The conceptual nature of metaphor
A consequence of the claim that conceptual organisation is in large part metaphorical is that thought itself is metaphorical. In other words, metaphor is not simply a matter of language, but reflects ‘deep’ correspondences in the way our conceptual system is organised. This being so, we expect to find evidence of metaphor in human systems other than language. Indeed, this view comes from studies that have investigated the metaphorical basis of a diverse range of phenomena and constructs, including social organisation and practice, myths, dreams, gesture, morality, politics and foreign policy, advertisements and mathematical theory. For example, the organisation of a business institution is often represented in terms of a diagram that represents a hierarchical structure, in which the CEO is at the highest point and other officers and personnel of the company are placed at lower points; relative positions upwards on the vertical axis correspond to relative increases in importance or influence. This type of diagram reflects the conceptual metaphor SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS ARE HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES. Conceptual metaphor theorists argue that this metaphor is in turn grounded in more basic kinds of experience, such as the correlation between height or size and influence, or the fact that the head (which controls the body) is the uppermost part of the body.
To provide a second example, linguistic theories themselves can have a metaphorical basis. The dominant metaphor in Generative Grammar, for example, could be described in terms of SENTENCE STRUCTURE IS A HIERAR CHY. This explains why a proliferation of terminology emerged from this theory that reflected hierarchical relationships, including terms like dominate, govern, control, bind and so on. Moreover, sentence structure is visually represented in a number of syntactic theories by ‘tree diagrams’, structures that are hierarchically organised so that the sentence ‘dominates’ or ‘contains’ phrases, which in turn ‘dominate’ or ‘contain’ words. Equally, Mental Spaces Theory (Chapter 11) is a model of meaning construction that relies upon the metaphor COGNITIVE REPRESENTATIONS ARE CONTAINERS to describe the process of on-line meaning construction. According to cognitive semanticists, examples illustrate the central importance of metaphor in human thinking.
