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Metaphor: A Practical Introduction
This clear and lucid primer fills an important need by providing a comprehensive account of the many new developments in the study of metaphor over the last twenty years and their impact on our understanding of language, culture, and the mind. Beginning with Lakoff and Johnson's seminal work in Metaphors We Live By Kövecses outlines the development of "the cognitive linguistic theory of metaphor" by explaining key ideas on metaphor. He also explores primary metaphor, metaphor systems, the "invariance principle," mental-imagery experiments, the many-space blending theory, and the role of image schemas in metaphorical thought. He examines the applicability of these ideas to numerous related fields.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 24, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 7, 2020
I want to start by saying that I really got a lot out of this book and that it clarified some ideas that I didn’t know I needed clarified – which, obviously enough, is always a nice thing for a book to do for you. I’m saying this because, as good as this book is, if you wanted to read a book on metaphors and their role in supporting idealised cognitive models, well, you probably want to read ‘Metaphors We Live By’. In some ways this book is probably more useful than that book for someone wanting to learn about these issues, but Lakoff and Johnson’s book is, to use a metaphor often criticised for being sexist, seminal.
That said, and I don’t think there was any way to avoid saying it, this book is a textbook and so it walks you through topics like: what is a metaphor, how are they different from metonymy, what role do they play in idioms and language learning… and this and so much more. That is, I think this book covers quite a lot more ground than Lakoff and Johnson’s, is supported by more recent work – by both of them and others in the field, and there are little exercises for you to complete along the way and nice little summaries at the end of each chapter. You know, you’ll learn a lot from this book, and you will have your hand held while you are learning it. None of which is a bad thing. But if you want to look good at a dinner party, and is there any other possible motivation for reading a book on metaphors? You will look more impressive having read Lakoff and Johnson. I’m not even sure the author would of this book would argue – he is a very big fan and he recommends Metaphors We Live By perhaps a dozen times throughout this. (Hint: you could read this and then say you had read MWLB too – who is ever going to check?)
So, are metaphors things we ‘live by’ or are they just a flourish poets turn to on a wet afternoon because they have nothing better to do with their time? It does, after all, sound like something an English major would say while arguing with an engineer (perhaps even at a dinner party) after the engineer has said something like civilisation is impossible without a functional sewage system. “Oh yeah, shit face, what about metaphors!”
What about them, indeed. There’s a fundamental contradiction in a lot of post-Freudian psychology. We all know we have an unconscious, we are happy enough to believe we have unconscious desires, but the whole point of an ‘unconscious’ is that it’s, well, unconscious. We aren’t meant to be aware of it. You might think that would end the conversation pretty much as soon as it had gotten started. Which is where metaphors come in.
There are so many ways to define metaphors, but let’s build as we go. The word itself is Greek for ‘to transfer’, which means that the word metaphor itself is a metaphor – how cool is that? Metaphors tend to be concrete images that we associate with abstract ideas. So, there are two things you need for a metaphor to work – a source of the metaphor (a swan, say) – and the target of the metaphor (an elegant lady). And then you also need a cultural context where the source and the target map together in a way that makes sense. You know, no one ever confused a swan with something elegant while it was walking on land – so, not everything about the swan is ‘elegant’. If I say, ‘he’s a lion’, I expect you to think of him as someone powerful with natural leadership qualities, maybe ‘regal’ will also come unbidden to mind. I certainly don’t expect you to think he is somehow lick his own bum in while resting in the shade of the savanna. That is, the source and the target have multiple properties, not all of which help with the metaphor, and so metaphors only work when you can link a subset of those properties in a way that helps to make sense of what you’re trying to say about the other thing – and everyone knows the subset you are applying.
If you’ve ever studied physics, you’ll know that there was, for a long time, a heated debate about the nature of light – about whether it was a wave or a particle. The problem is that whatever a wave is, it is certainly not a particle. So, this does seem to be an either/or metaphorical choice we are confronted with. And for most of the history of physics that’s exactly how we played the game – with some physicists coming down on the side of waves and others coming down on the side of particles. The amusing thing is that quantum theory has light being both particle-like and wave-like – that is, if taken too literally, quantum theory says something that is clearly absurd. Like I said before, a particle is basically the definition of what a wave isn’t. We can’t know what things are really like when they get that small, and so we are forced to talk about them with metaphors – that is, concrete images that we understand very well in our world, and that we can use to help us understand things in a world we have much less access to. And so, sometimes it makes sense to think of light as acting like waves, and sometimes it makes more sense to think of it as being made up of tiny balls.
This is pretty much the same thing with so many metaphors for things we have trouble understanding. Love is the example often used here, as it is with Lakoff and Johnson. You know, love can be thought of as some pretty contradictory things. As a form of insanity, a kind of illness, a battle, an investment or a journey, just as a start. And like waves and particles, there’s not a whole lot of similarity between those things. The thing is that each metaphor illuminates one or another characteristic of love that isn’t available using the other ones. Which is interesting, because I don’t think it is all that likely that people would get into a fight over whether or not any of these contradictory metaphors for love ‘could’ be used to describe love. You know, who is going to say, “How dare you compare love to a battle!” So, we certainly understand that there are multiple metaphors that might be appropriate to describe love – and we might even use two or more of these metaphors at different times to describe our own feelings when we are in love – but at any one time we are probably likely to come down on one rather than another.
Which is pretty much Lakoff and Johnson’s point when they talk of their idealised cognitive models and how metaphors help us to see what is playing out in our unconscious minds. Their point is to ask if we choose metaphors or if metaphors choose us. That is, if we attend to the metaphors we use, what does that tell us about the way we see the world? Their point is that it tells us a lot. If you are talking about love and all of your metaphors are about being at war with the person you love, that’s quite a different mind-set to all of them being about love as a journey. Battles, for instance, are won and lost – journeys, not so much.
I’ve been reading some papers lately that discuss early career teachers and the metaphors they use to describe their new profession. Often these metaphors involve natural growth – so, the teachers see themselves as gardeners and the students as flowers or trees. In these metaphors teaching is about nurturing and providing the right environment to allow students to flourish. Sometimes the metaphors have the teachers as tour guides. Sometimes they are a lion tamer. Each of these metaphors provide distinctly different roles to teacher and student. The thing is, it isn’t clear that when the teachers are asked for a metaphor for their teaching that they systematically work through all of the available metaphors – even when they are presented with metaphorical prompts – and rationally choose. I think what happens is that this is much more a ‘gut feeling’ where one metaphor ‘feels’ right. But the thing is that some metaphors for teaching ‘it’s like being hit by a wave’ make the teacher a mostly powerless recipient of the forces of the universe – and others, ‘it’s a pretty garden that grows under my care’, put too much stress on what the teacher can control and achieve. It isn’t clear to me, then, which of these metaphors is necessarily the best for a beginning teacher. Some of the papers I’ve been reading also point out that student metaphors are remarkably hard to shift. The papers say that university teacher education courses should consider investigating the metaphors used by students in initial teacher education courses and to see if these metaphors are compatible with the attitudes they are seeking to encourage their graduate teachers to bring into schools with them. The point being, that their metaphors are likely to be a better indicator of their future practice than what they say they believe given what they are ‘taught’ in class about teaching and learning.
Paying attention to the metaphors we use is a bit of a life changing thing. It is much, much harder to argue against metaphors than it is to argue against ideas. This is because metaphors reflect things that structure how we make sense of ideas. I really liked this book a lot – not least since it does give you the tools to be able to spot metaphors and to consider what they might mean in various contexts. If you feel you need to read a second book on this topic, this is the book to read.
That said, and I don’t think there was any way to avoid saying it, this book is a textbook and so it walks you through topics like: what is a metaphor, how are they different from metonymy, what role do they play in idioms and language learning… and this and so much more. That is, I think this book covers quite a lot more ground than Lakoff and Johnson’s, is supported by more recent work – by both of them and others in the field, and there are little exercises for you to complete along the way and nice little summaries at the end of each chapter. You know, you’ll learn a lot from this book, and you will have your hand held while you are learning it. None of which is a bad thing. But if you want to look good at a dinner party, and is there any other possible motivation for reading a book on metaphors? You will look more impressive having read Lakoff and Johnson. I’m not even sure the author would of this book would argue – he is a very big fan and he recommends Metaphors We Live By perhaps a dozen times throughout this. (Hint: you could read this and then say you had read MWLB too – who is ever going to check?)
So, are metaphors things we ‘live by’ or are they just a flourish poets turn to on a wet afternoon because they have nothing better to do with their time? It does, after all, sound like something an English major would say while arguing with an engineer (perhaps even at a dinner party) after the engineer has said something like civilisation is impossible without a functional sewage system. “Oh yeah, shit face, what about metaphors!”
What about them, indeed. There’s a fundamental contradiction in a lot of post-Freudian psychology. We all know we have an unconscious, we are happy enough to believe we have unconscious desires, but the whole point of an ‘unconscious’ is that it’s, well, unconscious. We aren’t meant to be aware of it. You might think that would end the conversation pretty much as soon as it had gotten started. Which is where metaphors come in.
There are so many ways to define metaphors, but let’s build as we go. The word itself is Greek for ‘to transfer’, which means that the word metaphor itself is a metaphor – how cool is that? Metaphors tend to be concrete images that we associate with abstract ideas. So, there are two things you need for a metaphor to work – a source of the metaphor (a swan, say) – and the target of the metaphor (an elegant lady). And then you also need a cultural context where the source and the target map together in a way that makes sense. You know, no one ever confused a swan with something elegant while it was walking on land – so, not everything about the swan is ‘elegant’. If I say, ‘he’s a lion’, I expect you to think of him as someone powerful with natural leadership qualities, maybe ‘regal’ will also come unbidden to mind. I certainly don’t expect you to think he is somehow lick his own bum in while resting in the shade of the savanna. That is, the source and the target have multiple properties, not all of which help with the metaphor, and so metaphors only work when you can link a subset of those properties in a way that helps to make sense of what you’re trying to say about the other thing – and everyone knows the subset you are applying.
If you’ve ever studied physics, you’ll know that there was, for a long time, a heated debate about the nature of light – about whether it was a wave or a particle. The problem is that whatever a wave is, it is certainly not a particle. So, this does seem to be an either/or metaphorical choice we are confronted with. And for most of the history of physics that’s exactly how we played the game – with some physicists coming down on the side of waves and others coming down on the side of particles. The amusing thing is that quantum theory has light being both particle-like and wave-like – that is, if taken too literally, quantum theory says something that is clearly absurd. Like I said before, a particle is basically the definition of what a wave isn’t. We can’t know what things are really like when they get that small, and so we are forced to talk about them with metaphors – that is, concrete images that we understand very well in our world, and that we can use to help us understand things in a world we have much less access to. And so, sometimes it makes sense to think of light as acting like waves, and sometimes it makes more sense to think of it as being made up of tiny balls.
This is pretty much the same thing with so many metaphors for things we have trouble understanding. Love is the example often used here, as it is with Lakoff and Johnson. You know, love can be thought of as some pretty contradictory things. As a form of insanity, a kind of illness, a battle, an investment or a journey, just as a start. And like waves and particles, there’s not a whole lot of similarity between those things. The thing is that each metaphor illuminates one or another characteristic of love that isn’t available using the other ones. Which is interesting, because I don’t think it is all that likely that people would get into a fight over whether or not any of these contradictory metaphors for love ‘could’ be used to describe love. You know, who is going to say, “How dare you compare love to a battle!” So, we certainly understand that there are multiple metaphors that might be appropriate to describe love – and we might even use two or more of these metaphors at different times to describe our own feelings when we are in love – but at any one time we are probably likely to come down on one rather than another.
Which is pretty much Lakoff and Johnson’s point when they talk of their idealised cognitive models and how metaphors help us to see what is playing out in our unconscious minds. Their point is to ask if we choose metaphors or if metaphors choose us. That is, if we attend to the metaphors we use, what does that tell us about the way we see the world? Their point is that it tells us a lot. If you are talking about love and all of your metaphors are about being at war with the person you love, that’s quite a different mind-set to all of them being about love as a journey. Battles, for instance, are won and lost – journeys, not so much.
I’ve been reading some papers lately that discuss early career teachers and the metaphors they use to describe their new profession. Often these metaphors involve natural growth – so, the teachers see themselves as gardeners and the students as flowers or trees. In these metaphors teaching is about nurturing and providing the right environment to allow students to flourish. Sometimes the metaphors have the teachers as tour guides. Sometimes they are a lion tamer. Each of these metaphors provide distinctly different roles to teacher and student. The thing is, it isn’t clear that when the teachers are asked for a metaphor for their teaching that they systematically work through all of the available metaphors – even when they are presented with metaphorical prompts – and rationally choose. I think what happens is that this is much more a ‘gut feeling’ where one metaphor ‘feels’ right. But the thing is that some metaphors for teaching ‘it’s like being hit by a wave’ make the teacher a mostly powerless recipient of the forces of the universe – and others, ‘it’s a pretty garden that grows under my care’, put too much stress on what the teacher can control and achieve. It isn’t clear to me, then, which of these metaphors is necessarily the best for a beginning teacher. Some of the papers I’ve been reading also point out that student metaphors are remarkably hard to shift. The papers say that university teacher education courses should consider investigating the metaphors used by students in initial teacher education courses and to see if these metaphors are compatible with the attitudes they are seeking to encourage their graduate teachers to bring into schools with them. The point being, that their metaphors are likely to be a better indicator of their future practice than what they say they believe given what they are ‘taught’ in class about teaching and learning.
Paying attention to the metaphors we use is a bit of a life changing thing. It is much, much harder to argue against metaphors than it is to argue against ideas. This is because metaphors reflect things that structure how we make sense of ideas. I really liked this book a lot – not least since it does give you the tools to be able to spot metaphors and to consider what they might mean in various contexts. If you feel you need to read a second book on this topic, this is the book to read.
July 1, 2023
برای آشنایی ابتدایی با مبحث استعارهی مفهومی کتاب جالبیه ولی واقعا فقط به عنوان قدم اول.
June 4, 2017
The author is trying to deliver what is metaphor in a nutshell. Without difficult language. this is good for an introduction actually for linguist or literary student.
November 10, 2019
Life-saver.
July 11, 2023
Read and re-read this book so many times over the past few months.
April 6, 2015
More a text book on the philosophy of metaphor (complete with exercises at the end of each chapter) than a practical literary engagement of metaphor, this book doesn't help the poet in me, though on the level of ideas it's quite compelling.
January 30, 2008
clearly explains major tenets of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and some related ideas. maybe best in the field.
Read
May 8, 2013easy to read, understandable, the basics for metaphor, conceptual metaphor and cognitive linguistics research
March 15, 2021
Done again. It keeps bringing me insights in teaching about metaphor and the way it is used in marketing, politics, public discourse, and communication.
March 27, 2021
Unless you're taking a course and this is required reading, don't buy this. It's a textbook and it's boring as hell.
November 27, 2024
basically gonna read this guy throughout whole MA thesis writing process. all hail to the king kovecses
May 23, 2009
everything is metaphor.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews