ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a general overview of metaphor, one of the key research areas covered in the book. It seeks to serve as an introductory guide to some of the most important concepts developed by the extensive literature produced since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) seminal work Metaphors we live by. Given the vast amount of research and the new avenues being opened (e.g., multimodality), only key conceptual developments will be covered. Thus, the book starts with an explanation of how adopting a Cognitive Linguistics (CogL) perspective can help readers understand the importance of cognition in language in general and in metaphor in particular. Then, the most important conceptual distinction that CogL brings to the analysis of metaphor is explained. Thus, the chapter describes how metaphors not only involve a linguistic expression or meaning but, more importantly, they consist in mind mappings that connect domains of experience that are apparently unrelated. In other words, metaphor exists in language, but its primary nature is in thought. Based on this new basic insight in metaphor research, I provide a basic summary of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), as the major framework dealing with metaphor from a CogL perspective. I then turn my attention to a more recent strand of research that, originating in CMT, has stressed the need to focus on the study of metaphor as it is used in real contexts (Cameron & Low, 1999). This body of research, which Deignan (2005) labels as “discourse approaches”, advocates the study of metaphor within communicative contexts and draws on methodologies involving the analysis of real data. The following subsection highlights the apparent advantages of using Cognitive Linguistics (CL) methods in the study of metaphor given the felt need by the discursive approach to engage with linguistic data. The chapter finishes with a detailed account of the different CL methods that metaphor researchers have used to identify metaphor in corpora.
