The Experiential Basis Of Metaphor

The conceptual system underlying a language contains thousands of conceptual metaphors -- conventional mappings from one domain to another, such as the Event Structure Metaphor. The novel metaphors of a language are, except for image metaphors, extensions of this large conventional system. Perhaps the deepest question that any theory of metaphor must answer is this: Why do we have the conventional metaphors that we have? Or alternatively: Is there any reason why conceptual systems contain one set of metaphorical mappings rather than another? There do appear to be answers to these questions for many of the mappings found so far, though they are in the realm of plausible accounts, rather than in the realm of scientific results. Take a simple case: the MORE IS UP metaphor, as seen in expressions like: Prices rose. His income went down. Unemployment is up. Exports are down. The number of homeless people is very high. There are other languages in which MORE IS UP and LESS IS DOWN, but none in which the reverse is true, where MORE IS DOWN and LESS IS UP. Why not? The answer given in the contemporary theory is that the MORE IS UP metaphor is grounded in experience-in the common experiences of pouring more fluid into a container and seeing the level go up, or adding more things to a pile and seeing the pile get higher. These are thoroughly pervasive experiences; we experience them every day of our lives. They are experiences with a structure-a correspondence between the conceptual domain of quantity and the conceptual domain of verticality: MORE corresponds in such experiences to UP and LESS corresponds to DOWN. These correspondences in real experience form the basis for the correspondence in the metaphorical cases, which go beyond the cases in real experience: in Prices rose there is no correspondence in real experience between quantity and verticality, but understanding quantity in terms of verticality makes sense because of the existence of a regular correspondence in so many other cases. Consider another case: What is the basis of the widespread KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor, as in expressions like: I see what your saying. His answer was clear. This paragraph is murky. He was so blinded by ambition that he never noticed his limitations. The experiential basis, in this case, is the fact that most of what we know comes through vision, and that in the overwhelming majority of cases, if we see something, then we know it is true. Consider still another case: Why, in the Event Structure Metaphor, is achieving a purpose understood as reaching a destination (in the location subsystem) and as acquiring a desired object (in the object subsystem)? The answer again seems to be correspondences in everyday experience. To achieve most of our everyday purposes, we either have to move to some destination or acquire some object. If you want a drink of water, you've got to go to the water fountain. If you want to be in the sunshine, you have to move to where the sunshine is. And if you want to write down a note, you got to get a pen or pencil. The correspondences between achieving purposes and either reaching destinations or acquiring objects is so utterly common in our everyday existence, that the resulting metaphor is completely natural. But what about the experiential basis of A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY? Recall that that mapping is in an inheritance hierarchy, where life goals are special cases of purposes, which are destinations in the event structure metaphor. Thus, A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY inherits the experiential basis of PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS. Thus, inheritance hierarchies provide indirect experiential bases, in that a metaphorical mapping lower in a hierarchy can inherit its experiential basis indirectly from a mapping higher in the hierarchy. Experiential bases motivate metaphors, they do not predict them. Thus, not every language has a MORE IS UP metaphor, though all human beings experience a correspondence between MORE and UP in their experience. What this experiential basis does predict is that no language will have the opposite metaphor LESS IS UP. It also predicts that a speaker of language that does not have that metaphor will be able to learn that metaphor much more easily than the opposite metaphor.

Consider objects like thermometers and stock market graphs, where increases in temperature and prices are represented as being up and decreases as being down. These are real man-made objects created to accord with the MORE IS UP metaphor. They are objects in which there is a correlation between MORE and UP. Such objects are a lot easier to read and understand than if they contradicted the metaphor, say, if increases were represented as down and decreases as up. Such objects are ways in which metaphors impose a structure on real life, through the creation of new correspondences in experience. And of course, once such real objects are created in one generation, those objects serve as an experiential basis for that metaphor in the next generation. There are a great many ways in which conventional metaphors can be made real. Metaphors can be realized in obvious imaginative products such as cartoons, literary works, dreams, visions, and myths. But metaphors can be made real in less obvious ways as well, in physical symptoms, social institutions, social practices, laws, and even foreign policy and forms of discourse and of history. Let us consider some examples:

Cartoons:

Conventional metaphors are made real in cartoons. A common example is the realization of the ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER metaphor, in which one can be boiling mad or letting off steam. In cartoons, anger is commonly depicted by having steam coming out the character's ears. Similarly, social clumsiness is indicated by having a cartoon character fall on his face.

Literary works:

It is common for the plot of novel to be a realization of the PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, where the course of a life takes the form of an actual journey. Pilgrim's Progress is a classical example.

Rituals:

Consider the cultural ritual in which a newborn baby is carried upstairs to insure his or her success. The metaphor realized in this ritual is STATUS IS UP, exemplified by sentences such as: He clawed his way to the top. He climbed the ladder of success. You'll rise in the world.

Dream Interpretation:

Conceptual metaphors consitute the vocabulary of dream interpretation. It is the collection of our everyday conceptual metaphors that make dream interpretations possible. Consider one of the most celebrated of all dream interpretations: Joseph's interpretation of Pharoah's dream from Genesis. In Pharoah's dream, he is standing on the river bank, when seven fat cows come out of the river, followed by seven lean cows that eat the seven fat ones and still remain lean. Then Pharoah dreams again. This time he sees seven full and good ears of corn growing, and then seven withered ears growing after them. The withered ears devour the good ears. Joseph interprets the two dreams as a single dream. The seven fat cows and full ears are good years and the seven lean cows and withered ears are famine years that follow the good years. The famine years devour what the good years produce. This interpretation makes sense to us because of a collection of conceptual metaphors in our conceptual system -- metaphors that have been with us since Biblical times.

• The first metaphor used is: TIMES ARE MOVING ENTITIES. A river is a common metaphor for the flow of time; the cows are individual entities (years) emerging from the flow of time and moving past the observer; the ears of corn are also entities that come into the scene.

• The second metaphor used is ACHIEVING A PURPOSE IS EATING, where being fat indicates success being lean indicates failure. This metaphor is combined with the most common of metonymies: A PART STANDS FOR THE WHOLE. Since cows and corn were typical of meat and grain eaten, each single cow stands for all the cows raised in a year and each ear of corn for all the corn grown in a year.

• The final metaphor used is: RESOURCES ARE FOOD, where using up resources is eating food. The devouring of the good years by the famine years is interpreted as indicating that all the surplus resources of the good years will be used up by the famine years.

The interpretation of the whole dream is thus a composition of three conventional metaphors and one metonymy. The metaphoric and metonymic sources are combined to form the reality of the dream.

Myths:

In the Event Structure metaphor, there is a submapping EXTERNAL EVENTS ARE LARGE, MOVING OBJECTS that can exerted a force upon you and thereby effect whether you achieve your goals. In English the special cases of such objects are things, fluids, and horses. Pamela Morgan (in unpublished work) has observed that in Greek Mythology, Poseidon is the god of the sea, earthquakes, horses and bulls. The list might seem arbitrary, but Morgan observes that these are all large moving objects that can exert a force on you. Morgan surmises that this is not an obvious list. The sea, earthquakes, horses, and bulls are all large moving objects that can exert a significant force. Poseidon, she surmises, should really be seen as the god of external events.

Physical symptoms:

The unconscious mind makes use our unconscious system of conventional metaphor, sometimes to express psychological states in terms of physical symptoms. For example, in the Event Structure metaphor, there is a submapping DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO MOTION which has, as a special case, DIFFICULTIES ARE BURDENS. It is fairly common for someone encountering difficulties to walk with his shoulders stooped, as if carrying a heavy weight that is burdening him.

Social institutions:

We have a TIME IS MONEY metaphor, shown by expressions like:

He's wasting time.

I have to budget my time.

This will save you time.

I've invested a lot of time in that.

He doesn't use his time profitably.

This metaphor came into English about the time of the industrial revolution, when people started to be paid for work by the amount of time they worked. Thus, the factory led to the institutional pairing of periods of time with amounts of money, which formed the experiential basis of this metaphor. Since then, the metaphor has been realized in many other ways. The budgeting of time has spread throughout American culture.

Social practices:

There is conceptual metaphor that SEEING IS TOUCHING, where the eyes are limbs and vision is achieved when the object seen is touched.

Examples are:

My eyes picked out every detail of the pattern.

He ran his eyes over the walls.

He couldn't take his eyes off of her.

Their eyes met.

His eyes are glued to the tv.

The metaphor is made real in the social practice of avoiding eye contact on the street, and in the social prohibition against undressing someone with your eyes.

Laws:

Law is major area where metaphor is made real. For example, CORPORATIONS ARE PERSONS is a tenet of American law, which not only enables corporations to be harmed and assigned responsibility so that they can be sued when liable, but also gives corporations certain First Amendment rights.

Foreign policy:

A STATE IS A PERSON is one of the major metaphors underlying foreign policy concepts. Thus, there are friendly states, hostile states, etc. Health for a state is economic health and strength is military strength. Thus a threat to economic health can be seen as a death threat, as when Iraq was seen to have a stanglehold on the economic lifeline of the U.S. Strong states are seen as male, and weak states as female, so that an attack by a strong state on a weak state can be seen as a rape, as in the rape of Kuwait by Iraq. A just war is conceptualized as a fairy tale with villain, victim, and hero, where the villain attacks the victim and the hero rescues the victim. Thus, the U.S. in the Gulf War was portrayed as having rescued Kuwait. As President Bush said in his address to Congress, The issues couldn't have been clearer: Iraq was the villain and Kuwait, the victim.

Forms of discourse:

Common metaphors are often made real in discourse forms. Consider four common academic discourse forms: the Guided Tour, the Heroic Battle, and the Heroic Quest.

The Guided Tour is based on the metaphor that THOUGHT IS MOTION, where ideas are locations and one reasons step-by-step, reaches conclusions, or you fail to reach a conclusion if you are engaged in circular reasoning. Communication in this metaphor is giving someone a guided tour of some rational argument or of some intellectual terrain. The present paper is an example of such a guided tour, where I, the author, am the tour guide who is assumed to be thoroughly familiar with the terrain, and where the terrain surveyed is taken as objectively real.

The discourse form of the Heroic Battle is based on the metaphor that ARGUMENT IS WAR. The author's theory is the hero, the opposing theory is the villain, and words are weapons. The battle is in the form of an argument defending the hero's position and demolishing the villain's position.

The Heroic Quest discourse form is based on the metaphor that knowledge is a valuable but elusive object that can be discovered if one perseveres. The scientist is the hero on a quest for knowledge, and the discourse form is an account of his difficult journey of discovery. What is discovered is, of course, a real entity. What makes all of these cases realizations of metaphors is that in each case there is something real structured by conventional metaphor, and which is made comprehensible, or even natural, by those everyday metaphors. What is real differs in each case: an object like a thermometer or graph, an experience like a dream, an action like a ritual, a form of discourse, etc.

What these examples reveal is that a lot of what is real in a society or in the experience of an individual is structured and made sense of via conventional metaphor. Experiential bases and realizations of metaphors are two sides of the same coin: they are both correlations in real experience that have the same structure as the correlations in metaphors. The difference is that experiential bases precede, ground, and make sense of conventional metaphorical mappings, while realizations follow, and are made sense of, via the conventional metaphors. And as we noted above, one generation's realizations of a metaphor can become part of the next generation's experiential basis for that metaphor.

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