Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Abstract

In a radical departure from theories based on digital, amodal accounts of cognition and language, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) proposed an account of metaphor as fundamentally conceptual, arguing that familiar linguistic metaphors are but surface manifestations of underlying conceptual relationships. They claimed that most conceptual thought is metaphorical, and conceptual domains are instantiated and expressed in families of conceptual metaphors, such as ‘MORE IS U’, ‘EMOTIONALLYINTIMATE IS PHYSICALLY CLOSE’, ‘ARGUMENT IS WAR’, ‘LOVE IS A JOURNEY’, and ‘THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS’. These conceptual metaphors number in the hundreds (Gibbs, 1994b; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), and they combine to serve as the foundation for new metaphors. For many of these families of metaphors Lakoff and Johnson trace the underlying metaphor to a literal concept based on embodied physical experience.

Keywords

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Parts of this chapter were adapted with permission from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers from L. David Ritchie (2003a), ‘ “ARGUMENT IS WAR”—or is it a game of chess? Multiple meanings in the analysis of implicit metaphors’, Metaphor and Symbol, 18: 125–46.