Metaphor Wars Conceptual Metaphors in Human Life

The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Yet metaphors may not only be special communicative devices, but a fundamental part of everyday cognition in the form of 'conceptual metaphors'. An enormous body of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics and related disciplines has emerged detailing how conceptual metaphors underlie significant aspects of language, thought, cultural and expressive action. Despite its influence and popularity, there have been major criticisms of conceptual metaphor. This book offers an evaluation of the arguments and empirical evidence for and against conceptual metaphors, much of which scholars on both sides of the wars fail to properly acknowledge.

1. What are metaphor wars?; 2. Conceptual metaphor analysis; 3. Identifying metaphors in language; 4. Inferring conceptual metaphors from language; 5. Psychology of conceptual metaphors in verbal metaphor use; 6. Conceptual metaphors in multimodal experience; 7. Conclusion and the future; Endnotes; References; Index.

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests focus on embodied cognition, pragmatics and figurative language. He is the author of several books, including The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding (Cambridge, 1994), Intentions in the Experience of Meaning (Cambridge, 2000), Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, 2006), and Interpreting Figurative Meaning (with Herbert L. Colston, Cambridge, 2012). He is also editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge, 2008), and editor of the journal Metaphor and Symbol.