Metaphor and the Social World - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2014

This article offers a metaphorical and embodied examination of the representation of perception in narrative cinema. Using insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory we argue that the perceptual states of characters can be represented cinematically via audio-visual expressions of metaphors related to the physical functioning of human bodies. More specifically, we show how a predominant pair of conceptual mappings, namely the metonymy perceptual organ stands for perception and the metaphor perception is contact between perceiver and perceived, plays a crucial role in the non-verbal representation of the characters’ perceptual experience.

Drawing on data from a series of informal conversations about public safety and police-community relations, we distinguish between a speaker’s generalized communicative intentions with respect to metaphor use and story-telling, based on what Chafe (1994, p. 145) calls “unifying ideas that persist in semiactive consciousness” and the spontaneous intentions that arise within the short-term focus or spotlight of consciousness and guide the production of actual utterances. Although speakers occasionally enter a conversation with a fixed intention to express an idea with a particular metaphor, tell a particular story in a particular style, or accomplish some other speech act, such as persuading or informing, more commonly in ordinary conversations speakers begin with only a generalized intention to engage in the social interaction, sometimes but not always accompanied by generalized intentions regarding a particular topic or a particular form of expression. We argue that these “unifying ideas” interact with the contents of the short-term focus or spotlight of consciousness to generate spontaneous communicative intentions that in turn guide the production of metaphors, stories, and other language segments. Often these spontaneous communicative intentions arise interactively in response to other participants’ utterances; sometimes they arise in response to unforeseen opportunities in the speaker’s own utterances. Consequently, in ordinary casual conversations the spontaneous communicative intentions behind metaphor, story-telling and humor are often formed ‘on the fly,’ in response to the dynamic social interaction, and sometimes as a result of collaboration with other participants.

Metaphors about love in online dating advertisements might seem to be an easy and inconsequential way to express people’s romantic expectations. Using Critical Metaphor Analysis methodology, this paper takes a closer look at a sample of love metaphors used by Spanish-speaking heterosexual ad posters, to show how they use the metaphors to create a discourse of traditional romance in a modern medium, the online dating world. These metaphors are powerful tools for conveying traditional ideologies about romance and relationships. Additionally, they provide ad posters with a useful rhetorical tool for portraying themselves as ideal romantic partners, ‘regular’ and/or ‘normal’ heterosexuals, who play according to the regulatory norms of their gender, allowing them to ‘sell’ themselves as better candidates for romance.

The beneficial effect of creative activities on individuals’ subjective wellbeing has become a popular and academic given in recent years. Yet the creative processes occurring in a complex, non-drug intervention and their relationship with perceived beneficial effects on wellbeing are difficult to define. Health professionals, arts practitioners and commentators alike identify the need for the development of a multi-disciplinary vocabulary that reflects the interests and values inherent in this rapidly developing discipline. Newcastle University’s “Ageing Creatively” project was an 18-month pilot study to explore the relationship of creative arts interventions to wellbeing in later life (Adams, Thomas & Thomson, 2014). This paper presents the results of metaphor analysis in a series of exit interviews with 31 participants. One-to-one interviews were administered by telephone or in person by specialist, creative arts researchers and each interview was semi-structured using the CASP-12 questionnaire, which aims to measure quality of life in the third age (Sim et al., 2011). The Metaphor Identification Procedure was applied (double-blind) by hand to the transcribed corpus of c.93,000 words, inputted into MS Excel and then discursively coded with vehicles by the researchers. Two dominant vehicle groupings emerged that suggest subjective wellbeing amongst the participant group is conceptualized using the container image schema and the source-path-goal image schema. We therefore propose two systematic, novel metaphors — wellbeing is a container and wellbeing is a journey — as meaningful alternatives to Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor wellbeing is wealth, especially in the search to better understand the relationship between creative activities and subjective wellbeing. Our findings suggest that systematic metaphor analysis may be usefully incorporated into the range of social science methodologies available for the measurement of subjective wellbeing.

A previous article about the use of migration as a metaphor was concerned particularly with migration as a metaphor for metaphor (Lambkin, 2012). Here the concern is with migration as a metaphor for time, particularly as a metaphor for accessing the past and the future from the present. Two related dominant or guiding metaphors are identified: the past/future is a foreign country and the past/future is a lost /undiscovered world. The procedure adopted is to look first at how the novelist L.P Hartley and the historian Peter Laslett respectively developed these metaphors in “The Go-between” (1953) and “The World we have Lost” (1965). Then consideration is given to the analysis of the discourse in which these metaphors are used by the cultural geographer David Lowenthal, particularly in his “The Past is a Foreign Country” (1985). Finally, the metaphors of travelling between present and past and travelling between present and future are discussed in relation to the discipline of migration studies and a proposal is made for re-framing time past, present and future, in terms of migration.

Two previous articles proposed the reframing of metaphors for metaphor and time in terms of migration as a device or tool for promoting public understanding. They addressed the difficulty in the social world of explaining the world of metaphor and the world of time (Lambkin, 2012, 2014). The latter was concerned with a particular difficulty of time: explaining how we access the world of the past and the world of the future from the world of the present. The concern here is with a further difficulty of time: explaining how, once ‘accessed’, we ‘deal with’ the past and ‘deal with’ the future. It is argued that a better understanding of the simultaneity of these two inextricably linked actions is important in the social world, especially in the discourse of conflict resolution when the tension between ‘dealing with’ the past and ‘dealing with’ the future is an intractable problem, as currently in the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’. The metaphorical representation of that tension is examined in a recent document of the Northern Ireland peace process (Haas & O’Sullivan, 2013) and in three other illustrative texts (Hughes & Hamlin, 1977; Giddens, 1999; Cameron, 2011). A proposal is made for reframing the phenomenon of ‘simultaneous pluralism’ or ‘plural singularity’ in terms of migration, as a way of promoting the public understanding of time in particular, and as an aid to resolving or ‘dealing with’ the tension between ‘dealing with’ the past and ‘dealing with’ the future when in the social world it becomes problematic.