Shen and Balaban: "Metaphorical (In)Coherence in Discourse" (1999)

One consequence of the strong "conceptual structure" view of metaphors is that metaphorical expressions are always understood through activations of an underlying metaphor or source domain.

As a consequence, one would expect that writers and speakers were primed to use several instantiations of the same metaphor once they has used a single instantiation of it: We have come a long way since our humble beginnings, we were stuck, but now we're back on track, etc., etc.

But this doesn't seem to be the case, Yeshayahu Shen and Noga Balaban show in this paper. Their methodology pivots around a comparison of a corpus of "planned" or highly explicit uses of a metaphor, and corpus of spontaneous uses. Using a number of different measures, they find that the "planned" newspaper clippings in their corpus exhibit much, much higher metaphorical coherence than the unplanned.

They conclude:

None of the analyses [in the paper] supports the claim that, as a default, unplanned discourse exhibits a coherent distribution of metaphorical expressions. […] The use of metaphors in unplanned discourse appears more like free, uncontrolled "navigation" between a large number of root metaphors than a consistent elaboration of any unifying root metaphors. Indeed, special planning seems to be required to make discourse metaphorically coherent. (p. 151)

As a consequence, it would seem that kliché metaphors have a different cognitive status than deliberate, explicit, and overt metaphors do. Conventional metaphors do not necessarily activate any interesting cognitive architecture:

Rather, the fact that conventional metaphorical instantiations of a given metaphor appear in a given discourse does not necessarily seem to reflect a corresponding activation (in the producer's mind) of the root metaphor. Perhaps this means that the use of conventional expressions in real discourse is autonomous in that, under such conditions of natural discourse production, they do not rely on the functional activation of the entire root metaphor and, in that sense, their meanings are divorced from the underlying conceptual metaphors posited by the CM theory. (p. 152)

Thus, no role for "conceptual structures" with respect to conventional metaphors.

Shen and Balaban also note in passing that "metaphorical shifts in the unplanned passages occurred not only at the intersentential level but also at the intrasentential level" (p. 148). They found, for instance, inconsistent metaphors packed closely together in phrases like "cook up a trap" (p. 150) or the following examples (p. 148):

The peace process is moving forward and ripening (FOREIGN POLICY IS A JOURNEY/FRUIT).

The first step [of the Oslo agreement], the real embryonic one, actually works well (FOREIGN POLICY IS A JOURNEY/A PERSON/A MACHINE).

Violence is eating away the foundations of democracy (THE POLITICAL SYSTEM IS A FOOD/A BUILDING).

Given the reading speed of an ordinary adult, it seems reasonable to assume that these metaphor pairs cannot possibly be comprehended through a process involving mental imagery.

Keysar, Shen, Glucksberg, Horton: "Conventional Language: How Metaphorical Is It?" (2000)

This article reports an set of experiments on conventionalized metaphors. The experiments support the claim that stock metaphors such as He defended his argument are not in any real psychological sense understood by means of (literal) defense.

The experiments rest on the assumption that if the literal meanings of such metaphors are in fact "accessed" or "activated" during the reading of the metaphor, then they will be more readily available immediately after the reading (as in the priming effect known from other contexts). This availability is estimated by measuring the reading time of a sentence that uses the same source domain (e.g., defense) in a non-trivial way.

For instance, consider these three primings and stimuli:

1. prolific researcher, conceiving ideas ===> weaning her latest child
   
2. fertile researcher, giving birth to ideas ===> weaning her latest child

In the first case, the stimulus consists of stock phrases, in the second it consists of more original metaphors (but using the same mapping). If both types of metaphor are actually unpacked by thinking about what children and giving birth means, then they should prime subjects equally much for the metaphor that follows.

This, however, is not the case---at least not if reading time is used to measure the priming effect. Reading the target stimulus (weaning her latest child) is significantly slower when subjects are primed as in the first example compared to when they are primed as in the second.

This, in essence, is the result reported in the article. As the authors say:

Thus, while his criticism was right on target might not require use of a mapping between argument and war, his criticism was a guided cruise missile might very well do so. (p. 580)

By the way, the article appeared Journal of Memory and Language 43 (2000).