网范文：“Conceptual Metaphor Theory” 从早期的隐喻理论，对目前假设的思想进行构想,对隐喻的本质进行定义，关于尤为突出的形象语言,尤其是比喻。这篇语言范文讨论了概念性隐喻这一观点。换句话说,这个问题在多大程度上会作用语言和认知的隐喻。隐喻思维对语言的年代来说，有一种独特的风格,这一趋势被称为认知语言学。认知语言学家离开假设，英语毕业论文，英语论文题目，语言不再被认为是一组安排的毫无意义的符号。
早在1979年，迈克尔解释，我们的思想和观点是无意识的假设，在他的文章中进行了解释，沟通的概念隐喻，本质作用我们的思维和解决问题的方式。我们不仅试图解决沟通问题。下面的范文进行详述。
Introduction
From early metaphor theories to current hypotheses about metaphoric structure of thought, views on the nature of metaphor have radically evolved both in terms of definition and influence. Paradigm shift is particularly prominent when it comes the importance of figurative language in general, and metaphor in particular, for language and thought. In other words, the question whether and to what extent metaphor affects language and cognition.
Metaphoric thought and metaphorical language In the nineteen eighties a distinctive style of theorizing about language, thought, and meaning took shape in the works of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Michael Reddy, Ronald Langacker and their followers. This trend came to be known as cognitive linguistics (Hills 2017). Cognitive linguists marked a departure from the assumptions of Chomsky's Generative Grammar (1980) in that language was no longer considered a set of meaningless symbols arranged by, yet unrelated to grammatical structures. 23 While “Metaphors we live by” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) is undoubtedly a seminal work on conceptual metaphor, many other researchers participated in bringing about this revolutionary change in paradigm.
As early as 1979 Michael Reddy exposed our unconscious assumption that thoughts and ideas are things. In his “The conduit metaphor” (1979) he explains how the metaphorical nature of the concept of communication influences our thinking and problem-solving strategies. For instance, when we say “Try to get your thoughts across better” or “You still haven't given me any idea of what you mean” (emphasis author's) we are not only trying to solve the problem of a breakdown in communication, we are defining the problem by viewing communication as transfer of meaning, and words as containers into which that meaning should be packed (Reddy 1979: 286). By this logic, if the communication is unsuccessful it is either the fault of the speaker for not putting enough meaning into words, or the listener for not being able to unpack this meaning, or even sneaking meaning of their own into the words they received; “reading too much into things”.
Reddy goes on to show how introducing a different metaphoric paradigm of communication dramatically changes not only our understanding of the process, but also our problem solving strategies. The type of insight that came from “The conduit metaphor” makes it not only a brilliant exploration of previously undetected issue, but also a turning point for cognitive science. Late twentieth Century was a crucial period for the development of cognitive science. In the same year Reddy's work on conduit metaphor was published, Donald Schön released his excellent analysis of what he called at that time the “generative metaphor” (1979), describing what we now know under the term conceptual metaphor.
Schön advocated a perspective on metaphor research that treats it as central to the task of accounting for human thought and problem solving strategies. “Metaphors we live by” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) appeared shortly after, spurring the development of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. CMT was closely followed by its sister, the embodiment theory. While Lakoff and Johnson's theory stated that many abstract concepts had a metaphorical basis, embodiment set out to explain the existence and meaning of concrete concepts by claiming they are grounded in everyday experience (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). By the end of the 1990's metaphor research became entrenched in cognitive linguistics, although CMT was still subjected to criticism from researchers representing a variety fields of broadly understood empirical cognitive science.
Published in the 1980's Lakoff and Johnson's book “Metaphors we live by” (1980) lay the foundations of the conceptual theory of metaphor. The theory of conceptual metaphor has been modified and refined since its inception (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). In order to account for recent discoveries in cognitive sciences, including interesting results of brain studies, Lakoff attempted to incorporate a number of computational modelling principles into his hypotheses to make CMT more neurologically grounded. This prompted him to suggest the renaming of CMT as Neural Theory of Metaphor (2017). In addition, Lakoff and colleagues created a list of possible conceptual metaphors which can be found in the Master Metaphor List (Lakoff et al. 1991). Although the list is under continuous development it is not, and did not intend to be, an exhaustive set of mental mappings. In fact, under the current iteration of CMT creating such a list would be impossible.
Main assumptions of Conceptual Metaphor Theory In their works on CMT Lakoff and colleagues (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Gibbs 1994; Gibbs et al. 1997; Kövecses 2017) argued that metaphor is not primarily a language phenomenon but rather a cognitive mechanism. In other words, not only do we describe things in terms of other things, we think about them in this manner as well. Within the CMT framework metaphor is understood as a „conceptual mapping”, a set of correspondences from a source to a target domain (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Pérez Hernández 2017: 162). For instance, we may say „this software is a gem” to evoke a multitude of meanings: that we are happy to have found it, that we feel lucky to have it, that it is unique and coveted by our peers and so on. In this metaphor the source domain „precious stone/material” is mapped onto the target domain „computer software”, adding to the original meaning of the target concept. At this point two important observations regarding mappings can be made.
First, clearly not all features of the source domain are mapped onto the target; we do not necessarily mean that the software is valuable in monetary terms, or imagine it has decorative potential. Second, many researchers pointed out that in general source domains tend to be more concrete than target domains (Ungerer and Schmid 1996: 121; Gibbs 1996: 310; after Szwedek 2017). As a consequence, most metaphors are unidirectional. While examples of computer programmes being described in terms of valuables are plentiful, one would be hard pressed to find evidence that people talk about gems in terms of software. In order to address these observations Lakoff proposed a set of rules for metaphorical processes which he summarised in the invariance hypothesis (Lakoff 1990; Brugman 1990) and embodied grounding hypothesis (Lakoff and Johnson 1999).
Invariance hypothesis As mentioned in the previous sections, conceptual metaphors involve mappings of features between conceptual domains. Although it is possible to draw an infinite number of similarities between any two concepts making the number of potential mappings unlimited, only some of those mappings are used. Initially conceptual metaphor theory “had difficulty explaining why certain source-to-target domain mappings in conceptual metaphors are not likely to occur and why some lexical items, but not others, associated with a source domain are evident in analyses of metaphorical discourse”(Gibbs 2017: 536).
It is evident that conceptual metaphors are not complete mappings with one-to-one feature correspondence, and certain mappings are favoured over others. For instance, if abstract concepts such as theories are understood in terms of concrete concepts like buildings as CMT claims, then we should be able to see all the properties of buildings occasionally reflected in the way people speak about theories. This is not the case. While it is possible to speak of theories as having “foundations (assumptions), architects (formulators), and blueprints (origins)” (McGlone 2017: 114) we rarely mention their stairwells, hallways or sprinkler systems. Lakoff introduced the Invariance Hypothesis as a general principle meant to account for this seeming gap in mapping patterns in the cognitive and linguistic systems.
To this effect, he proposed that “metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology 26 (the image-schematic structure) of the source domain” (Lakoff 1990: 54). Image schemata were originally defined as meaningful experiential pre-conceptual structures grounded in recurrent bodily movements through space, perceptual interactions, and ways of manipulating objects (Hampe 2017: 1). Therefore, what Lakoff postulates is that the structure of experience imposes constraints on non-experientially based conceptual representations, because source domain structure must be preserved in the target domain mappings. However, this explanation ran into two problems. First, the invariance hypothesis is based on the assumption that domains are equipped with pre-metaphoric structure grounded in embodied experience and able to influence mapping. Yet, it is unclear how source domain structure can be preserved in an abstract target domain which, due to its non experiential nature, by definition cannot have this type of preexisting structure (Brugman 1990).
Second, if the process of metaphorical mapping is constrained only by source domain structure, then it is difficult to explain why certain expressions within the theories are buildings mapping are deemed acceptable and others are not. After all, the source domain technically permits all building-related mappings, incuding those that rarely, if ever, occur in language. Furthermore, the invariance principle (Lakoff 1990; Brugman 1990) does not predict which mappings are more likely to occur in language. Clearly, while it solved some problems, the invariance hypothesis brought to light other issues. Assuming invariance of structure between source and target domains, is it possible to identify one source domain from which all structure is ultimately inherited? Do abstract and concrete concepts share structure at some basic level? Perhaps it is best to seek answers to these questions by analysing the nature of conceptual structure, and the relationship between the concrete-abstract distinction and experience.
Concreteness and embodied realism
Conceptual metaphor theory postulates that most abstract thoughts depend on metaphorical projection from embodied experience, which is literal in the sense that it is directly understood. If metaphor is understood as a set of mappings between different domains, 27 then data from developmental studies show evidence of metaphorical thinking very early in development. Infants as young as 29 days have exhibited the capacity to make cross-modal inferences (Meltzoff and Borton 1979). Meltzoff and Borton demonstrated this in an experiment where two groups of infants were given either a knobbly or smooth pacifier to suck on. Each pacifier was placed in the infant's mouth without being seen by the baby. Afterwards, big visual models of knobbly and smooth pacifiers were shown to the babies. Both groups preferred to fixate on the shape that they have explored orally, and did so 70% of the time.
The results were interpreted to mean that children were able to make a connection between the texture explored by touch (the knobbly/smooth texture of the pacifier) and its equivalent from a different sensory domain (the visual representation of a pacifier with a knobbly or smooth texture). Experiments like this may indicate that the capacity for cross-domain metaphorical thinking appears very early in human development. Although the experiment was found difficult to replicate with children that young, the results of follow up studies conducted with with older children seem to confirm Meltzoff and Borton's findings. What is more, children get better at this task with age (Rohrer 2017). Meltzoff and Borton's experiment shows that the ability to make inferences between sensory domains appears at a very early stage in development.
It is worth considering whether this, or a similar mechanism can be used for inferencing about abstract concepts by recycling existing motor representations to support abstract thought. Casasanto (2017: 453) suggests that cross-modal inferencing may have been the foundation of abstract thought. Implications of these findings will be the subject of further chapters. Patterns in language certainly suggest that physical experience and abstract mental representations are related. Cognitive linguists point out that speakers who talk about abstract phenomena recruit metaphors from more concrete domains (Lakoff 1993; Gibbs 1996; Casasanto 2017; Johnson 1993). However, the assertion that some domains are more conceptually rich, concrete and embodied than others poses a problem in itself.
Cognitive research paradigms often differentiate between abstract and concrete source and target domains as if the distinction were an easy one, and intuitively made. However, as Szwedek (2017, 2017) astutely points out, identifying the grounds on which a phenomenon may be classified as “concrete” or “abstract” is far from uncom- 28 plicated. In general, researchers operate under the assumption that target domains “tend to be more vague and incomplete than the source domains" (Gibbs 1996: 311). The problem with this standpoint is twofold. First, it is difficult to find objective criteria for measuring the level of 'vagueness' and 'incompleteness' of a domain, particularly because most conceptual metaphors are considered implicit. ()
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