A Cognitive-cultural Study In Metaphor

Metaphor is pervasive in language. The study of metaphor has a long history. In Poetics and Rhetoric Aristotle considered metaphor as merely an ornamental extra in language, and he thought one had to be genius in order to use a metaphor properly. What Aristotle said has a deep influence on the study of metaphor. Therefore, traditionally, metaphor has been regarded only as a figure of speech. It is widely shared that some words are used metaphorically in order to achieve some artistic and rhetorical effect.But over the past twenty years there has been a shift in metaphor studies to a cognitive position, prompted by Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) book Metaphors We Live By, arising from the perception of inadequacies of traditional approach, and the need to take account of new findings about the psychology of categorization, including prototype theory. Many scholars from a variety of disciplines have since contributed to this work over the years and have produced new and important results in the study of metaphor, for example, cognitive psychology (Gibbs, 1994), cognitive linguistics (Lakoff, 1987), speech act theory (Searle, 1979), semantic-field theory (Kittay, 1987), similarity-creating theory (Indurkhya, 1992), relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1985/1986), space blending theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 1996&1998; Coulson, 1997). Their conception of metaphor...