ABSTRACT
Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has become widely known for its claims about metaphor as a fundamentally cognitive phenomenon, as opposed to a purely linguistic one.1 Propounded most notably by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999), and developed by many others in the field of study known as cognitive linguistics, CMT builds on the premise that many expressions in everyday language reflect deep-seated ways of characterising one conceptual domain, often a more abstract notion, in terms of a different domain, one which is often more closely related to our physical, embodied experience. A frequently cited example from Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 8) is that many expressions in English about time (spending time, saving time, how much time an activity costs us, etc.) reflect a pattern in which TIME is characterised as MONEY. The tradition in the literature is to denote the pattern of A being talked about in terms of B with the formalism ‘A IS B’ in small capital letters (that is TIME IS MONEY) with ‘IS’ representing not equivalence, but a partial mapping of some concepts from the second domain, or the ‘Source’ (in this case, MONEY), onto the first domain mentioned, or the ‘Target’ (here, TIME).
