Deliberate Metaphor Affords Conscious Metaphorical Cognition

Abstract

Contrary to what is assumed in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the conceptual power of metaphor may not lie in its widespread unconscious use but in its more limited and targeted deliberate use, which may or may not give rise to conscious metaphorical cognition. Deliberate and conscious metaphorical thought is connected to the general functions of all conscious thought as described by Baumeister and Masicampo (2010). Their theory provides a basis for demonstrating how deliberate and conscious metaphorical cognition facilitate social and cultural interactions, by reconsidering Musolff's (2004) analysis of metaphor in political discourse on European integration. The paper concludes by formulating some implications of CMT's neglect of conscious metaphor and of deliberate metaphor more generally. If the power of metaphor lies in thought, as has been held by CMT for thirty years, it may be that conscious rather than unconscious cognition -or, more generally, deliberate rather than non-deliberate metaphor use -enables that power. Given the relative infrequency of deliberate and conscious metaphor use, this, in turn, may entail that the online effect of metaphor is more restricted than has been assumed over the past three decades.

Developing, testing and interpreting Deliberate Metaphor Theory

“…Statement 7 suggests that DMT claims that deliberate metaphors are used to make addressees consciously think hard. I have argued against this implication in Steen (2011bSteen ( , 2013.…”

“…Krennmayr, 2011); and this may also suggest that these potential linguistic and conceptual criteria trigger people's processing of a metaphor as a deliberately used device in communication. I have described a number of formal consequences for utterance analysis in Steen (2011b) and a number of processing consequences in Steen (2013), but the complete theoretical framework is still being elaborated. By way of aside, this is not to say that structural-functional analysis is comparable to processing research, a position Gibbs (this volume) seems to attribute to DMT; on the contrary, as I have made explicit in numerous places (especially in Steen, 2007Steen, , 2011a, linguistic analysis is fundamentally different from psychological research and the two offer complementary pictures of the phenomenon of metaphor use: linguistics a structural-functional one and psychology a process-product one.…”

“…The central prediction of DMT is about attention (Steen, 2011c(Steen, , 2013: a metaphor is used deliberately when its structure signals that the addressee has to move away their attention momentarily from the target domain of the utterance or even phrase to the source domain that is evoked by the metaphor-related expression. This hypothesis about attention to the source domain is highly specific: it focuses on the mandatory representation of the source domain as part of the situation model in utterance processing (Van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983).…”

“…It does not imply that they require deliberation either, for cross-domain mappings processed by comparison are extremely fast and unconscious, as has precisely been shown by a lot of contemporary metaphor research and fits in with more general psychological research on fast and slow thinking (Kahneman, 2012) --deliberate metaphor is not the same as deliberative metaphor (Gibbs' phrase). At the same time, the fact that the source domain is attended to and requires cross-domain comparison to be integrated into the target domain of the utterance can afford further post-comprehension processes such as recognition, interpretation and appreciation (Steen, 2013) --but these are optional and not necessarily conscious either.…”

Does deliberate metaphor theory have a future?

“…DMT started out with a splash with the pronouncement that it provided a ''new and improved'' approach to contemporary metaphor theory (Steen, 2006(Steen, , 2013. The essential claims of the theory are twofold: (1) The vast majority of words and phrases typically seen as conveying metaphorical meaning, especially within conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), are not understood as cross-domain mappings and, therefore, are not really metaphorical.…”