Change In Conceptual Metaphors

Dr. Özgün KOŞANER Dokuz Eylül University Department of Linguistics

ozgun.kosaner@deu.edu.tr http://web.deu.edu.tr/dilbilim

Paper Presented at the

28th National Linguistics Conference 8 – 9 May 2014, SAKARYA / TURKEY

Contents

• Aim and Scope

• What is Metaphor?

• Approaches to Metaphor

• Cognitive Grammar and Conventional/Conceptual Metaphors

• Change in Metaphors

• Method and Database

• Findings

• Conclusion

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Aim and Scope

• To propose that the inter-domain mappings called as ‘conventional metaphor’ in Cognitive Grammar are not as conventional as claimed

• To prove that conceptual domains that constitute the conventional metaphor or the metaphor itself could change in time over examples from Turkish

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What is Metaphor?

• Greek

meta + pherein

(beyond) (carry)

• Turkish

Eğreti: ‘not fitting, borrowed, not in place, not fixed’

Eğretileme: ‘use the name of another thing as a borrowing to explain another thing via similarity’

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Approaches to Metaphor

• Antiquity

• Platon

• Aristotle

• “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion”.

• Three properties of Aristotelian Metaphor:

• Word level

• Deviation from normal use

• Depends on the similarities between two things

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Approaches to Metaphor

• Antiquity

• Cicero

• Quintilian

• Metaphor is a borrowing between words

• Used in linguistic decorations

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Approaches to Metaphor

• Modern Period

• Hobbes

• The conceptual system of human beings operate with denotations, metaphor is a «deviant» use of the word

• Hegel

• Metaphor is an abbreviated simile, a mere accessory

• John Stuart Mill

• Metaphors are analogies that help to understand the propositions

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Approaches to Metaphor

• Modern Period

• Kant

• Metaphor is not an ordinary thing produced by mechanical rules, it is produced authentically; it is the result of the interaction between the perception and the imagination of the perciever

• Nietzsche

• Metaphor is not separated from normal words. It penetrates into human thought and language; it is not a linguistic entity, but a process which we encounter and experience in the real world.

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Approaches to Metaphor

• Contemporary Approaches

• Richards

• Metaphor is not a trope on the world level nor an issue related to language only

• Thought is metaphorical, it derives via comparison and the metaphors in the language emerges from the metaphors in thought

• Philosophers and linguists missed this point and handle metaphor as a superficial tool or an ornament

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Approaches to Metaphor

• Contemporary Approaches

• Ricoeur

• Groups approaches to metaphor into three:

• Rhetoric: Metaphor is an oratory for peruasion

• Semantic: Metaphor is an intra-linguistic transference of meaning

• Hermeneutic

• Hermeneutic:

• Metaphor has a cognitive role in the conceptualisation of human experience and reality

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Cognitive Grammar

• Cognitive Grammar

• Emerged first as ‘Spatial Grammar’

• From the start on, it claimed that the conceptualisation process of humans should be based on spatial basis

• The domain, can be defined as a coherent domain of conceptualisation in which the semantic items can be defined

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Conceptual Metaphors

• Metaphor is a cognitive process in which a series of concepts are understood via another set of concepts

• Metaphor, first, is an issue of conceptualisation

• They are intra-domain mappings where concepts are projected from one domain (source domain) to another domain (target domain)

• The mappings provide the transference of the information in the source domain onto the target domain

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Conceptual Metaphors

• Metaphors are conceptual rather than verbal

• Conceptual metaphor try to explain a more abstract conceptual domain via a relatively more concrete conceptual domain

• Conceptual metaphors are completely abstract; however, metaphoric expressions are the projections of these to actual language use

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Conceptual Metaphors

• [LIFE IS A JOURNEY]

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Path PAssengers

Point of Departure Point of Arrival

Obstacles Path Covered

Landmarks Forks

Life Living Persons

Birth Aims in the life

Difficulties in life Successful moments Life-changing events Important Choices

JOURNEY LIFE

Conceptual Metaphors

• [LIFE IS A JOURNEY]

• Yaş otuz beş, yolun yarısı eder

• Age 35, it is the half of the way

• Yeni öğretmeni, ona yeni ufuklar açmış, onu bu mesleğe

yönlendirmişti. • His new teacher had opened new horizons, and directed him to

this profession

• Bu mevkiye gelmesi kolay olmamıştı.

• It was not easy for him to come at this rank.

• Hayatta tam olmak istediğim yerdeyim.

• I am exactly at where I wanted to be in my life.

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Change in Metaphors

• Lakoff

• The mappings in conceptual metaphors are conventional, they are fixed parts of our conceptual system

• Each conceptual metaphor is fixed pattern of the mappings between different conceptual domains

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Change in Metaphors

• Wierzbicka (1986), Jackendoff and Aaron (1991), Glucksberg and Keysar (1990, 1993)

• Metaphors cause polysemy in the lexicon

• Steen (2010)

• ARGUMENT IS WAR

• The words ‘defence, counter, attack, win, lose’ have both ‘war’ and ‘argument’ meanings and they exhibit a regular polysemy in the lexicon

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Change in Metaphors

• Steen (2010)

• It is not certain that these words, even when they use in a metaphorical sense, trigger the processes comprising the conceptual metaphor

• It is controversial that there is mapping between ‘war’ source domain to ‘argument’ target domain

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Change in Metaphors

• Cognitive Grammar

• The mappings are produced online, during language production

• Opposing View

• These mappings could have been used in a period in the past; however their relation to the thought processes of today’s language user is not intact

• The metaphorical senses of these words are equally, even more, conventional than their non-metaphorical senses

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Change in Metaphors

• Steen (2010)

• Why would children, who live in an environment where ‘argument’ conceptual domain is more prominent than ‘war’ conceptual domain, would have to acquire the ‘war’ related meanings of these words first?

• This suggests that metaphors, especially conceptual metaphors are not so conceptual as claimed

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BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

• Conceptual metaphors are not as conventional as claimed

• They can change with respect to time, conditions and new

contexts

• The conceptual metaphor *ZİHİN BİR MAKİNEDİR+ (*MIND

IS A MACHINE]) is changing as to include the conceptual metaphor *ZİHİN BİR BİLGİSAYARDIR+ (*MIND IS A COMPUTER])

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METHOD AND DATABASE

• The metaphorical expressions and conceptual metaphors were determined using MIP-VU (Metaphor Identification Procedure – Vrije Universiteit)

• MIP-VU has four stages:

1. Read the entire text to get a general idea of the text

2. Determine lexical units

3.

a. Determine the contextual meaning of the unit

b. Check if there is a more basic sense of the lexical unit

Does the contextual meaning contrast with the basic meaning but can it be understood in comparison with it?

4. If yes mark the unit as metaphorical

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METHOD AND DATABASE

• In order to determine the metaphorical expressions and thus the conceptual metaphors MIP-VU was applied on two different corpora:

• The TDK (Turkish Language Association Dictionary) corpus, where it is expected to find more conventional metaphors: idioms including keywords (‘mind, intelligence, head, brain’) (1381 idioms)

• Ekşi Sözlük Corpus: Texts gathered from a social-network dictionary called ‘Ekşi Sözlük’ (Sour Dictionary, www.eskisozluk.com) where it is expected more contemporary language usage examples: texts obtained by keyword search (2467 texts)

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FINDINGS

• Three conceptual metaphors were found prominent in TDK corpus

• MIND IS A MACHINE

• MIND IS A CONTAINER

• MIND IS A LIQUID/GAS

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BULGULAR

• MIND IS A MACHINE

• Kafası çalışmak – one’s head is working

• Kafası işlemek – one’s head is operating

• Balatayı sıyırmak – one’s scraped the clutch (go crazy)

• Kafası sarmamak – one’s head does not wind up

• Kafası basmamak – one’s head won’t crank (ignition)

• Kafası bozulmak – one’s head is broken

• Kafasını kurcalamak – sth. tampers with one’s head

• Aklının terazisi bozulmak – the weighing machine is broken

• Aklının ayarı bozulmak – one is out of tuning

• Kafası durmak – one’s head has stopped

• …

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FINDINGS

• MIND IS A CONTAINER • Aklı almamak – one’s mind won’t accomodate

• Kafası almamak – one’s head won’t accomodate

• Kafasını boşaltmak – empty one’s head

• Zihnini boşaltmak – empty one’s mind

• Kafasından çıkarmak – to remove from one’s head

• Aklından çıkıvermek – to be out of one’s mind

• Kafasına sığmamak – not to fit into one’s head

• Aklına gelmek – to come into ones mind

• Zihninde yer etmek – to make place in one’s mind

• Aklında kalmak – to stay in one’s mind

• Aklına koymak – to put into one’s mind

• Aklından geçirmek – to pass through one’s mind

• …

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FINDINGS

• MIND IS A LIQUID/GAS

• Kafası bulanmak – one’s head is blurred

• Zihni bulanmak – one’s mind is blurred

• Kafası dumanlanmak – one’s mind is smoked

• Kafayı tütsülemek – to fume one’s head

• Kafası bulutlu – one’s mind is cloudy

• Kafası küflü – one’s mind is mouldy

• Beyni bulanmak – one’s brain is blurred

• Zihin açıklığı – clarity of mind

• Zihin berraklığı – lucidity of mind

• Zihin bulanıklığı – blurriness of mind

• Kafası açılmak – one’s mind has cleared

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FINDINGS

• The Ekşi Sözlük Corpus gives another metaphor, in addition to those in the TDK corpus:

• MIND IS A COMPUTER

• Beyin.dll bulunamadı – Brain.dll not found

• Mavi ekran vermek – To give a blue screen

• Devreleri yanmak – to burn the circuits

• Geçersiz işlem yürütmek – to produce an ‘unexpected error’

• Beyin bağlatmak - To connect a brain

• RAM’i (belleği) yetmedi – He does not have enough RAM

• İşlemcin yetmez – You do not have enough CPU

• Kendime format attım – I have formatted myself.

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CONCLUSION

• The analyses on TDK and Ekşi Sözlük corpora indicated that

• the conceptual metaphor [MIND IS A MACHINE] has changed with the emergence of the conceptual metaphor MIND IS A COMPUTER in recent language use

• The primary findings of the study showed that

• Conceptual metaphors are not as conventional as claimed,

• the domains (especially the source domain) comprising the conceptual metaphor can change,

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CONCLUSION

• The findings suggest that

• it may not be sufficient to consider semantic and cognitive features in the analysis of metaphors,

• rather pragmatic factors that would include context should be paid attention to

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CONCLUSION

• Limitations

• It is thought to be early to generalize the assumptions of the study since the database is relatively small

• The change in conceptual metaphors should be studied with detailed analyses on larger corpora using different conceptual metaphor examples

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REFERENCES

• Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

• Gibbs, R. W. (2008). The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: CUP.

• Hiraga, M. (2005). Metaphor and Iconicity: a cognitive approach to analyzing texts. New York: Palgrave Mcmillan

• Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: CUP.

• Punter, D. (2007). Metaphor: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge

• Ricoeur, P. (2004). The Rule of Metaphor. London: Routledge. • Lakoff, G. and Mark Johnson (1980) , Metaphors We Live By Chicago, IL:

Chicago University Press. • Deane, P. (1995) ‘Metaphor of Center and Periphery in Yeats’ “The

Second Coming”’. Journal of Pragmatics, 24(6): 627–42. • Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories

Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. • Lakoff, G. (1993) ‘The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor’. In Metaphor

and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 202–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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REFERENCES

• Steen, Gerard J. (1994): Understanding metaphor in literature: An empirical approach. London: Longman.

• Steen, Gerard J. (1999): “From linguistic to conceptual metaphor in five steps”, in: Gibbs, Raymond/Steen, Geerard (eds.): Metaphor in cognitive linguistics Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 57-77.

• Steen, Gerard J. (2009): “From linguistic form to conceptual structure in five steps: Analyzing metaphor in poetry”, in: Brône, G./Vandaele, J. (eds.), Cognitive poetics: Goals, gains, gaps, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 197-226.

• Steen, G., Herrmann, D., Kaal, B., Krennmayr, A., Tryntje, P. T. (2010): A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

• Steen, Gerard J. (2011): “The contemporary theory of metaphor - now new and improved!”, in: Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9(1), 26-64.

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