Gibbs - Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor Theory (2011)
Gibbs - Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor Theory (2011)
Gibbs - Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor Theory (2011)
To cite this article: Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. (2011) Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor Theory,
Discourse Processes, 48:8, 529-562, DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2011.606103
A major revolution in the study of metaphor occurred 30 years ago with the
introduction of “conceptual metaphor theory” (CMT). Unlike previous theories
of metaphor and metaphorical meaning, CMT proposed that metaphor is not just
an aspect of language, but a fundamental part of human thought. Indeed, most
metaphorical language arises from preexisting patterns of metaphorical thought
or conceptual metaphors. This article provides an evaluation of the linguistic and
psychological evidence supporting CMT, and responds to some of the criticisms of
CMT offered by scholars within cognitive science. Some new ways of thinking of
conceptual metaphors from the perspective of embodied simulations and dynamical
systems theory are also presented.
A good part of the Fall 2006 Congressional election campaign debated the
wisdom of President George Bush’s metaphorical statement that the United
States intended to “stay the course” in the ongoing war in Iraq. Bush said on two
occasions, “We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy
succeed,” and “We will win in Iraq as long as we stay the course.” However, as
various political pundits soon noted, “The White House is cutting and running
from ‘stay the course’ ”—a phrase meant to connote steely resolve instead has
become a symbol for being out of touch and rigid in the face of a war that
seems to grow worse by the week; Republican strategists said, “Democrats have
now turned ‘stay the course’ into an attack line in campaign commercials, and
the Bush team is busy explaining that ‘stay the course’ does not actually mean
stay the course” (Baker, 2006, p. A01).
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530 GIBBS
The debate over what Bush really meant by his use of “stay the course” is
especially relevant to scholars of language and communication because it high-
lights enduring issues over whether the use of clichéd language, such as Bush’s—
or Bush’s speechwriters—reflects anything fundamental about how people think
metaphorically. Was Bush’s use of the phrase “stay the course” motivated by
a more general underlying metaphorical concept, such as “Progress toward a
goal is a journey,” or did he simply use this clichéd expression because it
conventionally means “not changing plans” without any underlying metaphorical
conception about the U.S. strategy for the Iraq war? Most important, what
sort of empirical/experimental evidence can be relied on to answer this ques-
tion?
The proposal that metaphor is as much a part of ordinary thought as it is of
language has been voiced by rhetoricians, philosophers, and others for hundreds
of years, but it has gained its greatest attention in the last 30 years with the rise of
“conceptual metaphor theory” (CMT) within the field of cognitive linguistics,
most notably starting with the publication in 1980 of the widely read book,
Metaphors We Live By, co-authored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Unlike
earlier scholars who speculated on the metaphorical basis of thought, Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) aimed to provide systematic linguistic evidence to support the
claim that there are indeed metaphors of thought or “conceptual metaphors.”
Since 1980, there has been an avalanche of studies from numerous academic
disciplines that have been motivated by CMT, enough so that this perspective
currently represents the dominant theoretical framework in the academic study
of metaphor.
At the same time, there have been numerous criticisms of CMT from scholars
both within and outside of cognitive linguistics. Most generally, as one psy-
chologist recently concluded, “Its atmospheric influence notwithstanding, the
[conceptual metaphor] view has not fared well theoretically or empirically”
(McGlone, 2007, p. 122); and, as a consequence, raised strong doubts about
“the explanatory value of the ‘conceptual metaphor’ construct” (McGlone, 2007,
p. 109).
My purpose in this article is to describe some of the evidence supporting
the basic tenets of CMT, noting areas of study that are typically not discussed
by critics of CMT, to better assess the role that enduring metaphors of thought
play in language, thought, and culture. Part of the goal here is to highlight
the significant linguistic, nonlinguistic, and experimental research that directly
responds to criticisms of CMT. However, I also discuss, toward the end, some
new developments that may alter how cognitive scientists think about conceptual
metaphors and their purported role in communication.
At the outset, it is important to note that CMT is not a general theory of
“figurative” language understanding, as it is not relevant to forms of figurative
language such as irony, metonymy, and oxymora. CMT primarily relates to
EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 531
certain kinds of metaphor (i.e., those with implicit target domains, such as in
“I don’t see the main point of that paper,” which is motivated by “Knowing
is seeing”), but not necessarily others (i.e., so-called resemblance metaphors
where the source and target domains are explicitly stated, as in “My job is a
jail”; however, for a proposal on how CMT may account for certain resemblance
metaphors, as in “Social restrictions are physical restrictions” for “My job is a
jail,” see Lakoff, 1993).
The original evidence for conceptual metaphors comes from the systematic
analysis of conventional expressions in different languages (Croft & Cruse, 2004;
Kovecses, 2002, 2006; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999). Consider the following
ways that English speakers sometimes talk about their romantic relationships:
Cognitive linguistic analyses argue that these individual expressions are not
clichéd idioms expressing literal meaning, but reflect, and are said to be partially
motivated by, different aspects of the enduring conceptual metaphor, “Love
is a journey.” There is a tight mapping according to which entities in the
domain of love (e.g., the lovers, their common goals, and the love relationship)
systematically correspond to entities in the domain of journeys (e.g., the traveler,
the vehicle, destinations, etc). Each previously mentioned linguistic expression
refers to a different correspondence that arises from the mapping of familiar,
often embodied, understanding of journeys onto the more abstract idea of a love
relationship (e.g., difficulties in the relationship are conceived of as obstacles on
the physical journey).
An important part of CMT is that many abstract concepts can be structured by
multiple conceptual metaphors. Thus, a love relationship can also be understood
as a natural force (“Love is a natural force”), as exhibited by the following
conventional expressions:
There have, at the very least, been attempts to create schemes by which
metaphorically used language may be reliably identified (Pragglejaz Group,
2007), and various computational programs have been developed that offer
explicit procedures, and not just intuitive judgments, for discerning conceptual
metaphors motivating different semantic fields/domains of metaphorical dis-
course (Martin, 1990; Mason, 2004). Corpus linguistic research has also begun
to create procedures for identifying metaphor in language and thought, such
as specifying what counts as a metaphorically used word and what counts as
a relevant source domain in a metaphorical mapping (Deignan, 2006; Stefano-
witsch & Gries, 2006). Most generally, corpora analyses are mostly supportive of
the wide range of conceptual metaphors identified by introspection in cognitive
linguistic research, but are also better able to quantify metaphorical patterns to
provide important insights on the relative salience of conceptual metaphors in
different domains (e.g., “Anger is heat” is more prominent than “Anger is a
fierce animal”).
This corpus work also indicates certain complexities in the kinds of metaphor-
ical mappings seen in real discourse, which requires modifications to standard
CMT. For instance, different inflections of the same word (or phrase) appear in
different evaluative patterns when used metaphorically. Thus, the plural word
“flames” conveys negative meanings (e.g., “His future crashed in flames”),
whereas the singular “flame” mostly refers to positive evaluations (e.g., “George
still carried a flame for Kelly”; Deignan, 2006). Many other corpus linguistic
studies demonstrate similar lexical and grammatical constraints on metaphorical
mappings (Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2006)—constraints that CMT have not always
sufficiently acknowledged.
The corpus linguistic research is relevant to one misunderstanding of CMT,
which claims that conceptual metaphors must necessarily map all aspects of
a source domain onto a target—a process that leads to incoherent mappings.
McGlone (2007, p. 114) argued the following in regard to the strong version of
metaphoric representation (i.e., metaphor completely structures certain abstract
concepts—see Murphy, 1996):
However, CMT does not maintain that all aspects of the source domain
are mapped onto the target domain in metaphorical expressions or conceptual
metaphors. One proposal within CMT, named the “invariance hypothesis,” states,
536 GIBBS
“metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the image-
schematic structure) of the source domain” (Lakoff, 1990, p. 54). Thus, most
source domains have an image-schematic structure in being motivated by “recur-
ring, dynamic patterns of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that
give coherence to our experience” (Johnson, 1987, p. xix). Image schemas are
not propositional in nature, but are highly abstract or schematic (Hampe, 2005;
Kovecses, 2006). Some image schemas include container, balance, source–path–
goal, blockage, link, and center–periphery.
For instance, the source–path–goal schema develops as we move from one
place to another in the world and as we track the movement of objects. From
such experiences, a recurring pattern becomes manifest, which can be projected
onto more abstract domains of understanding, including those having to do
with any intentional action. Thus, the source–path–goal image schemas gives
rise to conceptual metaphors, such as “Purposes are destinations” (e.g., “I got
sidetracked on my way to getting a PhD”). The invariance principle suggests,
specifically in this case, that only the schematic aspects of taking journeys are
applied to the domain of purposeful action such that the student is a traveler,
destinations along the path are sub-goals, the final destination is the ultimate
goal, and so forth (for some amendments to the invariance hypothesis, see Ruiz
de Mendoza & Mairal, 2007).
The invariant mapping of source domain knowledge onto abstract target
domains is related to proposals, and extensive empirical evidence from cog-
nitive psychology, suggesting that metaphorical mappings are relational and
not based on specific attributes or features (Gentner & Kurtz, 2006). Research
in experimental psycholinguistics also specifically demonstrates how ordinary
people’s intuitions, as measured by various indirect methods, about the image-
schematic structure of some source domains (e.g., “heated fluid in a bodily
container”) can be used to predict the specific meanings of metaphorically used
words (Gibbs, Beitel, Harrington, & Sanders, 1994) and idioms (e.g., “blow your
stack”) motivated by different conceptual metaphors (e.g., “Anger is heated fluid
in a bodily container”; Gibbs, 1992).
Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, traditional CMT once had difficulty ex-
plaining why certain source-to-target domain mappings in conceptual metaphors
are not likely to occur and why some lexical items, but not others, associ-
ated with a source domain are evident in analyses of metaphorical discourse.
Yet, one important advance in CMT argues that conceptual metaphors are not
the most basic level at which metaphorical mappings exist in human thought
and experience. Grady (1997, 1999) proposed that strong correlations between
domains in everyday embodied experience leads to the creation of “primary”
metaphors, such as “Intimacy is closeness” (e.g., “We have a close relationship”),
“Important is big” (e.g., “Tomorrow is a big day”), “More is up” (e.g., “Prices
are high”), “Causes are physical forces” (e.g., “They push the bill through
EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 537
Congress”), and “Understanding is grasping” (e.g., “I’ve never been able to grasp
transfinite numbers”). A primary metaphor exhibits a metaphorical mapping for
which there is an independent and direct experiential basis and independent
linguistic evidence. A “complex” metaphor, on the other hand, is a self-consistent
metaphorical complex composed of more than one primary metaphor.
For instance, combining the primary metaphors “Persisting is remaining erect”
and “Structure is physical structure” provides for a complex metaphor “Theories
are buildings,” which nicely motivates the metaphorical inferences that theories
need support and can collapse, and so forth, without any mappings—such as
that theories need windows. In a similar way, the combination of “Structure
is physical structure” and “Interrelated is interwoven” gives rise to a different
complex metaphor for theories—namely, “Theories are fabrics.” This complex
metaphor gives rise to the reasonable inferences that theories can unravel or
may be woven together without generating less likely entailments, such as that
theories are colorful in the way that some fabrics have colors.
In general, the theory of primary metaphor provides critical constraints on
the mapping of metaphorical relations. Various experimental studies in psy-
cholinguistics suggest that recruitment of primary metaphors are part of under-
standing certain abstract concepts, people’s interpretations of many conventional
metaphoric expressions, and young children’s early comprehension of some
verbal metaphors (Gibbs, Lima, & Francuzo, 2004; Pelosi, 2007; Siquerra &
Gibbs, 2007). Although the work on primary metaphor does not explain all
aspects of why certain words, and not others, get metaphorically mapped from
source-to-target domains, the theory does provide a crucial limit on why some
metaphorical constructions are likely to occur, and others not (for how metonymy
also limits metaphorical mappings within CMT, see Kovecses, 2002; see also
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Santibáñez Sáenz, 2003).
One of the largest complaints from critics of CMT is that evidence from nonlin-
guistic domains is needed to truly show the presence of conceptual metaphors in
human thought apart from its manifestations in language (Murphy, 1996; Pinker,
2007). In this regard, McGlone (2007) suggested a particular challenge for CMT
involving three steps:
First, one would identify an abstract concept for which the idiomatic expressions
used to describe it in a particular culture suggest a conceptual metaphor, such
as the THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS metaphor in our culture. Next, one would
explore the idiomatic expressions used in another culture to describe the concept
and determine whether this culture employs a different metaphor. Third, having
538 GIBBS
established that members of the different cultures talk about theories in different
ways, one would then demonstrate that they think about theories in different ways,
as evidenced by their performance in non-verbal reasoning about theories. This
third step is crucial, for without it there is no empirical basis for the claim that
conceptual metaphors transcend their linguistic manifestations (Lakoff, 1993). To
date, conceptual metaphor researchers have not ventured beyond the first step of
this investigation. (p. 114)
important difference between two major civilizations of the world caught in our
label as heart-centering holism versus heart-head dualism” (Yu, 2008, p. 375).
Overall, the analysis of metaphorical expressions across different languages
supports the claim that many conceptual metaphors are largely universal, partic-
ularly in cases where the metaphors are based on recurring bodily experiences.
Differences in the ways cultures metaphorically talk of certain abstract topics
reflect important variation in the ways cultures think about those domains of
experience. This assorted linguistic work constitutes evidence for McGlone’s
(2007) second step toward supporting CMT. One further possibility to consider
along these lines is whether people’s use of certain metaphorical language, which
is presumably motivated by conceptual metaphors, partly enables speakers to
think about certain abstract topics in specific metaphorical ways. For example,
people learning Hungarian as a second language may come to infer the culturally
specific instantiation of the “Love is a journey” metaphor from hearing and
using particular Hungarian expressions. If this were to happen, then it would
be evidence for some version of the Whorfian hypothesis on the influence of
language on thought. Indeed, there are some experimental results consistent with
a more dramatic version of this possibility (Boroditsky, 2000, 2001), although
some of these findings have not been replicated (Chen, 2007). Clearly, more
linguistic and psycholinguistic work is needed to explore the extent to which
speaking metaphorically alters the nature of metaphoric thinking.
The third step in McGlone’s (2007) challenge for CMT is to find evidence
that people really use conceptual metaphors in how they think, and not just
speak of, different abstract concepts. First, cognitive linguistic studies already
show the deeply systematic ways that people not just speak, but reason, with
conceptual metaphor in a large number of academic domains, including work
related to mathematics (Lakoff & Núñez, 2002), the history of philosophy
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), natural science concepts (Brown, 2003), and theories
of mind in psychology (Gentner & Grudin, 1985). Various experimental studies
also reveal how ordinary people’s understanding of metaphor can be critical in
certain forms of problem solving and decision making, including how people
resolve everyday dilemmas that could be framed in two different metaphorical
ways (“Trade is war” vs. “Trade is a two-way street”; Robins & Mayer, 2000),
how conceptual metaphors affect people’s attitudes toward controversial debates
(Read, Cesa, Jones, & Collins, 1990), how people reason about economics (Boers
& Littlemore, 2000), and people’s reasoning about advertising and marketing
communication (Coulter, Zaltman, & Coulter, 2001; Phillips & McQuarrie,
2007).
In addition to these studies, there is also a growing body of research from
many academic disciplines that suggests the presence of conceptual metaphors
in many nonlinguistic domains, including psychophysical judgments about time
and space (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008), gestural systems (Cienki & Mueller,
EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 541
2008; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006), mathematics (Lakoff & Núñez, 2002), music
(Johnson & Larsen, 2003; Zbikowski, 2002), dance (Gibbs, 2003), pictorial
advertising and comics (Forceville, 2002, 2005), architecture (Ferrari, 2006),
and material culture (Orton, 2004; Tilley, 1999).
For example, conceptual metaphors play a significant role in people’s use
and understanding of gestures. Calbris (1990) identified metaphoric gestures as
“passing from something concrete to the physical representation of something
abstract” (p. 194), as when one person moves apart two palms facing each
other to refer to the wide range of work that needs to be accomplished. Thus,
mathematicians exhibit gestural images for the concept of limits, both direct
and inverse (e.g., hand moving a straight line in front of the body for direct
limits, and hand looping downward and back up for inverse limits; McNeill,
1992). In a different domain, Cienki (1998) showed in an analysis of students’
discussions about honesty how one person said, “Like dishonest suggests, like,
um, not truthful, the truth is what like,” and when saying “truth” made a flat-
hand gesture with her left hand in the vertical plane, fingers pointing away
from her body. This gesture appears to express the conceptual metaphor of
“truth,” or “Honesty is straight” (e.g., “straight talk”), although nothing in
the speech denotes this metaphoric understanding. Metaphoric gestures are not
simple duplications of metaphoric lexemes, but reflect independent modes of
expressions that are motivated by underlying conceptual metaphors (Cienki &
Mueller, 2008).
All of the previously cited nonlinguistic evidence on conceptual metaphor
demonstrates that similar patterns of conceptual metaphor are seen in the analysis
of linguistic and nonlinguistic domains, such that conceptual metaphors are
not merely linguistic, but reflections of entrenched thought. There is also a
growing literature from experimental social psychology revealing how concep-
tual metaphors influence different nonlinguistic, social perception and cognition
(Crawford, 2009). For example, there is the widespread set of metaphors sug-
gesting that “Good is up” and “Bad is down.” Experimental studies show that
people evaluate positive words faster if these are presented in a higher vertical
position on a computer screen, and recognize negative words faster if they appear
in the lower part of the screen (Meier & Robinson, 2004). People also judge a
group’s social power to be greater when these judgments are made at the top of
a computer screen than when presented in the lower part of the screen (Schubert,
2005). These findings are consistent with the idea that people conceive of good
and bad as being spatially located along some vertical dimension—a concept
that arises from good experiences being upward (e.g., being alive and healthy)
and bad ones being downward (e.g., sickness and death).
Furthermore, increasing the vertical distance on a computer screen between
a boss and an employee increases people’s impressions of the boss being
more powerful—a finding that is not replicated along the horizontal dimension
542 GIBBS
(Giessner & Schubert, 2007). Both power and social status are formed by
bodily based conceptions of vertical space. Quite interestingly, even spiritual
concepts are conceived along vertical spatial dimensions. Thus, people judged
words related to God faster when these were presented in the top half of the
computer screen, with the opposite occurring for Devil-related words (Meier,
Robinson, Crawford, & Ahlvers, 2007). When asked to guess which people,
based on their pictures, were more likely to believe in God, participants chose
people more often when their pictures were placed along the higher vertical axis
on the computer screen. Once again, people’s nonlinguistic judgments appear
to be shaped by conceptual metaphors depicting “Good is up” and “Bad is
down.”
All this experimental research illustrates the general point that evaluative
judgments automatically activate embodied, spatial knowledge, including rele-
vant metaphorical understandings of social concepts in spatial terms. Not sur-
prisingly, people also judge their interpersonal relationships partly in light of
their spatial experiences. Williams and Bargh (2008b) showed that when people
engaged in a task emphasizing distance between two objects (e.g., placing 2
dots far apart on a Cartesian plane), they subsequently judged themselves to
be interpersonally, or socially, further apart than when engaged in a distance-
closeness task (e.g., placing 2 dots close together on a Cartesian plane). This
finding makes sense given the conceptual metaphor that “Intimacy is closeness.”
A different study revealed that having people briefly hold warm, as opposed to
cold, cups of coffee led them to judge a fictitious person’s interpersonal traits
as being warmer (Williams & Bargh, 2008a)—a finding consistent with the
metaphor of “Affection is warmth.”
Within a different experiential domain, having people make judgments about
people’s behavior in a dirty work area caused them to rate the behavior as more
immoral than when the same judgments were made in a clean work area (Schnall,
Benton, & Harvey, 2008). Asking people to recall an immoral deed, as opposed
to an ethical one, made them more likely to choose an antiseptic wipe as a free
gift after the experiment (Zhong & Lilgenquist, 2006). Both these findings are
consistent with the conceptual metaphors “Good is clean” and “Bad is dirty.”
Similarly, people see “Good is white” and “Bad is black,” which explains why
people are faster in evaluating words when presented in font colors consistent
with the embodied metaphors of good–white and bad–black (Meier, Robinson,
& Clore, 2004). People who exhibit a greater desire for cleanliness even have
a stronger association between morality/immorality and the colors white/black
than do people with less interest in cleanliness (Storbeck & Clore, 2008).
These findings from social psychology directly respond to the challenge that
CMT must demonstrate the power of conceptual metaphors in nonlinguistic
domains of experience. Any proper evaluation of CMT must acknowledge, and
discuss, this nonlinguistic evidence. My claim is that the work described earlier
EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 543
Source Target
the specific meanings they do?, and (b) Do conceptual metaphors play a role in
people’s immediate production and understanding of metaphoric language? It is
important to distinguish between these two questions because people may, given
the appropriate experimental circumstances, reveal something about the concep-
tual metaphorical motivation for why certain words and phrases mean what
they do without necessarily accessing this information during online metaphor
production and interpretation. Different experimental methods are required to
investigate each of these possibilities, and my claim is that the results of many
studies provide affirmative answers to both questions.
Experimental studies showing that conceptual metaphors shape people’s tacit
understandings of why conventional and novel metaphoric expressions have
the meanings they do includes research on mental imagery for idioms and
proverbs (Gibbs & O’Brien, 1990; Gibbs, Strom, & Spivey-Knowlton, 1997;
Sanford, 2008), people’s context-sensitive judgments about the meanings of
idioms (Nayak & Gibbs, 1990), people’s judgments about the mappings from
source-to-target domains for idiomatic phrases (Gibbs, 1992), people’s judg-
ments about the permissible mappings underlying primary metaphors (Gibbs
et al., 2004), people’s answers to questions about temporal events (Boroditsky &
Ramscar, 2002), people’s answers to questions about metaphorically motivated
fictive motion (Matlock, Ramscar, & Boroditsky, 2005), readers’ drawing of
coherent connections during text processing (Albritton, McKoon, & Gerrig,
1995), and people’s semantic and episodic memories for conceptual metaphors,
such as “Life is a journey” (Katz & Taylor, 2008).
These assorted experimental findings, collected using a variety of experi-
mental methods, indicate that the metaphorical mappings between embodied
source domains and abstract target domains partly motivate the specific figurative
meanings of many conventional and novel metaphors; and preserve the structural,
or image-schematic, characteristics of the source domains. More important, these
data also showed that people have specific metaphorical conceptions of abstract
ideas (e.g., emotions) that are shaped by recurring bodily experiences (e.g., their
own bodies as containers; Gibbs, 2006a).
However, do conceptual metaphors influence people’s immediate use and
understanding of verbal metaphors? There are many factors that affect peo-
ple’s in-the-moment comprehension of metaphoric language. One possibility
is that people should find it relatively easy to read verbal metaphors whose
meanings are motivated by conceptual metaphors identical to those structuring
the previous text. Under this hypothesis, people are automatically accessing
conceptual metaphors as they read and make sense of discourse. The activation
of a specific conceptual metaphor should facilitate people’s comprehension of a
verbal metaphor if that expression is motivated by the same conceptual metaphor,
compared to reading a verbal metaphor motivated by a different conceptual
mapping.
EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 545
The data from several psycholinguistic studies show that conceptual metaphors
do affect online processing of verbal metaphor. For example, Pfaff, Gibbs, and
Johnson (1997) found in a full-phrase reading task that euphemistic expressions
(e.g., “She’s turning my crank” motivated by “Sexual desire is an activated
machine”) were understood more quickly in contexts that depicted similar con-
ceptual metaphors than in contexts that conveyed different conceptual metaphors.
The data from this set of studies also ruled out the alternative possibility that
reading time advantage for some verbal metaphors in context is due solely
to lexical priming between words in contexts and words in the metaphors.
More recently, a series of reading time studies, where contexts were presented
in a full paragraph style and not line by line, also showed that conceptual
metaphors are accessed during the online processing of verbal metaphors (Gong
& Ahrens, 2007). Furthermore, studies employing an online lexical priming task
also demonstrated that conceptual metaphors (e.g., “Anger is heated fluid in a
container”) are accessed during immediate idiom (e.g., “John blew his stack”)
processing (Gibbs, Bogdonovich, Sykes, & Barr, 1997). In line with this other
work, studies indicate that people read metaphors that were consistent to a single
conceptual metaphor faster than they did metaphors that were motivated by
different conceptual metaphors (Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky, 2002; Langston,
2002).
This body of experimental findings is clearly complementary to the various
linguistic analyses of conceptual metaphor in ordinary language use. Yet, other
studies have presented data that may contradict aspects of CMT as a psycholog-
ical theory of verbal metaphor comprehension. For instance, one possibility is
that ordinary people’s intuitions about the meanings of idioms depend on their
knowledge of the stipulated (i.e., historically given) figurative meanings of the
phrases, and not on recognizing the possible conceptual metaphors that give rise
to idioms and conventional expressions in the first place, as suggested by the
cognitive linguistic and psycholinguistic literatures. Keysar and Bly (1995) tested
this idea by first having people learn either the original or opposite meanings of
unfamiliar idioms (e.g., for the idiom “The goose hangs high,” meaning either
“things look good,” its original meaning, or “things look bad”). Later on, when
participants were asked to rate whether an idiom’s meaning made sense, the
learned meanings were generally perceived as being more transparent than the
non-learned meanings. More important, this result was obtained regardless of
whether the original meaning of the idiom was stipulated. In other words, if
people were told that the meaning of “The goose hangs high” is “things look
bad,” when in fact its original meaning was “things look good,” they believed
that the meaning presented to them originally made more sense as best capturing
what the phrase “The goose hangs high” could mean. Keysar and Bly interpreted
these findings to suggest that intuitions alone about why idioms mean what they
do should not be trusted as evidence for CMT.
546 GIBBS
However, the major problem with Keysar and Bly’s (1995) findings is that
the vast majority of the idioms they studied are based on metonymy, and not
metaphor. Thus, the phrase “The goose hangs high” means “things look good”
because the act of hanging a dead goose up for all to see metonymyically stands
for an entire sequence of events leading up to the successful slaughter of the
goose for food. Contemporary speakers often have great difficulty explaining
why metonymically based idioms mean what they do, even for widely used
expressions (e.g., “kick the bucket”). Furthermore, Keysar and Bly’s results
may be due to the fact that all of their idioms had low transparent meanings
(i.e., had opaque relations between their surface forms and figurative meanings).
Studies that examined second language learners’ understandings of more trans-
parent meanings found that participants could give highly consistent and correct
definitions for these phrases, even when these were encountered for the first time
(Skoufaki, 2009). Thus, Keysar and Bly’s “use of low-transparency idioms in
highly biasing contexts and forced definitions choices may have presumpted
the partial reliance of participants on idiom-inherent features to form their
interpretations” (Skoufaki, 2009, p. 32). This possibility casts further doubt
on the Keysar and Bly studies as evidence against CMT. Just as important,
however, various experiments have demonstrated that first language learners
acquire the meanings of idioms motivated by conceptual metaphors before they
do other idioms (Gibbs, 1991), and that second language learners learn idiomatic
phrases more readily when they explicitly attend to these expressions’ conceptual
metaphorical motivations (Boers, 2004; Boers & Littlemore, 2000).
Another set of studies critical of CMT asked people to paraphrase verbal
metaphors, such as “The lecture was a three-course meal,” to see if these
may reveal the presence of conceptual metaphors in people’s processing of
these linguistic expressions (McGlone, 1996). Analysis of these paraphrases
revealed that only 24% contained any references consistent with underlying
conceptual metaphors, such as “Ideas are food.” Even when participants were
more specifically asked to give “figurative paraphrases” of the verbal metaphors
in a second study, they still only did so 41% of the time (i.e., mentioning source
domain terms, like food, related to the conceptual metaphor “Ideas are food”).
A follow-up study found that people do not perceive expressions motivated by
conceptual metaphor to be any more similar in meaning than they did expressions
motivated by different conceptual metaphors (however, see Nayak & Gibbs,
1990). These data were interpreted as showing that people’s interpretations of
verbal metaphors might not be related to their putative, underlying conceptual
metaphors.
Yet, asking people to verbally paraphrase a novel metaphor may not be the
best indicator of the possible underlying presence of conceptual metaphors in
interpreting these novel expressions. Given the long-noted difficulties people
have in paraphrasing metaphors (Gibbs, 1994), the fact that 41% could provide
EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 547
interpretations that seem to meet some criteria for conceptual metaphor may be
a positive finding in favor of CMT. Moreover, the specific metaphors McGlone
(1996) examined in his studies may not be related to conceptual metaphors, as
most were classic “A is B” resemblance metaphors. Some of McGlone’s (1996,
p. 450) examples, such as “Dr. Moreland’s lecture was a three-course meal for
the mind” are examples of XYZ metaphors (e.g., “Religion is an opiate of the
masses”), which are not typically motivated by single conceptual metaphors,
and are likely produced and understood through complex conceptual blending
processes (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002).
Keysar et al. (2000) also reported psycholinguistic results that appear to
contradict the idea, in this case, that conventional metaphoric expressions are
understood through recruitment of conceptual metaphors. Specifically, Keysar
et al. found that when novel metaphors, such as “Tina was currently weaning
her latest child,” was read in the context of related conventional metaphors
(e.g., talk of Tina as prolific and conceiving new findings, all related to the
conceptual metaphor “Ideas are people”), they were comprehended no more
quickly than when read in the context of non-metaphoric language. However,
people were faster to read the same novel metaphors when seen in contexts
containing related novel metaphors (e.g., Tina thinks of her theories as children;
she is fertile and giving birth to new ideas). This pattern of results suggested
that understanding novel metaphors activates a deeper conceptual metaphorical
base, whereas conventional expressions do not, contrary to the claims of CMT.
However, a more recent corpus analysis of some of the experimental stimuli
employed in Keysar et al. (2000) revealed that many of the so-called novel
metaphors examined were really conventional, and that other metaphors were
novel more because they reflected atypical language patterns as opposed to
the context in which they appeared (Deignan, 2006). This corpus study raises
questions about whether the empirical findings really reflected much about
conventional and novel metaphor understanding. Indeed, a different examination
of the Keysar et al. complete set of experimental materials also raised several
problems with their stimuli (Thibodeau & Durgin, 2008). Many conventional
metaphors used by Keysar et al. did not appear to be related to similar under-
lying conceptual metaphors, as well as the novel metaphorical expressions; and
other conventional expressions seemed dissimilar from those described as being
motivated by pervasive conceptual metaphors, as identified by much work in
cognitive linguistics.
Thibodeau and Durgin (2008) replicated the same findings obtained by Keysar
et al. (2000) using their original stimuli. However, a second study employed
new stimulus materials that had consistent relations between conventional and
novel metaphors in terms of their being motivated by identical conceptual
metaphors. The results of a second reading time study with these revised stimuli
demonstrated that reading conventional metaphors facilitated understanding of
548 GIBBS
metaphors appear to play some, but not necessarily exclusive, role in people’s
interpretation and online processing of many types of verbal metaphors. To take
just one example, given space limitations, I have also not touched on some of the
emerging ideas on a neural theory of conceptual metaphor (Gallese & Lakoff,
2005; Lakoff, 2008).
However, several key questions can still be raised about conceptual metaphors’
exact role in metaphoric language understanding. First, does one initially access
the complete conceptual metaphor (e.g., “Love relationships are journeys”) from
memory and then apply it to infer the metaphoric meaning of an expression (e.g.,
“Our marriage is a roller-coaster ride from hell”)? Second, if the conceptual
metaphor is accessed prior to interpretation of expression, does it come with
a package of detailed meaning entailments or correspondences that are also
inferred as part of one’s understanding of what the expression means?; or, must
people compute source-to-target domain mappings online to determine which
entailments of the conceptual metaphor are applied to the meaning of utterance?
Finally, do conceptual metaphors arise as products of understanding and are,
therefore, not necessary to create an initial understanding of a metaphorical
expression?
There are, as of yet, no empirical studies that provide exact answers to these
questions. Nonetheless, two related trends in cognitive science offer partial
responses to these questions, which may lead to a new vision of conceptual
metaphor in thought and communication. One development is the idea that
embodied simulations play some role in people’s immediate processing of ver-
bal metaphors, and language more generally (Bergen, 2005; Bergen, Lindsay,
Matlock, & Narayanan, 2007; Gibbs, 2006a). People may, for instance, be
creating partial, but not necessarily complete, embodied simulations of speak-
ers’ metaphorical messages that involve moment-by-moment “what must it be
like” processes that make use of ongoing tactile-kinesthetic experiences (Gibbs,
2006c). More dramatically, these simulation processes operate even when people
encounter language that is abstract, or refers to actions that are physically
impossible to perform. Understanding abstract events, such as “grasping the
concept,” is constrained by aspects of people’s embodied experience as if they
are immersed in the discourse situation, even when these events can only be
metaphorically, and not physically, realized.
Various experimental studies employing both offline and online methods
provide evidence in support of these ideas about simulation and metaphor (Gibbs,
2006c; Gibbs, Gould, & Andric, 2006; Wilson & Gibbs, 2007). Gibbs et al.
(2006) demonstrated how people’s mental imagery for metaphorical phrases,
such as “tear apart the argument,” exhibit significant embodied qualities of the
actions referred to by these phrases (e.g., people conceive of the “argument”
as a physical object that, when torn apart, no longer persists). Wilson and
EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 551
Consider some of the different levels at which conceptual metaphor has been
claimed by scholars in various disciplines to have some influence:
The extensive debates on CMT focus, to a large extent, over which of the
previously mentioned levels is most critical to understanding the workings of
conceptual metaphors in language, thought, and culture. Psycholinguists opposed
to CMT may, for example, accept that conceptual metaphors may influence
Levels 1 through 3, but not Levels 4 through 6. However, a dynamical perspective
argues that these levels may represents different time scales in experience that
are not independent, but are hierarchically organized (from slowest to fasting
moving) and nested within one another such that constraints operating at one
level (e.g., Levels 1 or 2) may be coupled in complex, nonlinear ways with
those at other levels (e.g., Levels 5 or 6). For this reason, the occurrence of
metaphorical words or phrases in some discourse may not only reflect the
influence of certain conceptual metaphors, as basins of attraction (operating
at Levels 5 and 6), but the interactions of metaphorical experience working
simultaneously, in a continuously reciprocal fashion, at all levels.
For example, understanding of a conventional metaphorical expression, like “I
don’t see the point of this article,” may not just arise from the simple activation
of a primary metaphor, such as “Knowing is seeing,” which has been stored
within some conceptual network. Instead, people may spontaneously create a
particular construal of this expression given the interaction of constraints from
all of the previously mentioned, and other, levels, and what emerges from these
interactions, in the very moment of speaking and understanding. Conceptual
metaphors may, therefore, be “soft-assembled” during thinking, speaking, and
understanding, rather than “accessed” or “retrieved” from long-term memory.
EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 553
CONCLUSION
There will continue to be debates about the empirical and theoretical work done
related to CMT, and this article only addresses some of the different evidence
supporting, and criticisms of, CMT. At the same time, my evaluation of CMT
is not intended to serve as a critique of any other theory of metaphor. My
own belief is that other theories of metaphor may also have some relevant role
in describing all we know about the complex topic of metaphor (see Tendahl
& Gibbs, 2008). However, unlike virtually every other theory of metaphor,
CMT provides important insights into the interaction of embodiment, language,
thought, and culture that points to a fuller integration of metaphor studies within
cognitive science (Gibbs, 2006a; Kovecses, 2005). However, at the very least,
this article suggests that CMT has much empirical merit; and even if it does not
necessarily account for all aspects of metaphoric thought and language use, this
approach has great explanatory power, and must be considered to be foundational
for any comprehensive theory of metaphor, as well as for broader theories of
human cognition.
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