CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Introduction
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Introduction
The notion that metaphor is conceptual can be traced back to Reddy’s (1979)
framework on how people conceptualize communication by “conduit metaphor”. In this kind
of metaphor, people put thought or feelings into words, and language is regarded as a
container which can bodily transfer thoughts or feelings. Namely, linguistic expression is
structured by following metaphors: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE
CONTAINERS, and COMMUNICATION IS SENDING (Lakoff & Johnson 1980c). He estimated
that “of the entire metalingual apparatus of the English language, at least seventy percent is
directly, visibly, and graphically based on the conduit metaphor” (Reddy 1979: 177), which
suggests that ordinary English is metaphorical to a large extent.
Lakoff and Johnson further structured the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Lakoff and
Johnson suggested that metaphor is a conceptual mapping from one domain to another
domain. The source domain being used to understand another domain is typically concrete;
the target domain is rather abstract (Lakoff & Johnson 1980c). However, it should be noted
that the target domains we conceptualize via metaphors can be concrete, such as ACTIVITY in
ACTIVITIES ARE CONTAINERS (Lakoff and Johnson 1980c: 31) and EYES in THEEYES ARE
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CONTAINERS FOR THE EMOTIONS (Lakoff and Johnson 1980c: 50). Lakoff and Johnson’s
influential book Metaphors We Live By showed an attempt to respond to Davidson (1978)
who claimed that a metaphor does not have senses other than its literal meanings and Searle
(1979) who claimed that the truth condition of the literal meaning of a metaphor allows
people to have metaphorical interpretations. Lakoff and Johnson rejected the traditional
assumption that everyday language is all literal and state “linguistic metaphor is a natural part
of human language” (Lakoff & Johnson 2003: 247). Also, the locus of metaphor is not in
language but in thought; linguistic metaphor is the surface realization of the conceptual
metaphor which is based on the correspondence (or the mapping) from a source domain to a
target domain rather than similarity.1 They also claimed that metaphor is grounded in both
the body experiences and the socio-cultural experiences. Through studying metaphors in
language, Lakoff and Johnson suggested that conceptual metaphor is systematic and that a
metaphor may highlight a certain aspect of an abstract concept (i.e., a concept might be
defined by various metaphors from different facets. Following their framework, Kövecses
(2002) studied the common source and target domains of the metaphoric expressions in
English. His qualitative study provides evidence for the view that metaphoric
correspondences are asymmetrical and that the corresponding direction is generally from a
concrete concept to an abstract one.
1 According to Lakoff (1993: 207), “metaphors are mappings, that is, sets of correspondences.” The term,
‘source-to-target correspondences’, is used in this thesis to refer to cross-domain mappings for the distinction between the conceptual metaphorical mapping and the cross-modal mapping between the linguistic and gestural modalities.
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Several studies on metaphors in language in Chinese are based on the Conceptual
Metaphor Theory as well. These studies depend mainly on the qualitative analysis of the
metaphors collected from dictionaries or pop songs. Yu (1998) investigated the emotion
metaphors, time metaphors, and event structure metaphors, Lin (2003) focused on body-part
metaphor, Liu (2010) paid attention to the journey metaphor, and Lai (2011) researched the
expressions of love metaphor. These works compared metaphoric expressions in Chinese and
English and proposed that some metaphors are universal. In Wang’s (2010) study on pop
songs, he also focused on the different types of metaphors of LOVE. His quantitative study
showed that people tend to conceptualize LOVE through event structure metaphors and
ontological metaphors.
The previous studies on language have offered insightful thoughts about conceptual
metaphor, such as the common source-domain and target-domain concepts, the unidirectional
correspondences between two domains, the profiles of metaphors, and the embodiment of
metaphors. Nonetheless, many of the studies focus solely on the qualitative data. Based on
the insights provided in these studies, the present study would like to examine the metaphoric
expressions from both the qualitative and quantitative perspectives. The present study collects
metaphoric expressions from conversational data, which allow us to see the cross-modal
manifestations of metaphors. With the quantitative data, we can have reliable information
about the habitual expressions of metaphors as well as the synchronization and collaboration
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of linguistic and gestural modality.
Since metaphor is conceptual, it should be able to be realized in various modalities.
Gesture is thought to be a non-linguistic and independent source to reflect our metaphoric
thinking (Cienki 2008; Cienki & Müller 2008; Müller 2008; Gibbs 2008b). Despite the fact
that gesture is an independent modality to present metaphors, it has a close relationship with
language. Regarding the manifestations of metaphors, there are different interactions between
language and gesture (Cienki 1998; Cienki 2008; Müller 2008; Cienki & Müller 2008; Chui
2011, 2013). A metaphor may be expressed verbally but not in a co-speech gesture. A
metaphor may occur in gesture but not in accompanying speech. A metaphor may be jointly
manifested in both speech and gesture. Speech and co-speech gesture also can express
different metaphors at the same time.
McNeill (1992) applied Lakoff and Johnson’s notion of conceptual metaphor to his
study of gesture. Metaphoric gestures belong to one of the gestural types; they “are like
iconic gestures in that they are pictorial, but the pictorial content presents an abstract idea
rather than a concrete object or event” (McNeill 1992: 14). McNeill observed that metaphoric
gestures primarily appear in extranarrative contexts and proposes that the function of
metaphoric gestures is to represent ideas which do not have physical forms. Nevertheless, he
solely paid attention to the expressions of conduit metaphors (usually presented palm up with
an open hand) in which an abstract idea is conceptualized as an object. It should be noted that
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a conduit metaphor is not the only metaphoric gesture; there are other types of metaphoric
gesture occurring on a narrative level (Cienki 2008). In McNeill’s (2008) further study on
unexpected metaphor—the metaphoric gestures which create images that are not established
in the culture—he proposed that they serve to maintain the coherence and fluidity in the
discourse as well.
Nevertheless, the traditional way to collect gestural data from video records of
participants narrating the plot of the cartoon comprising elaborate motion events has its
limitation. Such a method helps to produce concrete referential gestures (the iconic gestures)
but decreases the thought and utterances about abstract ideas which might be accompanied by
metaphoric gestures (Cienki 2008). To gain more metaphoric expressions in gesture, research
on other styles of talk which involve abstract topics is needed. Other investigations about
metaphoric gesture include not only representations in narratives but also other kinds of talk,
such as television interviews (Calbris 2008), lectures in college (Mittelberg 2008; Núñez
2008), conversation interviews (Cienki 2008; Cienki & Müller 2008; Müller 2008), and
spontaneous face-to-face conversation (Cienki & Müller 2008). There are studies on
metaphoric gesture in Chinese discourse as well. Chui (2011; 2013) investigated the
metaphors conveyed by gesture with/without metaphoric speech. In her work, she discussed
the grounding of conceptual metaphor in embodied experience and the aspect of metaphoric
thinking which reveals people’s focus of attention in real-time conversation.
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Previous studies on metaphors in language and gesture have provided abundant
insights and visible evidence to the realization and the embodiment of conceptual metaphor;
however, most of them only take account of qualitative analysis. In addition, many studies
investigate metaphoric expressions in a single modality. Even though some studies pay
attention to metaphoric expressions in both language and gesture, how the two modalities
interact in presenting metaphoric concepts still needs further exploration and support. This
study focuses on (a) the metaphors simultaneously conveyed in speech and gesture and (b)
the metaphors presented by gesture alone (i.e., the referents of the metaphors are literally
presented in language) in order to understand the temporal patterning and the collaboration of
language and gesture. Meanwhile, the qualitative and quantitative methods are incorporated
in the present study on conversational data. The qualitative data can provide dependable
evidence for the habitual expressions of metaphors, the synchronization between language
and gesture, and the collaboration between the two modalities. The present study then can
further examine whether there are similarities or differences between the metaphors
concurrently presented in language and gesture and the metaphors presented in gesture-only.
Finally, there are three hypotheses about the production process of speech and gesture:
the Free Imagery Hypothesis, the Lexical Semantic Hypothesis, and the Interface Hypothesis.
The first hypothesis maintains that gestures are independent from the content of speech and
that gestures are produced before the formulation of speech. The second one suggests that
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gestures are generated from the semantics of lexical items. The third one maintains that the
information in gesture originates from the representations based on the on-line interaction of
spatial thinking and speaking. Kita and Öyzürek (2003) have conducted research on the
cross-linguistic expressions of motion events to look at the three hypotheses. They focused on
the informational coordination between iconic gestures and their corresponding lexical
affiliates. Likewise, the present study investigates the relationship between language and
gesture, but we will discuss the hypotheses from the perspective of metaphorical expressions.