ABSTRACT
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) are usually recognized as the founding fathers of what has become known as Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), although Ortony (1979) helped pave the way. Briefly, CMT, rooted in Cognitive Linguistics, sees metaphor—which Lakoff and Johnson define as “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (1980, p. 5)—as a device that systematically structures the way humans conceptualize abstract and complex phenomena by comprehending them via concrete phenomena (i.e., phenomena that are experienced through the human body and its sensory organs). Examples of such structural metaphors, extensively studied over the past 30 years are LIFE IS A JOURNEY, TIME IS SPACE, and EMOTIONS ARE PHYSICAL FORCES. (In the CMT paradigm it is customary to signal metaphors’ conceptual level by using small capitals.) However, CMT scholars have gradually begun to acknowledge that the ‘embodied’ basis of metaphors needs to be complemented by cultural dimensions (e.g., Gibbs, 2008; Gibbs & Steen, 1999; Kövecses, 2005). This work is expanding, but CMT’s focus is still predominantly on verbal manifestations of the embodied dimension of conceptual metaphors.
