The Ubiquity of Metaphor and Metonymy: The metaphor/metonymy balance redressed

Abstract

In¹ 1985 Wolf Paprotté and I published our collective volume The Ubiquity of Metaphor: Metaphor in Language and Thought, which was largely based on papers presented during a highly successful 3-day Lakoff seminar in Trier in 1983. In those days the scientific community was beginning to discover the enormous possibilities opened up by the cognitive approach to metaphor as developed in Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live by (1980). The cognitive approach was revolutionary. Yet it was also too narrow in two respects. First, it did not see the equally innovative function of metonymy. Though a brief chapter in Metaphors We Live by discusses metonymy, it was only ten or fifteen years later that the serious investigation of metonymy came about. A second problem was the strict two-domain mapping proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, only providing for the source domain to be mapped onto the target domain. This is now replaced by the multi-space approach developed by Fauconnier and Turner (see below).