CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION
6.1 Summary of the Thesis
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CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
An important claim of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that the locus of metaphor is
in thought. This view indicates that metaphors can be realized in different modalities.
Following this view, the thesis examined the linguistic and gestural manifestations of
conceptual metaphors in conversational discourse. Section 6.1 provides a summary of the
thesis. Section 6.2 presents the limitations and direction for future study.
6.1 Summary of the Thesis
The thesis aimed to explore people’s habitual cross-modal expression of metaphors in
daily conversation, and to investigate the collaboration of language and gesture in the
expression of metaphorical thoughts. The present study focused on the metaphors realized
concurrently in language and gesture, and the metaphors realized in gesture exclusively.
These two groups of metaphors were investigated with regard to metaphor types,
source-domain concepts, target-domain concepts, source-to-target correspondences, and
temporal patterning of speech and gesture. The present study also examined whether the two
groups of metaphors were similar or different with regard to the above issues.
According to the past research (Lakoff &Johnson 1980c, 1999; McNeill 1992; Talmy
1996), nine metaphor types were identified. In the current data seven of them were found:
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causation metaphor, conduit metaphor, container metaphor, entity metaphor, fictive-motion
metaphor, orientation metaphor, and complex metaphor. Entity metaphor is prone to be
conveyed in metaphors in the gesture-only group. In both the language-gesture and
gesture-only groups, entity metaphor and orientation metaphor are the most common
metaphor types to be expressed in daily communication. Our experience of discrete objects
offers “a further basis...that goes beyond mere orientation” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980c: 25).
Understanding abstract concepts in terms of objects then allow us to project various
experiences of object to the concepts. Thus, it is likely that entity metaphor is frequently used
to conceive abstract concepts. Spatial orientations provide an “extraordinary rich basis” for
reasoning about other concepts, and orientation metaphor are closely relate to our physical
and cultural experiences (Lakoff and Johnson 1980c: 25). In some cases, it is difficult to find
an alternative to talk about a concept without the help of the orientation metaphor. Hence, the
orientation metaphor is often utilized to conceptualize abstract concepts.
Based on the notion of image schemas (Johnson 1987; Cienki 1997; Clausner & Croft
1999; Santibáñez 2002), nine kinds of source-domain concepts were distinguished in
previous studies. Seven of them were found in the current data: ACTIVITY, CONTAINER,
FICTIVE-MOTION, FORCE, OBJECT, PATH, and SPACE. Metaphors in the language-gesture
group tend to employ SPACE as their sources; metaphors in the gesture-only group are apt to
utilize OBJECT as their sources. Taken the two groups together, OBJECT is the most frequent
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source for entity metaphors; SPACE and PATH is the second most frequent source for
orientation metaphors. Concerning the target-domain concepts, the present study focused on
the targets that had at least five tokens in the data. Eight kinds of targets were identified:
GROUP, MENTAL ACTIVITY, (physical) ACTIVITY, DEGREE, SEQUENCE, SPEECH CONTENT,
STATE, and TIME. SPEECH CONTENT is inclined to be conceived by metaphors in language
and gesture. Targets like STATE, PHYSICAL ACTIVITY, GROUP and MENTAL ACTIVITY are
prone to be conceptualized by metaphors in gesture exclusively. Among all the 247
metaphoric expressions, STATE, TIME, and PHYSICAL ACTIVITY are the common targets to
be manifested through metaphors.
With regard to the metaphorical mappings between the two domains, the present study
analyzed the one-source-to-many-targets correspondences and the many-sources-to-one target
correspondences. Excluding FORCE which has merely a token, all the sources could be used
to conceive multiple targets. OBJECT can be employed to conceptualize a great variety of
targets; concepts like STATE and TIME are the common targets mapping to OBJECT. SPACE is
usually employed to conceive concepts like TIME, SEQUENCE, and DEGREE. The sources
PATH, FICTIVE-MOTION, ACTIVITY,and CONTAINER are utilized to conceptualize multiple
targets as well. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980b), metaphors have partial nature in
the way that a metaphor only profiles a certain aspect of a concept. An abstract concept is
likely to be conceptualized in terms of more than one concrete concept. In the current data,
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TIME, MENTAL ACTIVITY, SPEECH CONTENT, SEQUENCE, and DEGREE are the targets
which are conceived through multiple sources. These results demonstrate the common types
of metaphors, the source- and target-domain concepts, and the source-target correspondences
in daily conversations.
Furthermore, the collaboration of speech and gesture enables us to look at the
hypotheses of speech-gesture productions—the Lexical Semantic Hypothesis and the
Interface Hypothesis. The present study examined the two hypotheses from the following
aspects: the temporal patterning of speech and gesture, the linguistic unit to influence the
content of a metaphoric gesture, and the semantic coordination of speech and gesture in
conveying metaphors. According to the Lexical Semantic Hypothesis, gestures can help
lexical search when one has difficulty to retrieve a word in speech; hence, gesture strokes
may precede the associated speech. Since gestures are thought to be generated from the
semantics of the lexical items, it is predicted that gestures can only encode information that is
conveyed in accompanying speech and that the linguistic unit to determine the content of
gestures is a single word. However, the Interface Hypothesis suggests that gestural content is
shaped on-line by information which is exchanged between linguistic and spatio-motoric
thinking. Thus, gestures temporally synchronize with related speech, and the relevant unit to
influence the content of a gesture is a processing unit—which can be a clause to a certain
extent—for speech production. Since gestures are thought to be produced from an interface
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between linguistic and spatio-motoric information, they may encode what is conveyed or not
conveyed in accompanying speech. Results from the current data show that many metaphoric
gestures synchronize with their associated speech, which supports the view of the Interface
Hypothesis more. Although most of the lexical affiliates of the metaphoric gestures are words,
a substantial portion has the gesture associated with a phrase rather than with a single word.
This portion of data provides evidence in contrast to the Lexical Semantic Hypothesis. In the
current data, over a half of the metaphoric expressions are gesture-only metaphors in which
language expresses the target-domain concepts and gesture expresses the sour-domain
concepts. Gesture-only metaphors reveal that the information encoded in speech and gesture
may differ from each other in conveying metaphors. This portion of data opposes to the
prediction of the Lexical Semantic Hypothesis but agrees with the Interface Hypothesis. In
general, results based on the current data support the Interface Hypothesis more than the
Lexical Semantic Hypothesis.