Lakoff And Johnson: A Conceptual Analysis

Since Lakoff and Johnson first introduced the idea of conceptual metaphor in 1980, it has been widely acknowledged that metaphor is fundamentally conceptual rather than linguistic in nature. In another word, human beings not only make use of the metaphoric expressions but also perceive the world as well as think metaphorically.

This innovative theory totally changed the conventional image of metaphor as a kind of rhetorical devices and led to heated discussion on its mechanism and function. Various papers have been written to discuss the use of conceptual metaphor in English as well as Chinese. Lakoff and Johnson discussed conceptual metaphors in their world-famous work Metaphors We Live by (1980). Later on, Lakoff continued his studies on

Yu (1996) carried out a comprehensive investigation on the Chinese metaphor, especially the TIME-AS-SPACE metaphor and the event structure metaphor. His study contradicts Alverson (1994)’s conclusion that in Chinese the speaker (experiencer) is always stationary, facing the past and with the future behind. Lan (1999) discussed the use of UP-DOWN metaphor in Chinse and the reason behind the manifestations and realizations. Zhou (2000) proposed 11 structural dimensions of metaphorical concept of time and supports the experientialism theory concerning the relationship between thinking and meaning. Lv and Lu (2013) investigated the vertical-spatial metaphor of emotions in Chinese and challenged the one-way projection theory of Lakoff and

Traditionally, metaphors are deemed as individual entities, which occur one by one. But Lakoff and Johnson proposed that metaphors are systems of human conceptualization, operating deep in human thought and cognition and, at the same time, surfacing in everyday language in a systematic manner (Yu, 1996:36). The essence of metaphor is to comprehend and experience a certain kind of thing in terms of another.

In another word, the specific linguistic expressions don’t occur randomly. Instead, they are governed by different sorts of conceptual metaphors systematically. Thus, the mechanism of conceptual metaphors is mappings across conceptual domains: the source domain (entities that we are familiar with) is mapped onto the target domain (entities that we attempt to explain or comprehend) by ontological and epistemic correspondences.

Via the ontological correspondences, the entities in the source domain are mapped onto the entities in the target domain. As for the epistemic correspondences, knowledge of the source domain is mapped onto knowledge of the target domain to form inference patterns. With the ARGUMENTS ARE BUILDINGS metaphor, for instance, the ontological correspondences between the two domains are as follows:

1. The supportive evidences and theories of the argument correspond to the foundation of the