Table 2.1 Categories of lexicalization (Packard 2000: 222) Lexicalization
metaphorical metaphoriacal present diànyǐng
electric-shadow
‘movie’
asemantic opaque present wènshì
ask-world
‘to be published’
agrammatical full or metaphorical
absent xuéjiù
study-research
‘pedant’
complete opaque absent yāgēn
pressure-root
‘complete’
2.2 Metaphor Theory
In Aristotle’s Poetics, where much of the classical view of metaphors was built, metaphors were considered a figure of speech, a linguistic device, and ornaments of langauges (Halliwell 1987). However, the focus on metaphors shifted from words to thoughts with the publication of Lakoff & Johnson’s work Metaphors We Live By in 1980. Many cognitive linguists have proposed that metaphor is not just a figure of speech: “ Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 3). People make
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their conversation more smooth and economic through the use of metaphors; people understand abstract concepts like emotions by using metaphors as well. Metaphor serves as a kind of mechanism that links different but somehow related concepts in two domains to help or accelerate people’s understanding of abstract subjects or concepts (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). It can be considered natural for people to understand the world through metaphors because the relationships between human cognition and human language are not arbitrary but highly systematic (Lakoff &
Núñez 2000).
The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor suggests that metaphor is a mental mechanism that applies people’s common experience to understand other abstract concepts, and it always appears under this formula “an A is a B” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980 ). For example, the surfacelinguistic expressions you need to budget your time, you are wasting my time, I lost a lot of time when I got sick, this gadget will save you hours, and do you have much time left are all created through the underlying
conceptual metaphor TIME IS MONEY (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 11). Lakoff and Johnson propose that people understand and describe the abstract concept of time via conceptual mappings between the source domains (MONEY) and the target domain (TIME). Time is considered valuable and limited in modern Western culture.
Therefore, based on a similarity in the characteristics of time and money, people map the partial characteristics of money to talk about time (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). In addition to conventional usages, cognitive metaphor theory also deems that both
“dead” and novel metaphors in literary works can be analyzed through the existing conceptual mappings (Lakoff 1993; Kövecses 2002).
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However, “cognitive linguists do not generally seek to provide an account of novel metaphor use in non-literary discourse” (Cameron & Deignan 2006: 672). Moreover, it appears that cognitive linguists have recently put too much emphasis on thought and have ignored linguistic behavior when they study metaphors. Language is always changing, and language is the window for linguists to uncover human thoughts.
Therefore, neither thought nor linguistic behavior can be neglected in understanding metaphors.
With the rapid development of technology, corpus linguists and computational linguists have provided an innovative and combined methodology to examine the usages of metaphors (Cameron 2003; Deignan 2005; Ritchie 2003, 2004; Semino et al. 2004; Semino 2005). Cameron and Deignan explore the usages of metaphors not in literary works but in spoken discourse (Cameron 2003) and in corpora (Deignan 2005). They try to link “the conceptual with the linguistic, in theory and in empirical work” (Cameron & Deignan 2006: 672). Cameron & Deignan (2006) explore three issues to show the importance of language itself in understanding metaphors. The first issue is related to the form of linguistic metaphors. They argue that if linguistic
metaphors are all about conceptual mappings, why is it the case that their surface expressions cannot be combined freely, but are restricted in a range of forms, such as [be] in the dark, come/bring to light, and shed light on (Cameron & Deignan 2006:
673). The second one concerns the uneven and inconsistent distribution of linguistic metaphors. They find that the singular flame and the plural flames in the corpora are used to express different metaphoric and metonymic meanings. Based on their data, the plural flames is used to express anger and love, while the singular flame refers to
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faith or idealism, and flame is in only used in a few instances to talk about anger (Cameron & Deignan 2006: 673). This uneven and inconsistent distribution cannot be explained based on The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor which regards linguistic metaphors as surfaceexpressions of systematic conceptual mappings. The last issue deals with cross-linguistic differences in linguistic metaphors. According to their observation and that of other studies on metaphors (e.g., Kövecses 2005) they find that some cross-linguistic differences in linguistic metaphors can be explained by cultural differences, while others still remain unsolved. (Cameron & Deignan 2006:
674). To deal with the first two issues, they propose the concept of “metaphoreme”.
They define “metaphoreme” as “a bundle of relatively stable patterns of language use, with some variation, that, for the time being, describes how people are using the lexical items” (Cameron & Deignan 2006: 686). For the last issue, they adopt an emergentist perspective to explain the cross-linguistic differences in linguistic metaphors. They propose that sometimes closely-related languages and cultures may also generate various metaphoremes because of their different socio-cultural
backgrounds or social values, and this may cause the emergence of the different metaphoremes (Cameron & Deignan 2006: 687).