The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor

The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor

George Lakoff

(c) Copyright George Lakoff, 1992

To Appear in Ortony, Andrew (ed.) Metaphor and Thought (2nd edition), Cambridge

University Press.

Do not go gentle into that good night. -Dylan Thomas

Death is the mother of beauty . . . -Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

Introduction

These famous lines by Thomas and Stevens are examples of what classical theorists, at

least since Aristotle, have referred to as metaphor: instances of novel poetic language in

which words like mother, go, and night are not used in their normal everyday senses. In

classical theories of language, metaphor was seen as a matter of language not thought.

Metaphorical expressions were assumed to be mutually exclusive with the realm of

ordinary everyday language: everyday language had no metaphor, and metaphor used

mechanisms outside the realm of everyday conventional language. The classical theory

was taken so much for granted over the centuries that many people didn’t realize that it

was just a theory. The theory was not merely taken to be true, but came to be taken as

definitional. The word metaphor was defined as a novel or poetic linguistic expression

where one or more words for a concept are used outside of its normal conventional

meaning to express a similar concept. But such issues are not matters for definitions; they

are empirical questions. As a cognitive scientist and a linguist, one asks: What are the

generalizations governing the linguistic expressions re ferred to classically as poetic

metaphors? When this question is answered rigorously, the classical theory turns out to be

false. The generalizations governing poetic metaphorical expressions are not in language,

but in thought: They are general map pings across conceptual domains. Moreover, these

general princi ples which take the form of conceptual mappings, apply not just to novel

poetic expressions, but to much of ordinary everyday language. In short, the locus of

metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in

terms of another. The general theory of metaphor is given by characterizing such cross-

domain mappings. And in the process, everyday abstract concepts like time, states,

change, causation, and pur pose also turn out to be metaphorical. The result is that

metaphor (that is, cross-domain mapping) is absolutely central to ordinary natural

language semantics, and that the study of literary metaphor is an extension of the study of

everyday metaphor. Everyday metaphor is characterized by a huge system of thousands of

cross-domain mappings, and this system is made use of in novel metaphor. Because of

these empirical results, the word metaphor has come to be used differently in

contemporary metaphor research. The word metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain

mapping in the conceptual system. The term metaphorical expression refers to a linguistic

expression (a word, phrase, or sentence) that is the surface realization of such a cross-

domain mapping (this is what the word metaphor referred to in the old theory). I will

adopt the contemporary usage throughout this chapter. Experimental results

demonstrating the cognitive reali ty of the extensive system of metaphorical mappings are

discussed by Gibbs (this volume). Mark Turner’s 1987 book, Death is the mother of

beauty, whose title comes from Stevens’ great line, demonstrates in detail how that line

uses the ordinary system of everyday mappings. For further examples of how literary

metaphor makes use of the ordinary metaphor system, see More Than Cool Reason: A

Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, by Lakoff and Turner (1989) and Reading Minds: The

Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science, by Turner (1991). Since the everyday

metaphor system is central to the understanding of poetic metaphor, we will begin with

the everyday system and then turn to poetic examples.

Homage To Reddy

The contemporary theory that metaphor is primarily conceptual, conventional, and part of

the ordinary system of thought and language can be traced to Michael Reddy’s (this

volume) now classic paper, The Conduit Metaphor, which first appeared in the first

edition of this collection. Reddy did far more in that paper than he modestly suggested.

With a single, thoroughly analyzed example, he allowed us to see, albeit in a restricted

domain, that ordinary everyday English is largely metaphorical, dispelling once and for

all the traditional view that metaphor is primarily in the realm of poetic or figurative

language. Reddy showed, for a single very significant case, that the locus of metaphor is

thought, not language, that metaphor is a major and indispensable part of our ordinary,

conventional way of conceptualizing the world, and that our everyday behavior reflects

our metaphorical understanding of experience. Though other theorists had noticed some

of these characteristics of metaphor, Reddy was the first to demonstrate it by rigorous

linguistic analysis, stating generalizations over voluminous examples. Reddy’s chapter on

how we conceptualize the concept of communication by metaphor gave us a tiny glimpse

of an enormous system of conceptual metaphor. Since its appearance, an entire branch of

linguis tics and cognitive science has developed to study systems of metaphorical thought

that we use to reason, that we base our actions on, and that underlie a great deal of the

structure of language. The bulk of the chapters in this book were written before the

development of the contemporary field of metaphor research. My chapter will therefore

contradict much that appears in the others, many of which make certain assumptions that

were widely taken for granted in 1977. A major assumption that is challenged by

contemporary research is the traditional division between literal and figurative language,

with metaphor as a kind of figurative language. This entails, by definition, that: What is

literal is not metaphorical. In fact, the word literal has traditionally been used with one or

more of a set of assumptions that have since proved to be false:

Traditional false assumptions

• All everyday conventional language is literal, and none is metaphorical.

• All subject matter can be comprehended literally, without metaphor.

• Only literal language can be contingently true or false.

• All definitions given in the lexicon of a language are literal, not metaphorical.

• The concepts used in the grammar of a language are all literal; none are

metaphorical.