COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC METAPHORS

Today many metaphor researchers work in the framework of cognitive linguistics. The cognitive linguistics revolution began in 1980 with the publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. In their book, Lakoff and Johnson amassed an amazing number of examples showing that the way we talk about abstract domains appears to be systematically structured by the way wetalk about certain more concrete domains. Thus, we talk about theories and arguments as if they were buildings: theories can have support and arguments can be demolished. These observations gave rise to the theory of conceptual metaphor which moved metaphor out of language into our conceptual organization. According to Lakoff and Johnson, linguistic expressions such as ‘to demolish a theory’ or ‘the foundation of a theory’ are not isolated expressions but parts of the conceptual metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS.