Metaphor as ideology

Cognitive Science: Piecing Together the Puzzle

“…At the psychological level, a range of studies have shown that fine‐grained event knowledge plays a role in language comprehension from the earliest stages of processing, leading Elman (2009) to argue against distinguishing lexical knowledge from conceptual knowledge broadly construed. In line with this, we recently argued that metaphoric conceptualization and, by extension, language interpretation, involves a blending of conceptual knowledge drawn from cultural (including linguistic), contextual, and individual sources, in addition to conceptual material drawn from the metaphorical source and target domains (Duffy & Feist, in press; cf. Fauconnier & Turner, 1998, 2002).…”

“…Cross‐linguistic research on metaphor has likewise uncovered variation, this time in cross‐domain mappings, even in cases where the domains involved are the same. A much‐studied case is the widely attested metaphor time is space , in which spatial language is used to talk about the timing of events (cf., Duffy & Feist, in press; Haspelmath, 1997). Layered on top of this frequent mapping, however, analyses of language and co‐speech gesture reveal that, across cultures, the future may be spatialized in a multitude of ways, with speakers subconsciously placing it “in front” (English), “behind” (Aymara), “below” (Mandarin), and “uphill” (Tzeltal, Yupno) (Brown, 2012; Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Li, 2017; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006; Núñez, Cooperrider, Doan, & Wassmann, 2012).…”