Prototypicality Among Metaphors: On the Relative Frequency of Personification and Spatial Metaphors in Literature Written for Children Versus Adults

Abstract

This paper argues that personification is the prototypical metaphor and that it occurs more frequently than other metaphors, especially during the early stages of child development. The paper also argues that personification comes disguised in many other figurative devices (metonymy, spatial metaphors, and container metaphors) and syntactic expressions (frozen word orders and the nominal gender marking that is obligatory in languages such as French and German) and that it pervades many other aspects of human cognition (including fundamental philosophical frameworks such as objectivism and subjectivism). The main source of data is a frequency analysis of personification and spatial metaphors in two samples of poetry: one written for adults, the other for children. I categorized the topic and vehicle of each metaphor as either human or nonhuman and spatial or nonspatial and found that spatial topics and vehicles were relatively infrequent. Personifications (nonhuman topic-human vehicle) were much more commo...