There Is No Island—and Everybody Is One

Abstract

There Is No Island—and Everybody Is One Sharon Cote (bio) In this paper, I consider what may be a rather singular role of islands as metaphors. I begin with the presentation of a few particular metaphoric expressions, some that may seem novel and some that will undoubtedly seem very familiar. I then briefly offer a little background on how a cognitive theory of metaphor provides some insight into our responses to these examples. I also summarize the extent to which geographic metaphors, in particular, have thus far been considered both as conceptual metaphors and more generally. The remainder of the paper then focuses on my own examination of metaphoric uses of islands versus some other geographic metaphors in a wide variety of contexts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, concluding with some motivated speculations about our cognitive/emotional connection to islands. Consider for a moment your reactions to the following examples: 1. a. Every man is an elk. b. No man is an elk. 2. a. Every man is a crater. b. No man is a crater. 3. a. Every man is an island. b. No man is an island. 4. I am a rock. I am an island. The paired examples in (1) and (2) most likely presented a bit of a puzzle. There are plenty of well-known animal metaphors for types of people (tigers, pigs, foxes, worms, etc.), but in the absence of more detailed context, the main question you probably had about (1a) and (1b) concerned what aspect of human nature is being accepted (or rejected) with this elk metaphor. Possibly, you started speculating about proud stature, about some metaphoric use of antlers, or about any of the other things that might first come to mind when you think of an elk. Similarly, the use of the geographic feature "crater" as a metaphor in examples (2a) and (2b) raised numerous possibilities: largeness, change though dramatic experience, a blemish on the "landscape," capable of becoming a "lake," etc. Most likely, you had no conventionalized meaning to turn to as a default. [End Page 259] When you got to (3), however, you may have been considerably less puzzled, partly because (3b) is one of John Donne's well-known lines from his "Meditation 17," but perhaps also because the image of an island as separate and distinct stood out as the most obvious choice, even the first time you encountered that line. Similarly, you had more than just the context of Paul Simon's famous lyrics to the Simon and Garfunkel song "I am a Rock" to rely on in example (4). You probably had stored conventional metaphoric expressions about rocks to consider for the first half of the example while the island meaning in the second half is, at its core, the same vividly obvious one intended in the paired examples in (3). You may well also have felt the presence of an emotional connotation with these island metaphors that was not immediately there for the elk and crater metaphors. What I want to focus on more specifically here is the possibility that this particular metaphoric use of an island is indeed a special one, not only among other possible metaphoric meanings that have been associated with islands but also among metaphors more generally. To clarify and motivate this cognitive distinction, I need first to provide a little background on how cognitive linguists define metaphor. For over thirty years now, metaphor research has been a productive sub-field of both linguistics and cognitive science, starting with work that convincingly demonstrated the existence of large patterns of metaphoric expressions deeply embedded in our language (cf. Reddy; Lakoff, and Johnson). This ongoing work has made it increasingly clear that these patterns are not just etymological phenomena of mostly historical interest. Instead, they are, at least in many cases, still highly relevant metaphorically in human communication and cognition. While some specific elements of these metaphors can be influenced by different cultures, there is as well strong evidence that at least some of the core metaphoric meanings arise from universal characteristics of human embodied experience (cf. Lakoff and Johnson; Kövesces). As linguistic philosopher Mark Johnson puts it, "cognitive...