1. modern linguistics as a change of paradigms

References :
1.Cheney, D.L. (1984): Category formation in vervet monkeys. In: Reynolds, V. &Harrй, R. (eds.): The Meaning of Primate Signals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 58-76.
2.Clark, H.H. (1996): Communities, commonalities, and communication. In: Gumperz, J.J. &
3.Croft,W. & Cruse, D.A. (2004):Cognitive Linguistics.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4.Geeraerts, D.(1997):Diachronic Prototype Semantics. A Contribution to Historical Lexicology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
5.Heit, E. (1997): Knowledge and concept learning. In: Lamberts, K. & Shanks, D. (eds.):
Knowledge, Concepts and Categories. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 7-41.
6.Herrnstein, R.J. (1984): Objects, categories, and discriminative stimuli. In: Roitblat, H.C.,
7.Langacker, R.W. (1990): Concept, Image, and Symbol. The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
8.Pansky, A. &Koriat, A. (2004): The basic-level convergence effect in memory distortions. Psychological Science 15, 52-59.
9.Rosch, E. (1978): Principles of categorization. In: Rosch, E. & Lloyd, B.B. (eds.): Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 27-48.
10.Smith, E.E. &Medin, D.L. (1981): Categories and Concepts. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
11.Taylor, J.R. (1995): Linguistic Categorization.Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford.
12.Wierzbicka, A. (1984): Apples are not a ‘kind of fruit’ – the semantics of human
categorization. AmericanEthnologist 11, 313-328.


Lecture 8. Conceptual metaphor and conceptual integration

1.The conceptual theory of metaphor

2.Issues in the conceptual theory of metaphor
3.Conceptual integration

Cognitive linguists reject the so-called substitution theory of metaphor,according to which a metaphorical expression replaces some literal expression thathas the same meaning. Metaphors (‘true’ metaphors), in general, are not literally

paraphrasable: they have a character that no literal expression has. At the same time,although metaphorical meaning has a special character that distinguishes it fromany literal meaning, it has the same range of basic functions as literal meaning. Ofcourse, many metaphorical expressions have a heavy load of expressive meaning,butsodo many literal expressions. In other words, metaphorical meaning is not,at least in basic functional respects, a special kind of meaning: it is rather the casethat metaphor is the result of a special process for arriving at, or construing, ameaning.
One of the most influential books to emerge from the cognitive linguistic tradition is Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we live by (Lakoff and Johnson 1980;see also Lakoff and Turner 1989; Lakoff 1987, 1993). Lakoff and his colleaguesuse evidence from everyday conventional linguistic expressions to infer the existence of metaphorical relations or mappings between conceptual domains (inthe sense of chapter 2) in the human mind. Lakoff’s primary goal in developingthe conceptual theory of metaphor is to uncover these metaphorical mappings between domains and how they have guided human reasoning and behavior, as canbe seen by his subsequent application of metaphor theory to literature (Lakoff andTurner 1989), philosophy (Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999), mathematics(Lakoff and Nґun˜ez 2000) and even politics (Lakoff 1996).Because of Lakoff’s aim to uncover deeply embedded conceptual relations inthe mind, for him the ideal metaphorical expressions to analyze are not the widelydiscussed type of examples in (3), but rather those in (4):

(3) a. Juliet is the sun. (Shakespeare)

b. my wife . . . whose waist is an hourglass (from Andreґ Breton; Lakoff and
Turner 1989:90)
(4) a. I’ll see you at 2 o’clock.
b. He is in danger.
c. Her anger boiled over.
d. She’s had to contend with many obstacles in her life, but she has come a long
way since her days in the orphanage.

The expressions in (3) differ from those in (4) in two important respects. First,

the expressions in (3) are all of the form XisYwhere X and Y are both nominal expressions,a quite uncommon type of metaphorical expression in ordinary speech.
The expressions in (4) are all common, everyday constructions in which metaphor-
ically used prepositions, verbs and other expressions (typically relational in nature) combine with literal phrases (typically nominals functioning as argumentsof the metaphorical relational elements). Hence the metaphorical expressions in(3) are grammatically and semantically quite different from those in (4). This distinction is pertinent because much psycholinguistic research on metaphor (e.g.Gentner 1983, 1988), including research purported to test Lakoff and Johnson’stheory (e.g. Glucksberg 2001), is based on the metaphor type illustrated in (3),not (4).
Second, and more important, the metaphors in (3) are novel creations ([3a–b]
are both from literary works, for example) while the metaphors in (4) are conventionalized linguistic expressions, another aspect of their common everyday
character. Lakoff and Turner distinguish novel metaphors from conventionalized
metaphors, calling the former ‘image metaphors’ (Lakoff and Turner 1989:99;
Lakoff 1993:229; see below). Of course, many metaphors do not become conven-
tionalized. But certain metaphors do get conventionalized, and more interesting,
the same metaphors tend to become conventionalized independently across languages. There is presumably some reason why certain metaphors are conventionalized again and again across languages, while others are not. Lakoff and colleaguesargue that their repeated conventionalization is due to their cognitive significance,which in turn is grounded in human experience (hence the title Metaphors welive by). Thus, the main focus of their theory of metaphor is of conventionalmetaphors, not novel metaphors; we will return to this point at the end of thissection.
The central characteristic of Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of (conventional)
metaphor is that the metaphor is not a property of individual linguistic expressions
and their meanings, but of whole conceptual domains. In principle, any concept
from the source domain – the domain supporting the literal meaning of the expression – can be used to describe a concept in the target domain – the domain
the sentence is actually about.
Forexample, the literal meaning of at in (4a) is locative in nature, but it has
been metaphorically extended to apply also to time. Likewise, in in (4b) has a
196 Cognitive approaches to lexical semanticsbasic locative meaning, and the use in (4) is a metaphorical extension of this:here, a state (danger) is conceived as a container that one can be inside of oroutside of. But many other locative expressions can be used to describe time, asin (5), and many container expressions can be used for a wide range of states, asin (6):

(5) a. We have entered the 21st century.

b. I finished this in two hours.
c. They worked through the night.
(6) a. They’re in love.
b. How do we get out of this mess?
c. He fell into a deep depression.
Lakoff and Johnson use a formula target domain is source domain todescribe the metaphorical link between the domains. The metaphorical mappingsin (4a) and (5) are manifestations of the TIME IS SPACE metaphor, and thosein (4b) and 6 of the STATES ARE CONTAINERS metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:31–32). Likewise, (4c) is a manifestation of the ANGER ISHEAT OF A FLUID metaphor, and (4d), the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. As Lakoffputs it: