Discourse in Signed Languages

Revisiting the Conduit Metaphor in American Sign Language

155 Revisiting the CONDUIT METAPHOR in American Sign Language Daniel Roush As long as we have deaf people on earth, we will have signs. It is my hope that we all will love and guard our beautiful sign language as the noblest gift God has given to deaf people. —George W. Veditz The Preservation of the Sign Language, 19131 Yet that treasure, those sweet glowing lights, that treasure still lives—it lives, my friend! I leave it in your hands. —Ella Mae Lentz The Treasure, 19952 In the opening sentence in his recent book on metaphor identification, Gerard Steen states, “Metaphor is booming business” (Steen et al., 2010, p. 1). Many attribute the beginning of this boom to the publication of Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980). Few would deny the explosive effect of their book. However, in a section entitled “Homage to Reddy,” Lakoff himself attributes the detonation of this explosion to Michael Reddy’s classic essay “The Conduit Metaphor,” which first appeared as a book chapter in 1979 (1993, p. 203). Lakoff says of Reddy, With a single, thoroughly analyzed example, he allowed us to see, albeit in a restricted domain, that ordinary everyday English is largely metaphorical, dispelling once and for all the traditional view that metaphor is primarily in the realm of poetic or “figurative” language. Reddy showed, for a single, very significant case, that the locus of metaphor is thought, not language, that metaphor is a major and indispensable I’d like to thank Cynthia Roy, Lisa Bordone Roush, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments. All errors are my own. Roy_Part 3_Pgs 119-176.indd 155 8/17/2011 1:54:09 PM 156 : daniel roush part of our ordinary, conventional way of conceptualizing the world, and that our everyday behavior reflects our metaphorical understanding of experience. (p. 204) Not only did Reddy spark the contemporary understanding of metaphor in general, his proposed Conduit Metaphor sparked the identification of this metaphor in languages other than English, including American Sign Language (ASL), thereby setting off reverberations of its transcultural applicability. It is this original description of the Conduit Metaphor for English and its applicability to ASL that is the focus of this chapter. In this chapter, I attempt to answer the primary question: To what extent does the Conduit Metaphor also exist in the conceptions of ASL signers? Secondary questions that I attempt to answer are: If gaps in the respective conceptual metaphors exist, what challenges does this present to translation to and from these languages, and what potential procedures might a translator use to handle these differences? To answer these questions I provide a brief introduction to conceptual metaphor theory and Reddy’s Conduit Metaphor in English. I then discuss a framework for handling metaphor in translation and make predictions of the shifts that may occur when translating Conduit Metaphor expressions from English to ASL. The discussion of these shifts is the basis for attempting to answer these questions. THE CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR, METONYMY, AND IMAGE SCHEMA IN ENGLISH AND ASL Conceptual metaphor theory is the study of how humans understand one thing in terms of another. It is the study of the mappings from one cognitive domain (the source domain) to another cognitive domain (the target domain). The source domain is usually a more concrete concept that enables us, through conceptual mapping, to understand the target domain, which is typically a more abstract concept. An example of a conceptual metaphor that exists in both English and ASL is Good Is Up.3 A linguistic expression of this metaphor in English is,“Things are looking up.” An expression of this metaphor in ASL is the sign improve (figure 6.1). The key differences in the metaphor/iconic systems between ASL and English are that “rather than promoting the metaphorical use of existing Roy_Part 3_Pgs 119-176.indd 156 8/17/2011 1:54:10 PM Revisiting the CONDUIT METAPHOR in American Sign Language : 157 linguistic signs (as in English), ASL’s metaphorical/iconic system tends to (1) create new signs, (2) allow creative modifications of existing signs, or (3) allow the establishment of a metaphorical scene or object that can be manipulated meaningfully throughout a discourse” (Taub, 2001b, p. 98). Taub proposes that ASL metaphors have a double mapping: the first is an iconic mapping between the sign articulators and the source domain (in...