Metaphor and metonymy
Some of the sentences discussed in the previous section involved metaphorical appearances of the image schemas of path and containment. Metaphor is stressed in much cognitive semantics as ‘an inherent and fundamental aspect of semantic and grammatical structure’ (Langacker 1987: 100). This contrasts with the more traditional view of metaphor as a special, additional feature of particular utterances, associated with imaginative or artistic uses of language rather than with everyday speech. On the traditional view of metaphor, metaphors are assumed not to reveal anything fundamental about the nature of meaning. Metaphor was originally a category of literary and rhetorical analysis, not of linguistic description (see e.g. Ricœur 1975). In contrast, a tradition of research inaugurated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) has demonstrated the ubiquity of metaphor in ordinary, everyday speech and claimed that it has a central importance in language structure.
On the traditional view of metaphor, which goes right back to Aristotle, metaphors are principally seen as a matter of (especially literary) usage. On this understanding, metaphors assert a resemblance between two entities. Thus, the metaphor the holiday was a nightmare works because it asserts a resemblance or similarity between the holiday and a nightmare. Understanding the meaning of the metaphorical utterance involves identifying things which holidays and nightmares might hold in common, such as being unpleasant. Metaphors like this are no more than isolated usages which can only be discussed on a case-by-case basis: we should not expect there to be any significant generalizations about metaphorical usages.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Lakoff 1993) questioned this traditional view on two grounds. First, they noticed that metaphor is much less exceptional and more widespread than is traditionally claimed. As an example of the widespread nature of metaphor, consider some of the expressions we use to talk about obligations:
Lakoff and Johnson noted that far from being unusual or atypical, metaphorical utterances like those in (3) are actually the basic, ordinary way in which obligations would be described in English. They also observed that these expressions all express a common underlying idea, which we could label OBLIGATIONS ARE PHYSICAL BURDENS. The sentences in (3) all express this single underlying idea differently, but this diversity should not obscure the fact that they all essentially make reference to the same similarity between obligations and physical burdens. Lakoff and Johnson observe that this systematicity is entirely characteristic of metaphor crosslinguistically. We typically find a variety of ways in which a single underlying metaphorical correspondence can be expressed.
Second, Lakoff and Johnson propose that it is not simply a random linguistic fact that English has so many expressions along the lines of (3). There is a reason that obligations are described as though they were physical burdens, and not in any other of the innumerable ways we could dream up. This is that the very idea of obligation is conceptualized through the idea of a physical burden: we actually think of, or conceptualize, obligations, Lakoff and Johnson claim, through the idea of burdens. The concept of assuming an obligation is structured on the analogy of the simpler concept of carrying a physical burden. We explore this idea in the following paragraphs.
The idea that some concepts can have metaphorical structure is referred to by Lakoff and Johnson as the conceptual theory of metaphor. This theory focuses on metaphor as a cognitive device which acts as a model to express the nature of otherwise hard-to-conceptualize ideas. Lakoff and Johnson’s claim rests on the idea that certain concepts lack independent structure of their own. Obligations would be one example of this: on the conceptual theory of metaphor, the concept of obligation inherits its structure from the concept of physical burdens. There are three terms which will help us to describe this process. The target concept – here, obligations – is the concept which is being understood metaphorically. The vehicle concept – here, physical burdens – is the concept which imposes its structure onto the target. On the conceptual metaphor theory, we understand the target through the vehicle: the structure of the vehicle concept shapes the structure of the target concept. This is usually described by saying that the conceptual metaphor OBLIGATIONS ARE PHYSICAL BURDENS maps our concept of obligation onto our concept of physical bur dens.
We can show the details of this mapping by lining vehicle and target up as follows. The capitalized concepts in the target domain correspond to those in the vehicle domain:
a. CARRYING PHYSICAL BURDENS requires the expenditure of energy and can become tiring.
b. If the burden is too HEAVY, it is impossible to CARRY: if you do not LOWER it, or DROP it, it will CAUSE YOU PHYSICAL DAMAGE.
c. DROPPING the physical burden may damage it.
d. The BURDEN may be TRANSFERRED to someone else.
e. In some cases its WEIGHT MAY BE LESSENED by removing some of its parts.
a. FULFILLING OBLIGATIONS requires the expenditure of energy and can become tiring.
b. If the obligation is too ONEROUS it is impossible to FULFIL: if you do not FREE YOURSELF OF IT, or RELINQUISH IT SUDDENLY, it will CAUSE YOU UNDUE STRESS.
c. SUDDENLY RELINQUISHING THE OBLIGATION may BE HARMFUL TO THOSE TO WHOM THE OBLIGATION IS OWED.
d. The OBLIGATION may BE FULFILLED by someone else.
e. In some cases it may be made LESS ONEROUS by removing some of its parts.
On the conceptual metaphor view, metaphor is a cognitive process which helps us to conceptualize our experience by setting up correspondences between easily understood things like burdens and hard to understand things like obligations. A metaphorical mapping allows knowledge about the metaphor’s vehicle domain to be applied to the target in a way that fundamentally determines or influences the conceptualization of the target: metaphor is a cognitive operation first and foremost.
To give another example, Lakoff identifies the connections between a target concept, love, and the metaphorical vehicle used to conceptualize it, the image of a journey. In the following paraphrase, the capitalized concepts in the vehicle domain correspond to those in the target domain:
Two TRAVELLERS are in a VEHICLE, TRAVELLING WITH COMMON DESTINATIONS. The VEHICLE encounters some IMPEDIMENT and gets stuck, that is, becomes nonfunctional. If the travellers do nothing, they will not REACH THEIR DESTINATION.
Two LOVERS are in a LOVE RELATIONSHIP, PURSUING COMMON LIFE GOALS. The RELATIONSHIP encounters some DIFFICULTY, which makes it nonfunctional. If they do nothing, they will not be able to ACHIEVE THEIR LIFE GOALS. (Lakoff 1993: 208)
In this instantiation, lovers correspond to travellers, the love relationship corresponds to the vehicle, and the lovers’ common goals correspond to their common destinations on the journey. The mapping is found in many common English metaphors for love and the situation of lovers, especially in times of difficulty: a relationship is stalled, lovers cannot keep going the way they’ve been going, they must turn back. Alternatively, the participants in the relationship may say look how far we’ve come, we can’t turn back now, we’re at a cross-roads, or we may have to go our separate ways (Lakoff 1993: 206). Since we actually use the concept of a journey in our reasoning about love, it is not surprising that English has so many different expressions in which journey-language is used to represent love. Treating metaphor as simply a matter of linguistic usage misses this obvious generalization.
QUESTION What evidence might there be in English for the conceptual metaphor TREATING AN ILLNESS IS FIGHTING A WAR?
On the conceptual theory of metaphor, metaphor is a deep-seated cognitive process which can be used to understand the structural relations between the meanings of lexical items. It is not the only such process, however. Another important structural relation is the relation of metonymy. In traditional rhetoric, metonymy is the figure of speech based on an interrelation between closely associated terms – cause and effect, pos sessor and possessed, and a host of possible others. The common element in metonymy is notion of contiguity: the things related by a metonymy can be understood as contiguous to (neighbouring) each other, either conceptually or in the real world. Here are some examples:
In (4a) we understand that Moscow refers to the Russian government. In (4b) it isn’t the kettle itself, but the water inside it, which is boiling. In (4c) the cinema is not claimed to just have seven screens: the speaker means that it has seven separate auditoriums, each with its own screen. In (4d) the speaker does not mean that they just saw the doctor: they mean that they consulted the doctor. In (4e) it was not just the bags, but their contents as well which were destroyed. In all these examples the highlighted word expresses something associated with its literal meaning: in (a), a place stands for one of its salient institutions (the Russian government), in (b) the container stands for the contents, in (e) the container stands for the container and the contents, and in (c) an important part of the auditorium stands for the whole auditorium. Example (4d) is the verbal equivalent of (4c): one event, seeing, stands for the wider event of which it is part: having a medical appointment.
Notice the difference between metonymies and metaphors: in metaphor, there is a relation of mapping between two concepts, with the structure of one concept (JOURNEYS, PHYSICAL BURDENS) being imposed onto another (LOVE, OBLIGATIONS). Metonymies do not serve to structure one concept in terms of another: it is not possible to articulate the detailed map pings we established in the love and obligation cases. Instead, they draw on the associations within a single conceptual ‘domain’, allowing one part of a concept to convey another. We will see further examples of this in the next section.
