Metaphor and Culture

Metaphor and Culture

Conceptual Metaphor

A conceptual metaphor consists of correspondences or mappings between a source and a target domain. The meaning of metaphorical linguistic expressions is based on these correspondences.

Issues in Metaphor and Culture

1. Universal Metaphors:

  • Native speakers of all languages use many metaphors.

  • Metaphorical expressions vary across languages (e.g., "spending your time" in English vs. "filling your time" in Hungarian).

  • Question: Are there any universal metaphors?

  • Difficult to study due to the number of languages (4,000-6,000).

  • Many conceptual metaphors appear in a wide range of languages, such as:

    • TIME IS SPACE (English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Sesotho)

    • AN ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER (English, Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian, Wolof, Zulu, Polish)

    • HAPPINESS IS UP (English & Chinese)

    • KNOWING IS SEEING (European languages)

    • MIND IS THE BODY (European languages)

  • Event Structure Metaphor:

    • CAUSES ARE FORCES

    • STATES ARE CONTAINERS

    • PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS

    • ACTION IS MOTION

    • DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS (TO MOTION)

  • Metaphors for inner life:

    • SELF CONTROL IS OBJECT POSSESSION

    • SUBJECT AND SELF ARE ADVERSARIES

    • THE SELF IS A CHILD

Potential Universality

  • Many cases constitute near-universal or potentially universal conceptual metaphors.

Explaining Near-Universal Metaphors

  • Why do these exist in diverse languages and cultures?

    • Languages belong to different families and cultures.

    • Possible explanations:

      1. Miraculous independent development.

      2. Borrowing between languages.

      3. Universal basis for development.

  • Example: HAPPINESS IS UP

    • English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hungarian are from different language families.

    • Unlikely Hungarian borrowed it from Chinese and English from Hungarian.

Universal Bodily Experience

  • Lakoff and Johnson's argument: When happy, people tend to be physically up, active, and smiling.
    *These are common experiences that may produce universal conceptual metaphors.

  • The linguistic expressions may vary.

  • Kövecses's proposal: Universal bodily experiences are captured in conceptual metonymies.
    *Metonymies correspond to physiological, behavioral, and expressive reactions, giving us the embodied nature of concepts.
    *Embodiment of concepts may be overlapping across languages, leading to shared conceptual metaphors.
    *It is the primary metaphors that are potentially universal.
    *The primary metaphors consist of correlations of a subjective experience with a physical experience
    *complex metaphors (e.g., THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS) are composed of primary metaphors (e.g., LOGICAL ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE).

Primary Metaphors

  • Examples of primary metaphors:

    • MORE IS UP

    • PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS

    • INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS

Brain Mechanisms and Metaphor

  • Steven Mithen's suggestion: Early humans had a domain-specific brain where cognitive domains were isolated.

  • Metaphoric thought developed in the Upper Palaeolithic period with a more fluid brain.
    *Humans developed the PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS conceptual metaphor

  • Examples:

    • ANIMALS AND PLANTS ARE PEOPLE

    • ANIMALS AND PLANTS ARE STRUCTURED OBJECTS

    • PEOPLE ARE STRUCTURED OBJECTS

  • Cars metaphorically viewed in terms of the human body (Western Apache).

  • Spatial relations understood as parts of the human body (e.g., head = up, feet = down).

  • These metaphors represent global metaphoric potentialities of a cognitively fluid brain.

Commonality in Human Experience

  • Commonality in human experience shapes metaphors.

  • Countervailing forces work against universality.

2. The Issue of Embodiment

  • Embodiment distinguishes the cognitive linguistic conception of meaning.

  • The human body plays a role in the emergence of meaning.

  • Image schemas (based on basic physical experiences) are crucial.

  • Embodied experience is not homogeneous, and cultures can emphasize different components.

  • Differential experiential focus.

Example: Anger

  • Physiological reactions: increase in skin temperature, respiration rate, blood pressure, and heart rate (Ekman et al. 1983).

  • These explain why we find the same generic-level conceptual metaphor across independent languages.

  • Languages and cultures do not attend to the same physiological reactions.

  • English and Hungarian: rise in body temperature and increase in blood pressure.

  • Chinese: PRESSURE is more focal (Yu 1998).

  • Ilongot of New Guinea: undifferentiated and generalized state of physiological arousal (Rosaldo 1980).

  • Different languages/cultures base anger-concepts on different components and levels of embodiment.

Historical Perspective

  • Historical corpora reveal changes in conceptualization over time (Gevaert 2001, 2005).

  • In English, anger as HEAT was prominent (850-950), later as PRESSURE, then jointly.

  • ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER.

  • Differential experiential focus resolves the issue that physiological responses do not change over time.

  • Different components of embodiment may occupy a central position due to cultural influences.

3. The Relationship Between Metaphor and Culture

  • Metaphorical conceptualization occurs under two pressures:

    • Pressure of embodiment.

    • Pressure of context.

  • Context is determined by local culture.

  • Effort to be coherent with both body and culture.

Context

  • Context: physical, social, cultural, discourse aspects.

  • Factors: setting, topic, audience, medium.

  • ECONOMY IS HEALTH metaphor is more frequent in winter.

  • Metaphor selection depends on personal history, concerns, and interests.

  • EUROPEAN UNION AS AN ELECTRIC CIRCUIT (example of personal metaphor).

4. Dimensions of Metaphor Variation
4.1. Cross-cultural variation:

  • Obvious dimension of variation.

  • Forms of variation:

    • Congruence between generic-level and specific-level metaphors.

    • Different source domains for a target domain.

    • Different target domains for a source domain.

    • Preference for certain metaphors.

    • Unique conceptual metaphors.

    • Congruent metaphors

      • THE ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER metaphor may be near-universal.

      • The metaphor constitutes a generic schema that gets filled out by each culture that has the metaphor.

  • Example: ANGER IS (UNDERSTOOD AS BEING) IN THE HEART

    • English: Heart = love and affection.

    • Japanese: + ANGER IS (IN THE ) HARA (unique)

  • Chinese THE ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER (gas instead of fluid)

  • Zulu shares many conceptual metaphors with English

    • ANGER IS (UNDERSTOOD AS BEING) IN THE HEART.

    • The heart metaphor conceptualizes anger in Zulu as leading to internal pressure since too much “emotion substance” is crammed into a container of limited capacity.

4.2. Alternative Metaphors

  • There can be differences in the range of conceptual metaphors (the range of source domains) that languages and cultures have available for the conceptualization of particular target domains.

Life as a target:

*Hmong (in Laos; Thailand) LIFE IS A STRING. It can be cut and broken.
*English LIFE IS STRUGGLE/WAR LIFE IS PRECIOUS POSSESSION

4.2. Within-culture variation

  • Metaphors vary not only cross-culturally but also within cultures.

  • Dimensions of variation: social, regional, ethnic, style, subcultural, diachronic, and individual.

  • Cognitive dimension of social-cultural diversity.

  • Social dimension: men/women, young/old, middle-class/working-class.

  • Do these groups use different metaphors?

  • Limited systematic studies from a cognitive linguistic perspective.
    *Men use words such as bunny, kitten, bird, chick, dish, sweetie pie of women: WOMEN ARE (SMALL) FURRY ANIMALS (bunny, kitten), WOMEN ARE BIRDS (bird, chick, hen-party); WOMEN ARE SWEET FOOD (cookie, dish, sweetie pie)
    *Women Men are called LARGE FURRY ANIMALS by women. Men are describes as FOOD, especially for sexual purposes

  • Regional dimension:

    • Languages often develop new metaphors when the language is moved by some of its speakers to a part of the world different from where it was originally spoken.

    • Languages develop new metaphors when moved to different regions (e.g., Afrikaans).

    • Afrikaans was carried from Europe to South Africa, and, as shown by Rene Dirven (1994), it changed its metaphorical patterns. It acquired many new metaphors based on natural phenomena and the animal world.

  • Style dimension:

    • Style is determined by audience, topic, setting, and medium.

    • Slang is typically rich in metaphor.

  • Subcultural dimension:

    • Each society and culture consists of a number of subcultures.

    • Subcultures develop their own metaphors.
      *Empathy Groups Certain conceptual metaphors for each group Emotionally mentally ill people Depressed people DEPRESSION IS DARKNESS, DEPRESSION IS HEAVY, DEPRESSION IS DESCENT/DOWN (shared between)
      *DEPRESSION IS A CAPTOR (unique to them)

  • Individual dimension:

    • Individuals have idiosyncratic metaphors.

    • Novel or versions of existing metaphors.

    • Example: Love relationships as