Metaphor is not just the boring writing technique you learned about at school. It’s a fundamental and fascinating aspect of human cognition. In fact, metaphor is a socially and politically powerful process that shapes the way we understand the world (see Chilton, 2004). But as tends to be the case with language, it’s not that simple — because as much as metaphor can shape our reality, our cultures, societies, and cognition shape metaphor too.
You probably know vaguely what metaphor is. It’s where we conceptualise one thing in terms of another. We might say “I’m at a crossroads in my life”, where we’re conceptualising LIFE in terms of a JOURNEY. Or we might say “I defended my position in the debate”, where we’re conceptualising an ARGUMENT as a WAR. Language is absolutely packed with different types of metaphors. (That was one.) Some are conventionalised metaphors — where we recognise with relative ease that it’s a metaphor e.g., “I’m feeling down” or “I’ve fallen in love”. Some are creative and made up by clever writers. Some are what we call dead metaphors — we don’t even notice them anymore e.g., “I saw his point” conceptualises UNDERSTANDING as SEEING. Generally, we use the process of metaphor to conceptualise abstract targets (Goatly, 2022) — which basically means we find ways to talk about complicated, intangible things like love or life or sadness.
But metaphor is more than a cool feature of language. A revolutionary turn in Linguistics came from Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) work on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (you should totally read their book). It’s the idea that we don’t just talk in metaphors, but we experience the world as such. Metaphors are cognitive constructs. And this is particularly the case for recurrent (or conceptual) metaphors, like LOVE IS A JOURNEY — where we have loads of ways of using this concept, such as “we’ve hit a dead end” or “we experienced some bumps along the way” or “we’re on the journey together”. We don’t just talk about love in this way, but we experience love as a journey.
Another conceptual metaphor is ARGUMENT IS WAR, where we often say things like “we fought our case” or “they were attacking us” or even phrases like “culture wars”. We don’t just talk about arguments as wars, but we process and understand them as wars. We take parts of wars, like having opponents, two sides, battles, fighting, and we map them onto parts of arguments — the people in the arguments are framed as opponents, talking is framed as fighting, and so on. In this sense, then, metaphors do indeed shape how we experience basic parts of life. You can take a look through the Master Metaphor List to surprise yourself with how many metaphors structure the way we think about the world.
There are quite a few examples that suggest metaphor shapes how we experience reality — particularly when we look at metaphors across different languages. Let’s think about time. We tend to think about time in terms of space — we can move through time, look forward to the future, run towards our goals, look back to yesterday, and so on. But different languages conceptualise time differently. Both Mandarin and English conceptualise time through horizontal terms (e.g., “looking forward to times ahead”), but Mandarin also uses vertical terms. In multiple studies (Chan & Bergen, 2005; Boroditsky, Fuhrman & McCormick, 2011), when asked to arrange temporal sequences in pictures, English speakers — unlike Mandarin speakers — would only arrange the pictures horizontally. And English speakers, unlike Mandarin speakers, were faster when the keys were horizontal. So here, metaphor has clearly influenced our understanding and processing of time.
For another example of how metaphor influences thought, we can return to ARGUMENT IS WAR. Various linguists (including me) have researched what Tannen (1999) aptly called the “argument culture” — which is how, in politics, we conceptualise arguments, debates, political opponents and so on, as part of a war. The consequence? Theoretically speaking, if we conceptualise political issues as battles, perhaps we’re more likely to take polarised, antagonistic, uncompromising stances — maybe even normalising undertones of political violence. We need to think very carefully and much more critically, then, about how (sometimes unnoticed) metaphorical structures shape the way we understand society. The impact is likely more than we can comprehend.
Whilst metaphor might often construct the way we perceive things, we also construct metaphors. They come from our brains, societies, and cultures. In fact, one hypothesis (Lakoff’s Experiential Hypothesis) argues that metaphor is built upon primary and universal bodily experiences, mostly through childhood. For example, the MORE IS UP conceptual metaphor (e.g., “profits are high”, see Lakoff 1992) comes from, quite literally, the physical experience of children putting things on top of one another. And maybe some experiences like these are pretty universal, and they may inform our construction of some metaphors.
But universality in bodily experience is a hard case to justify, given that we all inhabit very different societies, geographical locations, and bodies. Think about it — would people in countries with vast and treacherous terrain use JOURNEY metaphors differently from smaller, easier-to-navigate countries? Would countries experiencing war use ARGUMENT AS WAR metaphors differently? Do people with different neurotypes experience or use metaphor differently? (Consider the connections between ASD and processing non-literal language differently). The only way we can answer these questions is to diversify Linguistics, and examine language use in different cultures and in different people.
So, in conclusion, metaphor does shape our experiences, cultures, and thought processes — and we should be critical and conscious of that. But our experiences, cultures, and thought processes also shape metaphor. The important thing is working out how to use improve our knowledge of metaphor (hint: diversify Linguistics), and how we can use that knowledge for social good.
I’ll wrap this quick introduction to metaphor and cognition up with some questions — and feel free to comment below. How is metaphor different across the languages you speak? Do your family have any metaphors you created? How easy do you find it to interpret metaphorical language? If we want to raise improve our knowledge of language, culture, and society, a good place to start is through interrogating the way we think.
References
Boroditsky, L., Fuhrman, O., & McCormick, K. (2011). Do English and Mandarin speakers think differently? Cognition, 118(1), 123–129. 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.010
Chan, T.T., & Bergen, B. (2005). Writing direction influences spatial cognition. In Proceedings of the twenty-seventh annual conference of the cognitive science society.
Chilton, Paul. (2004). Analysing political discourse. Routledge.
Goatly, A. (2022). Two dimensions of meaning. Routledge.
Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. (1992). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 202–251). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139173865.013
Tannen, Deborah. (1999). The argument culture: Stopping America’s war on words. Random House Publishing Group.