What counts as a metaphor? Challenges that Slavic data present
for conceptual metaphor theory
Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 book _Metaphors We Live By_ not only introduced
conceptual metaphor theory to a broad audience, it also propagated certain assumptions
about what constitute legitimate data for study. The work followed the
Chomskyan tradition of using English sentences which were made up and were deemed
plausible and felicitous by native-speaker authors. This tradition went
unquestioned for years in much subsequent research within this paradigm, but
also in cognitive linguistics more generally. In addition, most of the
research using this theory of metaphor has been done on English.
In the past few years, spurred by recent conferences in Western Europe on "Researching
and Applying Metaphor," the tide has been turning, and the value of using data
from real discourse -- from various languages -- is being recognized:
if we want to know how language reflects how people really think, we need to
look at how people really talk. Given that as of yet there is still little
research on metaphor in actual spoken discourse, in English or in other languages,
the question remains: What are we really talking about when we try to
identify the metaphors that someone or some group lives by? The process
of metaphor identification in linguistic data has been assumed to be unproblematic.
Yet in real conversation, metaphoric expressions rarely appear in the neat,
complete sentences used as examples in much of the research published after
_Metaphors We Live By_, in which the source domains are explicitly clear.
In Russian and some other Slavic languages, the situation is complicated by
ellipsis in contexts where it would not be appropriate in English, and
by impersonal constructions which leave the subject unspecified.
Another question to be considered when determining what will count as evidence
of conceptual metaphors in one's data is whether one is looking for metaphoric
mappings that are likely to be cognitively active for speakers of the language
today, or for mappings that have become conventionalized and "frozen," or both.
For English, the distinction is clearer when Romance or Greek roots are involved
-- which are more likely opaque to most non-linguist native speakers.
The average English-speaker who does not know the original spatial meaning of
certain Latin or Greek roots that now have abstract meanings in English is not
going to cognitively process the historical metaphoric mapping from source to
target domain when hearing the word used. Russian, like other Slavic languages,
maintains the use of Slavic morphemes in word formation to a much higher degree
than English maintains Germanic forms. To what degree are originally spatial
morphemes cognitively real as such for native speakers when they occur in words
that now have conventional non-spatial meanings (e.g., _donosit' na kogo-libo_
as 'inform against someone')? The spatial origins of such morphemes are
likely more apparent to non-native speakers, who may be more actively parsing
word forms. While the historical linguist can clearly count these forms
as having metaphorical origins, does the linguist interested in native speakers'
metaphoric "thinking for speaking" (a la Slobin 1987) want to count them as
well? Clearly, data from Slavic languages, and from any other language with
more complex morphology than English, present particular challenges. The
data for this study consist of excerpts from some 20 conversations between
pairs of Russian university students discussing exam-taking practises at universities,
which were videotaped in Moscow in 1996 (part of a larger study involving comparison
with similar data from American students).
As possible solutions to these challenges, we will provide a brief overview
of the following contemporary approaches as applied to these data: Gibbs'
(1999) distinction between process and product of metaphoric mappings, Cameron's
(1999) procedures for metaphor identification, Steen's (1999) proposal to break
down the propositional structure of the text to assist in metaphor identification,
and Kyratzis' (1999) arguments about the mutability of metaphors' status as
"frozen" versus "unfrozen," even within the context of one conversation.
We will also point out the need for additional methodologies in research with
real discourse data if one wants to try to argue that certain metaphoric mappings
are taking place cognitively in real time. Examples from the video data
will show the usefulness of analyzing topic development over longer stretches
of discourse, and of drawing on supporting data from spontaneous gesture co-occurring
with speech.
In conclusion, it is the goals of one's study that are going to determine
the form of the data one begins with, the method for determining which expressions
count as metaphoric, and therefore how many metaphors one will find in the data.
Considering Slavic languages as an object of study brings certain theoretical
and methodological questions to the forefront for cognitive linguistics which
otherwise have remained in the shadows; this talk will propose some ways of
approaching them.
References:
- Cameron, Lynne. 1999. "Identifying and Describing Metaphor in
Spoken Discourse Data," in Cameron and Low.
- Cameron, Lynne, and Graham Low, eds. 1999. _Researching and
Applying Metaphor_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Gibbs, Raymond. 1999. "Researching Metaphor," in Cameron and
Low.
- Kyratzis, Sakis. 1999. "A New Metaphor for Metaphor: Evidence
for a Single Dynamic Metaphoric Category." Paper presented at the Sixth
International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Stockholm.
- Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. _Metaphors We Live By_.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Slobin, Dan I. 1987. "Thinking for Speaking," in _Proceedings
of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society_, 435-445.
- Steen, Gerard. 1999. "From Linguistic to Conceptual Metaphor
in Five Steps," in _Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics_, Gibbs and Steen (eds.).
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.