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.

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.

Lakoff: "Cognitive models and prototype theory" (1987)

Lakoff argues that the prototype effects exist because concepts are defined by several partly overlapping "cognitive models." A possible example of a mother might then fit some of the models (the "genetic mother") and not others ("the wife of the father"). This may lead to graded membership judgments.

Structure of the Paper

The paper is a little bit difficult to navigate in, as it contains a large number of sections which are all on the same level of organization.

The sections differ in content and length. Their headings are:

1. Untitled introduction
2. Interactional properties
3. Cognitive models
4. Graded models
5. The idealized character of cognitive models
6. Cognitive models versus feature bundles
7. Mother
8. Metonymic models
9. Metonymic sources of prototype effects
10. The housewife stereotype
11. Working mothers
12. Radial structures
13. Some kinds of metonymic models
14. Social stereotypes
15. Typical examples
16. Ideals
17. Paragons
18. Generators
19. Submodels
20. Salient Examples
21. Radial categories
22. Japanese hon
23. Categories of mind, or mere words
24. What is prototype theory
25. The core + identification proposal
26. Osherson and Smith
27. Armstrong, Gleitman, and Gleitman
28. Conclusion

Cognitive Clusters

His own theory on cognitive models is most clearly explained in section 6 and 7 (pp. 66-70). His idea is that concepts are defined in terms of a cluster of competing models -- for instance, a salient example, an idealized picture, and a positive paradigm.

The effect seems oddly close to the weighted lists of attributes used by, e.g., Linda Koleman and Paul Kay (1981). But he insists that bundles of cognitive models are empirically distinguishable from bundles of features. He refers to Eve Sweetser (1987) for support of this claim, but does not discuss the evidence.

Sections 14 through 20 (and perhaps section 21?) are intended to give examples of how "cognitive models" can look. They can look like a lot of different things, it appears.

An Alternative Theory

Sections 25, 26, and 27 criticize a "reactionary" counterproposal.

According to this theory, category judgments can be made in two ways, by deliberation or by quick-and-dirty heuristics. Prototype effects are then, as far as I understand, only present when the heuristic method is used.

Lakoff identifies a comment from his own 1972 paper on hedges (journal version, 1973) as the inspiration for this new theory. He finds this "ironic."

The arguments he proposes against this two-method theory oddly resembles arguments in favor of it (e.g., p. 92). His main concern, if I understand it correctly, is the metaphysical assumptions of the theory rather than any specific empirical problem.

Robin Lakoff's introduction (2004) to Language and Woman's Place (1975)

In 2004, a new annotated edition of Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place came out. I addtion to the orignal text, this new edition includes a number of essays on the topics raised in the book as well as a new introduction by Lakoff herself.

The Frustration of a Comskyan

The introduction is interesting for several reasons. One of them is that it contains an interesting personal account of the ideas that were splitting transformational grammar apart in the era of Aspects:

By the late 1960s it had become clear to several of us that Chomsky's linguistic revolution wasn't the recolution in which we had enlisted. Chomsky had promised us a theory that would make language a "window into the mind." But within standard transformational theory that possibility could be realized only to a very limited dregree, if at all. While investigators could use their minds as interpretive instruments—to judge the grammaticality or semantic similarity of sentences—they were not permitted to investigate meaning, much less a speaker's intention in uttering a sentence in a particular form, or the effect of that utterance on the addressee.

Consequently, Lakoff and others got the idea of starting from meaning representations of a certain form and then deriving syntactic form out of that. To the extent that it ever was a single or coherent theory, this new framework is what we now call "generative semantics":

We devised rules and representations to relate externally accessible linguistic forms to mental states—for example, desires, assumptions, and personal identities—while retaining the Chomskyan belief in the primacy of the syntactic component of the grammar. Deep structure got deeper, wider, and more complex.

"Deep structure got deeper"—what a wonderful summary. Remember also George Lakoff's comment that he and his gang just wanted to be "good little comskyans," quoted in The Linguistics Wars. How wrong they both were—about what they were doing, and how much linguistics would change.

Grammar Unlimited?

Interestingly, the orthodox Chomskyan argument against this augmented view of grammar was, in Lakoff's rendering:

If you followed generative semantics to its logical conclusion, everything speakers know about the world would have to be included within the transformational component, which therefore would become infinite. [...]

Not necessarily, said the generative semanticists. The linguistic grammar need only include those aspects of the extralinguistic world that have direct bearing on grammatical form: just a small subset of everything. [...] But we still had to answer, at least to our own satisfaction, the question that these claims raised: What parts of our psychological and social reality did require linguistic encoding, in at least some languages?

Lakoff's point in the essay is of course that gender is one of the important variables of linguistic expression—not just "in a few 'exotic' languages (Japanese, Dyirbal, Arawak, and Koasati)," but in solid, run-of-the-mill English as well.

But at the same time, the quote points right at the big taboo of linguistics, whether or not Lakoff herself intends it to do so: Once we admit that syntax can't be isolated from meaning, the floodgates are open to seeing that there really isn't any such thing as a "language" at all; the difference between syntax and anthropology is really more about differences in interests than about anything inherent in the "object of study."

Is Linguistics Linguistics?

Lakoff is also aware that something in transformational grammar and generative semantics was holding it back from saying anything intelligent about discourse structure on a larger level:

Linguists spoke on occasion of "structure above (or beyond) the sentence level," but mostly about how it couldn't be done. When we attempted it, we thought of larger units as concatenations of sentences: S+S+S ..., rather than as structures with rules of their own, wholes different from the sum of their parts.

While I think that this has something to do with the game of showing-and-hiding that linguistics necessarily entails, Lakoff seems to attribute it more to the fact that different tools fit different situations:

While a generation ago, "structure above the sentence level" had the status of the basilisk (mythical and toxic), now it is an accepted area of linguistics [...] These analyses made it clear that discourse should be understood not as concatenations of S's, but as language directed toward particular interactive and psychological purposes.

So now we're OK, the message seems to be; we just had to realize that a different set of concepts was needed (turntaking, politeness, power, identity, etc.).

While I agree that conversational analysis has something new and interesting to say about language use, I also think that there's something genuinely wrong about saying that it does the same thing as Chomskyan grammar, only with a different tool. It's not just a shift of attention or of measuring equipment, it's a shift of standards, mindset, ethics, and goals.

Not that there's anything wrong with either hermeneutics or with mathematics—it's just that they are never going to be unified into a single methodology. There is a tension between the picture of what counts as data and valid argument that Lakoff's book drew attention to, and I don't think it's a tension that can or should be resolved.

Gibbs: The Poetics of Mind, ch. 4 (1994)

Chapter 4 of Raymond Gibbs' book contains some very, very long discussions of the use of metaphor in various domains as well as some evidence.

The chapter is by far the longest in the book (one and a half time longer than chapter 5, the second longest) and makes up around 20% of the whole text.

However, only 6 out of a total of 87 pages in the chapter are used to present psychological evidence for his cognitive claims (pp. 161-67). Much of this evidence is the same as that which he presents in chapter 6.

In the last section before the conclusion of the chapter, Gibbs addresses the objections against cognitive metaphor theory that Naomi Quinn raised in 1991.

Structure of the chapter
Chapter 4 of Poetics of Mind has the following sections and subsections:

1. Metaphor in language (pp. 122-145)
1. The ubiquity of metaphor (pp. 122-124)
2. The communicative functions of metaphor (pp. 124-134)
3. Social functions of figurative language (pp. 134-140)
4. Metaphor and politics (pp. 140-145)
2. The Metaphorical structure of everyday thought (pp. 146-206)
1. Systematicity of literal expressions (pp. 146-154)
2. Novel extensions of conventional metaphor (pp. 154-157)
3. Polysemy (pp. 157-161)
4. Psychological evidence (pp. 161-167)
5. An alternative to metaphor in thought and language (pp. 167-169)
6. Metaphor in science (pp. 169-179)
7. Metaphor in law (pp. 179-183)
8. Metaphor in art (pp. 183-187)
9. Metaphor and myth (pp. 187-192)
10. Metaphor in culture (pp. 192-206)
3. Conclusion (p. 207)

Below, I will summarize the contents of each of these sections. Following that, I will also zoom in on two particular subsections and comment on the arguments given in those.

Contents of the chapter
Here's a brief telegraphic summary of what each section contains:

1. Unnamed introduction: People use metaphor a lot.
2. Metaphor in language
1. The ubiquity of metaphor: Some quantitative estimates of how many metaphors a person produces per minute of conversation -- a somewhat meaningless number from my perspective.
   
2. The communicative functions of metaphor: People use metaphors in order to be more expressive, compact, and vivid. Further, "metaphors facilitate prose comprehension" (p. 131). They are also easier to remember (p. 132).
3. Social functions of figurative language: Language signals group membership.
4. Metaphor and politics: People talk about politics in terms of war, sport, etc.
3. The Metaphorical structure of everyday thought: "The ubiquity of metaphor in everyday discourse is not due to sophisticated rhetorical abilities of ordinary speakers; rather, it is motivated by the [sic] persuasiveness of metaphor in everyday thought" (p. 146).
1. Systematicity of literal expressions: Expressions form thematic clusters. Conceptual mappings can be ordered in a hierarchy of generality (p. 152).
2. Novel extensions of conventional metaphor: Elaborations of metaphors in poetry count as "evidence for the metaphoric nature of everyday thought" (p. 154)
3. Polysemy: Claudia Brugman and George Lakoff's analysis of over also counts as "evidence for the metaphorical nature of thought" (p. 157).
4. Psychological evidence: See below.
5. An alternative to metaphor in thought and language: Gibbs mentions Jackendoff's theory as an alternative to cognitive metaphor theory, but doesn't really discuss the difference in any depth.
6. Metaphor in science: Some Kuhnian observations. Also, a reference to an interesting 1985 historical study that Dedre Gentner and Jonathan Grudin did of the change in metaphors in psychology.
7. Metaphor in law: Essentially a long reference to Winter (1989).
8. Metaphor in art: Film and painting use cognitive mappings, too (e.g., Magritte).
9. Metaphor and myth: Myth use path metaphors etc.
10. Metaphor in culture: References to Claudia Brugman's 1983 paper on Mixtec and Quinn's 1991 paper on marriage. See also below.
4. Conclusion: "[M]etaphor is a fundamental mental capacity by which people understand themselves and the world through the conceptual mapping of knowledge from one domain onto another" (p. 207).

Psychological evidence
The subsection on psychological evidence (pp. 161-167) puts forward the following types of data:

1. The classroom study by Dedre Gentner and Donald R. Gentner (1983) showed that whether students were taught about electricity in terms of water metaphors or crowd metaphors would affect their performance on subsequent tests (p. 162).
2. People form mental images of idioms that are consistent with the words in the idiom; this allegedly contrasts with literal sentences, although no evidence is given for that claim (p. 163).
3. Priming subjects with an instance of a conceptual mapping allowed for more rapid reading of another instance of the same metaphor in one of Gibb's studies (p. 163).
4. When people are interviewed about the cause, volition, and manner of literal explosions, they make the same judgments as they do for metaphorical explosions (pp. 163-164).
5. Gesture studies show, according to Gibbs, that metaphor precedes speech (pp. 164-167).

Some Comments on "Cognitive Topology"
The interview studies mentioned in point 4 are a strange and dubious thing to cite for a cognitive psychologist. In Gibbs' mind, these "reflected mappings of source to target domains that preserved the cognitive topology of the source domain" (p. 163).

The reason is that if you ask someone whether a bomb explodes out of its own accord, they say "no," and if you ask someone whether people explode with anger out of their own accord, they also say "no". Hence, metaphor preserves "cognitive topology," according to his logic.

Lucky that Gibbs didn't ask about the speed, consequences, or reach of explosions instead, one might add."When a person explodes with anger, does he push the air away from him in a sudden shockwave?" "When a person explodes with anger, do people risk shrapnel wounds?" His findings proves more about his methods than about cognition.

Some Comments on the Gesture Studies
The gesture data that Gibbs cites as evidence for his cognitive metaphor theory is really bizarre. Much of it is hardly interpretable as metaphorical, and when it is, it doesn't correlate with speech in any simple way.

Let's look at the examples he quotes from David McNeil (1992), as there are only a few. This will give a sense of how thin the evidence is. Here they are, with slight changes in typography:

• It was a Sylvester and Tweety cartoon
  hands rising to offer an object (p. 165)
• I want to ask you a question
  hand forms a cup (p. 165)
  
• That book is packed with meaning
  one hand pushes against the palm of the other (p. 166)
  
• I've got to tell you something.
  palm-up hand moves toward hearer (p. 166)
• He's trying to masquerade
  both hands spread out and forward with a rotation (p. 167)

I can see that the example with packed with meaning might be taken as support for cognitive metaphor theory if the subject did indeed cram an imaginary object tightly into a container. But how on earth does Gibbs come to see the other cases as "evidence"?

Since when has cognitive metaphor theory related cups to questions? No one has reported that people use phrases like hand you a cup to mean "asking," not has anyone speculated that they might. It seems that these new gesture idioms can only be explained if we postulate a whole new set of mappings to deal with the new modality. That makes gesture data irrelevant as evidence for mappings underneath speech.

This point to the general problem that cognitive metaphor should first commit itself to a single model of what hangs together in the cognitive universe, and only then predict that this structure will be found in language, too. For instance, how are the concepts of speed, certainty, difficulty, hardness, and tallness related in cognition? After you've committed yourself to an answer to that question, cognitive metaphor theory will produce a prediction regarding speech.

Gibbs vs. Quinn
Naomi Quinn has objected to cognitive metaphor theory on the grounds that although people use a whole range of different incoherent metaphors to talk about marriage, they actually live in a pretty stable and coherent way. Often, they will even try out different verbal metaphors to find one that betters fits what they want to express. This constitutes evidence that culture precedes metaphor.

In the section headed "Metaphor in culture", Gibbs replies to this by saying that Quinn's analysis "confuses metaphor with idealized cognitive models" (p. 204). His idea of how an "Idealized Cognitive Model" can be both metaphorical and non-metaphorical at the same time is quite confusing, so I have to quote it at some length:

[...] there may possibly be one general cognitive or cultural model for marriage, just in the way Quinn suggests, that is motivated by a cluster of contiguous conceptual metaphors. The variety of expressions people use to speak of marriage reflect their different conceptual metaphors for different aspects of their experience of marriage. Yet the variety of expressions do not mean that there is not some sort of cultural model of marriage based on a complex configuration of different types of conceptual metaphors. [...] As is the case for anger, people use different metaphors, even within the same narrative, because each metaphor reflects a different aspect of their metaphorical understanding of some experience. One's cognitive model of marriage may consist of various metaphors that capture different aspects of our understanding of marriage, such as compatibility, mutual benefit, and lastingness. These metaphors may be contiguously linked, perhaps as a kind of radial structure, yet need not be internally consistent. For example, we may at times see marriage as being a container but at other times as being like a manufactured product. (pp. 204-205)

The best I can do in terms of interpretation is to say that Gibbs imagines that we have a chimera of metaphors in our head, so that marriage might have pigeon wings but a lion head. This doesn't explain how people can use two distinct metaphors for the same aspect (the head is both pigeon and lion?). It also doesn't explain how the conflicts between inconsistent metaphors are resolved.

Quinn's theory, on the other hand, is quite simple: People have a cultural model which is not a metaphor, and they then choose metaphors to express aspects of that model. It is revealing how this simple model contrasts with the "complex configuration" that Gibbs proposes.

Gibbs: The Poetics of Mind (1994)

This is the book that everyone in cognitive metaphor theory refers to when they get nervous. Written by a psychologist and full of compact summaries of experimental evidence, it provides just the kind of authority that a linguist needs when people start asking skeptical questions.

Some of the assertions about metaphor that have been claimed to have their empirical support in this book do indeed. Others do not. And in between, there are disputable points and conclusions that others have stretched beyond what they can carry.

General Outlook and Ideas
The book is pretty orthodox in its embrace of cognitive metaphor theory. Here are some illustrative quotes from the introduction, with parentheses added by me:

• "Language (is not independent of the mind but) reflects our perceptual and conceptual understanding of experience." (p. 16)
• "Figuration (is not merely a matter of language but) provides much of the foundation for thought, reason, and imagination." (p. 16)
• "Metaphorical meaning is grounded in nonmetaphorical aspects of recurring bodily experiences or experiential gestalts." (p. 16)
• "[...] metaphorical understanding is grounded in nonmetaphorical preconceptual structures that arise from everyday bodily experience." (p. 17)

Just to add a few from later in the book:

• "[...] it seems certain now that the study of clichéd idiomatic expressions can provide significant evidence on how people think metaphorically in everyday life." (p. 318)
• "[…] the mind itself is primarily structured out of various tropes." (p. 434)
• "Figuration (is not merely a matter of language but) provides much of the foundation for thought, reason, and imagination." (p. 435)
• "Similar cognitive mechanisms drive our understanding of both literal and figurative speech." (p. 435)
• "[…] we metaphorically conceptualize our experiences through very basic sensory experiences that are abstracted to form figurative thought." (p. 444)

So, in summary, we still have the three-stage model of cognitive metaphor theory:

Experience

→

Thought

→

Speech

Mental Images as Empirical Evidence
Gibbs enthusiastically embraces the use of introspective reports as a way of investigating psychological aspects of metaphor: "One way to uncover speakers’ tacit knowledge of the metaphorical basis for idioms is through a detailed examination of speakers’ mental images of idioms," he explains (p. 292).

It turns out that the kind of support he has in mind concerns the coherence of imagery across subjects:

If people’s tacit knowledge of idioms is not structured by different conceptual metaphors, there should be little consistency in participants’ responses to questions about the causes and consequences of actions in their mental images of idioms with similar nonliteral interpretations. (p. 293)

That is, supposing that the coherence cannot be brought about be any other means than a conceptual metaphor. This heavy but implicit assumption is never questioned or examined and puts his whole edifice in danger of become a load of introspective nonsense.

He does, of course, find that people are pretty consistent in the way they picture scenes like spilling the beans. From this he concludes that "the figurative meanings of idioms are motivated by various conceptual metaphors that exist independently as part of our conceptual system" (p. 295).

However, he is understandably uncomfortable with the idea of the mental image being the meaning of an idiom. To avoid this natural next step, he is at pains not to have the mental image be a byproduct of the conceptual mapping, not the flesh and blood of it:

The empirical evidence in support of this conclusion does not in any way suggest that people actually form mental images of idioms as a normal part of their online understanding of idioms. The data simply, and significantly, demonstrate how people’s common metaphorical knowledge provides part of the motivation for why idioms have the figurative meaning they do. Traditional theories of idiomaticity have no way of accounting for these imagery findings, because they assume that the meanings of idioms arise from metaphors that are now dead and no longer a prominent part of our everyday conceptual system. (p. 295)

 So oddly, he recognizes that the mental images that his subjects described may have been constructed on his cue -- but he insists that this drawing up of a picture from a sentence can only occur in a consist way if people already think in terms of conceptual mappings.

From those premises, sure, this data proves the existence of cognitive mappings.

Dead Metaphors and Shallow Processing
On of the basic tenets of cognitive metaphor is that there are no dead metaphors. If cognitive metaphor theorists concedes that some metaphors were dead, it would undermine the "deep" analyses of all the others. If kick the bucket is dead, why should we believe that see the point isn't?

It is therefore somewhat surprising that Gibbs does in fact allow for dead metaphors:

[...] the dead-metaphor and conceptual views of idiomaticity should not be seen as competing theories. Many idiomatic phrases could very well be dead or have meanings that are arbitrarily determined by as matters of convention. (p. 308)

Even more disturbingly, he states that people can in fact get by pretty well without conceptual mappings:

[…] listeners may not always instantiate specific conceptual metaphors that motivate an idiom’s meaning when understanding some phrase in conversation. Similarly, people may not always analyze the literal word meanings of idioms during comprehension. There will be occasions when people do tap into an idiom’s conceptual foundation. Readers may also process the individual word meanings when they attempt to comprehend certain kinds of idioms. But it is a mistake to assume that some types of analysis will occur each and every time someone encounters an idiomatic expression.

So one may ask what exactly it is that conceptual mappings do if they aren't really central to understanding an idiom, but aren't images either?

Both of these points certainly cast a somewhat troubling light the reference Lakoff and others make to Gibbs' book as if it supports the "aliveness" of any speculative story they might cook up.

Analyzable and Unanalyzable Idioms
Gibbs makes a distinction between idioms that are understood in a compositional fashion and idioms that aren't, and he states that "there is reasonable consistency in people’s intuitions of the analyzability of idioms" (p. 279).

This claim is, again, based on introspective reports from his subjects. In a 1989 article he wrote with Nandini Nayak, a list of idioms are thus categorized according to a number of parameters, for instance the possibility of passivization (e.g., *the bucket was kicked by him).


This gives them a list of "decomposable" idioms (including break the ice, let off steam, play with fire, and clear the air) and a list of "nondecomposable" ones (including kick the bucket, chew the fat, raise the roof, and play the field).

Interestingly, they also feel the need for a third category for idioms that can be analyzed under certain assumptions about the metaphorical reference of the constituents. As the booklet given to the subjects explain,

[...] there are idioms that are decomposable but whose individual words have a more metaphorical relation to their figurative meanings. Thus, the phrase spill the beans means something like ‘reveal a secret.’ Although there is a fairly close relationship between spill and ‘reveal’, the word beans refers to ‘secrets’ in a less direct, metaphorical way. Idioms such as spill the beans are called ‘abnormally decomposable.’ (p. 109)

This category ends up catching a number of idioms including promise the moon, pass the buck, steal one's thunder, and bury the hatchet.

Whatever we think of the psychological relevance and reality of this taxonomy of metaphors, it is certainly clear that Gibbs does not want all idioms to be on par.

He must have an intuition that the empirical evidence can't hold up to Lakoff and Johnson's strong claims about the "aliveness" of idioms, and he thus tries to carve out a more reasonable position for himself by introducing a protective belt of terminology.

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.

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)

"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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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)

From Molecule to Metaphor (2006), chapters 15-17

These three chapters in Feldman's book are based on the classes he and George Lakoff give together at Berkeley. They describe Lakoff's theory of metaphor as we know it from countless other sources.

Primary Metaphor and the Basis of Meaning
Feldman begins by repeating the well-known theory that meaning grows out of first-hand experience:

For perception, action, emotions, and so on, human experience and the social relations shared by all people provide the basis for learning words. (p. 185)

[...] abstract, cultural, and technical words and concepts arise from the opulent substrate of direct experience. [...] people, as neural systems, understand abstract ideas because these concepts are mapped to and actiavte brain curcuits involved in embodied experience. (p. 185)

There is now very strong evidence that essentially all of our cultural, abstract, and theoretical concepts derive their meanings by mapping, through metaphor, to the embodied experiential concepts we explored in earlier chapters. (p. 199)

Bi-directional Metaphor and Scaffolding
Lakoff (through Feldman) makes a curious remark in the middle of chapter 16:

Once a domain of knowledge becomes well known, it can itself serve as a source domain (basis) for understanding more novel concepts. We sometimes get metaphors mapping both ways, for example, between war and sports. These create no difficulty---the appropriate concepts in each domain are activated and inferences are drawn from the combined activation. (p. 209)

And nothing more is said of that matter. This seem to be essentially Lakoff falsifying Lakoff: Saying at once that metaphors need not go "all the way down" and still claiming that they do.

More concretely, the first sentence seems to oscillate between to claims depending on which way the evidence goes: Either it means that we learn new things by comparing them to old (which everyone agrees on); or else it means that the connection between the new subject matter and the old are permanently established and remain in use (which is false).

I don't know exactly what it means that "the appropriate concepts in each domain are activated and inferences are drawn from the combined activation," and Feldman/Lakoff doesn't explain. Is the target domain known or not known? Is any information actually transferred, and if so, what?

The Invariance Principle Returns
They also repeat what Lakoff said twenty years ago:

Metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the frame and schema structure) of the source domain, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domain. This is called the invariance principle. (p. 209-10)

Or, equivalently: metaphors preserve structure except when they don't. They continue:

As a consequence, the image-schematic structure of the target domain cannot be violated: one cannot find cases in which a source domain interior is mapped onto a target domain exterior, or a source domain exterior is mapped onto a target domain path. This simply does not happen. (p. 210)

But since the target domains don't have literal paths, this could hardly be more than a tautology. There would be no way to identify whether the thing we map the interior onto actually is an "interior," since no such thing is there.

The only way we could in principle falsify this claim would be if we could find some case where the metaphorical outside of the target domain could also be the metaphorical inside. Such cases do indeed exist and thus falsify Lakoff's claim. Examples are HOT/COOL IS FASHIONABLE, UPHILL/DOWNHILL IS DIFFICULT, and THICK/THIN IS IMPLAUSIBLE.

Zoltán Kövecses: "Anger" (1995)

Looking back at the case study on anger metaphors in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987), Zoltán Kövecses clarifies and elaborates his views on the respective roles of culture and body in the shaping of languages.

He reiterates that human physiology constrains metaphor systems (p. 195), but now also concedes that "there may be differences between cultures in both conceptualized and real physiology" (p. 193). Thus, upon reflection, he admits that concepts are "influenced by both culture and the human body" (p. 182).

The assertion that anger may differ physiologically across cultures is followed by a reference to a paper by Robert C. Solomon, "Getting Angry" (1984). From what I gather, the paper contains some anthropological reflection on William James' theory of emotions.

The paper is written partly as a response to Dirk Geeraerts and Stefan Gondelaers' contribution to the same volume, "Looking back at anger."

Geeraerts and Gondelaers' point is (according to Kövecses' summary) that the fluid concepts for anger in English are actually remnants of the medieval theory of the humors, in which moods were explained in terms of imbalances between bodily fluids.

Kövecses' paper seems quite sound and insightful. I would perhaps only add that separating body and culture appears increasingly difficult given that bodies differ, body images differ, and that behavior depends on both.

George Lakoff: "The contemporary theory of metaphor" (1993)

George Lakoff's contribution to the second, expanded version of Metaphor and Thought (1979/1993) is written like a corrective to the "old," "traditional," and "classical" metaphor theories of the dark ages preceding Metaphors We Live By (1980). Lakoff's article gives paradigmatic examples of the thinking, rhetoric, and evidence he applies.

Literal means understood-without-mappings
Lakoff defines "literal" in terms of his hypothetical entity, the conceptual mapping:

those concepts that are not comprehended via conceptual metaphor might be called "literal." (p. 205)

He gives the sentence the balloon went up as an example of a literal utterance. It is thus not, according to Lakoff, comprehended through the use of a mapping. A sentence like the line goes from A to B does, on the other hand, does use a mapping (see also p. 215).

This definition is interesting, not only because it renders the concept of literal language dependent on Lakoff's theory. It also highlights the fact that what counts as literal and what counts as metaphorical is an empirical and psychological question. Lakoff should thus, according to his own theory, give an argument as to why the balloon went up does not require some pre-established bridge between various parts of the brain, and why the temperature went up does.

Note that he also implicitly hypothesizes that we do not need any conceptual infrastructure to comprehend surprising but presumably literal expressions such as the camel flew away or a wooden balloon.

If there is such a thing as conceptual mappings, it is not self-evident that they are only involved in what lakoff calls metaphorical expressions, and he gives no argument to that effect.

Literal language is identified by intuition
Later in the text, he relies even more explicitly on his intuition. He want to argue that the phrase ahead of is used metaphorically in the sentence

John is way ahead of Bill in intelligence. (p. 214)

To do so, he states:

To say that there is no metaphorical mapping from paths to scales is to say that "ahead of" is not fundamentally spatial and characterized with respect to heads; it is to claim rather that "ahead" is very abstract, neutral between space and linear scales, and has nothing to do with heads. This would be a bizarre analysis. (p. 214-15)

Again here, there is some confusion as to what counts as definition, and what counts as data. Lakoff clearly has the intuition that the meaning of ahead of is traceable to its spatial meaning, but he does not provide any criterion for literality or centrality other than this case-by-case intuition.

Since less clear-cut examples can be given, his extrapolation to all conceptualizations of magnitudes and scales is somewhat dubious.

Metaphor relates the abstract to the concrete
According to Lakoff, the function of metaphor is to conceptualize the abstract in terms of the concrete:

as soon as one gets away from concrete physical experience and starts talking about abstractions or emotions, metaphorical understanding is the norm. (p. 205)

Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject matter in terms of a more concrete, or at least highly structured subject matter. (245)

Metaphors are mappings across conceptual domains.
Such mappings are asymmetric and partial. [...]
Mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in everyday experience and knowledge. (p. 245)

This entails that we can picture the the metaphorical relations as a partial order on the set of domains. In this order, concrete, physical experience would be minimal elements, and all other domains could be placed somewhere higher up in the lattice corresponding to the order.

Conceptual mappings, a shy bird
One of the most interesting and controversial claims of cognitive metaphor theory is that there are no "dead" metaphors (see, e.g., pp. 227 and 245). We should be careful how we read this claim, though, to get its meaning and explanatory power right.

When asked how a particular metaphor is understood, we can pick an answer somewhere between two poles: In one extreme, we allege that the whole linguistic expression is stored in memory, along with its meaning, so that only recall and no "thinking" is required. In the other extreme, we claim that the metaphor requires a search from scratch for a good interpretation, perhaps in terms similarity, relevance, or both.

Lakoff and Johson's theory lies in between these two poles: They claim that the linguistic expressions are not stored, but that a non-linguistic infrastructure---"a huge system of thousands of cross-domain mappings" (p. 203)---is.

Thus, when I say that I'm boiling mad, you do not retrieve a stored meaning of the phrase. Instead, the metaphorical expression exploits an already existing mapping. This mapping works because activation in the concept "heated to the boiling point" will propagate into the concept "very, very angry." Thus, no stored phrase is needed; no search in conceptual space is needed.

Although there is nothing wrong with the picture of this neurological propagation, it fails to explain the linguistic data. The unfortunate effect is that clinging to a rigid structure behind metaphorical expressions (fixed mappings) is either wrong or a good old similarity-based account on a new bottle.

The mapping account: Motivation and idea
The mapping account of metaphor in its most basic form explains a metaphor with reference to a structure-preserving function from the source domain to the target domain. The explanatory power of the theory lies in the fact that this function can be employed by different linguistic terms, not just a fixed, finite set of phrases.

Lakoff himself exemplifies this mechanism by his stipulated function from the domain of travel to the domain of love. The theory then says that travel concepts map onto love concepts, but not only that: The relations that hold between any specific set of travel concepts are preserved by the function so that we reason as if they also hold between the love concepts.

So for instance, the images of IMPEDIMENTS and VEHICLE under this mapping are DIFFICULTIES and RELATIONSHIP. And since IMPEDIMENTS can cause the VEHICLE to stop (a relation in the source domain), so can DIFFICULTIES cause the RELATIONSHIP to stop (the corresponding relationship in the target domain).

So far, the theory is simple and true. It does seems to warrant the conclusion that we use these mappings, and using them for reasoning and not just talk. But then the problems begin.

Ontological gaps in the mapping
The first problem is that not all objects fit into the function.

It goes fine if we plug entities like DESTINATION, FUEL, etc. into metaphorical expressions---these are then discovered that to have been related to LIFE GOALS, EMOTIONS, etc. all along.

But other objects seem to have no equivalents in the target domain. GAS STATION, MAP, PASSPORTS, and numerous other entities are only feebly related, if at all, to entities in the domain of love.

A the quote above (from p. 245) shows, Lakoff is aware of this problem, and he recognizes that metaphors are only "partial" mappings. The functions can only be defined on a subset of the source domain

There is no explicit discussion of why that might be the case, given that the mappings are real, coherent objects, but the arguments I discuss below may throw some light on the mystery.

Epistemic gaps in the mapping
The second problem is the fact that not all source domain structure is in fact preserved in the target domain. For instance, as Lakoff notes,

you can give someone a kick, even if that person doesn't have it afterward, and [...] you can give someone information, even if you don't lose it. (p. 216)

Thus "giving" a kick and "giving" information does not have the same structure as "giving" a present.

Lakoff explains this by saying that the "inherent target domain structure automatically limits what can be mapped" (p. 216). He calls this, in super-sinister fashion, "the Invariance Principle," and he launches it as an empirical hypothesis, not a patch on his theory (p. 215).

It should be clear, though, that this principle takes the piss out of the theory to a quite considerable extent. Remember that the empirical justification for introducing the invisible conceptual mappings was the fact that they could explain an array of facts without invoking conventionality or learning of particular phrases; and a part of its attraction lay in the fact that it warranted the hypothesis that these mappings governed thought as well as speech.

Modifying this strong hypothesis with a cautious "principle" that can be invoked every time a mapping begins to look like nothing but a handy label on a bunch of contingent conventions significantly reduces the attractions of the theory. If mapping can't predict anything and only explain some things some times, then they should indeed be an endangered species.

The cyclicity of the language-thought-language argument
A last point that resonated well with McGlone's criticism is the fact that Lakoff sometimes seems to use his own hypotheses as evidence for his theory. An example concerns the mapping SEEING IS TOUCHING, which accounts for metaphors like their eyes met. Lakoff writes:

This metaphor is made real in the social practice of avoiding eye "contact" on the street (p. 243)

The example is quite similar to the ARGUMENT IS WAR example in Metaphors We Live By:

It is important to see that we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. [...] It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; its structures the actions we perform in arguing. (p. 4)

Given what Lakoff has said about the "Invariance Principle," this suddenly seems a lot less likely. If the target domain can really override the relations of the source domain, why should the mapping then provide any new information?

Apparently, we already have such an extensive knowledge of argumentation that we can filter out siege his argument from attack his argument. So why should the metaphor have anything to say with respect to our actions?

At best, the metaphor can fill out some roles that were not already filled or structured by our prior knowledge of the target domain -- but this is a much weaker statement than the one Lakoff (and Johnson) actually made.