Conceptual Metaphor Theory

1. INTRODUCTION
Metaphor and metaphorical thought have held a privileged position within research topics approached from an interdisciplinary perspective. It is possible to trace, in both cases, long-standing and important philosophical roots –to the works of Aristotle, Bacon, Hume, Hobbes and Ricoeur, to name a few– as well as more contemporary contributions from the field of Cognitive Sciences, such as Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, 1979/1993; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980/2003; 1999), Property Attribution Theory (Glucksberg, 2001; 2003) or Structure Mapping Theory (Gentner, 1983, 1988; Gentner and Markman, 1997; Gentner, Bowdle, Wolff and Boronat, 2001), among many others.
Although metaphor was traditionally understood as a linguistic phenomenon and a rhetorical resource, the groundbreaking Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff and Johnson (onwards CMT) introduced the idea that “metaphor is not a figure of speech, but a mode of thought” (Lakoff, 1979/1993, p. 210). From this perspective, metaphor can be instantiated in other modes, different from language (for instance, images, sounds or gestures).
However, with the exception of some works that explored the nature and cognitive role of

Thus, it has become a common practice to state that the metaphor is (i) a substitution of one word by another that has an apparently different meaning, (ii) a linguistic comparison, with aesthetic or rhetorical ends, between two ideas or entities that share certain characteristics or qualities that are identifiable, or (iii) the creation of an artificial, linguistic analogy by applying a descriptive term to an entity that is different but analogous to the entity to which that term is applicable (Feldman, 2006; Kövecses, 2010; Zanotto, Cameron and Cavalcanti,