ABSTRACT
Our experience of the world, like the world itself, is complex and somewhat chaotic. Yet we strive instinctively to put things in some kind of order, to explain our experience and understand it. Since the way we go about this is often far from objective (see Kahneman, 2011, for an account of heuristics and biases in human cognition), and our discourse influenced by all kinds of social factors (see, for example, Fine, Campion-Vincent and Heath, 2005), it follows that multiple, subjective understandings of a given aspect of experience will always be part and parcel of being human. It also follows that the task of finding out ‘what people think’ is not straightforward. Metaphors are one possible avenue for exploring people’s ‘ideas, attitudes and beliefs’ (Cameron, 2010), and feelings, even when they are not directly expressed; Systematic Metaphor is an applied linguistic approach to analysing metaphors in discourse. It was developed by Cameron and colleagues (Cameron, 1999a, 1999b, 2003, 2007; Stelma and Cameron, 2007; Cameron, et al., 2009; Cameron and Maslen, 2010; but cf. Schmitt, 2005) as one part of a metaphor-led discourse analysis within a broader Discourse Dynamics approach (Cameron, 2010).
