Abstract
Metaphors We Live By created an immediate stir in 1980, and it continues to spur interest in cognitive linguistics, cognitive stylistics, and metaphor theory. This article uses both collocations and random samples of words used in conceptual metaphors to search for corpus evidence of the pervasiveness of conceptual metaphor that was unavailable to Lakoff and Johnson. Some metaphors, such as TIME IS MONEY, are pervasive in giant natural language corpora. Others, such as MORE IS UP, are frequent in clearly and consciously metaphorical forms, but relatively rare in the basic forms that would clearly show that we use metaphor to understand more abstract concepts in terms of concrete ones. Some, including ARGUMENT IS WAR, that Lakoff and Johnson discuss throughout their book, are poorly represented. Some gaps in evidence probably result from multiple ways of expressing a complex conceptual metaphors, but others suggest that intuitive plausibility is an insecure basis for argument.
Highlights
When Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By in 1980, it created an immediate and deserved stir, and its legacy continues to expand in the areas of cognitive linguistics, cognitive stylistics, and cognitive metaphor theory
We even seem poised to be able to study the actual mechanisms of cognition (Starr 2013). Rather than discussing these and other important developments, here I want to go back to Metaphors We Live By and ask some questions about the ubiquity and centrality of conceptual metaphor that have only become answerable since the advent of huge electronic corpora
Note that all of these collocations are somewhat more frequent in the spoken part of COCA, suggesting that perhaps the more basic forms of the metaphor are more likely to be found in less formal contexts
Summary
When Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By in 1980, it created an immediate and deserved stir, and its legacy continues to expand in the areas of cognitive linguistics, cognitive stylistics, and cognitive metaphor theory. The Host’s invocation of Seneca suggests that the metaphor of TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY / LIMITED RESOURCE is much older still, and it has always seemed to me that Lakoff and Johnson paid too little attention to the implications of their theory for language history. If they are right about how central our use of metaphor is in helping us understand the abstract with respect to the concrete, TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY / LIMITED RESOURCE presumably predates money. At several points below, compare the spoken part of COCA with the fiction, magazine, newspaper, and academic parts.)
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