Linguistically Speaking

This is going to be a "back to the roots of this blog" post, concerned with liz-exam topics, more specifically: metaphor theory (Barbara: I have just printed out your posts on Lakoff/Johnson and Musolff, the first of which you posted almost exactly 2 years ago :-) ). I am struggling a bit with one of the books on my list and I would be really glad to hear your opinion on a few points.

The book in question is Metaphor in Corpus Linguistics, by Alice Deignan (2005). She intends to give an overview of research in conceptual metaphor theory, argues for the need of a corpus approach to the topic, and presents some results of her own analyses. How accurate her account of conceptual metaphor theory is, I cannot yet judge properly, but I have not stumbled over any obvious inconsistencies. Her presentation of corpus linguistics is (to say it nicely) a bit biased with regard to the specific corpus and software she herself used (corpus linguistics for her consists of the calculation of concordances, based on searches for (inflected) word forms). But that is not my main concern. What I find really confusing is her classification of word occurrences into "literal" and "metaphorical". Unfortunately, she does not explain which criteria she uses for this distinction (I think in one passage she states that the classification was surprisingly clear and easy -- which already made me suspicious). For the verb "move" she presents the following examples:

literal: "When Gordie's condition stabilised, his father moved the family to Southern California."
metaphorical: "That was the first music I heard live that really moved me." (p. 149)

Reading this I wondered whether there might not be a certain amount of metaphoricity involved in the first of these sentences. What I had expected as examples for the literal use was something like "Has someone moved my book?" (Oxford advanced learner's dicitionary), but not the meaning of "change the place where one lives".

Even more confounding I found the following classification of plant*:

Literal uses
Literal, noun: "... buy well-nurtured plants from the garden shop."
Literal, verb: "In the old days when you planted a crop there were loads of weeds."
Factory: "The plant will be shut down for two weeks."
Place a bomb: "No group has yet said that it planted the bomb."
Place other concrete object: "The women planted themselves in front of the stalls and crossed their arms to wait."
Place with intent to deceive: "They had planted drugs in our bags."
Place a kiss: "[He] planted a smacker on each of her cheeks."

Metaphorical uses
Place idea: "What happened planted seeds of doubt in some minds."
Spy: "He was a plant."
(p. 177)

Now, I do not see why "to plant drugs" or "plant a bomb" should be less metaphorical than "plant" in the sense of a spy. Or more precisely: how and where a clear line between literal and metaphorical uses should be drawn. As I said, she does not address these problems. In one section she alludes however to the problem that metaphors are also involved in processes of word formation and development of new word meanings. She takes the position that it does not make sense to speak of metaphor when a certain expression is nowadays exclusively used in a metaphorical sense and therefore does no longer invoke the (original) literal meaning. Her example is "scapegoat", for which she argues that the former metaphorical mapping on humans has now simply become the standard meaning of the term. Such "dead metaphors" should therefore not be treated as metaphors. There is however one methodological problem in here argumentation. In an earlier section, she proposes as a criterion for dead metaphors less than 1 occurrence of the literal meaning in 1000 occurrences. In her corpus are however only 218 occurrences of "scapegoat". Thus, it could well be possible that the literal sense of the word is still more frequent than 1 in 1000, since she has not observed 1000 occurrences. Moreover, as far as I can see her corpus does not contain any religious texts, which would be the most probable domain for encountering the literal use. Apart from these methodological problems, the case of "scapegoat" is different from "move" and "plant*" since for the the latter two terms literal occurrences are not rare (I suppose that also for "move" more basic literal meanings could be found). And even if one argues that "change the place where one lives" is a new meaning of the word "move" which is no longer metaphorical (in the sense that language users do not evoke a more basic meaning), it is still not clear whether the metaphorical use of "move" in connection with emotions is derived from this sense or rather from the more basic sense.

I do not know whether the last passage makes any sense, I fear my confusion confused the text as well... Anyway, I would appreciate any comment on these examples and my (metaphorical) question marks :-)

Musolff's study on Metaphor and Political Discourse (the book I've referred to in the comments to my last metaphor post) manages to operationalize Lakoff/Johnson's theory quite nicely. He investigates the metaphors referring to Europe/the European Union in the British and German print media from 1989-2001, using a two-step method:

First, he collects all the relevant metaphors in a small specialized corpus of news coverage about Europe. He then sorts them into domains/lexical fields, and finally into more specific scenarios with role slots, story lines etc (e.g. Having a child - two partners have a child and care/provide for it --> the euro as a child of the union; can be sickly or strong and healthy etc.). Thus, the conceptual structures he works with are based on corpus-based evidence, they are not just interpretations of salient examples like those of L/J.

He then uses the findings from the pilot corpus to analyze a larger and more representative corpus drawn from standard linguistic corpora (COSMAS for Germany and BoE for Britain). To tackle such a huge amount of data, he uses the results from the pilot corpus to formulate search criteria: He simply searches for all the lexical items that occurred in the metaphors about Europe in the first corpus (supplementing them with more from the same lexical fields) in connection with 'euro', 'europe' etc. (In other words, he searches for terms from the source domains of the metaphors he's already found and from the target domain 'euro').
This apparently worked out well and yielded a large number of relevant metaphors, showing which source domains and scenarios occur more frequently than others. (The obvious drawback is that any source domains that didn't occur in the pilot corpus would not be taken into account - Musolff does admit this and the limitation of statistical significance it entails. However, as the corpora used are not entirely comparable anyway - different size, different composition - this would have been difficult to achieve in any case. Also, the book does not draw more than cautious conclusions - the focus is mostly on the role metaphors play in political discourse and how this can be investigated empirically).

---all in all, Musolff provides good empirical backup for L/J's theory, showing that the print-media discourse about the European Union in Britain and Germany is indeed largely structured by metaphors - and also that in almost all cases, the same metaphors are used in both Germany and Britain, which can therefore be said to belong to the same 'metaphor community'. Among the most frequent ones are EUROPE AS BUILDING, AS A BODY POLITIC (e.g. health/illness, birth/death), AS A JOURNEY, or AS A FAMILY/LOVE RELATIONSHIP. Thus, the metaphors occurring most frequently can be shown to have experiential grounding, which again would support L/J's observations.

Even though the same metaphors are used, they don't have to lead to the same conclusions; different aspects and entailments can be highlighted, and as is to be expected, the British media are overall more sceptical of the EU than their German counterparts. One of the most striking examples Musolff cites is not directly relevant to the German-British discourse, but a great illustration because it's a direct dialogue, between Gorbatchev and Weizsäcker (then president of the German Federal Republic). They implicitly used the EUROPE AS A COMMON HOUSE-metaphor to discuss border issues between the two Germanies - Weizsäcker saying that neighbours should be able to visit each other, Gorbatchev explaining that not everybody liked to be visited in the middle of the night and thereby implying that at least some restrictions should remain. Thus, the metaphor served as a "conceptual basis for negotiation of differing but not incompatible interpretations of the ... political situation" (147).

Reference: Musolff, Andreas (2004): Metaphor and Political Discourse. Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

by George Lakoff and Marc Johnson - the foundational text of the conceptual theory of metaphor. To L/J, metaphors are basically conceptual; metaphorical language is just an expression of underlying conceptual metaphors. This is how they define metaphor:

"The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (Lakoff/Johnson 1980:5)

For example, we think of ARGUMENTS as STRUGGLES- this is revealed by the metaphors used to talk about arguments: arguments can be won, other people's arguments can be attacked or destroyed, etc. L/J claim that the systematicity with which arguments are talked about (and experienced) as struggles points to an underlying conceptual metaphor (which they refer to as ARGUMENT IS STRUGGLE).

With many other examples, they argue that a lot of our concepts are metaphorically structured in this way, i.e. they apply structures of one concept to another - usually, structures from things we have directly, often physically experienced are used to 'get a handle on' more abstract things (in the ARGUMENT IS STRUGGLE-example, we would know from physical experience how struggle works, and think of argument in the same way).

However, we don't only think of arguments as struggles, but because we perceive and experience them in that way, we also act accordingly - that's why their book is called "Metaphors We Live By".

For many concepts, different metaphorical concepts exist - love, for example, can be conceptualized as MADNESS, but also as a COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART. To experience love as madness will have different consequences for our actions than to think of it as a collaborative work of art, because different aspects of love are highlighted. If love is madness, it is conceived of as something beyond our control - but if it's seen as a collaborative work of art, it requires effort from all parties concerned to reach some kind of balance.

An application of this theory: In a really impressing article, Lakoff analyzes the conceptual metaphorical system used by the first Bush administration to justify the first Gulf War - like depicting Iraq as a villain raping innocent victim Kuwait, and the U.S. as the hero coming to save the victim and punish the villain. Everything not fitting this picture, like Kuwait's not at all democratical monarchy and former behaviour towards Iraq, was hidden because the conflict was conceptualized in these terms. You can find the article at http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/lakoff-l.htm (this is also really depressing, because it did nothing to stop the war - and so much of this was re-used for the second Gulf War :-(. Still, a very worthwhile read if ever you get the time!)

(I hope this was clear enough - I tried to be brief, but maybe that was a little too brief?)