ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 we established the important distinction between Active and Inactive metaphors. We labelled the latter “Tired”, “Sleeping” and “Dead”, and kept open the option that they might be “Buried”. Inactive metaphors become Lexicalized, that is acquire a second conventional meaning and find their way into the dictionary. Chapters 2 and 3 are concerned with these relatively Inactive and Lexicalized metaphors from two aspects. Chapter 3 demonstrates how processes of word-formation involve metaphor, and what effects the various kinds of wordclass and derivation have on metaphorical interpretation. Chapter 2 reports on research into the ways in which certain basic analogies, first proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), can be seen as structuring the lexicon of English. I give a guided tour of the metaphorical lexicon using a map (Figure 2.1) of these analogies. I then comment on the importance of metonymy as the basis for metaphor and on the interplay between the various metaphorical lexical sets. In particular I illustrate the claim that different Vehicles allow us to highlight different features of the same Topic, using as a case study the diverse Vehicles for language found in the English dictionary.
