Steen: Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage (2007)

Gerard Steen's 2007 book on metaphor is very long, and it contains both chapters that are interesting for me and chapter that aren't. Steen has chosen to read the chapters so as to cover all the possible combinations of the following pairs of dichotomies (cf. ch. 1.4):

• grammar — usage
• language — thought
• symbols — behavior

So that's eight topics. Not surprisingly, this structuring a book this way produces a fair bit of repetition, but it also makes it easy to skip things that are less important to you.

From my perspective, the two important chapters the ones that touch on psycholinguistic aspects of the theory. That's chapters 9 and 12.

Curriculum

There's a list of books and papers that seem to have been more informative of Steen's position than others. I would say his core reading list consists of the following:

• Rachel Giora: On Our Mind (2003)
• Ray Gibbs: Embodiment and Cognitive Science (2005)
• Ellen Winner: The Point of Words (1988)
• Charles A. Perfetti: "Comprehending Written Language," in The Neurocognition of Language (1999)

He also refers a number of times to Lynne Cameron's Metaphor in Educational Discourse (2003), although that seems to be less central to his argument.

With respect to the debates about the psychological reality of conceptual mappings, he cites the following works in particular a lot:

• Lera Borodistsky: "Metaphoric Structuring" (2000)
• The debate in Cognition between Gregory L. Murphy (1996, 1997), and Ray Gibbs (1996)
• The debate in Cognitive Linguistics between William Croft (1998), Dominiek Sandra (1998), David Tuggy (1999)

There are other references as well, but these are the ones that receive the most attention.

Conclusions

Much of the point of Steen extensive methodological discussion is to weed out some of the more crazy claims made by cognitive metaphor theorists. In the process of doing so, he occasionally his own opinions on these matters.

Somewhat surprisingly, he is quite pessimistic about the cognitive validity of cognitive metaphor theory. In his discussion of Perfetti and Giora, he poses the following three questions (pp. 351–52):

1. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always involve the activation of both the basic nonmetaphorical sense as well as the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of linguistic form)?
2. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always involve such a degree of activation of the basic nonmetaphorical sense that it is sufficiently rich to function as a conceptual source domain for mapping the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of conceptual structure domains)?
3. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always display some manifestation of an obligatory mapping from the basic nonmetaphorical sense to the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of conceptual structure of mapping)?

(Incidentally, this quote also illustrates Steen's almost meditatively repetitive style.) Anyway, his own answer to these questions is negative:

Salient word meanings [in the sense of Giora] are word meaning that are frequent, familiar, conventional, and prototypical, and it is these senses which are quickest to retrieve. Since metaphorical word senses may also be highly frequent, familiar, conventional, and prototypical, they may also be activated faster than their nonmetaphorical counterparts. It follows that questions 3, 2 and even 1 have to receive negative answers, as may be inferred from Giora's detailed review of her own and other researcher's work. (p. 352)

It follows that the symbolic analyses we know from cognitive metaphor theory don't really have much cognitive validity:

The fact that symbolic synchronic or historical analysis may helpfully privilege a particular class of senses as direct or nonmetaphorical does not directly map onto individuals' cognitive representation of such senses as prior or even necessary in the online comprehension of linguistic forms when these are to be processed in the metaphorical ways. (p. 352)

That's pretty radical, but it's perhaps less surprising if we see Steen as the strict methodology policeman of cognitive metaphor theory — in that case, we would expect him to have the most cautious conclusions in the field.