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Evaluating Conceptual
Metaphor Theory
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.
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Department of Psychology, University of California,
Santa Cruz
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2011.Published online: 27 Oct 2011.
To cite this article: Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. (2011): Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor
Theory, Discourse Processes, 48:8, 529-562
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Discourse Processes, 48:529–562, 2011
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ISSN: 0163-853X print/1532-6950 online
DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2011.606103
Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
Department of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
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).
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.,
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064-9999, USA.
E-mail: gibbs@ucsc.edu
529
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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 highlights
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 psychologist
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
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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).
SOME EVIDENCE SUPPORTING CMT
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:
1. “We’re headed in opposite directions.”
2. “We’re spinning our wheels.”
3. “Our relationship is at a crossroads.”
4. “Our marriage was on the rocks.”
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:
1. “She swept me off my feet.”
2. “Waves of passion overcame him.”
3. “We were engulfed by love.”
4. “She was deeply immersed in love.”
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532 GIBBS
The hypothesis that some concepts may be metaphorically structured makes
it possible to explain what traditionally has been seen as unrelated, conventional
expressions. Under the CMT view, so-called clichéd expressions, such as “stay
the course” and “We’re spinning our wheels,” are not dead metaphors, but reﬂect
active schemes of metaphorical thought. Certain kinds of idiomatic expressions
have meanings that arise from sources other than conceptual metaphor, such
as metonymically related idioms (e.g., “kick the bucket”). CMT does not assume
that all conventional or idiomatic expressions are motivated by conceptual
metaphor, and indeed many cognitive linguists study conceptual metonymy
and its role in structuring many aspects of conventional language use and
reasoning (Gibbs, 1994; Radden & Panther, 1999). Yet, the systematicity of
many conventional expressions, as noted earlier, provides evidence for their
meanings being motivated by enduring metaphorical mappings.
A second main discovery within CMT, beyond the exploration of systematicity
among conventional expressions, is that many novel metaphorical expressions
do not completely express new source-to-target domain mappings, but
are creative instantiations of conventional metaphors. For instance, the English
expression, “My marriage was a roller-coaster ride from hell,” is a slightly
unusual way of noting how one’s romantic relationship can be understood as
a kind of physical journey (e.g., “Love relationships are journeys”). Analyses
of literary metaphors (Freeman, 1995; Goatly, 1997; Lakoff & Turner, 1989;
Turner, 1996) and novel metaphorical arguments in expository writing (Eubanks,
2000; Koller, 2004) demonstrate how many so-called “novel” metaphors are
grounded in conventional mappings. Experimental studies indicate that readers
can readily infer the relevant conceptual metaphors in literary poems when
asked to talk aloud about their interpretations (Gibbs & Nascimento, 1996).
CMT has taken great pains to note the signiﬁcant differences between several
types of novel metaphors, such as novel metaphors that reﬂect conventional
conceptual metaphors (e.g., “My marriage was a roller-coaster ride from hell”);
novel metaphors that reﬂect one-shot mappings (e.g., “My job is a jail”); and
novel metaphors that map static images, and not rich conceptual domains, called
“image metaphors” (e.g., “my wife : : : whose waist is an hour glass”; Gibbs &
Bogdonovich, 1999; Lakoff & Turner, 1989).
Finally, cognitive linguistic analyses maintain that some of the meanings
of polysemous words are motivated by conventional metaphors such that the
meaning of “see” referring to knowing or understanding is motivated by an
enduring conceptual metaphor “Understanding is seeing.” A major trend in
cognitive linguistic analyses of polysemy is showing the large extent to which
these words’ meanings are historically derived from conceptual metaphors that
are still active parts of human conceptual systems (Cuykens & Zawada, 2001;
Lakoff, 1987; Sweetser, 1990). Under this view, the lexical organization of
polysemous words is not a repository of random, idiosyncratic information, but
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EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 533
is structured by general cognitive principles, like conceptual metaphor, which
are systematic and recurrent throughout the lexicon.
Cognitive linguistic analyses of conventional expressions, novel extensions,
and polysemy suggest that there are probably several hundred basic conceptual
metaphors (Kovecses, 2002; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Yu, 1999). Conceptual
metaphors have been found in virtually every language examined thus far, both
in contemporary spoken (Kovecses, 2002, 2006; Ozcaliskan, 2003; Yu, 1999)
and signed languages (Taub, 2002; Wilcox, 2000), as well as throughout history
going back to the hieroglyphics in Egypt (Goldwasser, 2005), ancient Chinese
(Singerland, 2003), and early Greek and Roman writings (Wiseman, 2007). As
Yu (2003) concluded, “The fact that distinct languages show metaphors in a
systematic way supports the cognitive status of these metaphors as primarily
conceptual, rooted in common human experiences” (p. 162).
The range of abstract conceptual domains that appear to be structured in some
manner by conceptual metaphor is immense and includes emotions (Kovecses,
2000), the self (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), morality (Johnson, 1993), politics
(Lakoff, 1996; Musolff, 2004), science concepts (Brown, 2003; Larson, Nerlich,
& Wallis, 2006), illness (Gibbs & Franks, 2002), psychoanalytic concepts
(Borbely, 2004), legal concepts (Winter, 2002), mathematics (Lakoff & Núñez,
2002), and certain cultural ideologies (Goatly, 2007), to name just a few of the
many abstract concept domains and to cite just a few of the dozens of studies
conducted on each domain (see Gibbs, 2008).
SOME POSSIBLE PROBLEMS WITH CMT
It is remarkable that scholars of completely different backgrounds have independently
reached the same or very similar results about conceptual metaphor
(Jakel, 1999), which speaks positively for the essential claims of CMT. However,
it is not clear that different scholars have used the same criteria in making their
judgments about systematicity and conceptual metaphors, and their intuitive
analyses of linguistic expressions may not accurately reﬂect what ordinary
speakers unconsciously do when using metaphoric language (Gibbs, 2006b).
Linguistic research favoring CMT, described earlier, suffers from a lack of details
about the ways these analyses are conducted.
For instance, cognitive linguistic analyses on conceptual metaphor typically
do not provide explicit criteria (a) for identifying what constitutes a metaphor in
language, as either the word or phrase level; (b) for deﬁning systematicity among
a given set of language expressions referring to a speciﬁc abstract target domain
(e.g., love); (c) for inferring the existence of a speciﬁc conceptual metaphor, as
opposed to some other conceptual metaphor, when ﬁnding systematicity among
some metaphoric expressions in language; and (d) for determining how represen-
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534 GIBBS
tative of real discourse are the analyses of isolated, self-constructed examples or
individual examples taken from corpora. Debates about CMT often raise these
and other questions (Steen, 2007), with some scholars suggesting that these
issues make CMT difﬁcult, if not impossible, to potentially falsify (Murphy,
1996; Vervaeke & Kennedy, 1996), particularly in regard to the circularity of
the theory (Haser, 2005; and for an analysis of what is required to decide if
CMT is circular or not, see Kertesz & Rakosi, 2009).
Another enduring concern in cognitive science with the linguistic evidence
on CMT is that many conventional expressions viewed as metaphorical by
cognitive linguists are not metaphorical at all. Conventional expressions, such
as “stay the course,” may have once originated with metaphorical meaning, but
may be seen by contemporary speakers as “dead” metaphors, literal speech,
or mere instances of polysemy (Glucksberg, 2001; Jackendoff, 1983; Keysar,
Shen, Glucksberg, & Horton, 2000; McGlone, 2007; Pinker, 2007). However,
simply calling something literal or polysemy, as critics of CMT refer to most
conventional and idiomatic speech, does not explain why there is systematicity
in conventional expressions and why individual linguistic expressions appear to
reﬂect the detailed correspondences that arise from the metaphorical mapping
of source onto target domains in talking about abstract concepts. Of course,
there may be other reasons for why there is such apparent systematicity in
both conventional and novel metaphoric expressions. At the very least, however,
linguistic analyses offer detailed reasons for why certain words and expressions
come into being and have speciﬁc correspondences arising from the mapping
of source onto target domains. Critics of CMT must provide alternative hypotheses
that explain the cognitive linguistic data, and not simply dismiss this
evidence by simply labeling conventional expressions as “dead” metaphors.
Conventional phrases motivated by conceptual metaphors are different from
so-called dead metaphors, such as “kick the bucket,” which typically come
into being as one-shot metonymies that are now mostly opaque to contemporary
speakers (Gibbs, 1994). Determining whether a person’s use of a conventional
or novel expressions is motivated by conceptual metaphor requires
that empirical work be done of the sort offered by both cognitive linguists and
psycholinguists (much more of which is presented later). One’s intuition that
some phrase is “dead” fails to consider the possibility that people have tacit
knowledge of conceptual metaphors, which may structure their unconscious
understandings of many abstract concepts and play a role in the immediate
production and interpretation of metaphoric language (see the later section
on psycholinguistic results related to these possibilities). Part of the reason
why cognitive psychological work on conceptual metaphor is so important is
because it provides various indirect methods for assessing what people unconsciously
know, including metaphorical, and embodied, understandings of
different abstract concepts.
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EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 535
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 discourse
(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; Stefanowitsch
& 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 metaphorical
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):
If we understand theories entirely in terms of buildings, then we should occasionally
make erroneous inferences about the applicability of building properties to
the abstract concept—e.g., theories not only can have foundations (assumptions),
architects (formulators), and blueprints (origins), but also stairwells (?), hallways
(?) sprinkler systems (?) etc. People rarely, if ever, make inferences of this sort.
(p. 114)
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,
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536 GIBBS
“metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the imageschematic
structure) of the source domain” (Lakoff, 1990, p. 54). Thus, most
source domains have an image-schematic structure in being motivated by “recurring,
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 cognitive
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 imageschematic
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 explaining
why certain source-to-target domain mappings in conceptual metaphors
are not likely to occur and why some lexical items, but not others, associated
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
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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 psycholinguistics
suggest that recruitment of primary metaphors are part of understanding
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).
A THREE-STEP CHALLENGE FOR CMT
One of the largest complaints from critics of CMT is that evidence from nonlinguistic
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
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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)
However, there is a huge body of research that in different ways carries
out McGlone’s (2007) proposed Steps 2 and 3. First, there is signiﬁcant crosslinguistic
work showing that many cultures share similar conceptual metaphors
(Kovecses, 2005). To take one example, there is an extensive subsystem of
metaphors in English for mind, centered on the idea that “The mind is a
body” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Sweetser, 1990). Among the speciﬁc metaphors
are “Thinking is moving” (e.g., “My mind was racing”), “Thinking is perceiving”
(e.g., “I am trying to see what you are saying”), and “Thinking is
object manipulation” (e.g., “Let’s toss around some ideas”), to name just a
few examples. Most important, these metaphors are not special to English
speakers because the same metaphors are also found in Chinese (Yu, 2003), such
as “Thinking is moving” (e.g., si-lu—thinking route/path—‘train of thought’),
“Thinking is perceiving/seeing” (e.g., kan-fa—see-method—‘a way of looking at
things’), and “Thinking is object manipulation” (e.g., sixiang jiaoliu—exchange
of thoughts/ideas—‘exchange of ideas’). It is not surprising that thinking is
metaphorically conceptualized in similar embodied ways across cultures because
of the prominence that moving, perceiving, manipulating objects, and eating have
in people’s everyday lives (Gibbs, 2006a).
The cognitive linguistic research on cross-cultural conceptual metaphor also
shows that two languages may share a conceptual metaphor, but that speciﬁc
linguistic manifestations of these metaphors can reveal subtle differences in
the cultural-ideological background in which conceptual metaphors function
(Kovecses, 2005; Yu, 2003). Consider the classic “Love is a journey” metaphor,
as illustrated by different English and Hungarian examples (Kovecses, 2003):
(1) “Look how far we’ve come.”
?Nezd milyen messzire jutotunk.
[Look how far rearch—1st PERS PL-PAST]
?Latod milyen messzire jutottunk?
[See how far reach—1st PERS PL-PAST
(2) “We’ll have to go our separate ways.”
*Kulon utakra kell lepnunk.
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EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 539
[Separate ways-on (LOC) must step—1st PERS PL]
Elvalnak utjaink.
[Separate—3rd PERS PL way-POSSPL]. (pp. 315–316)
The American English examples easily translate into Hungarian. In most
cases, where English has a metaphorical word or expression with a particular
physical meaning, Hungarian also has a word of expression with the same or
similar physical meaning. This suggests that the conceptual metaphor “Love is a
journey” is linguistically expressed in much the same way in the two languages.
Nonetheless, there are subtle differences in the ways that English and Hungarian
conceive of “Love is a journey,” which may reﬂect larger cultural themes
shaping metaphorical concepts and talk. For instance, the English example in
(1) used the word come, whereas Hungarian used jut ‘get to a place after
experiencing difﬁculties.’ In Example (2), the English expression used we in the
subject position, whereas Hungarian used “our road that separates.” Decisions
about relationships appear to be made via internal considerations of active agents
in English, whereas relationships are more inﬂuenced by external considerations
in Hungarian (e.g., the fork in the road is forcing the agents to go on their
separate ways). Kovecses (2003) argued that these subtle differences reﬂect
cultural-ideological traditions, with American English adopting a more active
stance in regard to relationships, and life more generally, whereas Hungarian
embraces a more fatalistic attitude toward relationships and life events. In this
case, different instantiations of a single conceptual metaphor in two languages
reﬂects and constrains the ways individuals in different cultures reasons about
an abstract target domain.
Finally, two cultures may sometimes have different conceptual metaphors
for a particular target domain, leading to radically different concepts for that
domain in two languages. For instance, Chinese language and culture typically
conceive of the heart as the locus of mind (i.e., “The heart is the locus of mind”),
which yields metaphorical concepts such as, “The heart is the ruler of the body.”
More broadly, within the Chinese cosmological view, the heart is the “center”
of the body, with the human body being the “heart” of the universe, implying
that the heart is the focal point of the entire universe (Yu, 2008). This view of
the “mind is the heart” informs many aspects of Chinese reasoning, including
that seen in art, music, literature, politics, and medicine (Yu, 2008). In English,
however, as well as in many Western cultures, the brain is the locus of mind,
leading to the “mind is the brain” metaphor, with the heart being seen as a
center of feelings and emotions. This metaphorical model of the mind leads to
alternative reasoning about the causes of human thought and action, which is
also evident in a wide range of cultural artifacts and beliefs. Most generally,
variation in Chinese and English metaphorical models of mind “symbolize an
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540 GIBBS
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, particularly
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,
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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 ﬂathand
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 conceptual
metaphors inﬂuence different nonlinguistic, social perception and cognition
(Crawford, 2009). For example, there is the widespread set of metaphors suggesting
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
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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 relevant
metaphorical understandings of social concepts in spatial terms. Not surprisingly,
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 distancecloseness
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
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EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 543
provides sufﬁcient evidence to meet McGlone’s (2007) three-step challenge for
CMT.
A ﬁnal point of contention in some criticisms of CMT is the mistaken assumption
that global conceptual metaphors alone must create the meanings of verbal
metaphors. However, CMT scholars have always acknowledged that conceptual
metaphors typically bring with them a whole range of source-to-target domain
mappings or correspondences that more subtly shape the meaning of a linguistic
metaphor. For instance, the expressions, “The argument ﬂared up between them”
and “His stupid comment just added fuel to the ﬁre,” mean something different,
although they are both motivated by the conceptual metaphor “Argument is
ﬁre,” which is a subset of the more general conceptual metaphor “Intensity is
heat” (Kovecses, 2008). However, the meaning difference between these two
expressions is due to the speciﬁc mappings that arise as part of the conceptual
metaphor “Intensity is heat,” such as the following:
Source Target
the degree of heat the degree of intensity
the cause of heat the cause of intensity
increase in the degree of heat increase in the degree of intensity
decrease in the degree of heat decrease in the degree of intensity
heat drops to zero intensity ceases
Thus, “The argument ﬂared up between them” is motivated by the speciﬁc
mapping of “increase in the degree of heat” onto “increase in the degree of
intensity,” whereas “His stupid comment just added fuel to the ﬁre” is motivated
by the speciﬁc mapping of “the cause of heat” onto “the cause of intensity.” In
this manner, the speciﬁc mappings arising from conceptual metaphors provide
substantial information that shapes the subtle meanings of verbal metaphors.
However, conceptual metaphors alone do not create the full interpretations of
all verbal metaphors as, once more, various lexical, grammatical, and sociocultural
constraints shape the use and understanding of metaphorical discourse.
PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDIES ON CMT
A fundamental concern for a broad range of cognitive scientists is whether
people actually recruit conceptual metaphors during their ordinary use and
understanding of language. The experimental studies related to this issue have
explored two speciﬁc questions: (a) do conceptual metaphors play a role in
people’s tacit understandings of why many metaphoric words and phrases convey
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544 GIBBS
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 conceptual
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 judgments
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 experimental
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 people’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.
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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 conceptual
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 psychological
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.
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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 transparent
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
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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 underlying
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
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548 GIBBS
novel metaphoric language, contrary to the conclusions of Keysar et al. A third
study in this series compared pairs of conventional metaphoric scenarios that
depicted different “metaphor families” for a target domain (e.g., “Anger is
heat”: “I was fuming”; and “Anger is a dangerous animal”: “I was bristling”),
with non-metaphoric expressions (e.g., “I was furious”). Once again, novel
metaphors were comprehended more quickly when they were read after a story
containing conventional expressions motivated by the same conceptual metaphor
than when they followed conventional expressions motivated by a different
conceptual metaphor. Thibodeau and Durgin concluded from these results that
“conventional metaphors remain productive,” and that “families of conventional
metaphors : : : can facilitate the mappings of relevant conceptual structures when
interpreting novel metaphoric language” (p. 537). One should note here that
Thibodeau and Durgin only talked of “families of conventional metaphors,” and
did not explicitly endorse the idea that these verbal metaphors are necessarily
reﬂective of underlying conceptual metaphors. Still, the Thibodeau and Durgin
work provides a refutation of Keysar et al.’s results and negative conclusions
about CMT.
Another psycholinguistic study whose ﬁndings, I claim, are consistent with
the idea that conceptual metaphors inﬂuence verbal metaphor understanding
is McGlone and Harding (1998). This set of experiments showed that people
take less time to comprehend temporal metaphors (e.g., “The meeting originally
scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days”) when these
are seen in contexts with consistent temporal perspectives (e.g., time is moving
while an observer is still, or an observer is moving while time is still—both
different versions of the “Time is motion” metaphor), compared to when these
same verbal metaphors were seen in contexts with inconsistent metaphors (e.g.,
moving-observer and moving-event metaphors juxtaposed). However, McGlone
and Harding interpreted these data as being most parsimonious with the idea that
there is some abstract similarity, and not metaphorical mapping, between time
and space (or motion through space; Jackendoff, 1983). Under this view, the idea
that time can move, as in moving a date forward, is grounded in those abstract
features that are common to both time and space, or movement through space.
The difﬁculty with this explanation, however, is that time and space have a
directional relation such that time is understood in terms of space, but space is
not understood in terms of time. Thus, the directional relation between time and
space suggests that time is metaphorically understood (e.g., “Time is motion”),
which is exactly the claim of CMT (Gibbs, 1994). One can argue, then, that
the abstract similarity position is untenable as an account of verbal metaphor
understanding, with the McGlone and Harding (1998) data being consistent
with the tenets of CMT. A more recent set of online visual priming studies
speciﬁcally demonstrated that people’s responses to the ambiguous time question
(“Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward by two days. What day will the
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EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 549
meeting now be held?”) is structured in terms of a speciﬁc conceptual metaphor
in which events that are in front are earlier, and those that are behind being seen
as later (i.e., a time–reference–point metaphor), rather than in terms of an egoor
time-moving metaphor (i.e., a time–ego metaphor; Núñez, Motz, & Teuscher,
2006).
Several other studies have also explored people’s various metaphorical understandings
of time. For instance, the spatial metaphor “Time is movement along
a path” raises the possibility of time moving from left to right, although there is
no linguistic evidence of the left–right axis being used in talk about time (e.g.,
the rightward month). Nonetheless, understanding of a left–right ﬂow of time
does appear in cultures whose language has a left–right writing direction. One
psychological study explored the automatic activation of the left–right axis in
processing of temporal concepts (Santiago, Lupiáñez, Pérez, & Funes, 2007).
Participants made speeded categorizations of individual words and phrases as
to whether they referred to the past or future (e.g., “after,” “next,” “I will
then,” “before,” “recently,” “I thought”). These words and phrases, however,
were visually displayed on either the right or left side of the computer screen,
and participants made their speeded responses by pushing a button with either
the left or right hand.
In general, participants were faster when past and future time was seen on the
left and right sides of the screen, respectively, and when the left and right hands
made the responses, respectively. This pattern of data suggests that irrelevant
parts of the judgment task (e.g., speeded processing of words on the screen
and hand response) played a role in people’s immediate judgments of temporal
concepts—a view that is consistent with the predictions of a speciﬁc conceptual
“mapping between past time and left space and future time and right space”
(Santiago et al., 2007, p. 515). Once again, experience in the left-to-right writing
direction, and reading, provides some of the experiential motivation for the
existence of this spatial understanding of past and future along the left-to-right
axis. These ﬁndings are especially interesting because they suggest how “time
can be spatialized in ways that have no corresponding reﬂection in language”
(p. 515). Although it is not clear when and how people immediately adapt
different spatial time metaphors, and resolve possible conﬂicts between them,
studies have suggested that attention plays an important part in highlighting
the relevant space–time metaphor for particular individuals in different cultural
contexts.
NEW VISIONS OF CMT
This review of some of the contemporary psycholinguistic research ﬁndings on
CMT describes only part of the work consistent with the idea that conceptual
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550 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 verbal
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 speakers’
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
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EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 551
Gibbs showed that people’s speeded comprehension of metaphorical phrases, like
“grasp the concept,” are facilitated when they ﬁrst make, or imagine making, in
this case, a grasping movement. Furthermore, hearing ﬁctive motion expressions,
implying metaphorical motion, such as “The road goes through the desert,”
affects people’s subsequent eye-movement patterns while looking at a scene of
the sentence depicted (Richardson & Matlock, 2007). This suggests that the
simulations used to understand the sentence, in this case involving a particular
motion movement of what the road does, interacts with people’s eye movements.
One implication of these different empirical studies is that people do not just
access passively encoded conceptual metaphors from long-term memory during
online metaphor understanding. Instead, conceptual metaphors emerge through
simulation of what these actions may be like in the moment of understanding to
create detailed interpretations of speakers’ metaphorical messages. This simulation
perspective on conceptual metaphor is generally consistent with claims that
thought and language are continually situated within the interaction of brains,
bodies, and world (Gibbs, 2006c).
An even broader approach on conceptual metaphor aims to situate this aspect
of mind within the framework of dynamic systems theory (Gibbs & Cameron,
2008). A dynamical systems perspective sees conceptual metaphor as an emergent
phenomenon that arises from the interaction of numerous constraints operating
at different time scales. Under this view, simple and complex behaviors are
higher-order products of individual’s self-organizational processes. The phrase
“phase space change” refers to the set of possible states of the system. As
the system changes states over time, it traces a trajectory in its phase space
landscape—a path of the successive states it occupies. When a system’s behavior
is observed over an extended period, it sometimes happens that certain regions
of the phase space are occupied often, others occasionally, and others never. An
area of phase space the system occupies or approaches more frequently than
others is called an attractor. An attractor exerts a kind of pull on the system,
bringing the system’s behavior close to it. Every system has multiple attractors
shaping behavior at any one time.
My suggestion is that conceptual metaphors may be best thought of as
basins of attraction (e.g., areas of stability in experience, such as correlations
like “Knowing is seeing”) in the phase space of the talking and thinking of
a discourse community, which emerge from many different forces, operating
along different time scales. For instance, some dynamic processes occur over
short time spans (e.g., neural ﬁrings or momentary thoughts). Others processes
unfold over the course of individuals’ lives, and so guide development and
change in personality, and interpersonal interactions throughout the lifespan.
Dynamic processes also operate on populations over a much longer, evolutionary
timeframe.
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552 GIBBS
Consider some of the different levels at which conceptual metaphor has been
claimed by scholars in various disciplines to have some inﬂuence:
1. Cultural models of many abstract concepts.
2. The evolution of language.
3. Contemporary language (e.g., conventional expressions, novel extensions,
and polysemy).
4. Aspects of contemporary speakers’ nonlinguistic thinking and communi-
cation.
5. Contemporary speakers’ entrenched knowledge structuring many abstract
concepts that motivate people’s tacit understandings of why various words,
phrases, and texts convey the ﬁgurative meanings they do.
6. Contemporary speakers’ entrenched knowledge that is immediately recruited
(i.e., accessed or activated) during online metaphorical language
use.
7. Neural and computational processing underlying certain abstract thought
and language use.
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.
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EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 553
Furthermore, the dynamical perspective nicely explains the indeterminacy
associated with metaphor understanding precisely because a central part of a
dynamical, self-organized system is that the majority of a trajectory’s time
is spent in intermediate regions of state space that gravitate toward multiple,
semi-stable attractor basins. A given conceptual metaphor is not just activated,
and employed as a single entity, to help interpret a metaphorical utterance.
Instead, multiple conceptual metaphors, which may have arisen to prominence
at a speciﬁc moment in time, given the particular dynamics of the system at
that moment, may collectively shape the trajectory of linguistic processing so
that no one conceptual metaphor has complete control over how an utterance
is interpreted. This possibility offers a very different view of the traditional
question regarding whether a particular conceptual metaphor is activated, as
many conceptual metaphors, along with many other constraining forces, may
have partial, probabilistic inﬂuence on one’s understanding of verbal metaphor.
A key principle behind a dynamical perspective on metaphor processing is
that there is no overarching mechanism that decides the process of constructing
a parse, or formulating an interpretation of a speaker’s metaphorical meaning.
Instead, the system as a whole will settle, or relax, into certain areas of stability,
or even instability, which will constitute the momentary understanding of what a
speaker is, for instance, communicating. This approach, which has been applied
to solving many empirical dilemmas in psycholinguistics, such as in debates
on lexical ambiguity resolution and the interaction of syntax and semantics
during sentence processing (Spivey, 2007), can capture the various interactions
of independently motivated contextual and linguistic constraints shaping verbal
metaphor processing (Gibbs & Cameron, 2008), including all those seen in the
psychological literature. How fast one processes a verbal metaphor in discourse,
and whether one or more conceptual metaphors shape processing, will depend
on the interaction of components, along multiple time scales, at a given moment
in time (for discussion on a continuum of metaphor processing, see Bortfeld &
McGlone, 2001). This makes it impossible, in principle, to state that metaphor,
as a general category of language, will always take more or less time to interpret
than any other kind of language. Similarly, it may very well be the case that, in
some circumstances, conceptual metaphors may have a strong inﬂuence on the
way a verbal metaphor is understood; and, in other instances, verbal metaphor
understanding will be less constrained by various conceptual metaphors.
How any verbal metaphor is understood, and what conceptual metaphors arise
to shape its processing, as well as emerge as a product of processing, will always
depend on the very speciﬁc state of the system given its past history and present
circumstances. Part of the difﬁculty here is that standard experimental studies of
modularity employ methods that seek only changes in average performances on
different trials or tasks (a very simple dynamic), and typically randomize stimuli,
eliminating sequential effects that are revealing of more complex dynamics.
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554 GIBBS
We can study these context-dependent contingencies, and make experimental
predictions about the nature of processing, by looking at the variety of constraints
that may inﬂuence whether certain conceptual metaphors come into play during
verbal metaphor understanding.
For instance, other work on self-organization in language processing has
examined cognitive performance in laboratory environments, as a whole contextsensitive
measurement system. These studies track temporal patterns that emerge
across a participant’s sequence of response times or judgments, spanning all the
trials of the experiment (Spivey, 2007). Close examination of changes, trial
by trial, across the repeated measurements, reveals characteristic dynamical
signatures that actually gauge the coupling between a person, the language
stimuli encountered, and the speciﬁc experimental task at hand. Within metaphor
studies, a whole host of factors may be experimentally studied—including one’s
familiarity with a metaphor, where it is presented in context, the trial pace at
which an experimental participant must respond, the speciﬁc difﬁculty of the
decision or judgment in a task trial, and the cognitive state at the moment of
the trial—which can all be considered to assess their inﬂuence on metaphor use
and understanding as a dynamic system.
There are several, particular empirical explanations that a dynamical account
of metaphor may offer. First, dynamical systems theory offers various statistical
tools to model how possible contingencies arise, and interact, according
to the principles of self-organization to account for the continuous dynamics
of metaphor performance. For example, verbal metaphors, and their possible
conceptual metaphorical roots, occur unevenly in discourse. Dynamical systems
theory is well-suited, more so than any other extant theoretical perspective, to
explain different patterns of stability and instability in the emergence of metaphor
in language, as well as gesture, precisely because it tracks nonlinear interactions
among different constraints operating along varying time scales. Part of this
modeling is likely to show patterns of metaphor coordination between speakers,
a form of emergent coordinative structure in which the dynamics of each body
and brain may come together to more closely mimic the other, as the two systems
come to change and behave as one (Fowler, Richardson, Marsh, & Shockley,
2008).
Second, a dynamical view of metaphor offers an account of how different
kinds of conceptual metaphors interact to produce speciﬁc metaphors at particular
moments in time. Once more, a speaker’s production of a speciﬁc verbal
metaphor may arise from not just a single conceptual metaphorical base, but from
a wide host of metaphorical contingencies that may exist in a given situation.
Third, a dynamical view of metaphor suggests how the creation of metaphorical
language need not be deliberate or conscious, yet, again, arise from the
interaction of a system’s components. Speakers can just decide to communicate
their recent thought processes, and the environmental constraints take care of
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EVALUATING CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY 555
the ﬁne-grained details of how these intentions are manifested in real-world
behavior (i.e., saying something that may be seen as metaphorical, literal, or
ironic; or also making a relevant gesture, head nod, body posture, etc.).
Fourth, dynamical systems theory also nicely explains how metaphorical
meaning can express emergent properties, precisely because emergence is a
fundamental property of self-organizing systems. Metaphorical meanings have
long been seen as emergent properties of the interaction of source and target domains,
or vehicles and topics in linguistic expressions. Within dynamic systems
theory, emergent behavior, or an emergent property, arises from the interaction of
different components, operating in some environment, over disparate size scales.
Emergence involves circular causality in which there is often top-down feedback
within the system. The metaphoric meaning of “My surgeon is a butcher,”
for example, is not simply a matter of bottom-up processes where semantic
features associated with “surgeon” and “butcher” are matched and aligned, but
depends on many other factors, working at a variety of time scales. Just as it
is impossible to predict the shape and behavior of a ﬂock of birds in ﬂight by
simply looking at the behaviors of individual birds, so, too, is it impossible to
predict the emergent behavior of ensembles of metaphors, especially given their
inherent context-dependent functioning. Emergent behaviors, such as metaphoric
meanings, are fundamentally irreducible, and cannot be easily predicted or
deduced from examination of the lower-level entities or components. Cameron
(2007) provided several examples of how self-organizing processes may shape
metaphor use, particularly in the way that emergent metaphors may constrain
lower-level use of words with metaphorical meaning.
Fifth, a dynamical perspective on metaphor also can account for a wide variety
of reading time results, showing ways in which verbal metaphors can either be
quickly or more slowly processed given the speciﬁc dynamics operating within
an experiment, for individual participants at different points in the experiment
(for speciﬁc research and a discussion of this idea in terms of constraint satisfaction
models of ﬁgurative language use, see Katz & Ferratti, 2001; see also
Pexman, Ferratti, & Katz, 2000).
Finally, a dynamical view of metaphor is, again, best suited to explain how
various constraints, from historical and cultural knowledge to the fast ﬁring of
neurons, simultaneously operate to shape any instance of metaphor use and
understanding. Many of the debates over conceptual metaphor concern the
most appropriate level at which to make generalizations about conventional patterns
of metaphorical thought (e.g., culture, history, immediate social contexts,
conceptual structures, linguistic expressions, and neural functioning). Scholars
tend to privilege the methods and traditional topics of their own disciplines
in making claims about “where” conceptual metaphor is best characterized.
However, a dynamical perspective again sees how multiple, nested hierarchies
of constraints, operating along different time scales, interact in nonlinear ways to
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556 GIBBS
produce metaphorical behavior at any given moment. In this manner, a dynamical
perspective, embracing principles of self-organization, provides a comprehensive
theory to conceive of, and study, conceptual metaphors in action.
Overall, dynamical system approaches to metaphor see metaphor use and
understanding as a whole system activity (i.e., interaction of brain, body, and
world), giving rise to both stability and instability in a wide variety of laboratory
and real-world behaviors. This approach is consistent with many other contemporary
theories of human performance based on principles of self-organization, and
holds much promise for studying the ways metaphor shape language, thought,
and culture.
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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