I. A. Richards: Interpretation in Teaching (1938)

Now, here's a thought:

Thinking is radically metaphoric. … To think of anything is to take it as of a sort … and that 'as' brings in (openly or in disguise) the analogy, the parallel, the metaphoric grapple or ground or grasp or draw by which alone the mind takes hold. (pp. 48–49)

My point is not that language is full of metaphors … It is that thought is itself metaphoric – not merely that it expresses itself in linguistic metaphors. The metaphor that a thought is using need not correspond to the metaphor that its language displays, though it usually does, and the thought will often adopt the verbal metaphor when it is noticed. But equally often we discount and disown the metaphors in our speech, treat them as dead, or kill them as we go. (p. 49)

Gardner: "Metaphors and Modalities" (1974)

This paper (by the later very famous developmental psychologist Howard Gardner) reports on an experiment in which college students and children of different ages were asked to apply adjectives like hot/cold to stimuli like uncommon stimuli like faces, color samples, or small objects. The young children were quite good at this, with some caveats.

The experiment is notable for employing materials that are not entirely obvious clichés, like the connection between big/small size and high/low tones.

In one task, for instance, the subjects to felt sandpaper of various degrees of coarseness, then deciding which of the two types of sandpaper was the more light, and which was the more dark. Other stimuli included as ping-pong ball vs. a jack (presumably meaning the edgy die used in playing the jacks), or the sound of a triangle vs. the sound of a recorder.

Table of materials used in the experiment; p. 86.

In general, Gardner found that even preschool children agreed more or less with the judgments college students made on these tasks. A notable exception was the application of color terms to new stimuli, something that seems to indicate a heavily conventional component in color metaphors, such as a blue tap for cold water (p. 88).

The smaller children also gave a number of bizarre, funny, and "incorrect" explanations for their choices. For instance,

The 7-year-old[s] equated "getting lots of presents on your birthday" with dark and "getting no presents" with light, because, as several subjects explained, "lots of presents are heavy to carry." Here the contrast to light/dark was apparently assimilated to light/heavy. (p. 88)

Also, the children equated

… a tactile-perceived Ping-Pong call with loud and a tactile-perceived jack with quiet; in this case, subjects reported that the Ping-Pong ball would make more noise if it fell, Here an action in which the elements might be involved overwhelmed the more conventional association of pointed compactness with noise and smooth emptiness with silence. (p. 88)

In both of these cases, the older children and the college students tended to arrive at the opposite conclusions.

The 11-year-olds in the study, by the way, also tended to answer that

[an] angry face is cold "because it makes you feel cold" (p. 88)

a finding that sits somewhat uneasily with Zoltán Kövecses' insistence on the universality of ANGER IS HEAT metaphors.

Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum: The Measurement of Meaning (1957)

Charles Osgood was a student of the psychologist Theodore Karwoski, who did a number of studies of synaesthesia between the 1930s and the 1950s. His own work partly continued this line, but also partly shifted the focus more explicitly to the expression of synaesthetic thought in language.

The Dimensions of Meaning

In this book, Osgood and his two coauthors thus use factor analysis to show that the actual dimensionality of semantic space is much smaller than the nominal, since there are strong correlations between oppositions such as up/down, good/bad, etc.

A test item used on one of the experiments reported in the book (p. 81).

In 1980, Osgood would summarize the findings as follows:

Happy is UP, COLORFUL, LIGHT, and CLEAR, but _sad_ is DOWN, COLORLESS, DARK and HAZY; heavy is DOWN, THICK, DARK, and LARGE, but light (weight having been specified) is UP, THIN, LIGHT and SMALL; excitement is VERTICAL, COLORFUL, CROOKED and SHARP, but _calm_ is HORIZONTAL, COLORLESS, STRAIGHT and BLUNT; woman is COLORFUL, THIN, (except for Mexicans), LIGHT, BLUNT and ROUNDED (except for Navajos), but man is (VERTICAL (woman tending to be HORIZONTAL), COLORLESS, THICK, DARK, SHARP and ANGULAR. These trends for four cultures suggest certain "universal" tendencies. (Quoted from the 1981 reprint, p. 59)

In the 1957 book, the authors explain:

 … it was found that, as used by our subjects in making their judgments, the semantic scales fell into highly intercorrelated clusters. For example, fair-unfair, high-low, kind-cruel, valuable-worthless, Christian-antiChristian, and honest-dishonest were all found to correlate together .90 or better. Such a cluster represents the operation of a single, general factor in social judgments, obviously here an evaluative factor. Scales like strong-weak, realistic-unrealistic, and happy-sad were independent of this evaluative group and pointed to the existence of other dimensions of the semantic framework. (pp. 24--25)

Funny how the metaphor "ANTICHRISTIAN IS DOWN" has escaped from the current literature on cognitive metaphor theory.

Watch the Music

Front cover of the book.

For his undergraduate thesis, Osgood had also studied a number of anthropological reports of "primitive man," coming to similar conclusions. He reports in the book that,

for example, good gods, places, social positions, etc., were almost always up and light (white), whereas bad things were down and dark (black). A prevalent myth tells how the gods helped the original man to struggle from the dark, cold, wet, sad world below the ground up to the light, warm, dry, happy world on the surface. (p. 23)

Given Osgood's background, all of these things of course had to be connected to synaesthesia:

It seems clear from these studies that the imagery found in synesthesia is intimately tied up with language metaphor, and that both represent semantic relations. (p. 23)

Or, more elaborately:

Whereas fast, exciting music might be pictured by the synesthete as sharply etched, bright red forms, his less imaginative brethren would merely agree that words like "red-hot," "bright," and "fiery," as verbal metaphors, adequately describe the music; a slow melancholic selection might be visualized as heavy, slow-moving "blobs" of somber hue and be described verbally as "heavy," "blue," and "dark." The relation of this phenomenon to ordinary metaphor is evident: A happy man is said to feel "high," a said man "low"; the pianist travels "up" and "down" the scale from treble to bass; souls travel "up" to the good place and "down" to the bad place; hope is "white" and despair is "black." (p. 21)

Metaphorical Grounding

They also proposed a genealogical explanation for these phenomena, essentially the same as the one given today by cognitive metaphor theorists once you strip away the behaviorist language:

Take the case of parallelism between auditory pitch and visual size (synesthetes typically represent high tones as small and low tones as large): it is characteristic for the physical world that large-sized resonators produce low frequency tones and small-sized resonators, high frequency tones (think of a series of organ pipes, bells, or even hollow logs and sticks, and of the voices of men vs. boys, large dogs vs. little dogs, or lions vs. mice). This means that repeatedly the visual stimulus of large objects will be paired with the auditory stimulus of low-pitched tones, and so on consistently throughout the continuum. Any representational processes associated with one (e.g., danger significance of threatening big dog vs. play significance of little dog) will tend to be associated with the other as well (e.g., sounds produced). This will a hierarchy of equivalent signs come to be associated with a common mediation process. Any encoding responses associated with this mediator, such as "large" drawing movements and saying the word "large," will tend to transfer to any sign which elicits this mediator — thus "synesthesia" when a deep tone produces "large" drawing movements and "metaphor" when the word "deep" is associated with the word "large." (p. 24)

Asch: "The Metaphor: A Psychological Inquiry" (1958)

The social psychologist Solomon Asch was interested in how we perceive, understand, and describe other people, and this let him (among other things) to conduct this small, cross-linguistic study on the polysemy of some common sensory adjectives.

He wanted to investigate whether the cross-modal ambiguity of English words like sharp was a language-specific coincidence, so he selected a set of promising terms and asked some informants what other meanings the corresponding word in their language could have.

Cutting the Cake

Asch presents his materials as follows:

Included among the terms were the following: warm, cold, hot; right, left; dull, bright, pale, shining; straight, twisted, crooked; sweet, bitter; colorful, colorless, white, black (and some other color terms); rought, smooth, slippery; dry, wet; clear, cloudy; deep, shallow, high, low; broad, rounded, sharp; hard, soft. (p. 88)

The languages he compared were ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, "Chinese" (not further specified), Thai, Malayalam, Hausa, Burmese (p. 88).

The conclusion he came to was that "… all the languages examined here contain terms that simultaneously describe both physical and psychological qualities" (p. 89). However, he also warned about overextrapolating these findings:

From the linguistic evidence alone, even if it were more complete, we could not, of course conclude about the responsible operations. For this purpose we need a psychological analysis. (p. 91)

Solomon Asch with his wife Florence (from the Asch Center website).

Cognitive Operations

After having presented his results, Asch also speculates about the "conceptual basis" for this dual function of sensory words:

Dual terms may be the consequence of stable associative connections established between dissimilar physical and psychological  conditions that regularly share some stimulus properties. (p. 92)

The concepts in question have little in common with abstract logical operations. They are not generalizations of what is common to an array of different instances. Rather they are concrete cognitive operations in terms of which we naïvely comprehend events and similarities between them. (p. 93)

We see natural events as conductors of the same fundamental forces that we find in the human sphere. Therefore we speak spontaneously of seeing a point, of shedding light on or illuminating a problem, of penetrating to the heart of a matter. (p. 93)

The Schema of Interaction

Thus:

What now is the sense of hard when it refers to a person? It describes an interaction that is formally similar. We see a man refusing the appeal of another. This interaction we experience as a force proceeding from one person, having as its aim the production of a change in the other, which, however, fails to move him, or which produces resistance. The hardness of a table and of a person concerns events radically different in content and complexity, but the schema of interaction is experienced as dynamically similar, having to do with the application of force and of resulting actions in line with or contrary to it. (p. 93)

Cacciari: "Crossing the Sense in Metaphorical Language" (2008)

Cristina Cacciari's contribution to the Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought contains two relatively independent parts: First, a discussion of various attempts to describe and explain the phenomenon of cross-modal metaphor in language; and second, a fascinating summary of some of the things we know about (clinical) synaesthesia as of now.

She also provides some useful pointers to pre-1980 literature on metaphor and thought:

• Joseph M. Williams: "Synaesthetic adjectives: A possible law of semantic change." Language, 1976.
• George A. Miller and Philip Johnson-Laird: Language and perception. Harvard UP, 1976.
• Brenda E. F. Beck: "The metaphor as mediator between semantic and analogical modes of thought." Current Anthropology, 1978.
• Sandra Derrig: "Metaphor in the color lexicon." Papers from the Parasession on the Lexicon, the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1978.
• Lawrence E. Marks: The Unity of Senses: Interrelations Among the Modalities. Academic Press, 1978.
• Geoffrey Nunberg: "The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy." Linguistics and Philosophy, 1979.
• Stephen de Ullmann: "Romanticism and Synaesthesia: A Comparative Study of Sense Transfer in Keats and Byron." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1945.

Something that might also be worth looking into is the anthology Cognition and Figurative Language (1980).

Meier, Robinson, and Clore: "Why Good Guys Wear White" (2004)

OK, now I'm officially confused.

In their 2007 study, Meier and Robinson found that affective cues prime spatial position, but not other way around:

TARGET (affect) →  SOURCE (position)

In this 2004 study — which contains the same references, the same statistical methods, the same ideas — Meier, Robinson, and Clore show that color primes affect, but not the other way around:

TARGET (affect)  ←  SOURCE (color)

In other words, they show two completely opposite things, and no one seems to have pointed this out.

Experimental Design

In the 2004 paper, the set-up is the following:

They show a number of words on a computer screen. Some are shown in a dark font, some in a bright; some words are positive, some negative. For instance, you could be shown the word candy in a dark gray font, or the word fickle in a bright gray font.

In the first batch of experiments, the subjects were told to determine the valence of the words as quickly as possible; this turns out to be easier when the color and the valence are congruent (e.g., the word sincere in a bright gray color).

In the second part, the subjects were told to determine the color of the font. This is easy, and word valence didn't make a difference.

Here's my own little mock-up of such a test material, so you can try it out yourself — say as quickly whether the following words are positive or negative:

gentle

bitter

cruel

trust

If you're like the average person in this study, then you're about 2% or 3% slower at making the judgment about the last two items (although you might be much faster at recognizing positive words in general).

As the authors say, this effect can be compared to that of the Stroop experiment, although the conflict here is indirect — there is no literal contradiction between trust and "black" (p. 86).

Order and Association

The authors interpret the asymmetry between color and word valence in terms of "a race model in which physical cues … are available before stimulus valence is" (p. 85).

If this is true, then the order is: First, you notice the white letters; then, the whiteness primes your valence judgment; and then, you finish reading the word. This would then mean that the appreciation of the color and its associated valence is "obligatory," and that people can't ignore it while making semantic judgments (p. 86).

This, however, does not show that we think about the abstract concept in terms of the concrete: If anything, it shows the opposite.

It thus seems that cognitive metaphor theorists can choose between two empirical results when they dig through the psychological literature — one that supports that idea of understanding-in-terms-of, and another that supports a "deep" metaphorical comprehension process. This would be wonderful if it weren't for the fact that the two papers both forcefully argue against the point made in the other.

Wilson and Gibbs: "Real and Imagined Body Movement Primes Metaphor Comprehension" (2007)

One of the recurring problems with experimental tests of cognitive metaphor theory is that it is exceedingly difficult to disentangle lexical priming from semantic priming. For instance, the notion of dragging is not only semantically related to "boredom" and "delay," but also discursively related to it: About 4 out of the 10 results for dragging out in the BNC are time-related metaphors.

In an attempt to circumvent this problem, Nicole L. Wilson and Ray Gibbs have performed two experiments in which a non-verbal movement served as the prime for a reading task. Specifically, they had their subjects learn to make certain movements like a stretching motion on cue, and then had them read small phrases like stretch for understanding. It turns out that performing these actions decreases reading time.

Are the Clichés Really Clichés?

The phrases they used were the following (p. 725):

• Stamp out fear
• Push the argument
• Swallow your pride
• Sniff out the truth
• Spit out the facts
• Shake off a feeling
• Grasp a concept
• Chew on an idea
• Stretch for understanding

These phrases are not all equally standard. This is a bit problematic because Wilson and Gibbs explicitly use the data to argue against "phrasal lexicon" and "clichés or dead metaphors" accounts (p. 723). It would thus have been more convincing if they had used actual clichés instead of constructed and not completely natural phrases.

These differences can be quantified by counting co-occurrences. To do so, I've taken all the verb/noun pairs above and looked for cases in which they co-occur in the BNC.

For instance, I took all the forms of the verb shake (shake, shakes, shook, shaken) and paired them with all the forms of the noun feeling (feeling, feelings). I then checked whether any combination of a word form from the first list co-occurred with one from the second list up to 20 words apart, and in any order.

Compiling such counts gives the following table:

v	n	#(n)	#(v)	#(v, n)	P(n | v)	P(v | n)
grasp	concept	280	2485	8988	11.27%	3.12%
chew	idea	72	1116	31876	6.45%	0.23%
swallow	pride	112	2585	2913	4.33%	3.84%
sniff	truth	40	1165	8397	3.43%	0.48%
spit	fact	40	1371	41801	2.92%	0.10%
shake	feeling	228	9109	17559	2.50%	1.30%
stretch	understanding	40	6239	9552	0.64%	0.42%
push	argument	48	10703	12006	0.45%	0.40%
stamp	fear	8	3086	14578	0.26%	0.05%

So it turns out that we quite often grasp concepts, but we rarely if ever stamp out fear.

We should thus expect such a phrase to be experienced as much more "fresh," or alternatively, much more awkward. It would be interesting to check whether these statistics correlate in any way with the priming effect, but there's no way to do so directly, because Wilson and Gibbs do not report reading times for individual reading times in the experiment.

Meier and Robinson: "Why the Sunny Side Is Up" (2004)

This Psychological Science paper by Brian P. Meier and Michael D. Robinson is a report on three experiments which collectively show that

1. reading positive and negative words facilitates the recognition of letters that are placed high or a low, respectively,
2. but looking up and down does facilitate the comprehension of positive and negative words.

In the terminology of Judea Pearl, we can thus say that activation of GOOD causes activation of UP, and BAD of DOWN:

Another result that came out of the experiments was that people recognize positive words faster than negative words, regardless of condition. Meier and Robinson do not discuss this effect explicitly, and I'm also not sure what to make of it.

From GOOD to UP, Not from UP to GOOD

The paper opens with a discussion of an experiment which shows that people are faster at judging whether a word is "positive" or "negative" if it's placed in a position on the computer screen which is congruent with the meaning. When the word polite is flashed at the top of the screen, for instance, you're faster at pressing the button corresponding to "positive" than when it flashes at the bottom.

This shows a correlation, but does not disentangle the question of causation. To do this, the two variables need to be manipulated independently of each other. This was achieved in two follow-up experiments which placed a spatial judgment task before or after a valence judgment task.

In the first of these follow-up experiments, the GOOD-to-UP direction was set up by a design looking roughly as follows:

That is, first the subject made a judgment about the valence of a word, and then about the identity of a letter which was presented in either a high or a low position. The last screen showed the word INCORRECT if the subject failed at the second task (as I've assumed in this example). This study found a significant facilitation effect.

The second follow-up experiment set up the UP-to-GOOD direction in a design that may be pictured thus:
 

Here, the subject first had to identify where a spatial cue was, and then to judge the valence of a word. In this task, they found no facilitation effect.

Is This Consistent With Cognitive Metaphor Theory?

In their brief conclusion, Meier and Robinson write:

These findings suggest that, when making evaluations, people automatically assume that objects that are high in visual space are good, whereas objects that are low in visual space are bad. (p. 247)

But there's an issue buried here which is usually evaded in cognitive metaphor theory: In which direction do the connections between source and target domain run? Meier and Robinson's results as well as the notion of "understanding in terms of" suggest that the connections run from target domain to source domain.

This analysis, however, leaves cognitive metaphor theory with little explanatory value with respect to word semantics. Consider for instance this paradigmatic instance of a "conceptual" metaphor:

• I'm feeling up.

According to the standard analysis, I understand that the word up here means "good" because the domain of spatial position translates into the domain of moods.

But this is exactly the opposite association of what we need. Meier and Robinson's show that we have a completely literal understanding of spatial position, and that looking upwards doesn't associate to feeling good:

People can use their senses to determine whether an object is up or down, white or black. There is no need to borrow metaphor to achieve an understanding of vertical position. Because of these considerations, we view it as unlikely that physical cues, in the absence of an evaluative context, activate evaluations. (p. 245)

There is thus no neurological reason why the word up should activate the meaning "good."

While Meier and Robinson thus offer excellent evidence in favor of a system of analogies in thought, it is not obvious that these should be responsible for the way we understand metaphorical language—only that they can be seen during our comprehension of literal language. To my mind, this creates a huge problem for cognitive metaphor theory, in particular in its more recent brain-talky incarnation.

McGlone: "What is the explanatory value of conceptual metaphor" (2007)

Matthew McGlone is one of the staunchest critics of cognitive metaphor theory, and in this 2007 paper, he reiterates a number of the arguments he has given in the past.

These arguments are roughly the following:

1

If our knowledge of abstract objects (like social relationships) were really derived from our knowledge of concrete objects (like heat, distance, and containers), then we would not be able to see the difference between the two (p. 114). This is a problem also pointed out by by Gregory Murphy (1996).

More generally, the stronger the claim of cognitive metaphor theory becomes, the weirder it becomes that we can distinguish, say, theories from actual buildings. In an interesting spin on this, McGlone considers the sentence

• My recent trip to L.A. was a rollercoaster ride (p. 122)

This is a conceptualization of a journey in terms of a journey—and so, it seems weird that we can recognize it as a metaphor, and that we don't draw literal rollercoaster inferences about the journey from this sentence.

2

He takes Keysar and Bly's 1995 study on false etymologies as evidence for the fact that our sense of linguistic coherence may be "illusory" (p. 115). He further supports this fact by citing other folk etymologies that are known to be false.

3

All the very good arguments made in his own 1996 paper on the topic are repeated (p. 117). This relates to paraphrase, reading speed, and recall.

4

The aptness data from Nayak and Gibbs (1990) and can be explained as an effect of stylistic coherence rather than cognitive facilitiation. Further, when Glucksberg et al. (1993) tested the stories for actual reading facilitation effects, they found none. In this connection, he also considers and rejects the recall data from Albritton et al. (1995) because they failed to control for lexical priming.

5

On a slightly different note, his own experiment in McGlone and Harding (1998) found that people read the ambiguous sentence the meeting was moved forward in a way that is consistent with the metaphor used in the preceding discourse (p. 120):

• We passed the deadline two days ago. The meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days [i.e., to Friday].
• The deadline passed two days ago. The meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days [i.e., to Monday].

 This is consistent with cognitive metaphor theory, but also with the theory that there is a more abstract super-structure which subsumes both time and space. He finds this latter suggestion "epistemologically more plausible" and suggests that perhaps the common features of time and space are "simply more transparent in spatial language than in other linguistic domains" (with a reference to Talmy 1996).

6

Lastly, he cites the reading time study by Keysar et al. (2000) which found that there was no significant difference between the facilitation effect of conventional and non-conventional metaphors.

The Steen-Gibbs-McGlone debate in Discourse Processes (2011)

In 2011, the journal Discourse Processes had a special issue on cognitive metaphor theory. The issue consists of four papers, a target piece by Raymond Gibbs, a reply by Matthew McGlone, a reply by Gerard Steen, and a rebuttal by Gibbs. The whole thing spans about 50 pages.

What is Cognitive Metaphor Theory?

Gibbs is quite direct in his claims. He directly openly says that:

Under the CMT view, so-called clichéd expressions, such as "stay the course" and "We're spinning out wheels," are not dead metaphors, but reflect active schemes of metaphorical thought. (p. 532)

However, the picture later muddles a bit because he constrains his claims to primary metaphors (pp. 9–10) and disqualifies explicit similes such as My job is a jail (p. 547). He also entertains the thought, inconsistent with conventional versions of cognitive metaphor theory, that these mappings may be learned through verbal behavior (p. 540).

But in fact, the story gets even muddier than that. In the last section before the conclusion, he floats his dynamical systems proposal for cognitive metaphor theory (p. 551ff). But while it all sounds very good with emergence and self-organization, Gibbs never commits to any particular model. This puts him in the questionable company of a tradition that throws around fancy math terms without actually saying very much.

That's not a nice accusation, but I'm afraid it's unavoidable. Gibbs himself seems to misunderstand fundamental concepts about dynamical systems: For instance, he seems to confuse the system states and state spaces (p. 551), confuse out-of-equilibrium states with chaos (see p. 115 of his 2005 book), and to confuse attractors with their associated basins of attraction (p. 551). Also, talking about "nonlinear interactions" (p. 554) without specifying what the independent variables are is just plain nonsense.

Constrained Comprehension

At any rate, the bottom line is that cognitive mappings aren't after all the basis of metaphor understanding; rather, they are factor that influence understanding, but neither necessary nor sufficient:

… many conceptual metaphors, along with many other constraining forces, may have partial, probabilistic influence on one's understanding of verbal metaphor. (p. 553)

That seems about right — but of course, we would have to specify what those forces were for this to be a informative statement. Gibbs seems to put everything in the mix, just to be on the safe side:

For instance, some dynamic processes occur over short time spans (e.g., neural firings or momentary thoughts). Others processes unfold over the course of individuals’ lives, and so guide development and change in personality, and interpersonal interactions throughout the lifespan. Dynamic processes also operate on populations over a much longer, evolutionary timeframe. (p. 551)

So just about anything can potentially be a relevant factor in determining comprehension. In his reply to this claim, Steen comments:

This basically brings all possibly relevant parameters of discourse processing together, from neural cognition to cognitive evolution, with all other dimensions of language use and discourse processing in between; and, in principle, allows for each of them to exert some yet to be determined effect on the ongoing discourse process. … If such a dynamic systems theoretical model could generate more precise predictions … it would be a valuable upgrade of CMT. (p. 587)

So it's not like the claim is wrong, it's just that it's only a ragtag collection of vague analogies rather than a theory.

The Case for Cognitive Metaphor Theory

OK, so getting a precise theory out of Gibbs can occasionally be a bit like holding on to wet soap. But he does bring a set of arguments to the table in order to support the claim that cross-modal effects play some sort of role in word comprehension. Here is, schematically, the arguments he cites:

1. Metaphorical expressions are systematic (p. 532)
2. Novel metaphors can be explained by means of old mappings (p. 532)
3. The mappings explain certain facts about etymology (p. 532)
4. Mappings are shared across cultures (p. 538)
5. Scientific concepts can be analyzed as metaphors (p. 540)
6. Verbal framing can influence decision-making (p. 540)
7. There are mappings in non-verbal thought (pp. 540–41)
8. Gestures sometimes seem to reflect mappings (p. 541)
9. There are cross-modal spill-over effects from non-verbal to verbal tasks (p. 541–542)
10. People have consistent mental images (p. 544)
11. People have consistent judgment of underlying mappings (p. 544)
12. (Quite novel) euphemisms are understood faster when primed metaphorically (p. 545)
13. Transparent idioms are learned faster than no-so-transparent (p. 546)
14. Domains are similar in an asymmetric way (p. 548)

So that's a lot of stuff, and not all of these arguments are equally good.

The Bad

Some of them are bad just for conceptual reasons: For instance, interviewing people about their mental imagery is just not a very reliable way of producing cognitive evidence. Ironically, Gibbs seems to accept this point when the data goes the other way, as in his comments on McGlone's paraphrase task:

Yet, asking people to verbally paraphrase a novel metaphor may not be the best indicator of the possible underlying presence of conceptual metaphor in interpreting these novel expressions. Given the long-noted difficulties people have in paraphrasing metaphors (Gibbs, 1994), the fact that 41% could provide interpretations that seem to meet some criteria for conceptual metaphor may be a positive finding in favor of CMT. (p. 546–47)

In fact, the quote goes on to question McGlone's materials on the grounds that metaphors of the form A is B or the form A is the B of C are "Not typically motived by single conceptual metaphors" (p. 547), so that that do not count as negative evidence anyway (even though they do, apparently, count as positive).

Other arguments are weak for empirical reasons: For instance, the systematicity which originally motivated cognitive metaphor theory has in fact been hugely overstated, and much of the last 15 years of research has been dedicated to the problems that arise from the fact that there are unsystematic holes in metaphorical mappings. (This parallels the fact that there is no cognitive reason that you can't ask for the time with the question How late is it?) Similar problems hold for the gesture evidence.

The Good

But some pieces of evidence are good. Here's a list of some of the experimental studies that Gibbs cites, and which I think have a lot of merit:

• Meier and Robinson 2004: Positive words are recognized faster when they're presented at the top of a computer screen.
• Giessner and Schubert 2007: Subjects judge bosses to have more power when they are depicted higher up on a screen.
• Williams and Bargh 2008a: Subjects find other people more friendly when they're holding a cup of warm coffee.
• Williams and Bargh 2008b: Subjects find themselves more socially isolated when they have been asked to measure large distances.
• Zhong and Lilgenquist 2006: Subjects who think about immoral behavior are more likely to accept an antiseptic wipe afterwards.
• Meier, Robinson, and Clore 2004: Subjects are slower at categorizing words like faith or beggar as positive or negative when the positive are dark or the negative bright.
• Wilson and Gibbs 2007: Subjects are faster at reading a metaphorical grasp sentence if they have first made a grasping hand movement.

I am not saying all of these studies are methodologically unproblematic (in fact, I am quite skeptical about using the Giessner and Schubert study as evidence of how online processing works). I am just saying that Gibbs is right in saying that they bring some information to the table which should not be ignored.

Gibbs: Embodiment and Cognitive Science, ch. 4 (2005)

It's a bit surprising that someone as keen on criticizing introspective psychology as Ray Gibbs should find himself doing it extensively when the lights are dimmed. Pages 90–114 of his most recent book almost reads as an illustration of the kind of speculative neuroscience that he warns others against.

The Defective Mouth

For example, in a discussion of the idioms chew the fat and chew the rag — based on discussions in Goossens et al. (1995) — he motivates the meaning of the phrase as follows:

Given that both fat and rags can be chewed a long time, with little nutritional value coming from these activities, these idiomatic phrases express the idea of talking about something a long time with little new information to be gained from this experience. (p. 100)

Even if we accept this link, when did fat ever become low on nutrition?

More factual weirdness crops up as Gibbs discusses how people experience various bodily processes:

The metaphor "spit out" reflect the idea that has something of value in the body, which through effort he or she is able to gather up (like spit or phlegm) and say (or expectorate). (p. 100)

That's a bit gross, but it's also inaccurate: When was spit ever "valuable," and when did we ever have a reoccurring experience of desiring other people's spit? Even if the connection was unproblematic, the imagery wouldn't work.

Similarly, without any open reservations, Gibbs links the experience of coughing something up to a state of well-being:

"Getting something off one's chest," just like "blowing off steam" and "coughing something up," restores a sense of balance or well-being to an individual. (p. 103)

Even more oddly, the idiom lie through one's teeth is explained by means of an image of the truth being located inside the mouth of the speaker:

When people "lie through their teeth," the [mouth which is perceived as a] container is perceived as a hiding place where true information resides, but the container is somewhat defective, and we can see through the speaker's shameless attempt to lie about something when the truth can partly be seen. (p. 104)

It wouldn't matter that this image strikes me as completely bizarre if we only got some evidence that it is psychologically plausible. The problem is that, of course, we don't.

Murphy–Gibbs Revisited

Gibbs still has an old axe to grind with Gregory Murphy, who pointed out some serious gaps in his theory back in 1996. In the book, Gibbs essentially reiterates his defense of cognitive metaphor theory — constrain the theory so everything it claims is prefaced by "optionally."

So let's take the conclusions first: In the last section of the chapter on concepts, Gibbs repeats that "conceptual simulations surely … create imaginative understandings of events" (p. 122), and that

… human conceptual processing is deeply grounded in embodied metaphor, especially in regard to abstract understandings of experience. (p. 122)

On the previous page, he also talks about "embodied simulation in the creation of concepts in context" and "the sensorimotor nature of conceptual processing" (p. 121).

All of this talk of online simulation and temporary constructs seems quite consistent with the idea that comprehension isn't a matter of word-for-word recall, but rather of constructing something like a little film clip in the head which represents the meaning of a sentence. In the process of creating such a film, common bodily experiences may take precedence over other contextual cues.

I take this to be the idea behind his talk of emergence and self-organization, although the whole thing is a bit vague:

My suggestion is that image schemas are attractors within human self-organizing systems. … The important point here is that attractors are not localized representations, but emerging patterns of entire systems in action (i.e., interplay of brain, body, and world). In this way, the stable properties of image schemas (e.g., the topographic structure of something like SOURCE-PATH-GOAL) are not separate from sensorimotor activity. Image schemas should not be reduced to sensorimotor activity, but it is a mistake to view image schemas as mental representations that are abstracted away from experience. (p. 115)

The problem is that this seems to contradict his claim that certain "attractors" can be ignored when we feel like it:

Each metaphoric construal of a concept [e.g., LOVE] in some context results in a concept that is independent as a temporary representation apart from embodied source domain information in long-term memory. My suggestion, then, is that conceptual metaphors may not preexist in the sense of continually structuring specific conceptual domains. But conceptual metaphors may be used to access different knowledge on different occasions as people immediately conceptualize some abstract target domain given a particular task. Conceptual metaphors may also simply emerge as the product of conceptualizing processes, rather than serve as the underlying cause of these processes. (p. 121)

As Murphy pointed out in the original debate, this leaves wide open the question of how people select the appropriate metaphor, and after the metaphor is chosen, how to select the correct properties from the source domain. Whenever someone postulates a context-sensitive selection, they also implicitly postulate a mechanism that can perform this selection.

What Does This Leaves Us With?

It's a part of this picture that Gibbs wholeheartedly supports Joe Grady's corrective to cognitive metaphor theory (1997), i.e., that non-primary metaphors are constructed out of several primary metaphors glued together. This means that the theory essentially only applies to primary metaphors.

So in sum, the picture that seems to emerge is the following: Whenever you understand affection, normality, power, quantity, etc., you do so by means of mental simulations of a bodily process. Comprehension is a matter of choosing he right analogy between a bodily process and an abstract concept. Because some experiences are more salient, they are also more likely to be used.

So that's at least a theory. It's probably wrong, though, since many sentences are understood perfectly fine without the use of any bodily simulation — in fact, bodily simulation can even be an obstacle to correct understanding in many cases.

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.

Gibbs: Embodiment and Cognitive Science, contents (2005)

Unlike The Poetics of Mind (1995), Gibbs' new book not only discusses psycholinguistics, but also perception and other linguistic phenomena. However, chapters 4 and 6 still focus on cognitive metaphor theory as such, and they largely reiterate the claims he has made elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the new book, like the old one, still has a mostly flat structure, more in the style of a laundry list than a narrative. Since I find this a little difficult to find my way around in, I'll just quickly give a table of contents for the two chapters.

Chapter 4: Concepts

The contents of chapter 2 (pp. 79–122) are as follows:

1. Untitled introduction (pp. 79–80)
2. Traditional Views of Concepts (pp. 80–81)
3. Problems with the Traditional View (pp. 81–86)
4. Perceptual Symbols (pp. 86–90)
5. Image Schemas and the Metaphorical Nature of Abstract Concepts (pp. 90–96)
6. Thinking (pp. 96–99)
7. Linguistic Action (pp. 99–104)
8. Grammar and Spatial Concepts (pp. 104–107)
9. Political Ideas (pp. 107–111)
10. Mathematical Concepts (pp. 111–114)
11. Questions about Image Schemas (pp. 114–115)
12. Questions about Conceptual Metaphors (pp. 115–116)
13. A New View of Embodied Metaphor (pp. 116–118)
14. Is Cognitive Linguistic Evidence Relevant to the Study of Cognition? (pp. 118–121)
15. Conclusion (pp. 121–122)

Sections 6 through 10 (pp. 96–114) contain various linguistic illustrations of the notion of an schema. The headings "Thinking" and "Linguistic Action" could thus also have been named "English words words for thought-related concepts" and "English words for speech-related concepts."

All three chapters are extremely speculative, and they rely almost solely on introspection and post-hoc rationalization of linguistic expressions.

Chapter 6: Language and Communication

Chapter 6 (pp. 158–207) contains the following subheadings:

1. Untitled introduction (pp. 158–159)
2. Time Course of Linguistic Communication (pp. 159–160)
3. Language Change (pp. 160–161)
4. Speech Perception (pp. 161–165)
5. Gesture and Speech (pp. 165–170)
6. Body Movement and Discourse (pp. 170–174)
7. Word Meaning (pp. 174–180)
8. Image Schemas and Utterance Interpretation (pp. 180–183)
9. Embodied action in Metaphor Processing (pp. 183–184)
10. Desire as Hunger: A Case Study in Embodied Metaphor (pp. 184–187)
11. Understanding Time Expressions (pp. 187–190)
12. Embodied Metaphors in American Sign Language (pp. 190–194)
13. Neural Theory of Language (pp. 194–198)
14. Embodied Construction Grammar (pp. 198–199)
15. Embodied Text Understanding (pp. 199–205)
16. A Case Study: Indexical Hypotheticals (pp. 205–207)
17. Conclusion (p. 207)

Section 2 is a warning not to confuse diachronic and synchronic issues. Section 3 is a discussion of etymology with a reference to Eve Sweetser.

Section 10 is about the desire/hunger study that I have read, but been unable to obtain the data from. Section 13 is a discussion of Narayanan's seriously inadequate computation model of verb comprehension.

Kövecses: Metaphor in Culture (2005)

Let's have a little look at the fine print in Zoltán Kövecses book Metaphor in Culture. After trawling through about 300 pages of positive evidence, Kövecses gets around to considering some problems. A short passage within the last five pages of the book is dedicated partly to a discussion of incoherence in metaphor (pp. 289–292).

Kövecses looks at two examples. First, he considers the conflict between fear-is-cold metaphors (cold feet etc.) and the sentence Our fears are fueled by acts of terrorism (p. 289). Then he gives a metaphorical explanation for why Clinton couldn't have an affair, while Mitterrand could (p. 291). Let's look at those two examples one by one.

Fear and the "'Cognition over Embodiment' override"

About the fear that seems to be both cold and burning at the same time, Kövecses writes:

What's going on here then? Does metaphorical thought conflict with embodiment, thus contradicting one of the major claims of the cognitive linguistic view of (metaphorical) understanding? I believe this is exactly what is happening. But I do not think that this conflict creates a major difficulty for the experientialist view of the embodiment of metaphors. All that needs to be done is to make a slight change in the strong version of the theory. I suggest that we conceive of the simple but highly generic metaphors that are based on tight correlations in experience (such as INTENSITY IS HEAT) as powerful conceptual devices that can override local embodiment in other parts of the conceptual system (in FEAR IS COLD). In other words, once we have a highly [p. 290:] entrenched and generic simple metaphor such as INTENSITY IS HEAT, this metaphor can be applied even to cases in which the metaphor does not fit local embodiment (as in the case of FEAR IS COLD). I do not know how common similar cases of "embodiment override" are, but I guess they are common enough that they call for some explanation within the theory of embodiment of meaning. The notion of simple, generic, correlation-based metaphors that are powerful enough to override local embodiment would be my best best shot at solving the issue. (pp. 289-90)

The biggest problem with this suggestion might not be its theoretical shortcomings, but rather its blatantly ad hoc character. It is indeed a "good shot" at evading a problem but has little psychological motivation. With such a patch-on-patch methodology, it is difficult to see what would count as a "major difficulty."

More specifically, it is also difficult to see why INTENSITY IS HEAT should be more "tight," "simple," and "entrenched" than FEAR IS COLD. If a "tight correlation" is not a matter of embodiment anymore, how then are we supposed to understand this concept? All this seems to pull the carpet from under several fundamental aspects of the theory, in an obscure corner of the book.

Sex in France and the "'Social-Cultural Experience' Override"

And now for the sex. Kövecses opens his discussion of the Clinton/Mitterrand comparison with a quick brush-up of George Lakoff's theory of political emotions, in particular, the alleged SOCIETY IS A FAMILY metaphor. Then the same puzzle as above:

Given that the same metaphor and metonymy in the French conceptual system [as in the American], how come marital infidelity never became a political issue in France? I believe that thte answer is that another part of the conceptual system can override some of the mappings of the SOCIETY IS A FAMILY metaphor. If there is a culture, such as France, in which sexual freedom (of even family members) is an important value, then the metaphorical connection "family issue → political issue" is not made (i.e., activated) because it would be inconsistent with the part of the conceptual system that maintains that sexual freedom is important. In other words, a part of the broader cultural context (in this case, the value of sexual freedom in France) can override the particular mappings that a culture sets up between the FAMILY source and the SOCIETY target. (p. 291)

So you see, your values are founded in metaphorical thought, except when they are founded in your values.

Who's On Top, Anyway?

The notion of "override," here as in Lakoff's version, implicitly requires one mechanism to have a higher priority than another.

This assumption is usually not spelled out when the concept is invoked, since it is usually called upon to explain inconvenient data while still maintaining the strong view that "metaphor governs thought." This is of course impossible if one simultaneously says that thought governs metaphor.

Naturally, Kövecses also faces this problem, which Michael Kimmel apparently pointed out to him (p. 292). Consequently, he goes on to disavow the rhetoric of the preceding pages:

The talk about "overrides" may seem to suggest some kind of temporal and causal progression from a "universal base" to a "cultural overlay" and an ontologically "most basic" part from which other things emerge, or develop. I do not intend any such interpretation. I do not claim that there is first a universally embodied shared metaphor in different cultures, just as I do not claim that the three systems that interact in metaphorical conceptualization [bodily, cultural, and cognitive] can be meaningfully separated from each other for other than heuristic purposes (see chapter 10). As I have argued elsewhere (Kövecses, 2000a) and in chapter 10, I view the emergence of metaphors as being simultaneously shaped by both embodiment and culture (and most likely also by communicative context). I simply use "override" as a convenient way of talking about certain "incoherences" and "conflicts" among the heuristically postulated systems. In reality, all that we see is the differences in metaphorical conceptualization across and within cultures. Thus the term override should be taken as representing a convenient fiction to talk about such differences as we move from culture to culture, from subculture to subculture, and so forth. (p. 292)

Falling back on "words don't matter" is a bizarre argument for somebody working in cognitive metaphor theory; but rhetoric aside, what does this mean in terms of the two examples above?

Specifically, have a second look at the following two snippets:

… generic metaphors that are based on tight correlations in experience … can override local embodiment …

… a part of the broader cultural context … can override the particular mappings …

What happens if we replace these sentences with the pedestrian observation that cultures differ?

There might be a reading under which this states more than the tautology that things differ when they differ, but I don't feel I'm getting much to work with here.

Eviatar and Just: "Brain correlates of discourse processing" (2006)

This paper shows that three different kind of text snippets lead to three different patterns of brain activity. This is interpreted as showing how literal, metaphorical, and ironic language is processed.

However, a closer look at the experimental materials show that these labels should be approached with some caution. The literal statements are not all "literal" by the standards of cognitive metaphor theory, and the metaphorical statements are in many cases not as conventional as they are claimed to be.

Are the Literal Sentences Literal?

Here are some examples of text snippets that Eviatar and Just categorized as "literal," with underscores added by me:

• Betsy and Mary were on the basketball team. Mary scored a lot of points in the game. Betsy said, “Mary is a great player.”
• Harry waited in line for 3 h to see the movie. He enjoyed himself. He said, “That was worth waiting for.”
• George promised to be quiet in the library. He sat in a corner looking at a book. His dad said, “Thanks for keeping your promise.”
• Laura was out sick for a week. Johnny called her every day. Laura said, “Thanks for worrying about me.”
• Betty and Laura were in the same class. Laura finished her homework before Betty. Laura said, “You sure are a slow worker.”

Several of these should not be categorized as literal according to the standards of cognitive metaphor theory.

For instance, great is typically taken as an example of a metaphor with size as its source domain. Similarly, worth, keeping, and perhaps worrying are here used in senses that are not their most "basic" ones. Further, slow worker should probably be categorized as a metonymy.

Are the Metaphorical Sentences Conventional?

Here are some examples that they consider to be "frozen" metaphors (p. 2350):

• In the morning John came to work early. He started to work right away at a fast pace. His boss said, “John is a hurricane.”
• Mary got straight A’s on her report card. Her parents were proud of her. They said, “You are as sharp as a razor.”
• Susie helped her mom when her brother got sick. She took good care of him. Her mom said, “You are an angel from heaven.”
• Donna was always late for everything. Today she made it home on time for supper. Her dad said, “You have turned over a new leaf.”
• George went to Betty’s birthday party. Fifty people crowded into her small apartment. He said, “I feel like a sardine.”
• Betty and Laura were in the same class. Laura finished her homework before Betty. Laura said, “You work like a snail.”

No doubt that these examples constitute metaphors; it's only that they are a very different kind of metaphors than unemployment is growing or I'll handle the press. One is very overt and almost cries out for attention, while the other is quiet and discreet.

Some Factors Causing the Metaphors to Grab Attention

We can hardly expect a sentence like

• You are an angel from heaven

to be processed the same way as

• The chocolate cake was divine

The resonance of angel with heaven, the quotation marks in the original story, and the syntactic clumsiness of the sentences all contribute to provoke a very vivid mental picture in the reader. This would probably not be the case for the divine chocolate cake.

Other sentences from the materials provoke such images because they are not really conventional, or occur in an abnormal form. For instance, the common "sardine" metaphor virtually always occurs in the plural form like sardines and never in the form like a sardine.

Lastly, because the subject-predicate form in sentences like You are X or John is X is so semantically weak in its subject, it draws a lot of attention to the metaphor which is its topic. Compare for instance

• He was a tallish man with a mind as sharp as a razor. (BNC)
• You are a razor.

To my intuitions, the razor in the first sentence seems to recede very much into the background, while in the second sentence, it is being put forward as the explicit topic of the sentence. The reasons are probably both syntactic (information is spread unevenly over constituents) and semantic (the first sentence contains more competing content words).

Are the Metaphors Metaphorical?

One last thing that I should mention is that at least one of the "metaphorical" examples could be interpreted as literal:

• Ken was worried about having his hair cut. When the barber finished, Ken’s ears stuck out. He said, “You’ve turned me into a clown.”

Without a more specific theory of what "metaphor" means, this is a very problematic borderline case.

So What?

This doesn't mean that the data that Eviatar and Just has collected is useless, or that it should be discarded. But it does mean that, once again, the notion of "metaphor" is so vague and contested that it can't just be transplanted from one field to another without some problems.

In particular, linguists should be careful not to take evidence from brain scans at face value; we need to look carefully into the details of what the neuroscience actually shows, and be explicit about what our own semantic theory actually say.

In this case, that means the following: First, some sentences provoke mental imagery more strongly than others; this is a product of several interacting factors, including word frequencies and resonance effects. And second, it is not at all clear what the relation between mental imagery and meaning is, and this relation cannot be made clear unless we come clean about what we thing linguistic meaning is.

Hanks: "Metaphoricity is gradable" (2006)

This is Patrick Hanks' contribution to Corpus-Based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy (2006). As the title says, its claim is that expressions can be more or less metaphorical.

Hanks grades a number of expressions involving the word sea according to how metaphorical he finds them, but it is unclear how to generalize his methods. In the course of the text, he gives at least two different answers to the question of how one might measure the metaphoricity of a phrase.

The Frequency Measure of Metaphoricity

First, he suggest the absolute frequency of the phrase as a measure (p. 21). An area of research is thus perceived as relatively literal because the string as a whole is quite frequent. By contrast, an oasis of calm is quite metaphorical because infrequent.

Hanks may have a point here, but it's difficult to tell, because he never submits any evidence that the statistic of interest is the absolute frequencies rather than the relative ones. It is true that area of research only accounts for about 0.1% of the 34,824 occurrences of area in the BNC, while the 6 occurrences of oasis of calm add up to 2.4% of the 248 occurrences of oasis.

But on the other hand, these numbers are seriously sensitive to paraphrase: if you include study and search into the analysis,  the tally jumps from 43 to 168, i.e., a near quadrupling. For the oasis of calm, expanding the search to include silence, peace, quiet, tranquillity, repose, and serenity only yields 9 more hits, i.e. a growth of about 50%. It is thus not at all clear which of those numbers we should trust more, and which will be responsible for how we think.

	study	work	research	research	concern	search	analysis	enquiry
area of …	87	61	43	43	40	36	5	4

	calm	peace	tranquility	serenity	silence	quiet	repose
oasis of …	6	3	2	2	1	1	1

The Resonance Measure of Metaphoricity

Second, Hanks suggests that the degree of metaphoricity is determined by certain quality called "resonance," a concept he has picked up from Max Black (pp. 20, 22). Hanks writes:

In the most metaphorical cases, the the secondary subject [source domain] shares the fewest properties with the primary subject [= target domain]. Therefore, the reader or hearer has to work correspondingly harder to create a relevant interpretation. At the other extreme, the more shared properties there are, the weaker the metaphoricity. (p. 22)

The term "resonance" subsequently seems to be used as the inverse of "semantic distance" (p. 22), and a similarity-based prototype theory is taken for granted. Accordingly, he finds that an Antarctic oasis—an ice-free area on Antarctica—is slightly metaphorical because it deviates from the stereotypical cartoon oasis with palm trees etc. (p. 30–31).

Meaning and Personal Experience

I thought I should just cite the summary of cognitive metaphor theory that Hanks gives, because it succinctly sums up some of the concerns that a number of people have had about it:

Lakoff and Johnson's basic thesis about metaphor is that its function is to enable us to interpret concepts (especially abstract concepts) in terms of familiar, everyday cognitive experiences. This is broadly satisfactory, though we might be tempted to substitute 'perceptual experiences' for 'cognitive experiences', and common sense forces us to acknowledge that the 'everyday experience' in question is that of the language community at large, not each individual. (p. 19–20)

In fact, I don't think a metaphor needs to be grounded in anybody's first-hand experience in the general case; and metaphors that involve dying are good illustrations of this phenomenon.

Corts: "Factors characterizing bursts of figurative language and gesture in college lectures" (2006)

Apparently, Daniel Corts and Howard Pollio published a study of the use of metaphor in college lectures in Metaphor and Symbol in 1999. Their conclusions were, unsurprisingly, that college lecturers tend to use figurative language when they have to explain something difficult. In 2006, Daniel Corts then published a new study which seem to cover pretty much the same ground.

What is a Metaphor "Burst"?

The data analyzed by Corts is a pair of videotaped lectures on geology and a pair on Greek mythology. Both pairs were held by a single lecturer.

The kind of "bursts" of metaphors that Corts has in mind are passages like the following, here taken from the geology lectures:

[269] That’s a glass with ice tea in it … this is the tea, and that is the ice … [272] so much sugar in there that it is very sweet … you drink that tea when it first arrives … it tastes very sweet … you come back later, and what’s happened to the iced tea there? … [276] The temperature melts the ice … changes the composition of the tea, and as you pointed out, it’s diluted … [279] That tea has a different chemical composition.

[316] That gets us to the end of … igneous rocks. Now I want to step across this line … move on to Objectives 3 and 4 … [319] This is kind of a gear shift … I want to help you through this gear shift.

[142] We have planes of weakness parallel to slope. Yeah, the best way to do that is a deck of cards. Take this deck of cards [places hands parallel to each other horizontally] and you tilt it [tilts hands]. Now, they’ll start sliding off one right after the other [after hands tilt, the top hand ‘slides’ off the other]. That’s in essence what we’re doing here – we’re taking a deck of cards … water gets in here...and then they’ll just get and go off these surfaces [hand slides off again].

The quotes are taken from his Table 4 on page 222. The numbers in square brackets refer to line numbers in the transcript.

As Corts notes, it is characteristic for all of these analogies that they are quite lengthy, quite novel, quite coherent, and that they are accompanied by suitable gestures. One might also add that they are quite explicit in nature, in the sense that no one listening to this lecture would doubt that we are talking in terms of analogies here.

Does Gesture Cohere With Speech?

According to Corts, one  of the conclusions of the original 1999 study was that gesture and speech appeared coherent in the college lectures:

When figurative language and gestures did overlap, they presented the same metaphorical concept rather than two different or independent representations of the concept. (p. 212)

This is true, he claims (p. 227), even for stock phrase metaphors such as

• "Here's where we've been so far … and here's where we're going…"

or

• "on one hand … but on the other…"

That's not quite consistent with the widespread speech/gesture incoherence that Daniel Casanto has reported in a number of studies. In fact, he claimed that the before/after dimension was almost always "conceptualized" as left/right by English speakers, not by behind/front, as Corts claims.

Wax Off, Wax On

It's difficult to assess whether this disagreement in the literature has come about because Corts has been overlooking contrary evidence, since we don't have his data. But at least one of his examples (p. 225) seems to indicate problems with a stricter version of the coherence claim:

Literature, especially oral literature [right hand loops backwards], reflects the way [right hand moves back and forth, flipping from palm up to palm down] the world is. It doesn’t generate the world [hands flip backward, palm down], it reflects it [hand flips forward, palm up].

OK, so if I'm a mirror, then I can "reflect" the world by holding up my hand, palm out, like a policeman stopping a car. But how does flipping my hand backwards, like I'm closing a cigar box, correspond to "generating" the world? This reminds me more of the weird examples Ray Gibbs cited in "support" of cognitive metaphor theory (1994, p. 165–67).

The real reason for this is probably rather that the gesture indicates contrast than that it has any inherent meaning on its own. Any sort of opposing hand movements could probably have done the same job (e.g., wave to the left, wave to the right).

And that's OK — it's only a problem if we claim that the gesture somehow reveals how this professor thinks about the subject, window-to-the-mind style. In that case, we would be forced into a highly awkward reading of the situation when we saw the "shovel water backwards" move next to the word generated.

Metaphor Comparison and Negation

Incidentally, this point is also confirmed by another of Corts' observations: In the discussion, he notes (p. 228) that we often find mixed metaphors in places where two analogies are explicitly compared, or one is negated:

• "Drug abuse is not a disease, it is a game"
• "Literature does not create the world as much as it reflects it"

The fact that we get the point of such comparisons, and especially of such negated metaphors, seems to indicate that we are less captives of our metaphors than the orthodox "conceptual structure" interpretation will have it. If anything, it is rather the metaphors that serve our purposes than the other way around.