A Re-examination of UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING

Abstract

Cognitive metaphor theorists have identified a number of mappings that, it has been claimed, are both central to thinking and productive of linguistic metaphors. One of these is UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING. In this article, we re-examine UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING using two sources of naturally occurring data. Our first source is the Oxford English Corpus: a two-billion-word corpus of authentic contemporary English texts, from which we extracted a 1,000-citation concordance of the lemma SEE. We analyzed this into major sense groups and identified the most frequent lexico-grammatical patterns. Our second source of data is transcribed spoken English from focus-group discussions. We analyzed this dataset, using detailed discourse analysis, to identify the meanings of SEE and its most frequent phraseologies. Both analyses lead us to conclude that SEE is, indeed, used to talk about understanding, as claimed by Conceptual Metaphor theorists, but that the metaphor usually describes difficulties with understanding another speaker's point of view or, more generally, the process of reaching an understanding: that is, it is used to talk about understanding or not understanding as processes, not states. Our findings are consistent with the construal of language and thought as a dynamic system.

How Basic Is“UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING” When Reasoning About Knowledge? Asymmetric Uses of Sight Metaphors in Office Hours Consultations in English as Academic Lingua Franca

“…Both metaphorical and non-metaphorical meanings of see are present at the same time. This is in line with Deignan and Cameron (2009), who found what they call "hybrid" cases in identifying metaphorical instances of see in the Oxford English corpus, a general corpus of written and spoken contemporary English. We therefore introduced a third category, and see in the example above was marked as a "conflated" case.…”

“…In some cases, the linguistic metaphors have been divorced from any real context of use (for example, Danesi, 1990;Lakoff & Johnson, 1980Sweetser, 1991); in others, discussion has focused on a single instantiation by the verb see (e.g., Deignan & Cameron, 2009;Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2013). The fact that these two approaches have dominated discussion of the metaphor may partly be a consequence of the Downloaded by [New York University] at 17:53 17 July 2015 lack of relevant discourse data.…”

Metaphorical Parametric Model for Brand Mark Design: Towards a universal model of computational visual communication design

“…In a special issue of the retrospective of conceptual metaphor after thirty years of its development, Riccardo and Morgagni [27] mentioned that some authors such as Leezenberg [28] suggested that embodied concepts do not come from an individual's experience only but largely shaped by the social, cultural and linguistic practice. Regarding the influence from society and culture, authors such as Brandt, Deignan and Cameron [29,30] have pointed out that the conceptual metaphor is not all dependent on bodily experience but conditions affected by the context. All these lead to the direction that the CMT should concern with the conceptual patterns affected by cultural practices and contextual issues.…”

Metaphorical Parametric Model for Brand Mark Design: Towards a universal model of computational visual communication design

“…In a special issue of the retrospective of conceptual metaphor, Fusaroli and Morgagni [34] mentioned that some authors such as Leezenberg [35] suggested that embodied concepts do not come from an individual's experience only but largely shaped by the social, cultural and linguistic practice. Regarding the influence from society and culture, Brandt [36], Deignan and Cameron [37] pointed out that the conceptual metaphor is not all dependent on bodily experience but conditions affected by the context. All these lead to the direction that the CMT should concern with the conceptual patterns affected by cultural practices and contextual issues.…”