Dr. Johanna Rubba
English Department
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
Last updated 2/4/05
Copyright Johanna Rubba 2005

Terms and concepts for metaphorical and metonymic analysis

The following are terms used in cognitive-linguistic and cognitive-stylistic discussion of metaphor and metonymy, with definitions and examples.

conceptual structure: our store of knowledge (lodged in the mind/brain) about the world. This includes sensory images, knowledge of emotions, as well as factual knowledge. This knowledge is organized into concepts that are arrayed in structured schemas. Concepts and schemas vary in size and complexity. They derive from two sources: (1) the inborn structure of our brain/mind; (2) mental processing of experience of the world.

domain: a schema; a relatively specific store of knowledge about some area of experience. Ex.: what we know about plants; what we know about friendship; basic knowledge of orientation in space, such as up-down, back-front, inside-outside, etc.

mapping: a conceptual (mental) connection between elements in one domain (schema) and elements in another domain. Ex.: In the conventional metaphor the bloom is off the rose, which is used to describe a relationship that has reached its peak and is starting to decline, we connect the concept "bloom" from the plant domain to the peak of quality of a relationship in the relationship domain; we connect the concept "rose" to the concept of the relationship itself.

correspondences: the connections between elements in each domain of a mapping. In the metaphorical mapping LIFE IS A JOURNEY, for instance, the person living the life corresponds to the traveler on the journey; in DEATH IS DEPARTURE the event of dying corresponds to the event of departing one place to journey to another place.

metaphor: a mapping across domains in which elements of a one domain are equated with, or given the properties of, elements of a different domain (e.g. LIFE = JOURNEY; PEOPLE = PLANTS). Metaphors may be linguistic or conceptual (see below).

conceptual metaphor: a metaphorical mapping that is part of conceptual structure. It is often claimed that conceptual metaphors give us structure for domains that are not clearly defined in themselves. For instance, we know what emotions feel like and what triggers them, but we generally use metaphors to structure them. A PERSON IS A CONTAINER OF EMOTION is one of these; we conceptualize the emotion as a substance that fills us or drains out of us. An extremely common conceptual metaphor is LIFE IS A JOURNEY, in which we map the various time-stages and events of life onto features of a journey such as starting points (birth; graduation) and ending points (achievements; death), paths, directions, goals, decision points between paths, etc. Standard practice in the cognitive-linguistics metaphor literature is to write conceptual metaphors IN CAPS. Important: These metaphors are not linguistic; they reside quietly in the mind and we may use them to think about the domain they structure (emotion, life), but they do not take the form of words or phrases. They are concepts, not words. These metaphors can be expressed by nonlinguistic behaviors in a culture. For example, TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY is expressed by the many ways we quantify and assign monetary value to time: parking meters; hourly wages or hourly charges for services, etc.

target domain: of the two domains involved in a metaphor, one is the target and the other the source. The target is the domain that needs structure or that is being given structure from the other domain. In LIFE IS A JOURNEY, the domain LIFE is being given structure that is taken from our schemas about JOURNEYS. Hence LIFE is the target domain.

source domain: the conceptual domain which supplies structure and relationships to the target domain. In the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, JOURNEY is the source domain: terms and concepts from the JOURNEY domain are used to structure the LIFE domain. For instance, one"s career or one"s social development is structured as a "path"; the person living the life is equated to the "traveler"; moments of change or decision are equated to "turning points"; disruptions or difficulties in achieving goals are thought of as "obstacles".

NOTE that the standard formula for stating a conceptual metaphor is TARGET IS SOURCE: LIFE IS A JOURNEY; TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY; PEOPLE ARE PLANTS, etc.

linguistic metaphor: a linguistic expression which expresses a metaphor; the meaning of the expression is a metaphor. Ex.: the bloom is off the rose; don"t waste time; "do not go gentle into that good night" (Dylan Thomas). Each of these linguistic expressions states a metaphorical mapping: the stages of flowering to the stages of a relationship; time to a precious commodity; death to night; death to departure; willingness to move to resistance to death. A linguistic metaphor is just that, linguistic: it pairs the spoken or written phrase or sentence (its form) with the conceptual metaphorical mapping (its meaning). See also "dead metaphors" at the end of this document.

conventional metaphor: linguistic metaphors that occur commonly in everyday language; these usually are evidence of conceptual metaphors that help structure the world view of the culture. Conventional metaphors require no effort to interpret, because they rest on conceptual metaphors shared by users of the language. Our language has many conventional metaphors that express various conceptualizations of time, for example. The conceptual metaphor TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY is manifested in such common expressions as don"t waste time; a time-saving strategy; this will buy us some time; my time is valuable.

novel or creative metaphor: new metaphors -- metaphors which have not been expressed before in a particular culture. These may be either conceptual or linguistic, or manifest in other ways. A new metaphor for our society is the conception of a computer screen as a desktop, and of computer data-storage systems as filing systems. This metaphor is not manifested only in language ("file", "folder") but also in icons, such as images of pages for files, manila folders for directories, the notorious Apple wastebasket, etc. Literary metaphors fall into this category. Literary metaphors often simply add specific detail to a conceptual metaphor already present in a culture, e.g. Emily Dickinson, in "Because I could not stop for death", uses one particular type of real journey -- the ride to the cemetery in a horse-drawn hearse -- to portray DEATH IS DEPARTURE; she personifies death as the driver of the hearse. It is not conventional for our culture to use expressions about the ride to the cemetery to refer to death itself, as Dickinson does in this poem. Nevertheless, the reader can easily arrive at the death interpretation because of the already-established DEATH IS DEPARTURE.

Novel metaphors (especially in modern and postmodern literature) may be completely novel (that is, introduce a brand new metaphorical mapping), or they may bear a relationship to an existing metaphor through inference or interpretation. This is why figuring out symbolism or metaphor in modern poetry can be very challenging. Elizabeth Bishop"s poem The Man-Moth, for example, portrays a mysterious creature which rides the subways of a city at night, occasionally surfacing and climbing the tall buildings in the hopes of being pushed through the circle of the moon, which he perceives as a hole in the night sky. An interpreter might look to basic metaphors such as GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN and KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT, IGNORANCE IS DARKNESS to develop an analysis (as did Lori Levine and Anne-Marie Williams in a paper for an English course a number of years ago).

Not all novel metaphors are literary, however. People are quite creative in their everyday use of language, and novel metaphors are ways that people inspire others to think of a situation or phenomenon in a new way. Consider, for example, someone who says "life is a pinball machine, and I"m the ball". This metaphor will lead us to map the way that person"s life has unfolded to the way a pinball machine works: the ball (the person) is projected by a force not under its control (birth? God? parents?) out of a narrow chute (a safe, predictable path) into a field of pins (events and forces one encounters in life). Gravity and other physical forces (causes not under the control of the person living the life) cause the ball to bounce from one pin to another; the control of its trajectory is in the hands of the operator of the machine (fate? God? the subconscious?) who may possess or lack gaming skill (good fortune or bad luck; a benevolent or malevolent God; a strong or sick subconscious). Some pins the ball hits render a gain in points (successes in life) and some to losses (failures, misfortunes in life). Hitting a certain pin influences the direction of travel from that pin (a certain event may influence the person towards some possible later events rather than other possible events). Eventually, the ball rolls into the exit, its trajectory finished, and stops (death). The score at the end is high or low (a successful vs. an unsuccessful life).

Someone who conceptualizes their life in this way clearly lacks a sense of control over their life, viewing their fate as in the hands of others or of random chance. This is a person who probably does not have five-year plans and a long-term goals, and possible feels that such planning is futile. Contrast this with someone who says "life is a racetrack, and I"m Dale Earnheardt Jr." (a famous winning driver in NASCAR racing).

entailments: conclusions reached in the target domain by reasoning taken from the source domain. Entailments show that metaphor is more than a single linguistic expression; large parts of the structure of a source schema may carry over to the target domain. In LIFE IS A JOURNEY, for example, the whole narrative of a journey and the typical outcomes of various maneuvers carry over to the target domain of life. In the journey schema, one sets out with the intent to reach a certain destination; one desires the smoothest and most direct path to that destination; undesirable features of a path, such as steep hills, brushy undergrowth, rocky roads, or dark woods cause delays, fatigue, discouragement, or danger. Obstacles may necessitate an indirect route; lack of a map or unexpected branchings of a path may cause a wrong turn, as a result of which one may get lost or have to backtrack. Devious individuals may give false directions or tempt you to take an alternate path, which may lead to a destination quite unlike the intended one. Enemies may lurk along the path É etc., etc. The unfolding of various journey events carries over fully to the target domain; as one thing leads to another on a journey, one thing leads to another in life. Consider someone who goes off the beaten path. In the journey domain, the beaten path is the one most used and generally leads to a destination frequented by many, making it ordinary. The unbeaten path -- "the one less traveled by" (Frost, The Road Not Taken) -- is used by fewer people and leads to less-freqented destinations. It is not ordinary; someone who deliberately steps onto such a path does not want to be ordinary. Their desried achievements in life are different from those of ordinary people; they live their lives in untypical ways. The whole logic of traveling a less-frequented path carries over to living an unusual life.

systematicity: this term refers to the quality of entailment carryover defined in the previous item: the logic of the source domain carries over to the target. It referss to the application of a system of logical relationships (part-whole, cause-effect, sequence of events, good-bad, etc.) from the source domain in the target domain. If TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE, then, since limited resources can run out, time can "run out". If a limited resource can be saved, then time can "be saved". If a state is conceived of as a location, then moving into or out of the location will be interpreted as experiencing the state or ceasing to experience the state ("falling in and out of love", for example).

coherence: the result of systematicity: a metaphorical mapping that results in a coherent overall structuring of a target domain by importing structure from a source domain. Whole sections of the journey schema give us a complex structure for conceiving of life.

cross-metaphorical coherence: Quite frequently, especially in literature, several metaphors are operative at once in the treatment of a target domain. These are "mixed metaphors" that work. In such cases, one gets not only carryover of lots of structure from the source schemas (coherence), but source-target mappings of one metaphor will correspond to source-target mappings of the other metaphors -- a kind of layering of metaphors within a single work. One metaphor that applies to death is DEATH IS DEPARTURE. Another is DEATH IS DARKNESS while LIFE IS LIGHT. When Dylan Thomas writes "Do not go gentle into that good night ... Rage, rage against the dying of the light", he mixes metaphors, but systematically, so that coherence is not lost: dying constitutes departure ("go ... into") from a light place to a dark place ("the dying of the light" = the waning of life ... "that good night" = death). The point of death is equated simultaneously with departure and a change from light to dark; both metaphors are at work at once.

metonymy: NOT metaphor; there is only one domain, and there is no carryover of features or logic. Metonymy is a mapping within a single domain or schema. An element in the domain "stands in" for another element in the domain. Linguistic metonymies use the word that refers to one element to refer to another element. Ex.: the food server comes to your table of five with all the food orders, and asks, "Okay, which one of you is the burrito?", and you answer, "I"m the burrito". The domain in this example is the restaurant scenario; the metonymy is "food ordered stands in for customer who ordered the food". Another common metonymy is "the name of a place stands in for the institution located at that place", e.g. "Washington was slow to respond to the tsunami disaster". "Washington" stands in for appropriate members of the US government.

Metonymy has various uses. It is a shortcut that allows one to focus in on the most relevant element of the situation: the expression "who"s the burrito" is shorter than "who ordered the burrito", and, for the instant, the burrito is the most practical feature of interest between the server and the customers. It can also signal group authority or the representation of a whole institution by a controlling few: If we say that SBC is planning a buyout of AT&T, "SBC" actually refers to the people in charge of this large corporation. Metonymies can also be used to name where the buck stops, as when someone says "Nixon bombed Cambodia". He didn"t fly the planes or release the bombs, but he is the commander in chief who bears ultimate responsibility. It can help keep track of who plays which character in a film. One might say, for instance, "this is the scene where Elijah Wood fights with Gollem over the Ring". Part-for-whole metonymies name the most relevant part of the whole for the purposes at hand: a "farm hand" does a lot of work with his/her hands; "putting our heads together" over a problem means joining the brainpower (located in the head) of several individuals -- "head" refers to the mind within the head.

dead metaphor: Since linguistic metaphors have two parts -- a form and a meaning -- we might imagine the separation of the parts. Take away the form, and you have a conceptual metaphor: one that exists purely in "mentalese", to use Stephen Pinker"s term. Take away the meaning, and you have a an expression that has the form of a metaphor ("the foot of the mountain") but may well no longer activate a mapping in the mind of the listener (that is to say, upon hearing "the foot of the mountain", the listener does not make a mental connection between the bottom of the mountain and a human foot). In these cases, if the linguistic part of the metaphor persists in use, it is because it has taken on a new literal meaning -- a new sense of the word "foot". "Foot" now has more than one meaning: the human appendage, and the bottom region of a mountain. This kind of development is an extremely common way that words extend their range of meanings in language.