ABSTRACT
The 1980 publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) marked a paradigm shift in metaphor studies, advancing the view of metaphor as a fundamental cognitive process (see Chapter 1). Rather than merely being an optional and ornamental element in discourse, the metaphors we produce in language are viewed in CMT as mirroring the way we conceive of the world around us. Metaphor operates primarily on the level of thought, through ‘conceptual metaphors’ that help define our understanding of reality. With the conceptual metaphor time is money, for instance, we map some of the properties of a ‘source’ domain (money) onto a ‘target’ domain (time); time is in some way compared to and understood in terms of money. Such conceptual metaphors are, in turn, reflected in language by the actual words and expressions we produce – so-called ‘linguistic metaphors’, exemplified by the lexical verb in we’re wasting time. In brief, metaphor is intrinsic to language because metaphor is intrinsic to thought.
