Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Critiques of cognitive metaphor theory -- literature

I've been doing a superficial search for literature that criticizes cognitive metaphor theory. This is what I'll begin with:
Besides these, there are some further texts that I may look at later:
  • González-Márquez (ed.): Methods in Cognitive Linguistics (2006), especially Gibbs' chapter.
  • Kristiansen (ed.): Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives (2006), again, especially Gibbs and Perlman's chapter.
  • Overton and Palermo (eds.): The Nature and Ontogenesis of Meaning (1994), maybe in particular chapter 5.
  • The debate between Mark Johnson and Eugene Gendlin. This may include Gendlin's paper "Crossing and Dipping" (1995) but definitely Mark Johnson's chapter in Language Beyond Postmodernism (1997) and Gendlin's reply to that in the same volume.
  • Sharifian, Dirven, Yu, and Niemeier "Culture and language: Looking for the 'mind' inside the body" in Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs across Cultures and Languages (edited by the article authors) might have some good examples of the non-universality of the body.
  • There are two papers in the discussion section of Pragmatics & Cognition 7(2) that might be relevant: Reuven Tsur: "Lakoff's roads not taken" and Teresa Bejarano: "Prelinguistic metaphors?".
  • Regarding the asymmetry of metaphors, Mark Tendahl and Ray Gibbs make a generic reference to Fauconnier and Turner: The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities (Basic Books, New York, 2002). I'll have to look into that and see if it's relevant to bidirectional metaphor.
  • According to himself, Markus Tendahl has a discussion of the somewhat problematic claim that metaphors preserve inference structure (all inference structure!) in his PhD thesis. This might be relevant to my story about systematic gaps in metaphor systems.
There seems to have been some attempts at quantifying "metaphoricity" and related notions in the late '70s and early '80s, but presumably it died out because of the success of cognitive metaphor theory. If I get time, I might look into this literature (since it's relevant to my evolutionary metaphor of semantic change).

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