Marcel Danesi

8Metaphor and figurative meaning in verbal communication

Abstract: The notion of metaphorical language starts with Aristotle, who claimed that it revealed much more than poetic decoration to literal language, although in the end he abandoned this idea. Jumping forward to developments in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology since the 1950s, Aristotle’s idea has come to the forefront and studied from various disciplinary angles. The findings are showing that figurative language is hardly decoration, but actually the backbone of linguistic meaning. This article looks at the work on figurative language and how it constitutes the core of linguistic cognition and then at how discourse unfolds through figurative structure. Overall, it is argued that figurative language is not simply idiomatic language, but part of a cognitive system employed to create meaning in discourse.

Keywords: metaphor, metonymy, irony, conceptual metaphor, discourse

Midway between the unintelligible and the commonplace,

it is metaphor which most produces knowledge.

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

1Introduction

One of the greatest linguistic discoveries of all time is due to Aristotle, who coined the term metaphor (from meta “beyond” + pherein “to carry”) to describe a phenomenon that was known intuitively in his era, but not identified formally (Aristotle 1952a, 1952b). Before Aristotle writers and philosophers believed simply that certain words can be used to add “figurative” (decorative) trimmings to basic literal discourse and thus that such usage was an art or craft of poets and orators, not an intrinsic component of everyday linguistic communication. To this day, we still commonly think of metaphor, or figurative language generally, as an ornamental form of language, used to make utterances more colorful, ornate, or else idiomatic. But research on metaphor and figurative language generally in the twentieth century has made it obvious that such language is hardly idiomatic; rather, it is as systematic as any commonly-used feature of discourse. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980: 3) have put it aptly as follows:

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish – a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought and action … We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.

The study of figurative language, sometimes called metaphorology, has become a major target of the cognitive and human sciences. The major finding in all disciplines is that it is not an option or complement to literal communication; it is the heart of verbal discourse.

2What is figurative language?

From ancient times, the use of figures of speech, or tropes, has been seen primarily as part of rhetorical and poetical traditions aiming to strengthen and embellish speeches and compositions. Metaphor in this framework is defined as the use of a word or phrase denoting one kind of idea in place of another word or phrase for the purpose of suggesting a likeness between the two – for example in “Their love is in bloom” the phrase in bloom is said to replace a more literal expression such as in “Their love is thriving.” But even a cursory consideration will reveal that there is a difference between the two, whereby the literal counterpart is missing something in content that is implicit in the metaphor. We shall return to this aspect below.

While metaphor is undoubtedly the aspect of figurative language that has deservedly received the greatest attention from philosophers, linguists and cognitive scientists during the last century, the domain of figurative language according to the rhetorical tradition is wider. Developing ideas already in the classical rhetorical tradition, Kelly et al. (2010) put forward a taxonomy of rhetorical figures distinguishing three main groups: schemes, which are preeminently formal in nature, tropes, based on conceptual operations, and chroma, which involve the staging of the communicator’s intentions.

Schemes are figures whose “most salient feature” is formal. They can be either based on sound patterns (such as rhyme) or on sentence architecture, such as chiasmus and antimetabole. Let us examine these two examples:

Tropes (from the Greek tropos ‘mode, fashioning, turn’) are figures of speech whose salient features can be identified at a conceptual-semantic level, rather than on a formal level. Metaphor is the prototypical example of trope, but the traditional list includes a variety of others, such as the following:

Modern scholars advocating a cognitive approach have sometimes dismissed these detailed taxonomies and long lists of figures as nothing more than “a disparate set of items” and the classical rhetorical tradition as a sterile endeavor lacking a “proprietary subject matter” (Wilson and Sperber 2012b: 96).

In fact, figures and even taxonomies recover much of their interest once we place them in the original context of rhetoric: persuasive communication. This classical orientation is recovered, for instance, by studies on figures of speech in advertising. McQuarrie and Mick (1996) develop a taxonomy of rhetorical figures in advertising in which they distinguish between two figurative modes – that is, schemes and tropes – which operate through “four fundamental, generative rhetorical operations” (p. 425), which are repetition, reversal, substitution, and destabilization. For them, all rhetorical figures are ‘artful deviations’ from the literal use of language, in other words, rhetorical figures are deliberatively designed and used to mark a text creating incongruities and “making the familiar strange” (pp. 426–427). For example, the scheme of repetition known as alliteration is less complex and applies a lower gradient of deviation or incongruity than irony, a trope of destabilization. Rhetorical figures are “the most effective way in swaying an audience” (p. 424) because they “attract and arrest attention” of the readers, they “produce a more positive attitude toward the ad” due to the pleasure and reward that people perceive when engaging in clever artful devices, and they are more memorable (p. 427). The beneficial effects of rhetorical figures in advertising are linked to the need of advertisements to motivate potential consumers to read the text to which they are exposed (p. 427).

Yet, the traditional focus on figures as exceptional “artful deviations” limits the scope of these studies and their potential for understanding the more fundamental and constitutive role played by figurative meaning in core verbal communication processes.

The remainder of this chapter on figurative meaning will address this more fundamental concern, by looking exclusively at the conceptual level of tropes, which forms the object of modern cognitive metaphorology. Since the 1970s, the trend in the cognitive sciences has been to consider the tropes, and, in particular, the more well established “core tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony as manifestations of separate cognitive processes, rather than as types of tropes. In other words they are now considered to be more than figures of speech, but thought processes. Moreover, many of the other tropes listed above are now viewed as subcategories under these four major tropes. For example, in the utterance “Three nights ago my cat brought me a present: a tiny field mouse”, which is traditionally an example of personification, is now considered part of a general metaphorical form of thought (called a conceptual metaphor, as will be discussed below) that has the structure animals are people (and animal behavior is human behavior). The term used to refer to this type of figurative expression is anthropomorphism. Hyperbole too is a metaphor, with a high degree of figuration. In other words, most of the classical rhetorical tropes can be amalgamated into a general framework of figurative cognition that sees them as exemplifications of several basic cognitive processes, not decorative accessories to certain types of speech.

Aristotle saw the power of figurative language in its ability to shed light on abstract concepts. How can one truly understand a concept such as love without reference to the kinds of feelings, symbols, and ideas associated with it? Love is thus more easily understandable as a flower (rose), as a botanical process (blooming), as a physical force (attraction), and so on, than as some physiognomic process. These metaphors allow us to get different conceptual glimpses of the effects and senses that the physiognomy of love has in specific social contexts. However, Aristotle affirmed that, as conceptually-powerful as it was, the primary function of metaphor was stylistic, a device for sprucing up more prosaic and literal ways of communicating. Remarkably, this latter position became the rule by which metaphor came to be judged in Western science and philosophy for many centuries. It was assumed that literal speech dominated everyday communication, while figurative language was an exception used in specific situations (orations, poems, and so on).

In contrast with this well entrenched restricted view French grammarian Dumarsais famously wrote in his treatise on tropes (1757): “I am persuaded that more figures of speech are produced in one market day at Les Halles [Paris’s central fresh food market] than in several days of academic sessions”. Dumarsais’ seminal intuition was empirically vindicated more than two centuries later by a pioneering 1977 study by Pollio, Barlow, Fine, and Pollio, which showed that the restricted view of figurative language is untenable. Those researchers found that speakers of English uttered, on average, 3,000 novel verbal metaphors and 7,000 idioms per week. Clearly, figurative language could no longer be viewed as infrequent and constrained to specific types of speech acts; rather, it was systematic in language use and part of every conversation. The reason why we still think of figurative language as exceptional is because we no longer perceive its presence in the language of everyday life.

3Linguistic metaphor

Defining metaphor as a figure of thought rather than of language poses an interesting dilemma. Indeed, as the work in what has come to be called Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) has amply demonstrated, access to metaphor as a form of thought starts with separating this phenomenon into linguistic and conceptual metaphors. The former is a single metaphorical utterance itself, the latter is a cognitive process from which the single metaphor derives; in other words the linguistic metaphor is a token of a type (a conceptual metaphor). Before discussing the latter, it is relevant to understand the structural components of the single linguistic metaphor.

Aristotle saw a metaphor as a product of proportional reasoning. For example, in the metaphor “Old age is the evening of life”, a proportion can be set up as follows:

A = old age, B = life, C = evening, D = day; and, thus, A is to B as C is to D.

The reasoning behind this proportion is supported by a more systematic mapping: – the period of childhood is to life as the morning is to the day; the period of adulthood is to life as the afternoon is to the day; hence, old age is to life as the evening is to the day. This particular metaphor, incidentally, pervades mythical and literary traditions throughout the world. It is found, for example, in the legend of the Sphinx – the mythical creature with the head and breasts of a woman, the body of a lion, a serpent tail, and the wings of a bird who guarded entrance to the ancient city of Thebes. When Oedipus approached the city of Thebes, so the story goes, the Sphinx confronted him, posing the following riddle to him: “What is it that has four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three at night?” Failure to answer it correctly meant instant death – a fate that had befallen all who had ventured to Thebes before Oedipus. The fearless Oedipus answered: “Man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two legs, and finally needs a cane in old age.” Upon hearing the correct answer, the Sphinx killed itself, and Oedipus entered Thebes as a hero for having gotten rid of the terrible monster that had kept the city enslaved for a long period of time.

It may have been Aristotle himself who ingrained the strictly rhetorical view of metaphor in Western philosophical thinking by affirming that, as knowledge-productive as it was, the most common function of metaphor in human discourse was to spruce up more basic literal speech (Aristotle 1952a: 34). It was a substitutive, not intrinsic, form of language. This view was extended by Quintilian and other ancient rhetoricians. In time, metaphor came to be either ignored or else condemned as a defect of human reasoning.

The source of latter view is, probably, John Locke’s (1690: 34) characterization of metaphor as a fault in language:

If we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats: and therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of language or person that makes use of them.

Similar dismissals are found in the works of influential philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (1656). An early notable exception to this view is the one by St. Thomas Aquinas, who claimed that the writers of Holy Scripture presented “spiritual truths” under the “likeness of material things” because that was the only way in which humans could grasp such truths, thus implying that metaphor was a tool of induction or inference, not just a feature of rhetorical flourish (quoted in Davis and Hersh 1986: 250):

It is befitting Holy Scripture to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things. For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things, because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in Holy Scripture spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the likeness of material things.

Other exceptions include the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (see Bergin and Fisch 1984) who attempted to spark interest in metaphor over four centuries later, emphasizing that it was evidence of how “knowledge originates from sense,” as St. Thomas had so aptly put it. Vico’s characterization of our sense-making capacity as poetic logic is the first true psychological theory of metaphor, although it remains largely unknown to this day to mainstream cognitive and social scientists. Immanuel Kant (1781) saw figurative language as evidence of how the mind attempts to understand unfamiliar things, and Friedrich Nietzsche (1873) came to see metaphor as humanity’s greatest flaw, because of its subliminal power to persuade people into believing it on its own terms.

Modern-day interest in metaphor as a trace to human cognition, rather than as a mere figure of speech, is due to the pivotal work of the early experimental psychologists in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth. The German physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner (1864) and the German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt (1901) were probably the first to conduct experiments on how people processed figurative language. Karl Bühler (1908) collected some truly intriguing data on how subjects paraphrased and recalled proverbs. A few decades later, I. A. Richards (1936) laid the foundations for a truly scientific, study of metaphor by developing a framework and nomenclature for studying it psychologically. In a metaphor such as “The professor is a bear”, Richards pointed out that the two referents are related to each other in the following way:

The ground can be paraphrased somewhat as follows with semi-literal language: “The professor is someone who is a large, heavy, unmannered, uncouth, and cumbersome individual.” But, as Richards suggested, no paraphrase can ever capture the ground of the metaphor. To use philosopher Susan Langer’s (1948) concept of discursive-versus-presentational meaning, a metaphor tells us much more than a literal paraphrase because it “presents” the vicissitudes and nuances of meaning inherent in a situation in a much more condensed and suggestive way. We do not process a metaphor as a combination of parts (as we do a literal paraphrase), but presentationally, as a totality which encloses the meaning. Describing it in literal language is, instead, a discursive process, which presents the same information in bits and pieces but which never can cover the metaphorical ground.

In the case of “The professor is a bear”, the probable reason for correlating two apparently unrelated referents seems to be the de facto perception that humans and animals are interconnected in the natural scheme of things. The philosopher of science Max Black (1962) came to realize, after Richards’ ground-breaking treatise, that a particular linguistic metaphor such as this one is really a token of something more general. It reveals a knack for seeking out and establishing similarities among things, interconnecting them cognitively. He formalized Richards’ theory as follows. In the metaphor “The professor is a bear”, professor is really an exemplar of the more general category of people and bear of the category of animals. The two categories are linked to each other because they are perceived to be subcategories of each other. Thus animal vehicles are sources of interpretation for human topics. It is this very idea that led subsequently to the notion of conceptual metaphor.

Richard’s crucial work opened the way for the serious investigation of metaphor within the human sciences. A 1955 study by the Gestalt psychologist Solomon Asch, for instance, showed that metaphors of sensation in several phylogenetically-unrelated languages used the same source domains (warm, cold, heavy), although the choice of specific items from a domain varied according to language. For example, he found that hot stood for rage in Hebrew, enthusiasm in Chinese, sexual arousal in Thai, and energy in Hausa. As Brown (1958: 146) aptly commented shortly after the publication of Asch’s study, “there is an undoubted kinship of meanings” in different languages that “seem to involve activity and emotional arousal”. As mentioned, the watershed 1977 study by Pollio, Barlow, Fine and Pollio then showed that metaphors pervade common everyday speech making it saliently obvious that metaphorical discourse could no longer be characterized as exceptional. Two collections of studies published shortly thereafter by Ortony (1979) and Honeck and Hoffman (1980) set the stage for the present-day view of metaphor as part of thought, rather than just part of language.

4Conceptual metaphor

The first language scientists to argue coherently that individual linguistic metaphors are traces to abstract concepts – following the line of inquiry opened up by Richards and Black – were George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980). First, they meticulously illustrated the presence of metaphor in everyday speech acts, thus disavowing the mainstream view at the time that metaphorical utterances were alternatives to literal ways of speaking. According to the traditional account of discourse, an individual would purportedly try out a literal interpretation first when he or she hears a sentence, choosing a metaphorical one only when a literal interpretation is not possible from the context. But as Lakoff and Johnson convincingly argued, this is the case because people no longer realize that most of their sentences are based (unconsciously) on metaphorical inferences and nuances. Moreover, many sentences are interpreted primarily in a metaphorical way, no matter what their true meaning. When a sentence such as “The murderer was an animal” is uttered, almost everyone will interpret it as a metaphorical statement. Only if told that the animal was a real “animal” (a tiger, a bear, and so on), is the sentence given a literal interpretation.

Lakoff and Johnson assert what Aristotle claimed two millennia before, namely that there are two types of concepts – concrete and abstract. But the two scholars add a remarkable twist to the Aristotelian dichotomy – namely that many socially-relevant abstract concepts are built up systematically from concrete ones through metaphorical reasoning. They then proceed to rename abstract concepts so formed as conceptual metaphors, defining them as generalized metaphorical thought formulas that underlie specific linguistic metaphors. In other words, the metaphor “The professor is a bear” is really a specific token of something more general, namely the conceptual metaphor people are animals. This is why we also say that John or Mary or whoever we want is a snake, gorilla, pig, puppy, and so on. Each specific linguistic metaphor (“John is a gorilla”, “Mary is a snake”, and so on) is not an isolated example of linguistic metaphors. It is a manifestation of a more general metaphorical idea – people are animals. Such formulas are what Lakoff and Johnson call, as mentioned, conceptual metaphors.

Each of the two parts of the conceptual metaphor is called a domain – people is the target domain because it is the general topic itself (the “target” of the conceptual metaphor); and animals is the source domain because it represents the class of vehicles, called the lexical field, that delivers the metaphor (the “source” of the metaphorical concept). Using the Lakoff-Johnson model, it is now easy to identify the conceptual metaphor in such otherwise seemingly random metaphorical utterances as those below:

(1)	Your ideas are always circular, getting us nowhere.

(2)	I have never seen the point of his ideas.

(3)	Her ideas are central to the entire debate.

(4)	My ideas are diametrically opposite to yours.

In this case the target domain is ideas and the source domain is geometrical figures/ relations. The conceptual metaphor is thus ideas are geometrical figures/relations. The above utterances are thus not isolated instances of metaphorical speech, they are derived from a general cognitive model of ideas. Further, the model is relevant and interpretable only on the basis of specific cultural experience and knowledge. That is, only in cultures who use Euclidean geometry is it possible to make a general inference between geometrical objects and ideas. Thus, conceptual metaphors are not just extrapolations from metaphorical utterances; they derive from historical, cultural, and social emphases, experiences, and discourse practices.

To get a firmer sense of how they shape discourse, consider the topic of argument, discussed by Lakoff and Johnson themselves. When this target domain comes up in discourse, a common source domain enlisted for talking about it is war. The argument is war conceptual metaphor shows up in such utterances as the following:

(5)	Your claims are indefensible.

(6)	You attacked all my weak points.

(7)	Your criticisms were right on target.

(8)	I demolished his argument.

(9)	I’ve never won a debate against her.

(10)	She shot down all my points.

(11)	If you use that strategy, I’ll wipe you out.

What does talking about argument in this way imply? It means, as Lakoff and Johnson suggest, that we feel that we actually “win” or “lose” arguments in a vicarious physical way, and thus that our reactions will be perceived (if not felt physically) as what they would be if we were involved in an actual physical battle: we attack a position, lose ground, plan strategy, defend or abandon a line of attack, and so on. In a phrase, the argument is war conceptual metaphor structures the actions we perform when we argue and influences the feelings we experience during an argument. It also shows that war is a model for human actions and thus an implicit philosophy of human nature, based on a cultural worldview. In cultures where war is not the paradigm of human conflict, these metaphors would not be understandable and the conceptual metaphor would never have crystallized.

Lakoff and Johnson trace the psychological source of conceptual metaphors to image schemas (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). These are mental impressions of our sensory experiences of locations, movements, shapes, and other bodily phenomena. They link physical and affective experiences to conceptual abstractions, permitting us not only to recognize patterns within certain bodily sensations, but also to anticipate their consequences and to make inferences and deductions. Thus, image schema theory suggests that the source domains enlisted in delivering an abstract target domain were not chosen originally in an arbitrary fashion, but derived from the experience of events.

As an example, consider the image schema derived from the experience of orientation and distance – up vs. down, back vs. front, near vs. far, and so on. It manifests itself regularly in expressions related to mood (“I’m feeling up today”; “She’s feeling down”), achievement (“He’s at the top of his field”; “You need to climb the ladder of success”; “Success is near”), financial trends (“The economy plummeted”; “Prices have gone sky high”), and so on. Another example of an image schema is the one derived from ontological thinking. This produces conceptual metaphors in which activities, emotions, ideas, and other abstractions are perceived as entities and substances that can be put in containers, receptacles, and the like. For example, the mind is a container conceptual metaphor undergirds expressions such as “I’m full of memories”, “My brain is empty today”, and so on. A third type involves several image schemas at once: for example, time is a resource is built from time is a resource and time is a quantity, as in “My time is money”.

We do not detect the presence of such schemas in our common expressions because of repeated usage. For example, we no longer interpret the word see in sentences such as “I don’t see what you mean”, “Do you see what I’m saying?” in metaphorical terms, because such uses of see have become so familiar to us. But the association between the biological act of seeing outside the body and the imaginary act of seeing within the mind was the original source of the conceptual metaphor seeing is understanding or believing, which produces many linguistic metaphors involving a source domain that contains the vocabulary of vision:

(12)	There is more to this than meets the eye.

(13)	I have a different point of view.

(14)	It all depends on how you look at it.

(15)	I take a dim view of the whole matter.

(16)	I never see eye to eye on things with you.

(17)	You have a different worldview than I do.

(18)	Your ideas have given me great insight into life.

This conceptual metaphor has been documented across societies as a fundamental source for understanding abstractions such as thinking, believing, understanding, knowing, and the like. This finding suggests that some conceptual metaphors are universal, differing only in the specifics of the source domain vocabularies, while others may be culture-specific. It seems basic or “root” metaphors, such as linking vision to knowledge are likely to be cross-cultural. However, their extensions may not be. In English, an extension of the vision root metaphor leads to further (or derived) metaphorizing. Consider the thinking is visual scanning thought formula exemplified below:

(19)	You must look over what you’ve written.

(20)	I must look into what you’ve told me a bit further.

(21)	She saw right through what you told her.

(22)	I’m going to see this thing completely out.

(23)	You should look into that philosophy further.

These are not found universally, suggesting that cultural cognition varies only in extended uses of language, not in its root uses. The reason for root metaphors being universal is probably because, as Walter Ong (1977: 134) has put it, that “we would be incapacitated for dealing with knowledge and intellection without massive visualist conceptualization, that is, without conceiving of intelligence through models applying initially to vision.”

The last relevant point made by Lakoff and Johnson is that cultural groupthink is built-up from layers or clusters of conceptual metaphors. They call these clusters idealized cognitive models (ICMs). To see what an ICM implies, consider the target domain of ideas again. The following three conceptual metaphors, among many others, are used in English-speaking cultures to deliver the meaning of this concept in separate ways:

ideas are food

(24)	Your ideas left a sour taste in my mouth.

(25)	It’s hard to digest all those ideas at once.

(26)	He is a voracious reader, but he can’t chew all those ideas at once.

(27)	That professor is always spoonfeeding her students.

ideas are persons

(28)	Darwin is the father of modern biology.

(29)	Those ancient stereotypes continue to live on today.

(30)	Quantum physics is still in its infancy.

(31)	Maybe we should resurrect that ancient idea.

(32)	He breathed new life into that old idea.

ideas are fashion

(33)	That theory went out of style a while ago.

(34)	Quantum scientists are the avangarde of their field.

(35)	Those ideas are no longer in vogue.

(36)	Semiotics has become truly chic.

(37)	That idea is an old hat.

The constant juxtaposition of conceptual metaphors in common discourse produces, cumulatively, an ICM of ideas: ideas are food, fashion, commodities, visual things (recall the examples above), and many more. These are described as clustering around a target, producing an interlacing network of source domains that we navigate during discourse. When the topic of ideas comes up in a conversation, therefore, speakers of English deliver it by navigating conceptually through the various source domains that cluster around it. For example, the sentence “Your ideas are enlightening because they have deep roots and are on solid theoretical ground” has been put together with three source domains: seeing, plants, and buildings.

ICM theory has many implications for the study of communication and cognition. For example, several of the source domains for the above ICM – food, people, and seeing – are relatively understandable across cultures: that is, people from non-English-speaking cultures could easily figure out what statements based on these domains mean if they were translated or relayed to them. However, there are some source domains that are more likely to be culture-specific, such as, for instance, the geometrical figures source domain, and thus beyond cross-cultural comprehension. This suggests that there are different categories of ICMs, some of which are more common in languages across the world than others. The ideas are food concept, for example, is a basic or root concept because it connects a universal physical process (eating) to an abstraction (thinking) directly. But the ideas are geometrical figures concept reveals a more culture-specific abstraction.

The research in CMT has also shown that metaphor emerges spontaneously in childhood, and is not the result of imitation or of the emergence of some innate capacity. When children refer to the sun or the moon as a “ball” they do so without having ever heard it named as such. They are using metaphorical reasoning, extracting the property of “roundness” which they had associated with one type of referent (ball) applying it to a new referent that is perceived to possess the same property (sun, moon). The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1962) saw this form of thinking as fundamental in linguistic development; he thus referred to children as little poets, because they make metaphorical inferences in the same way that poets do.

5Metonymy and irony

Recall the discussion on personification above. As mentioned, before Lakoff and Johnson’s trend-setting work, this trope would have been seen as separate from metaphor. However, within the framework of CMT, it is defined as a particular kind of metaphor, one in which the target domain is an animal or inanimate object and the source domain humans. This kind of reasoning reverses domains in the people are animals conceptual metaphor (animals are people), suggesting that rather than a mapping between domains, there really is an interaction, as Richards also argued – one domain influencing the other in tandem, so that we see people as animals and animals as people simultaneously. Today, conceptual metaphor theorists refer to this as blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002).

But there are two types of tropes that are considered separately from metaphor in CMT – metonymy and irony. Metonymy is the process by which the name of one thing is used in place of that of another associated with or suggested by it (the White House for the President). In metonymy the two associated elements are in a part-whole relationship with a broader scenario or domain. For this reason, CMT tends to view metonymy and synecdoche as one and the same trope, or, more precisely, as different manifestations of the same kind of reasoning.

Here are some examples of metonymic discourse (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 35–40):

(38)	She likes to read Dostoyevsky (= the writings of Dostoyevsky).

(39)	He’s in dance (= the dancing profession).

(40)	My mom frowns on blue jeans (= the wearing of blue jeans).

(41)	New windshield wipers will satisfy him (= the state of having new wipers).

(42)	The automobile is destroying our health (= the collection of automobiles).

(43)	We need a couple of strong bodies for our teams (= strong people).

(44)	I’ve got a new set of wheels (= car).

(45)	We need new blood in this organization (= new people).

In line with the notion of conceptual metaphor, the term conceptual metonym can be used to refer to the abstract cognitive pattern that underlies linguistic metonyms (Danesi 2004). In this case, the source domain item is not blended with the target domain, but rather stands for it in a part-whole relation, or is connected to it within a broader scenario of which both are part. For example, the use of the face as a metonym for personality produces the conceptual metonym the face is the person that manifests itself commonly in expressions such as the following:

(46)	He’s just another face in our large class.

(47)	There are only a few faces in the audience tonight.

(48)	The company needs new faces to revitalize it.

(49)	I can read the thoughts on your face.

Conceptual metonyms, like conceptual metaphors, are interconnected to other domains of meaning-making in a culture. The distribution of the concept the face is the person throughout the meaning pathways of a culture is the reason why portraits, in painting and photography, focus on the face. Here are some other examples of conceptual metonyms:

a body part for the person

(50)	Keep you nose out of my personal life!

(51)	The Yankees need a stronger arm in their pitching rotation.

(52)	We don’t hire long hairs.

the producer for the product

(53)	I’ll have a Budweiser.

(54)	We bought a BMW.

(55)	He’s got a Picasso in his house.

the object used for the user

(56)	My violin is sick today.

(57)	The steak eater is a lousy tipper.

(58)	The trains are on strike.

the institution for the people in the institution

(59)	Shell has raised its prices again.

(60)	The Internet has changed the world.

(61)	I don’t approve of Facebook’s new design.

the place for the institution

(62)	The White House denied any knowledge of the event.

(63)	Paris is introducing new pants this year.

(64)	Wall Street is in a panic.

Irony in CMT is delimited to the verbal phenomenon of using words to convey a meaning contrary to their literal sense – “I love being tortured” uttered by someone in pain and thus suffering. It is, more formally, a cognitive strategy by which a concept is highlighted through its opposite, its antithesis, its antonym, or some other such “contrary” structure. Irony creates a discrepancy between appearance and reality, thus producing a kind of “meaning tension by contrast.” Irony is particularly productive in satirical, parodic, and other kinds of captious language. It is important to note that irony emerges late in verbal development (Winner 1988), and tends to be culture-specific. Cultures throughout the world develop their own ironic forms and literary traditions derived from them. This is why ironic texts are not easily translated from one language to another. The role of irony in communication is to emphasize a situation through contrast. In the examples below, the source domain of animals is used contrastively to bring out some aspect of a target domain through irony:

(65)	This party is as pleasant as a rattlesnake.

(66)	That professor is as kind as a goat.

(67)	Your friend is as protective of your friendship as a fox.

Irony can be defined more concretely as the use of source domains in an oppositional fashion so as to bring out the meaning of something through a form of contrast or dissimilarity. This form of thinking is clearly dependent on context and traditions of usage. If someone uttered “I love being tortured” in a situation where he or she is suffering and is using language to bring this, then it would be interpreted as ironic. However, if the same utterance were spoken by a sadomasochist, then it would not be ironic, but literal.

CMT has led to many findings about the interconnection between language and communication, language and culture, language and knowledge. Above all else, it has shown that figurative cognition shows up not only in language but in nonverbal codes as well. The people are animals metaphor can be seen in many paintings that represent humans as animals, as well as narratives of animals we tell to children, and so on. Lakoff himself has always been aware of this level of interconnection, writing as follows: “metaphors can be made real in less obvious ways as well, in physical symptoms, social institutions, social practices, laws, and even foreign policy and forms of discourse and of history” (Lakoff 2012: 163–164).

6Figurative language and communication

The research in CMT has also been showing that conversations of all kinds are guided by figurative cognition. In this model of language, communication can be defined as a navigation through networks of source domains that are linked through associative cognition – the emphasis of utterances may be metaphorical (blending), metonymic (part-whole), or ironic (contrastive). The utterance can, of course, be literal, but in this model literal speech is actually rare and occurs typically in discourses that require it (science, technology, and so on), but in very specific ways. Moreover, CMT interconnects communication with culture. Western courtship rituals, for example, reflect the love is a sweetness conceptual metaphor (“She’s my sweetheart”, “I love my honey”, and so on) in nonverbal ways: sweets are given to a loved one on St. Valentine’s day; matrimonial love is symbolized at a wedding ceremony by the eating of a cake; we sweeten our breath with candy before kissing our romantic partners; and so on. Emantian (1995) documented similarities in the ways in which romance is metaphorized and spoken about in Chagga, a Bantu language and culture of Tanzania, where the same concept manifests itself regularly. In Chagga the man is perceived to be the eater and the woman his sweet food, as can be detected in expressions that mean, in translated form, “Does she taste sweet?”, “She tastes sweet as sugar honey” (Emantian 1995: 168).

More often than not, metaphors and metonyms are guides to a culture’s past and thus manifest themselves in everyday proverbial or colloquial speech. A common expression such as “He has fallen from grace” would have been recognized instantly in a previous era as referring to the Adam and Eve story in the Bible. Today we continue to use it with only a dim awareness (if any) of its Biblical origins. Expressions that portray life as a metaphorical journey – “I’m still a long way from my goal”; “There is no end in sight”; and so on – are similarly rooted in Biblical narrative. As the literary critic Northrop Frye (1981) aptly pointed out, one cannot penetrate such expressions, or indeed most of Western literature or art, without having been exposed, directly or indirectly, to the original Biblical stories. These provide the source domains for many of the concepts we use today for judging human actions and offering advice, bestowing upon everyday life and conversation a kind of implicit metaphysical meaning and value.

Proverbs are, in effect, historical or root conceptual metaphors that people employ unconsciously to provide sound practical advice when it is required in certain situations:

(68)	You’ve got too many fires burning (= advice to not do so many things at once).

(69)	Rome wasn’t built in a day (= advice to have patience).

(70)	Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched (= advice to be cautious).

(71)	An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (= equal treatment is required in love and war).

Every culture has its proverbs, aphorisms, and sayings. They constitute a remarkable code of ethics and of practical knowledge that anthropologists call “folk wisdom”. Indeed, the very concept of wisdom implies the ability to apply proverbial language insightfully to a situation. Preaching, too, would hardly be persuasive if it were not embedded in the proverbial practices of a culture. An effective preacher is one who knows how to structure his or her oration around a few highly understandable conceptual metaphors such as adultery is punishable by fire. These guide the preacher’s selection of words, illustrations, turns of phrase, practical examples – “You must cleanse your soul of the filth of sex”; “You will burn in Hell, if you do not clean up your act”; and so on and so forth.

Words in isolation have referential meaning. A word such as cat refers to a particular kind of mammal. It is when we use words in combination (in phrases, sentences, utterances) that figuration comes into play. So, rarely do we use cat literally, unless we are explaining what a cat is: “A cat is a feline mammal”. Generally when words are combined into larger structures, figurative cognition enters into play: “He walks like a cat”; “My friend is a cool cat”; and so on. Whereas individual words or linguistic categories (prepositions, articles, and so on) create referential domains for humans to reflect upon, utilize, and store as knowledge units, figuration is the strategy we use to interconnect such domains into increasingly layered orders of meaning – layers upon layers of source domains. One source domain suggests another, which suggests another, and so on. The central feature of human thinking is the fluid application of existing concepts to new situations. Communication is thus an implementation of this kind of thinking and its content can be accessed only if the interlocutors have access to the same networks or ICMs.

The domain in which figurative cognition manifests itself most saliently is in discourse. Discourse is intertextual and interdiscursive (Bakhtin 1981, 1986, 1993) because it has network structure – one source domain connected to another, and so on – directly or indirectly impelling interlocutors to cite or allude to previous texts and discourses – speech, symbols, rituals, and so on through some form of connectivity (imitation, presupposition, rejoinder, critique, parody). A close look at discourse data will, in fact, show the presence of figuration and its basis in source domains in terms of allusions, cross-references, and other connecting devices. Roman Jakobson (1960) also saw figurative cognition as shaping the internal structures of communication into pliable entities that respond to external social situations. This line of thought has recently found expression in a theory that, as mentioned, has come to be known as blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). In this framework, a blend is formed when the brain identifies distinct entities in different neural regions or maps as the same entity in another neural map. Together they constitute the blend. In the metaphor “That mathematician is a rock”, the two distinct entities are “the mathematician” and “the rock”. The blending process is guided by the inference that people are substances, constituting the final touch to the blend – a touch that keeps the two entities distinct in different neural maps, while identifying them simultaneously as a single entity in the third map. To put it another way, the connection between the conceptual metaphor, people are substances and the neural space required to apply it specifically constitutes the substratum of the blend.

In sum, there is no human discourse without figuration. Without the network of source domains (metaphorical, metonymic, ironic) that make utterances cohere semantically, culturally, and conceptually, all that would be left is exchange of literal information, much like the computer-based exchanges of artificial languages. Human information exchange is governed by the neural pathways that blend together during speech to produce meaning that is “grounded” in images of the world that come through metaphor, metonymy, and irony. These not only allow us to interpret the information, but to evaluate it and make sense of it on our own terms.

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