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Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics
Figurative Language
This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. Comprehensive and practical, the book includes analyses of figurative uses of both word meanings and linguistic constructions. • Provides definitions of major concepts • Offers in-depth analyses of examples, exploring multiple levels of complexity • Surveys figurative structures in different discourse genres • Helps students to connect figurative usage with the conceptual underpinnings of language • Goes beyond English to explore cross-linguistic and cross-modal data
- GenresLinguistics
253 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 28, 2014
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February 7, 2018
While intended as an introductory textbook on how cognitive linguists approach the fertile field of figurative language, this short book synthesizes, blends as it were, the insights of many lines of research. Taking as its starting point the landmark works of George Lakoff and Giles Fauconnier, Figurative Language diffuses into numerous branches of linguistics and touches many other fields as well. If it were a longer work, I would be highly critical of the fact that the book does not do enough to tie together the threads of other disciplines who also have made figures like metaphor and metonymy their bread and butter. But since it is a short introduction, I can’t complain much about the book’s scope over such a vast terrain of knowledge.
The authors, Dancygier and Sweetser, make a solid case for their viewpoint that figurative language is a) omnipresent in everyday cognition and discourse, b) semantically structured in a number of ways , c) grounded in universal and embodied experience, and d) open to creative variation across times and places. They give copious examples from the cognitive linguistics literature. War can be construed as an argument, where you can attack an idea or defend one, give ground on a point or advance your opinion, etc. Understanding can be understood as grasping, as when you grasp an idea or have a thought slip through your fingers. Or knowledge can be metaphorically tied to seeing: “I don’t see your point; your ideas are murky to me; why don’t you shed some more light on this idea?”. Examples like these, and their cognitivist interpretations, are multiplied throughout D&S’s book.
Figurative Language provides a scaffold for re-interpreting how everyday language functions to meet the cognitive and communicative needs of its speakers. Since we are led to see how figurative language aids our understanding of abstract or diffuse notions, I was not surprised much to find many metaphors used to contain or delimit figurative language in the wild. Consider first the notion of mapping, whereby a source concept is employed to make clear or vivid a target idea that we wish to comprehend or express. In other words, we might map the idea of war, for example, as a source for ideas we may wish to transfer to the target notion of argumentation. This is often a one-way street, using argument to describe war is not nearly as common as using war to describe argument. Mappings are seldom one to one, moreover. We need to understand how metaphor and other figures are framed by those concepts which comprise our pre-existing knowledge structures. These structures can be adapted on the fly because humans are able to conjure mental spaces, psychological ‘places’ where language users can project multifaceted cognitive productions of ideas onto imaginary or construed possibilities. When distinct cognitive domains are mapped together onto a new space by means of our imagination, a blending of these domains emerges. Blends are similar to metaphors, but they are more likely to entail analogical relations which transcend simple one point mappings. Anger = pressure is an example: (‘Let off steam...’, ‘Blow one’s top...’). Yet there are some constraints on these framings and blendings. Ultimately, to be effective tools for cognition and communication, figures need to be grounded in (near-)universals of embodied experience, from which arise possibly universal image-schemata such as ‘more is up’ (as discussed long ago by Lakoff and Johnson).
The book is mostly about metaphor and the articulated semantic structures of metaphor. However, other forms of figurative language are also discussed. There are elaborate explications of metonymy, simile, irony, and the uses of proper names as symbolic expressions. There is also some discussion of prototypicality, as when a robin approaches our core understanding of what a bird is while a penguin does not.
The book would be adequate even if it looked only at the cognitive basis for figurative uses of Modern English. Happily, D&S go beyond this well worn trail to explore the fascinating ways languages can be molded by minds across cultures and across time. As I said, it is a short book, so we only get a taste of how the ‘inner workings’ of language manifest themselves in lexical and grammatical etymology. Many literal meanings were once metaphorical, and it can be difficult to tease out a distinction between a conventionalized metaphor (like ‘I see.’ meaning ‘I understand.’) and one that still has a creative newness to it. The subfield of historical linguistics makes frequent use of metaphor and metonymy to explain how concrete terms (‘content words' like nouns and verbs) become grammaticalized (into 'function words’ like prepositions or auxiliaries). Throughout the world’s languages, for example, one frequently encounters body part terms becoming reanalyzed as prepositions, but the reverse process seems not to hold. Also in the domain of historical linguistics, we can appreciate how metaphors are basic to the creation of idioms whose construction form becomes frozen with use after a long time period (“let the cat out of the bag”, “kick the bucket”).
As part of the inclusive efforts of this book, there are discussions of how metonymy and metaphor are used to make a seemingly limited language like ASL open-ended and nearly as creatively manipulable as spoken languages. The diversity of human language is also explored in a cross-cultural analysis of how space is mapped onto time in different parts of the world. While is is common for linguistic communities to map the future as ahead and the past as behind, this is not universal. The Aymara ‘see’ the past as ahead, since it is the known, while the future is behind, since it is not known. As another example of linguistic diversity, there are peoples who live in narrow river valleys (the examples in this case are from New Guinea), whose directional orientation are absolute (up-stream v. down-stream, up-hill v. down-hill) rather than relative (to the right or to the left of speaker).
Figurative Language moves beyond the normal pale of core linguistics by considering the use of figures in different genres. The book demonstrates how metaphors are used by scientific communities not just to explain abstract ideas to students, but also as a means for a scientist’s conceptualizing and understanding of ideas that are hard to grasp without a better known frame of reference. For example, a century ago the atom was thought of as a miniature solar system. This metaphor is no longer current, not even in pedagogy, which shows how scientific understanding might progress through the adoption and out-growing of figural ideas. Politics is another area where figurative language reigns supreme, and so is advertising. And of course, it is difficult to imagine a treatment of figurative language that does not at least make an effort to reach over to literary criticism. There is even an attempt at the end of the book to examine how religions use metaphor and analogy (as in parables, for example) while adhering to a strict literalness in other parts of their scriptural domains.
There were a few things I did not like about this book, some arising from my personal tastes and preferences, while others seeming to emerge from certain inadequacies of the book itself. My training has been primarily as a cultural anthropologist, so I don’t put much faith in the potential for decontextualized psychological experiments. The discussion of people telling happy stories while moving marbles up as opposed to telling sad stories while moving marbles down seems like complete bullshit to me. I would also like to have seen much more cross-cultural comparison of how people divide and frame their spatio-temporal experience, although I am happy that there was some such discussion in the book at all.
My main criticism of this book is that it seems to have failed to emerge from behind the shadow of semantics. The book is peppered with jargon, and metalinguistic terms seem to overlap with traditional semantic concepts, or worse, with each other. There is not much analytical explicitness that would give me confidence in the staying power of these meta-metaphors. How exactly is the analysis of “If it rains tomorrow, I’m staying home...” treated differently as a mental space as opposed to a model-theoretic or possible worlds approach to meaning? It is not clear that there is a real difference, and if there is a real difference we should be told about it explicitly. Also, since the book dips into political oratory and the analysis of poetry, I would have liked more of an explication of how the very long traditions of rhetoric and literary criticism could give some fresh insights on the creative use of everyday language. I feel the traditions of rhetoric, hermeneutics, phenomenology, analytical philosophy, pragmatics, and many others were given short shrift because of a pervasive ideology that cognitive linguistics is something entirely new. It is not. To say it is something new borders on pseudoscientific dishonesty, passive plagiarism, and intellectual laziness. But we can’t have everything.
I would recommend this book to someone who wants a state of the art viewpoint on cognitive linguistics in America (and beyond). This work moves the ball forward and provides a panoramic perspective on the field of cognitive linguistics, a field which has seemingly come to fruition in the decades since Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. I give Figurative Language only four stars on account of how I feel about cognitive linguistics as a subfield and not as a reflection of any shortcomings of the work’s explication of figurative language itself.
The authors, Dancygier and Sweetser, make a solid case for their viewpoint that figurative language is a) omnipresent in everyday cognition and discourse, b) semantically structured in a number of ways , c) grounded in universal and embodied experience, and d) open to creative variation across times and places. They give copious examples from the cognitive linguistics literature. War can be construed as an argument, where you can attack an idea or defend one, give ground on a point or advance your opinion, etc. Understanding can be understood as grasping, as when you grasp an idea or have a thought slip through your fingers. Or knowledge can be metaphorically tied to seeing: “I don’t see your point; your ideas are murky to me; why don’t you shed some more light on this idea?”. Examples like these, and their cognitivist interpretations, are multiplied throughout D&S’s book.
Figurative Language provides a scaffold for re-interpreting how everyday language functions to meet the cognitive and communicative needs of its speakers. Since we are led to see how figurative language aids our understanding of abstract or diffuse notions, I was not surprised much to find many metaphors used to contain or delimit figurative language in the wild. Consider first the notion of mapping, whereby a source concept is employed to make clear or vivid a target idea that we wish to comprehend or express. In other words, we might map the idea of war, for example, as a source for ideas we may wish to transfer to the target notion of argumentation. This is often a one-way street, using argument to describe war is not nearly as common as using war to describe argument. Mappings are seldom one to one, moreover. We need to understand how metaphor and other figures are framed by those concepts which comprise our pre-existing knowledge structures. These structures can be adapted on the fly because humans are able to conjure mental spaces, psychological ‘places’ where language users can project multifaceted cognitive productions of ideas onto imaginary or construed possibilities. When distinct cognitive domains are mapped together onto a new space by means of our imagination, a blending of these domains emerges. Blends are similar to metaphors, but they are more likely to entail analogical relations which transcend simple one point mappings. Anger = pressure is an example: (‘Let off steam...’, ‘Blow one’s top...’). Yet there are some constraints on these framings and blendings. Ultimately, to be effective tools for cognition and communication, figures need to be grounded in (near-)universals of embodied experience, from which arise possibly universal image-schemata such as ‘more is up’ (as discussed long ago by Lakoff and Johnson).
The book is mostly about metaphor and the articulated semantic structures of metaphor. However, other forms of figurative language are also discussed. There are elaborate explications of metonymy, simile, irony, and the uses of proper names as symbolic expressions. There is also some discussion of prototypicality, as when a robin approaches our core understanding of what a bird is while a penguin does not.
The book would be adequate even if it looked only at the cognitive basis for figurative uses of Modern English. Happily, D&S go beyond this well worn trail to explore the fascinating ways languages can be molded by minds across cultures and across time. As I said, it is a short book, so we only get a taste of how the ‘inner workings’ of language manifest themselves in lexical and grammatical etymology. Many literal meanings were once metaphorical, and it can be difficult to tease out a distinction between a conventionalized metaphor (like ‘I see.’ meaning ‘I understand.’) and one that still has a creative newness to it. The subfield of historical linguistics makes frequent use of metaphor and metonymy to explain how concrete terms (‘content words' like nouns and verbs) become grammaticalized (into 'function words’ like prepositions or auxiliaries). Throughout the world’s languages, for example, one frequently encounters body part terms becoming reanalyzed as prepositions, but the reverse process seems not to hold. Also in the domain of historical linguistics, we can appreciate how metaphors are basic to the creation of idioms whose construction form becomes frozen with use after a long time period (“let the cat out of the bag”, “kick the bucket”).
As part of the inclusive efforts of this book, there are discussions of how metonymy and metaphor are used to make a seemingly limited language like ASL open-ended and nearly as creatively manipulable as spoken languages. The diversity of human language is also explored in a cross-cultural analysis of how space is mapped onto time in different parts of the world. While is is common for linguistic communities to map the future as ahead and the past as behind, this is not universal. The Aymara ‘see’ the past as ahead, since it is the known, while the future is behind, since it is not known. As another example of linguistic diversity, there are peoples who live in narrow river valleys (the examples in this case are from New Guinea), whose directional orientation are absolute (up-stream v. down-stream, up-hill v. down-hill) rather than relative (to the right or to the left of speaker).
Figurative Language moves beyond the normal pale of core linguistics by considering the use of figures in different genres. The book demonstrates how metaphors are used by scientific communities not just to explain abstract ideas to students, but also as a means for a scientist’s conceptualizing and understanding of ideas that are hard to grasp without a better known frame of reference. For example, a century ago the atom was thought of as a miniature solar system. This metaphor is no longer current, not even in pedagogy, which shows how scientific understanding might progress through the adoption and out-growing of figural ideas. Politics is another area where figurative language reigns supreme, and so is advertising. And of course, it is difficult to imagine a treatment of figurative language that does not at least make an effort to reach over to literary criticism. There is even an attempt at the end of the book to examine how religions use metaphor and analogy (as in parables, for example) while adhering to a strict literalness in other parts of their scriptural domains.
There were a few things I did not like about this book, some arising from my personal tastes and preferences, while others seeming to emerge from certain inadequacies of the book itself. My training has been primarily as a cultural anthropologist, so I don’t put much faith in the potential for decontextualized psychological experiments. The discussion of people telling happy stories while moving marbles up as opposed to telling sad stories while moving marbles down seems like complete bullshit to me. I would also like to have seen much more cross-cultural comparison of how people divide and frame their spatio-temporal experience, although I am happy that there was some such discussion in the book at all.
My main criticism of this book is that it seems to have failed to emerge from behind the shadow of semantics. The book is peppered with jargon, and metalinguistic terms seem to overlap with traditional semantic concepts, or worse, with each other. There is not much analytical explicitness that would give me confidence in the staying power of these meta-metaphors. How exactly is the analysis of “If it rains tomorrow, I’m staying home...” treated differently as a mental space as opposed to a model-theoretic or possible worlds approach to meaning? It is not clear that there is a real difference, and if there is a real difference we should be told about it explicitly. Also, since the book dips into political oratory and the analysis of poetry, I would have liked more of an explication of how the very long traditions of rhetoric and literary criticism could give some fresh insights on the creative use of everyday language. I feel the traditions of rhetoric, hermeneutics, phenomenology, analytical philosophy, pragmatics, and many others were given short shrift because of a pervasive ideology that cognitive linguistics is something entirely new. It is not. To say it is something new borders on pseudoscientific dishonesty, passive plagiarism, and intellectual laziness. But we can’t have everything.
I would recommend this book to someone who wants a state of the art viewpoint on cognitive linguistics in America (and beyond). This work moves the ball forward and provides a panoramic perspective on the field of cognitive linguistics, a field which has seemingly come to fruition in the decades since Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. I give Figurative Language only four stars on account of how I feel about cognitive linguistics as a subfield and not as a reflection of any shortcomings of the work’s explication of figurative language itself.
April 15, 2024
(i definitely didn’t read all of this i’m sorry barbara :()
also incredible that she writes nearly the exact way she talks. fantastic.
also incredible that she writes nearly the exact way she talks. fantastic.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews