Metaphorical propositions: a rationale

Abstract

This article is an overview of the approach to metaphor analysis expounded in the following three articles. Until now the study of conceptual metaphor has been based mainly on the evidence of invented linguistic examples. Although the great value of the work done within this framework is clear, a more empirically oriented approach will need to engage with metaphorical language in naturally occurring discourse. To study this an explicit analytic procedure is required. Although such a procedure should ultimately provide a new source of evidence for underlying cognitive processes, it will not provide a direct path from linguistic to cognitive reality. When our group classifies an instance of language as metaphorical we thus do not claim that it realizes a psychologically real conceptual metaphor, but only that it provides the linguistic basis for such a realization. In specifying the conceptual metaphorical potential of this linguistic basis, we have found the tools of propositional analysis, as developed by discourse psychology, as well as the concept of cross-domain mapping familiar in cognitive semantics, to be extremely useful. Our approach to metaphor analysis thus has three levels: that of metaphorical language; that of the metaphorical proposition; and that of the cross-domain mapping.