Metaphor and the Social World - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015

This paper examines President Barack Obama’s use of contrasting metaphors and metaphorical stories to frame the issue of climate change and the associated political controversies in a major policy speech at Georgetown University in 2013. One major theme in the speech contrasted a series of metaphors based on violence and destruction with a series of metaphors based on peace, tranquility, and health, all within an overall framing story about the Apollo 8 astronauts and the picture they took of the Earth from lunar orbit. Another major theme is the contrast between metaphors of passivity or obstruction and metaphors of movement and dynamic activity. Within these two sets of thematic contrasts are more subtle contrasts between metaphors associated with the effects of climate change and metaphors associated with ameliorative actions to counteract climate change. All of these themes are presented in a way that fails to acknowledge — and implicitly discredits — possible alternative frames. This, plus the obstruction / movement contrast, effectively aggravates the frame conflicts that have stymied fruitful discussion of these issues throughout the Obama administration. We close the analysis with some specific recommendations for increasing the potential for empathetic understanding through explicit awareness of the framing effects of language.

Over the last two decades, accumulating work in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics has provided evidence that language shapes thought. Conceptual metaphor theory proposes that the conceptual structure of emotions emerges through metaphorization from concrete concepts such as spatial orientation and physical containment. Primary metaphors for emotions have been described in a wide range of languages. Here we show, in Study 1, the results of a corpus analysis revealing that certain metaphors such as EMOTIONS ARE FLUIDS and EMOTIONS ARE BOUNDED SPACEs are quite natural in Spanish. Moreover, the corpus data reveal that the bounded space source domain is more frequently mapped onto negative emotions. In Study 2, we consider the question of whether the instantiation of metaphorical framing influences the way we think about emotions. A questionnaire experiment was conducted to explore this question, focusing on the Spanish case of locura (‘madness’). Our results show that when madness was framed as a fluid filling a container (the body), people tended to rate symptoms as less enduring and as more likely to be caused by social and environmental factors, compared with when it was framed as a place in space. Results are discussed in the light of conceptual metaphor theory.

This paper is aimed at verifying the experiential motivation of metaphorical language in a diachronic perspective. More specifically, I have tried to identify how socio-historical-cultural conditions may affect the actualization of a metaphor. To this end, I have grounded this research on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which presents the linguistic metaphors in language as resulting from a conceptual-level mapping between domains of knowledge. With this in mind, I have restricted the investigation to the evidence of the MORAL ACCOUNTING metaphor in medieval religious instruction texts in England. Linguistic evidence of this metaphor in the Early and High Middle Ages were extracted and aspects of MORAL INTERACTION they express were identified, tabulated and confronted. Lastly, I have sought explanations for the maintenance and variation in the actualization of the metaphor, both in the immediate context of doctrinal production and in the broader context of commercial practices. I have found that, side by side with a surprisingly similar number of occurrences, there is evidence of the highlighting of aspects of MORAL INTERACTION that are situated historically and discursively which considerably affect the frequency of the scenarios of realisation of this metaphor.

There are currently attempts to dovetail classical and conceptual metaphor to improve analyses of metaphor in political discourse, but the results, to date, are not robust or sufficiently comprehensive. In this article, I return to Aristotle’s original definition of metaphor in order to set up a framework for the analysis of political metaphors. I first designate the exact position of Aristotle’s theory within conceptual metaphor theory, in order to avoid a lack of coherence between classical and conceptual metaphor theory. In the combination of the two theories I am able to define three styles of purposeful political use of metaphor: reason-based, emotion-based and strategy-based usage of (conceptual) metaphor. These styles are significant, because using a political metaphor is performing a political speech-act, and an important purpose of that speech-act, besides persuasion, is establishing a political identity and style. Examples of the three metaphor purposes and styles show how they can be identified in political discourse. The framework can be used in further political analysis to assess what the role of rhetorical style is in political processes.

Many contemporary public health campaigns use some form of metaphor. Studies into what makes this strategy effective typically focus on the ability of metaphors to attract attention and trigger conversations. Consequently, the question of how they might enhance or impede people’s understanding of the information conveyed is often overlooked. This article brings together key concepts in Conceptual Metaphor Theory with the latest findings in health communication to present a framework for describing metaphors in health promotion on the basis of their experiential, internal, external and narrative coherence. Using the comparative analysis of two children’s comics about tuberculosis as a small-scale case study, the paper argues that metaphor coherence is particularly important in health campaigns that aim to convey complex, new information. The paper ends with suggestions for validating the framework more broadly.

This article-cum-narrative reflects on the use — indeed usefulness — of a dictionary in helping the researcher to identify metaphorical and non-metaphorical uses of language. Focusing on a group of ‘saying’ verbs as they were used in a face-to-face conversation between a university lecturer and an undergraduate student, it describes a researcher’s attempts to use the dictionary recommended by the Pragglejaz Group in their seminal article on metaphor identification (2007) to discover what basic sense of different words might (or might not) motivate their metaphorical meaning in context. The quest to identify the basic meanings of these verbs using this dictionary was fraught with difficulties and led to a less than satisfactory dénouement.

The use of a dictionary in metaphor identification may lead to conflicts between sense descriptions in the dictionary and analysts’ (native speaker) intuitions about word meanings. This paper offers suggestions for dealing with these conflicts by focusing on the descriptive rather than prescriptive role of the dictionary and the autonomy of the researcher. We argue that whether researchers decide to follow the dictionary or favour their own intuitions and specific interests is ultimately up to them, but they should aim to make their decisions as systematic and explicit as possible.

MacArthur questions the use of the “Macmillan Dictionary” in metaphor identification. In this response, I argue that the ideal way of determining basic meaning is by analysis of concordance citations sampled from an appropriate corpus. This is demonstrated using a 1000 word sample of the concordance for say and its inflections, taken from the “British National Corpus”. It is shown that it is very difficult to identify separable senses, which calls into question whether say is actually a realisation of a mapping from writing to speaking. A dictionary developed on corpus principles is a good alternative to using corpus data directly. It is argued that learners’ dictionaries are more suitable than native speaker dictionaries for this purpose.