Conceptual metaphor

Definitions & Descriptions for the Conceptual Metaphor Psalms Project

James N. Pohlig 7323 Davis Rd., Waxhaw, NC 28173, USA jimpohlig@gmail.com

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Associations of concepts
3. Category statements
4. Embodiment
   1. Embodiment and Prototype taxonomy of concepts
   2. Embodiment and Kinaesthetic image schemas
   3. Kinaesthetic image schemas and BH lexemes
5. Metaphor--what it is
   1. Metaphor on the operational level of analysis
   2. Metaphor on the cognitive level of analysis
6. Image metaphors
7. Conceptual metaphors (CM)
   1. Conceptual metaphor identification
   2. Instatiations, conventionality, and levels of prominence
   3. Entailments
   4. The internal structure of conceptual metaphors
   5. The value and price of keeping conceptual metaphors in translation, and the value and price of abandoning them
   6. Hyper Conceptual Metaphors
8. Metonymy and Synecdoche
   1. Metonymy
   2. Synecdoche
9. Similes and their combinations
   1. The formation and effects of similes
   2. Pre-metaphorized similes
      1. Pre-metaphorized similes in Biblican Hebrew
      2. Misidentifying pre-metaphorized similes in Biblical Hebrew
10. Cultural schemas
11. Cultural models
    1. Some BH cultural models
    2. Distinguishing conceptual metaphor instatiations from expressions of cultural models
12. Cultural exemplars and titles
    1. Cultural exemplars
    2. Titles
       1. The Rock of Israel ( צוּר יִשְׂרָ אֵל ), my Rock (ס ַֽלְׂעִי)
       2. The daughter of Zion (ב ת־צִיֹּון ), etc.
13. Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs)
14. Conceptual blending: praxis and examples
    1. Conceptual blending in My love is a red, red rose
    2. Conceptual blending in I put on righteousness (צֶדֶ ק לָבַשְׁתִּי) (Job 29:14)
    3. Conceptual blending in Your right hand [יְׂמִינֶך ] is filled (מָלְׂאָה ) with righteousness (צֶדֶ ק) (Psalm 48:10)
15. Conclusion

0. Introduction

What follows are working definitions and descriptions, all within the general framework of the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (CTM). They are probably not absolutely air-tight, but I have found them useful for most purposes. You are welcome and, in fact, required to improve them!

Most of these definitions and descriptions should be found to be of practical use for translators. One might claim less practical utility for cultural schemas and conceptual blending (see §§9, 13 below). But even if these particular items are situated more on the purely academic side of this paper’s topics, they are important for at least two reasons: (a) one never knows when a topic of purely theoretical interest will acquire practical utility, and (b) the wise translator understands theory so as to understand practice.

Additionally, if we consider the subject of conceptual blending (see §13 below), a discipline created specifically within CTM, we should point out that facility in this particular discipline leads to a blossoming appreciation of the magnificent mental feats daily executed by the human brain in producing and interpreting figurative language. The conceptual blending discipline also affords an understanding of discrete metaphors that often can be gained only by paying attention to their inner workings (see §6.4 below). The brain normally interprets a casually-met metaphor with lightning speed—and usually accurately, as well!—and then moves on to the next phrase far too quickly for any conscious analytical abilities to keep up. In my experience, the only way to learn the art of Conceptual Blending is assiduous practice. But its rewards are immense.

We should reflect on our task: it is to “get inside the heads” of the psalmists and their audiences, i.e., to infer as best we can the probable state, assumptions, and situations of these ancients, and then represent the inferences, as best as we can, that they themselves made. The definitions and descriptions presented in this paper are meant as some of the tools we should use in this task.

1. Associations of concepts

These are any combinations of concepts, whether they are unconscious assumptions or conscious ideas.

There are many kinds of such combinations, e.g., John kicked the football down the field, You don’t say!, I have a fever. In metaphorics, however, we have principal interest in the combination of the form Concept A is Concept B, where this combination does not amount to a true category statement (see below) or to a true identity statement, e.g., That is the man I was talking about.

2. Category statements

Statements such as The elm is a tree. However, John is a tree, although it has the same syntactic form, would normally be understood as a metaphor.

On what basis? Not on the basis of any similarity that can be found, for both John and tree are living things, both are taller than they are wide, etc. But because, in the semantic hierarchy, the lowest-level semantic domains into which they fall--those of Trees and Humans--are different.

Embodiment

At the heart of the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor is the concept of embodiment: that metaphors of all kinds are grounded in one’s interaction with oneself and with the surrounding environment. The more grounded human reasoning is in this type of interaction, the more embodied it is said to be.

What is the nature of this interaction with oneself and with the surrounding environment?

• This interaction is preconceptual in its base. That is to say, we began to engage in this interaction even before we were born or were able to generate any conceptions of it. But the process is most noticeable once a child is born. A baby, hearing a noise, soon starts trying to focus its eyes on the source, and in this way gradually learns that sight and hearing extend in a straight line. Later when crawling, the child learns to reach the desired destination most efficiently, e.g., a ball that is out of reach, by moving in a straight line. This experience reinforces the earlier lesson conferred by eyesight and sound: that the shortest and most effective distance between two points is the distance along a straight line.
• Obstacles are also experienced preconceptually. That baby crawling toward the ball will at first be completely stymied by anything in its path, e.g., a low footstool, and will be likely to stop and cry with frustration, instead of going around or over the blockage—maneuvers that it will learn soon enough. And the phenomenon of obstacles will become conceptualized along the way as OBSTACLE and remembered for life.
• These experiences of perception, of physical sensations, and of motor activities in relation and reaction to them, generate neuron pathways in the brain. These pathways become the basis for later concepts, e.g., of a straight line, of efficient action, of obstacles, and of solutions to those obstacles. Moreover, it is only later, likely at age three or four, that the child starts to express these concepts verbally.
• The sensations are all experienced in terms of the five senses: e.g., the baby learns about soft and loud sounds, rough and smooth touch, and sweet and sour tastes. The baby also reacts to these experiences in the same terms, eventually learning, for example, that the remedy for a sour taste is to taste something sweet.

When these interactions are first conceptualized in our brains, the process produces two primary kinds of mental structures: basic-level conceptual structures and kinaesthetic image schemas.

3.1 Embodiment and Prototype taxonomy of concepts

Basic-level conceptual structures appear in Prototype Theory along with other levels as shown in Table 3.1 below.

Table 3.1 Taxonomic Levels in Prototype Theory

Superordinate Level	animal	furniture
Basic Level	dog	chair
Subordinate Level	retriever	rocker

The basic level has the following characteristics:

1. it is the highest level whose elements are perceived as irreducible and similar gestalts; e.g., children learn what dogs are before they learn to distinguish kinds of dogs.
2. it is the highest level whose elements call for more or less the same interaction from people. For example, children learn to interact with dogs differently than with ants or worms.

In brief, basic-level elements are called “basic” by virtue of how they are perceived, how they function, how humans interact with them, and how humans organize them in their knowledge. Basic-level concepts can be said to be the concepts the most rooted in people’s physical experience.

The superordinate level, on the other hand, is characterized by its tendency toward abstraction. This is the level on which most conceptual metaphors seem to exist (Lakoff 1993:211).

As for the subordinate level, its concepts tend toward the technical, often including elements that are unfamiliar to people. Many, for example, might find it hard to distinguish a beagle from a terrier.

3.2 Embodiment and Kinaesthetic image schemas

“Kinaesthetic image schema” is defined by Johnson (1987:29) as “a recurrent pattern, shape, and regularity in, or of, these ongoing ordering activities”—referring to “our actions, perceptions, and conceptions.” Such schemas provide motor coherence to how we manipulate ourselves and our environment, allowing us to mentally organize our bodies’ spatial movements.

Kinaesthetic image schemas comprise a relatively small number of parts and relations among themselves. Examples are the FRONT-BACK schema, the LINEAR ORDER schema, the CONTAINER-CONTAINED schema, the IN-OUT schema, the FORCE schema, the CENTER-PERIPHERY schema, the WHOLE-PART schema, and the BALANCE schema.

As a small child internalizes these schemas without consciously conceiving of them, lessons are learned: force can be applied against force, force can be increased or diminished, and it can be redirected. With elementary lessons such as these, much of the foundation of our perceptual and reasoning capacity is laid.

The use of the term “image” in this category of concepts does not mean to restrict these schemas to what the eyes can perceive. Schemas such as SOFT-LOUD and FORCE may not involve the sense of sight at all. But the greatest truth about all these schemas is that they are irreducible gestalts, are meaningful to people because their own physical experiences, and enable us to assign structures to perceived objects and events, thus creating meaning.

When the image schema logic is extended to abstract domains, metaphor results, for the image schemas are easily recruited to create conceptual structure, usually in a metaphorical manner. For example, consider the following passage:

Your right hand(יְׂמִינֶך) is filled (מָלְׂאָה) with righteousness (צֶדֶ ק )(Ps. 48:10 NIV).

• The BH notion HAND (including its extensions RIGHT HAND and ARM) is often helps out in the task of conceptualizing AGENCY, POWER, so much so that we can safely posit a CM AGENCY, POWER ARE HAND, RIGHT HAND, ARM.
• We should recognize this CM's entailments (see §6.3 below) to include items such as:
  • One's hand can strike
  • One's hand can be stretched out to perform an action
  • One's hand can cover something
  • One's hand can steady or guide someone or something
  • One can hold something in the hand
• It is the last-listed entailment that is relevant in Ps. 48:10, for if one can hold something in the hand, then the hand (in BH as well as in English) can be metaphorically said to be filled with that thing. Here we find a metaphorical use of the CONTAINER-CONTAINED schema; the schema collaborates here with this CM entailment.
• Also at the same time, we should recognize the naturally-occurring metonymy in this CM, for one's hand and arm are inalienable parts of oneself.

3.3 Kinaesthetic image schemas and BH lexemes

Cognitivists have researched the question as to whether native English speakers associate kinaesthetic image schemas with words, notably with verbs. The indications are a resounding “yes.” We can assume that such associational behavior occurs in other languages also.

In the case of dead languages, the absence of live native speakers is a handicap to this kind of research. However, not all is lost for our study of BH. Consider, for example, the phrasal complements that often occur with BH verbs of destroying and perishing, as are seen in the examples given in Table 3.3 below.

Table 3.3 Phrasal Complements to BH verbs of Destroying and Perishing

Reference	Passage including italicized phrasal complement	Featured BH verb
Gen. 6:17	destroy from under heaven (מִּתַַּ֖חַת הַשָמָ ָ֑יִּם) all flesh	שחת (Piel)
Lev. 23:30	such a one I will destroy from the midst of the people (מקֶ ֶּ֥רֶ עַמ ָּֽהּ)	שמד (Hiphil)
Deut. 2:21	But YHWH destroyed them from before them [the Ammonites] (מִפְׂנֵיהֶֶ֔ם)	שמד (Hiphil)
Deut. 4:3	how YHWH your God destroyed from among you (מִקִרְׂ בֶַֽך) everyone who followed the Baal of Peor	שמד (Hiphil)
Deut. 4:26	you will soon utterly perish from the land	שמד (Qal)
Deut. 7.24	blot out their name from under heaven	אָבד (Hiphil)
Ps. 21:10	You will destroy their fruit from the earth (מֵאֶ ֶ֣רֶץ), and their seed from among the sons of (מִּבְׁנ ֵי) man	אָבד (Piel)
Num. 4:18	You must not let the tribe of the clans of the Kohathites be destroyed from among the Levites	כרת (Hiphil)
Ps. 101:8	cutting off all evildoers from the city of YHWH (מ ֵֽעִּיר־יְְׁ֝הוָָ֗ה)	כרת (Hiphil)
Duet. 2:14	until the entire generation of warriors has ended from inside the camp (מִּקֶ ֶּ֣רֶ ב הֵַֽמַחֲנֶֶ֔ה)	תמם (Qal)

Because of the multiplicity of verbs featuring the same image schema MOTION AWAY FROM, it seems evident that this schema is governed not by any one verb, but by the notion of DESTROY, PERISH itself, which lies behind these verbs.

Moreover, these verbs do not always feature this complementary image schema, so we suppose that the complex of DESTROY, PERISH + MOTION AWAY FROM constitutes a Lakoffian Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM—see §9 below). It is characteristic of this sort of mental construct that it is not always expressed in language, but that when it is fully expressed, we can speak of a full linguistic realization of the ICM.

4. Metaphor--what it is

Countless attempts have been made to define the essence of metaphor; they all have undoubted value. For the purposes of the Conceptual Metaphor Psalms Project, I think that we must define “metaphor” in two different ways, as I will explain below.

4.1 Metaphor on the operational level of analysis

I have found a practical operational definition of metaphor to be the mental manipulation of concept A belonging to one semantic domain as if it were concept B belonging to a different semantic domain, or the mental manipulation of any two or more combinations of such concepts.

If this mental manipulation occurs at the conscious level, we can call it the conscious thinking about A as if it were B. This kind of mental manipulation produces image metaphors and innovative instantiations of conceptual metaphors. If the speaker connects the concepts with a mental space builder, e.g., like, as, sort of, we call these manipulations similes. If, however, this mental manipulation occurs unconsciously, it does so usually because the speech community has integrated this manipulation into its cultural and linguistic knowledge base. In this case, any conventional linguistic manifestation of this unconscious assumption is known as a conventional instantiation of a conceptual metaphor. The less conventional, i.e., the more innovative, the spoken or written CM instantiation is, the more likely it is to be perceived as figurative, and hence as an image metaphor (see §5 Image metaphors).

Incidentally, this is the kind of analysis practiced in Meaning-Based Translation. This translation platform, which has served as a theoretical base of the twentieth century’s minority language Bible Translation movement, considers the primary motivator of metaphor to the “point of comparison” between concept A and concept B. This view can certainly be taught very methodically—an strong advantage in training translators. It also encourages attempts to represent the essence of metaphors by means of propositions. Thus, for example, if a receptor accepts neither the metaphor My love is a red, red rose, nor its corresponding simile My love is like a red, red rose, the translator can resort to propositional representation of the points of comparison, e.g., “My love makes me think of red roses,” “My love is delicate and smells sweet,” etc. Of course, the metaphor’s charm is mostly lost in these cases, a fact that Meaning Based Translation practitioners would acknowledge.

The main point is that this situation arises in Meaning-Based Translation from the view that metaphor is exclusively the thinking about one concept as if it were another.

4.2 Metaphor on the cognitive level of analysis

In the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, a metaphor creates a blend, which consists of emergent structure (see §12 Conceptual blending). In the case of the CMs themselves, these blends exist in culture and language, i.e., in the speakers’ worldview, so that, for example, we really do conceptualize a greater price charged for merchandise as being physically elevated. In the case of image metaphors, these blends, the metaphors’ creations, exist only in the thinking of the speaker and hearer. Further, in the CTM view, metaphorical blends create new meaning and hence new understanding (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:137ff].

In CTM theory, the blend is shaped by all parts of the conceptual blending process, not only by selected attributes from the Vehicle (i.e., Input 2). For this reason, as we explain at greater length in §12, we can regard the blend as possessing elements of fantasy.

In other words, metaphor analysis on the specifically cognitive level captures the part of the speaker’s intuition that is left unaddressed on the operational level that we described earlier.

5. Image metaphors

These are “one-off” metaphors, unique, not participating with other metaphorical expressions in any CM, e.g.,

• The angry swan uncoiled another eight feet of neck.
• Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.
• A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

These are from P.G. Wodehouse, a master of image metaphor

The ramifications projected by image metaphors are usually context-based and unique, unpredictable in advance. In Alfred Noyes' poem "the Highwayman," the context either specifies the ramifications--the interpretations--or allows the reader to infer them.

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding—

Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

What are thought of as other kinds of projected ramifications of image metaphors are perhaps most likely allusions to other sayings, works, times, conditions, etc.

E.g., the celebrated nineteenth-century oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury opens his treatise on the Gulf Stream in this way:

There is a river in the ocean.

The content of this image metaphor might at first glance appear to make no allusion to anything other than normal rivers and their currents. However, its form is reminiscent of the statement, majestic in its simplicity, in Gen. 1:1—In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The allusion to this verse is reinforced by the Maury’s subject matter, ‘the ocean’, which also figures prominently in Genesis’ opening. By these means, Maury evokes for his readers a primeval feeling, with which he sets the stage for the exposition of his scientific research.

Curiously, unlike perhaps the majority of CM instantiations, many image metaphors do not seem motivated by a need to elucidate more abstract terms via more concrete terms. Some certainly have this motivation, but very often their motivation seems the need to describe something less familiar to the reader via something more familiar. Thus, for example, Maury describes the unknown but equally concrete Gulf Stream in terms of rivers, which are well known.