The Story of Conceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings?

Abstract

Research into conceptual metaphor has improved our understanding of metaphoric mapping, but because researchers have largely ignored the concrete expressions that constitute metaphoric groupings, little or no heed has been paid to discursive and rhetorical influences that bear upon mapping processes. Because metaphors are always uttered by historically and culturally situated speakers, metaphoric mappings are subordinate to the speakers’ political, philosophical, social, and individual commitments. These ideological commitments are often expressed as, and may be constituted as, stories. Presenting evidence from focus groups, this article shows that metaphors and metaphoric mappings are guided by “licensing stories.”

Much has been explained about conceptual metaphor since George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) first introduced the idea. Indeed, research has supplied abundant evidence that most of our metaphors are based on conceptual metaphors such as argument is war, happy is up, life is a journey, and many others (see Gibbs 1994; Johnson 1987, 1993; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Sweetser 1992; Turner 1991). Yet there is good reason to investigate further the ways conceptual metaphors operate in our writing and talk. Currently, conceptual metaphors are described in two main ways. First, they are seen as preexistent structures available to be concretely instantiated. Second, they are seen as underpinnings, even fundamental underpinnings, of culture. While both of these views have merit—we do recruit conceptual metaphors to invent concrete discourse; conceptual metaphors do give coherence to many cultural regularities—there is an important sense in which these views impede our understanding of how conceptual metaphors themselves work. I want to argue (1) that my reexamination of conceptual metaphors reveals complexly operating rhetorical patterns, (2) that these patterns help to constitute conceptual metaphors, and (3) that we can develop a richer account of conceptual metaphor as a cultural phenomenon if we consider the patterned relationships between metaphors and other discursive forms—beginning with what I will call “licensing stories.”

In some sense, my argument is rooted in methodology. Studies of conceptual metaphor have usually limited the kind of data admitted as relevant, limited it chiefly to brief, formulaic utterances such as proverbs, idioms, and short quotations, thereby excluding most actually occurring metaphoric utterances and actually occurring responses to metaphoric utterances. Admittedly, limited examples have been sufficient to establish the importance of conceptual metaphors as broadly operating cognitive mechanisms. At the same time, however, the limitation masks important patterns of variation in the actual uses of metaphor, patterns that should lead us to rethink how conceptual metaphors work. Conceptual metaphors are constituted by innumerable concrete instances. And while we may conceptualize these groupings as gestalts, each instance of a conceptual metaphor is inflected—at minimum—by politics, philosophy, social attitudes, and individual construals of the world. When we take these inflections into account, the idea of conceptual metaphor gives us what we need in order to overcome habits of theorizing that have plagued metaphor theory from the start—that is, since Aristotle.

The Aristotelian view has hindered metaphor theory, and can be corrected by the idea of conceptual metaphor, in two main ways.

First, most theorists and researchers have followed Aristotle in treating metaphor as primarily a function of feature mapping. That is, although Aristotle did not use the term mapping, theorists have persistently treated metaphor as an Aristotelian two-part expression: “A is B.” In turn, following Aristotle, they have assumed that we can readily determine the limited ways in which A is B. For example, Aristotle offhandedly says that when we say he rushed as a lion, the metaphor makes sense because both the lion and the man to whom lion refers are brave (Aristotle 1991: 3.4.1). Not incorrectly, recent theorists and researchers have problematized this kind of analysis. However, in so doing, they have run the risk of exaggerating rather than correcting Aristotle’s approach. They have redefined metaphoric equivalence as a problem of selective mapping and have, in turn, attempted to predict what features or relations will be mapped (e.g., Carbonell 1982; Gentner 1983; Ortony 1979). But as a tool of prediction, the feature-mapping approach is, by itself, fundamentally inadequate...