Frank Boers and Hélène Stengers forms a part of the anthology Confronting Metaphor in Use (2008). It makes two points:

1. Different languages apply source domains with different frequencies;
2. the exact shapes of metaphorical idioms are motivated by sound.

Cross-lingual variation in source domain frequencies
The first point should be quite uncontroversial. Boers and Stengers give the example that Spanish has 42 bullfighting idioms, while English has three (p. 69)

However, as they note themselves (p. 69), they are not taking the frequency of the various idioms into account. Instead, they just count the number of dictionary entries.

Boers and Stengers try to patch this deficiency up by performing some corpus searches for the most common idioms in order to use those as an indicator for actual frequency (p. 69-70). This gives a couple of data points with indications of relative frequencies, but not more.

Idiom forms are based on sound
Boers and Stengers' second point is that phrases like it takes two to tango are selected over phrases like it takes two to waltz because of their attractive sound qualities. Further, they predict that English should have more phonetic motivation because of its relatively fixed word order and limited morphology.

Again, these claims are interesting, but their statistical methods for testing them are flawed. In particular, Boers and Stengers do not have any concept of accidental rhyme and alliteration in a language. This essentially means that the differences in "motivation" could be due to the fact that English simple rhymes more by accident.

They are, apparently, aware of this problem (p. 72), because they manually filter out Spanish post-fixes on adjectives and nouns (which would make anything in Spanish seem like it rhymed). They should have developed a methodology that could have done this more generally and quantitatively instead.

Joseph E. Grady: "Theories Are Buildings Revisited" (1998)

This is another paper in which Grady proposes that we should analyze problematic metaphors as results of a combination of several simple, "primary" metaphors.

This time, he applies his method to the "conduit metaphor," the many-faceted metaphor that is alleged to be behind our talk of information content, getting the idea across, etc.

According to his analysis, this compound metaphor is constructed from the following four metaphors:

• CONSTITUENTS ARE CONTENTS
• BECOMING ACCESSIBLE IS EMERGING
• TRANSMISSION IS ENERGY TRANSFER
• ACHIEVING A PURPOSE IS ACQUIRING A DESIRED OBJECT

This analysis can be tested by comparing the metaphor's English elaboration with its elaboration in other languages..

Haser: Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy (2005), chs. 2 and 3

Chapter 2 of Verena Haser's book deals with the often ill-defined distinction between metaphor and metonymy. It is not directly relevant to me.

Chapter 3 pecks a little at some of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's rhetoric. Two "case studies," that is, two point of criticism, are examined. The first (ch. 3.2.1) is the problems with overgeneration, and the second (ch. 3.2.2) is their use of non-existent straw men.

Only the former of these contains arguments directed at the substance of the theory itself (as opposed to its rhetoric).

In this section, Haser notes that ideas can't be sautéed when they evidently can be half-baked (p. 59). Lakoff and Johnson try to edge out of this problem by saying that abstract target domains aren't sharply defined and therefore behave somewhat unpredictably. Haser replies that this concept is ad hoc and ill-defined (p. 60).

She also notes that one of their prime arguments against their rhetorical straw man, the "strong homonymy view," presupposes the fact that metaphors are fueled by conceptual mappings (p. 60).

Criticisms of cognitive metaphor theory cited by Haser

In the "Introductory remarks" of her aggressively polemic book Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy (2005), Verena Haser cites a number of relatively recent works that criticizing cognitive metaphor theory.

The list contains the following items:

• Michiel Leezenberg: Contexts of Metaphor (2001)
• Matthew McGlone: "Concepts as metaphors," in Sam Glucksberg: Understanding Figurative Language (2001)
• Dirk Geeraerts: "Cognitive semantics and the history of philosophical epistemology," in Geiger and Rudzka-Ostyn (eds.): Conceptualizations and Mental Processing in Language (1993)
• Olaf Jäkel: "Kant, Blumenberg, Weinrich," in Gibbs and Steen (eds.): Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (1999)
• John R. Taylor: "Category extension by metonomy and metaphor," in Dirven and Pörings (eds.): Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast (2002)
• Petra Drewer: Die Kognitive Metapher als Werkzeug des Denkens (2003)
• Marina Rakova: The Extent of the Literal (2003)

Fortunately, I'm already more or less halfway through this list. Surprisingly, the most prominent scholar on her list happens to sit in an office just across the hall from where I am sitting right now.

Kövecses: Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (2002/2010)

This book is a textbook in cognitive metaphor theory, summarizing and surveying most of what has been going on the field since the publication of Metaphors We Live By.

It faithfully reproduces every example and argument ever proposed by that tradition. It has very few original examples, and the quality of the argumentation is often less than one would desire.

Metaphor "governs our thought"
In the preface to the first edition of the book, Kövecses cites a number of conventional metaphors like the ills of society, the road to success, and a branch of the organization.

He then goes on to claim that these aren't dead at all, contrary to appearances:

The "dead metaphor" account misses an important point: namely, that what is deeply entrenched, hardly noticed, and thus effortlessly used is most active in our thought. The metaphors listed above may be highly conventional and effortlessly used, but this does not mean that they have lost their vigor in thought and that they are dead. On the contrary, they are "alive" in the most important sense---they govern our thought: they are "metaphors we live by." (p. xi)

I suppose that by this logic, a word like capital most vigorously evokes the image of a head, since it is even more conventionalized and more hidden than phrases like head of state or warhead.

The evidence for metaphorical thought
Like all cognitive metaphor theorists, Kövecses wants to have his cake and eat it, too: He wants our knowledge of target domains to arise out of metaphors, but metaphors to be constrained by our knowledge of the target domains.

It is quite shocking how little the arguments for these claims have evolved over the past 30 years. I will need to quote him at some length to fully convey this state of affairs.

So, after citing the metaphor LOVE IS A JOURNEY, Kövecses writes (p. 9):

From this discussion, it might seem that the elements in the target domain have been there all along and that people came up with this metaphor because there were preexisting similarities between the elements in the two domains. This is not so. The domain of love did not have these elements before it was structured by the domain of journey. It was the application of the journey domain to the love domain that provided the concept of love with this particular structure or set of elements. In a way, it was the concept of journey that "created" the concept of love.

Note the lack of qualifiers here. All of our knowledge about love arises through metaphorical mappings, it seems. This should be contrasted with his reliance on "objective, preexisting similarity" when he talks about the constraints on metaphor (p. 79).

He goes on:

 To see that this is so, try to do a thought experiment. Try to imagine the goal, choice, difficulty, or progress aspect of love with making use of the journey domain. Can you think of the goal of a love relationship without at the same time thinking of trying to reach a destination at the end of a journey? Can you think of the progress made in a love relationship without at the same time imagining the distance covered in a journey? Can you think of the choices made in a love relationship without thinking of choosing a direction in a journey? The difficulty of doing this shows that the target of love is not structured independently of and prior to the domain of journey.

Another piece of evidence for the view that the target of love is not structured independently of any source domains is the following. In talking about the elements that structure a target domain, it is often difficult to name the elements without recourse to the language of the source. In the present example, we talk about the goals associated with love, but this is just a slightly "disguised" way of talking about destinations given in the source; the word goal has an additional literal or physical use---not just a metaphorical one. In the same way, the word progress also has a literal or physical meaning, and it comes from a word meaning "step, go."  These examples show that many elements of target concepts come from source domains and are not preexisting.

There are thus two main strands of evidence for this theory of the psychology of speech: Introspection and linguistic or etymological evidence.

I think Raymond Gibbs has said what needed to be said about the first one. Verena Haser, Sam Glucksberg, and others have said what needed to be said about the other.

Lakoff and Turner: More Than Cool Reason, ch. 4

In the chapter on "The Great Chain of Being," George Lakoff and Mark Turner invent a type of logical analysis so liberal that any sentence can be read as a metaphor.

The analysis employs what they call the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor. They use this to show how a sentence about a concrete situation (the proverb "Blind blames the ditch") acts as a schema that we can use to interpret another concrete situation (a defamed politician blames the press).

This is their theory: The metaphor GENERIC IS SPECIFIC

maps a single specific-level schema onto an indefinitely large number of parallel specific-level schemas that all have the same generic level structure as the source-domain schema. (p. 162)

From the discussion that follows (pp. 163-64) it is clear that what they have in mind is that we reconstruct the generic frame that the insulted blind person is an instance of, and then plug the bitter politician into the same frame.

Thus, no special knowledge of the role of proverbs in social norms is needed; no special bias towards people or their interactions is needed; no ability to recognize the literary genre of proverbs is needed; and no presupposition of communicative intent in a printed publication or a poetry reading is needed.

It should be clear that once all these contextual factors are removed, anything can be a picture of anything. If I say "I'm angry at my mother," that's a specific-level sentence, so that's a metaphorical statement about anybody else's anger. If I say "The plates are in the second cupboard," that's just as deep and meaningful as saying "I threw the first stone."

Again, analyses like these make Lakoff and Turner at best irrelevant to literature. As Reuven Tsur suggested, a wide and consistent application of their theories would most likely be a catastrophe for poetics and literary criticism.

Gibbs: "Metaphor and Culture" (1999)

In Ray Gibbs' contribution to his and Gerard Steen's anthology, Gibbs air some pretty serious second thoughts about his whole notion of where metaphor.

Thus, looking back at his extensive record of experimental work in metaphor theory, he comments:

My thinking about the role of conceptual metaphor in people's use and understanding of language has mostly embraced an individualistic view of cognition. (p. 151)

[T]his work did not explicitly acknowledge that social and cultural constructions of experience fundamentally shape embodied metaphor. (p. 155)

The alternative is "supra-individual" picture (p. 154) in which metaphors are "cognitive webs [...] spread out into the cultural world" (p. 146).

How Does the Supra-Individual Work?
It's not entirely clear what the dynamics of this more muddled picture would be.

Gibbs give as an example a report of a therapy session in which a couple were asked to think about their sex life in terms of food (p. 158). This clearly is not a metaphor arising spontaneously out of immediate experience, and yet it changed their behavior. Thus, the environment provided the cognition.

Somewhat more obscurely, he also noted that when you get angry, you are already exhibiting some cultural know-how about, e.g., politeness and retribution (p. 155-56). This is, of course, a kind of cultural knowledge build into your body and your immediate reactions, but the example would also benefit from some conceptual clarification.

Filling the Gaps
Gibbs is right about many things in this paper, but I think there are a number of observations that could have improved his thinking:

• Language is primarily a tool for communication. The problem is not just that the subjective semantics that some person has is influenced by the environment---rather, the idea of one isolated person "having" a semantics already misconstrues the situation.
• Language, subjective experience, and the symbolic order (i.e., the social norms) are three different dimensions of the theory, and we should name them so that we can talk about their interactions. I feel fairly certain that the symbolic order is by far the strongest and most immutable of these three.
• The linguist is a member of a culture. Therefore, when the linguistic has intuitions about meaning, these are shaped by social norms. Therefore, when the linguist says, "We experience things this way," the assertion may in some cases be more of a datum (revealing a norm) than an observation (revealing an a priori structure).

Glucksberg and Keysar: "Understanding metaphorical Comparisons" (1990)

In a critique of Ortony's imbalance model, Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar suggest that metaphorical vehicles are shorthands for ad hoc categories without conventional names. My job is a jail thus states that my job is a member of some category which is characterized by having a jail as a central member.

As far as I can see, they do not solve the problem of how this ad hoc category is constructed, but they hint in the direction of some kind of Gricean repair process. A jail is for instance both a prototypical punishment and a prototypical type of confinement, but we somehow select an appropriate candidate from this list.

They do not address the issue of why this process occurs so rapidly, and I think they are open to much of the psychologically motivated criticism that Grice himself is subject to.

The paper is interesting for bringing back conversation and communication in the discussion (see especially pp. 15-16). Lakoff and Johnson sometimes read metaphors as if they have no other role than to express well-established correspondences. This essentially builds irrelevance into the definition.

Glucksberg and Keysar also briefly mention the fact that people and names can act like source domain (pp. 15-16). They thus discuss the difference between utterances like the following three:

• Xiao-Dong is a Bela Lugosi (= like that type of actor)
• Xiao-Dong is like a Bela Lugosi (= somewhat like that type of actor)
• Xiao-Dong is like Bela Lugosi (= like that particular person)

The paper as a whole is a good example of the para-Lakoff/Johnsonian theory of metaphor stemming from Andrew Ortony and to some extent co-existing with it with very little interaction.

Casasanto and Henetz: "Handedness Shapes Children's Abstract Concepts" (2011)

This article by Daniel Casasanto and Tania Henetz shows a difference in the bodily experience which is not mirrored in speech. From the abstract:

In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right-handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to a box on the left. Left-handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right-handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left-handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good.

The article also quotes some other very interesting studies Casasanto has done with other coworkers.

These studies show that adult subjects have the same tendency to biased towards their dominant side, as shown for instance in an analysis of the gestures that four presidential candidates made during two debates (p. 2).

Further, this tendency can be temporarily reversed by handicapping the subjects' dominant hand with an annoying ski glove (pp. 9-10).

Ibarrexte-Antuñano: "Metaphorical Mappings in the Sense of Smell" (1999)

This paper by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano is a relatively minor follow-up on Eve Seetser's book.

Ibarretxe-Antuñano suggests that the metaphorical meanings of smell and sniff are constructed through a "property selection process" (pp. 38-41).

It's not entirely clear to me what she means. The article doesn't seem to explain where the selection criteria come from, whether the model is analytical or psychological, or how it would work in general.

Readings: On Traps and Gaps
In any event, the paper is useful because it contains a list of past attempts (as of 1999) to solve the over- and undergeneration problems in conceptual metaphor theory (p. 40).

These attempts have employed the following theoretical ideas:

• Salience imbalance (Ortony 1979): The vehicle and topic must share a feature; that feature must be salient in the vehicle, but not in the topic
• Domains-interaction (Tourangeau and Sternberg 1981, 1982): Metaphor aptness is a function of (a) the similarity between the terms within domains and (b) the disssimilarity of the domains
• Structure-mapping (Gentner 1983, Gentner and Clement 1988): Analogies work best when they (a) transfer a lot of object relations, i.e., structure, and (b) only transfer few object attributes
• Class inclusion (Glucksberg and Keysar 1990): Metaphors are simply class-inclusion statements, just like a tree is a plant; the underlying reading process exactly the same

If we include the other obvious sources on the topic, the list can be expanded with the following texts:

• Compound metaphors (Grady 1997, 1998, 2002): One metaphor can act as a relevance filter on another and thus remove unwanted entailments
• Process selection processes (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999): As word meanings are extended, certain properties (like "physical" or "volitional") are somehow dropped
• The Invariance principle (Lakoff 1993, 2008): Inferences are carried over from the source domain if and only if they are consistent with the target domain (i.e., they are carried over if and only if they are carried over)