Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

 
4.3.The Conceptual and Contextual Metaphor of Time and Space in the Novel 
 
 
 According to the theorist Lakoff (1987:302), human life consists of various kinds of 
experience that is structured in the mind and in the memory by certain “directly meaningful 
concepts”. These basic concepts are based on associations and links between places, events, and 
experiences that people tend to classify and analyze on the basis of their subjective understanding of 
reality. In Lakoff’s words (ibid.), concepts arising in the mind are important for our cognition 
because they provide “certain fixed points in the objective evaluation of situations”. Indeed, these 
structures of cognition can be divided into basic-level structures and image-schema structures: 
basic-level structures are characterized “as a result of our capacities for gestalt perception, mental 
imagery, and motor movement” (ibid.) and manifest as the basic feelings of hunger or pain, whereas 
image schemas are certain spatial mappings that consist of the source, path, and goal, or the central 
and peripheral elements. In general, Lakoff believes that the variety of concepts that occurs in the 
mind gradually forms certain patterns of thought, which “derive their fundamental meaningfulness 
directly from their ability to match up with preconceptual structure. Such direct matchings provide 
a basis for an account of truth and knowledge”. (1987:303) Preconceptual structures are mapped 
from source domains to target domains and thus, influence the rise and development of conceptual 
metaphors that play a vital role in our ability to think in abstract terms like knowledge. 

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Zoltan Kovecses (2002: 36) supports Lakoff’s insights about conceptual metaphors in life and 
art and complements them by saying that in literature, conceptual metaphors enable writers to 
represent in linear language complex nature of the human consciousness including feelings, 
emotions, dreams, memories, and other mental phenomena. In his opinion, the psychological reality 
and multidimensionality of conceptual metaphors provide readers with a better understanding of the 
piece of fiction they are reading and thus, encourage them to think in a creative critical way by 
making their own judgements, interpretations, allusions, and presuppositions. By comparison, Jurga 
Cibulskienė believes ( 2006) that within the context of a particular book, the conceptual metaphors 
are not used merely to illustrate one thing in terms of another; instead, they are both cohesive 
mechanisms of evoking emotions and conveying means of representing consciousness that would 
have been impossible to express in ordinary language. According to Kovecses (ibid.), structurally, 
conceptual metaphors can be characterized as the duality of two elements, namely A and B, which 
complement one another and complete a certain formula, where “the target domain (A) is 
comprehended through a source domain (B).” In linguist’s opinion, the semantic core of a 
conceptual metaphor can be fully understood only via the relationships that exist during the two 
aforementioned domains. 
Indeed, as I have already mentioned in previous chapters, Woolf’s style of writing has been 
defined as innovative and experimental because of her attempt to reveal the original nature of the 
individual consciousness by numerous verbal means. Lee believes that the writer purposefully uses 
allusive emotional vocabulary as well as stylistic means that enable her to express the most secret 
and subtle feelings of the human beings.According to me, in To the Lighthouse, Woolf uses a 
number of interesting conceptual metaphors which play a vital role in her readers’ ability to 
rediscover the meaning of abstract terms like life and death, happiness and sorrow, time and space. 
The notion of time, in my opinion, perceives the majority of attention in the novel and 
consequently, I suggest analyzing three conceptual metaphors that serve for discourse organization 
and construction as well as representation of varying consciousness styles. In the novel, the writer 
seems to extend, elaborate, and even reformulate well-known conceptual metaphors related to 
travelling, growing, changing, and discovering. Hence, judging from the temporal perspective, I 
would show the following kernel conceptual metaphors that enhance the issues of time and space in 
the figure below. 

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LIFE 
ART 
TIME 
Figure 7. Conceptual Metaphors of Time and Space in the Novel To the Lighthouse