By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban
Did you know that human language cannot do without metaphor or figurative language in general, and that it is a central part of the neural network structure and artillery of our brains? Have you ever mulled the figurative forms your daily speech teems with? And did you know that our thought is based on a bundle of deep, basic metaphors which surface in the so many linguistic metaphors we use in our daily speech?
Consider the following incident. On his way to collage, someone was stuck in traffic; streets were clogged with cars; he had an exam, which was way over his head; he went home so exhausted and was about to collapse.
His bookworm colleague was on cloud nine; he broke the glass ceiling and was likely to land an attractive job. See how our speech is brimmed with metaphors and other figurative language forms. We mistakenly say that there is literal language vs figurative language. In fact, all language is figurative, it signifies everything we know. The relationship between a word and what it represents or labels is arbitrary.
The word ‘cat’, for instance, which refers to the lovely four-legged animal, has no logical correlation to its referent. We call it ‘cat’ because we agree as a speech community to give it this name; it is a conventional relationship. In fact, all human language is this way.
What is metaphor?
Metaphor is derived from the Greek words ‘meta’ and ‘pherien’ meaning change and carrying, respectively; it simply means thinking of something in relation to another. Concepts are understood through comparison or association. Properties of the two domains, commonly called ‘target’ and ‘source’, of a metaphor are mutually transferred.
‘Mary is a flower’ is computed as Mary is beautiful; the sweet properties of the source ‘flower’ are mapped onto or transferred to the target ‘Mary’. They interact, and sufficient knowledge about the two domains is needed to understand the metaphor at hand.
Hierarchy of categories
Moreover, conceptual domains are organised in our brains along a hierarchy. Taking humans as an index or zero category, humans lie between animals and plants. This is why they are intersecting and sharing a lot of attributes, on top of which is that all are living things. But the degree of proximity of humans to animals is much greater. Distant domains from humans are liquids, gases, non-living things, and abstract things According to Keil, the closer the domains, the more likely to generate metaphors comparing them. By contrast, the distant the domains, the less likely to have conventional metaphors. Hence, to say that X is a shark would be so conventional as the mapping takes place between two proximal categories or domains, namely humans and animals. Yet to say that ‘X is a fog’, ‘Time holds a bundle of memories’, ‘X is a journey through dim forests’, ‘X is silent doubt’, ‘X is flying fear’, ‘emancipating hunger ‘, ‘the queue of silence’, or ‘Anger is yawning’, this involves a leap to distant domains and concepts. The degree of imageability and novelty is much greater in metaphors comparing between semantically distant concepts.
By way of example
George Lakoff takes metaphor a step forward; he distinguished between linguistic metaphor and conceptual metaphor. Think about ‘ waste time’, ‘save time’, ‘spend time’, ‘run out of time’, ‘preserve intimate moments’, among others. These metaphors are linguistic manifestations of a deeply-rooted comparison in us between time and money which is squarely summarised in the idiom ‘’time is money’. Here is another bunch: ‘He is a foxy guy’, ‘He preyed on her’, ‘She is a peacock’, among many others . All are derived from a deep view of a close connection between human beings and animals.
‘Love is heat’ involves two domains: one is emotion and the other is weather condition or natural phenomenon which are further manifested in ‘warm welcome’, ‘cold shoulder’, ‘on thin ice with’, ‘to let steam off’, etc. Emotions are chemical interactions taking place in our bodies. For instance, when anger builds up in us, we need to vent it. Take another example, ‘Knowledge is power’; the metaphor is comparing two abstract things and the shared properties predicate that when you have enough knowledge, you become powerful, taking control over your own life and choices.
‘Prices are objects’ is an additional example; it shows up in ‘oil prices plunged, soared, rocketed, tumbled, triggered, collapsed, etc’. Emotions are buildings, plants, and things. Confidence, for instance, has seeds and is incubated. ‘Mind is a container’ manifests itself in ‘deepest mind’, a space’, ‘an arena in which ideas come, pop, cross, etc.
Thus, the gift of metaphor is a central vehicle for constructing and understanding our world; it is really part of who we are as humans.
By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban Professor of linguistics Faculty of Arts Kafr el-sheikh University
Email: [email protected]
