An Overview Of Metaphors

Abstract: The cognitive linguistic view of metaphor can provide insights into how certain linguistic phenomena work, and it can shed new light on how metaphorical meaning emerges. It also presents the new analysis that both metaphorical language and thought arise from the basic bodily, sensorimotor experience of human beings. Metaphor seems to be deeply embedded in our way of conceptualising the world and, as a result, metaphors realized in language are only possible due to the conceptual metaphors that structure our thinking. The focus of this study is to analyse abstract target domains, which are often understood via human body parts in English, in order to support the hypothesis that the metaphorical concept is thus embodied and experiential

According to Kövecses (2010, 4): “Conceptual domain A is conceptual domain B, which is called a conceptual metaphor”. A conceptual metaphor consists of two conceptual domains, in which one domain is understood in terms of another. A conceptual domain is any coherent organisation of experience that is motivated by and grounded in our bodily experience. The two domains that participate in conceptual metaphor are the conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions to understand another conceptual domain. This view is also supported by Croft (1993) who claims that: “Domains play a central role in the definition of a metaphor as a mapping of conceptual structure from one domain to another. Domains also play a significant (though not defining) role in most metaphors...” (1993,

According to Johnson (1987), an important generalisation that emerges from these conceptual metaphors is that conceptual metaphors typically employ a more abstract concept as target and a more concrete or physical concept as their source. Although this process may typically be formulated as ‘TARGET DOMAIN IS SOURCE DOMAIN’ (Lakoff 1993, 207), it does not mean that the two domains are identical. Only certain aspects of the source domain are mapped onto the target domain, depending on which aspects of the target one intends to highlight (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Kövecses 2002). Given the partial nature of metaphorical mappings, it follows logically that different source domains can be used to focus on different aspects of the same target