Metaphor. Tony Veale

Although any mixed model that recognizes the career of metaphor will inevitably lack the parsimony of a one-size-fits-all approach, it is surely preferable to tailor our models to the phenomenon than to cut the phenomenon to fit our models.

2.5.1 DOMAIN REPRESENTATIONS IN METAPHOR AND ANALOGY

      As much as language unites us in our use of words to describe the world to each other, we are all free to think what we will about the world, or at least those aspects of the world that interest us the most. Different speakers may thus employ very different representations of the same domains, leading to strong disagreements about the most natural interpretation of a metaphor or an analogy involving those domains. Consider this exchange from the film Jurassic Park, between the owner and operator of the park (Hammond) and a mathematician (Malcolm) who has been tasked with evaluating the park:

      John Hammond: All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!

      Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.

      Here we see Hammond attempt to mitigate problems with his park by comparing them to the teething difficulties experienced in perhaps the most prototypical theme park of all, Disneyland. His representation of both domains (Disneyland and Jurassic Park) is thus high-level and generic, and so the resulting analogy lacks detail. If it is not so very different from an analogy comparing Amazon.com to Barnes and Noble, this blandness speaks to Hammond’s larger goal in using this analogy. In response, Malcolm focuses on the specific problems at hand (namely, the hungry dinosaurs running amok all about them), and so brings to mind a very specific representation of Disneyland to suit the very specific representation of Jurassic Park that circumstances have forced upon him. Had Malcolm made an additional joke about both parks suffering very different kinds of teething problems, this pun would require an even more detailed representation of the source and target domains (e.g., technical glitches in the representation of Disneyland could map to the problems wrought by the dinosaurs’ sharp teeth in the representation of Jurassic Park). Analogies and metaphors that are used to persuade are not simple one-shot efforts at communication. Rather, as argued in Cameron [2007], they form part of a larger framework of negotiation and alignment that allows speaker and listener to focus on the same aspects of a domain (or to at least see the other’s point of view). As highlighted by this example, the representation of the domains in an analogy (and thus any metaphor based on an analogy) is open to negotiation by the speakers during the formation and interpretation of the analogy. It is not realistic to assume that these representations are pre-formed before the analogy is made and simply retrieved from memory to participate in a process of structure mapping. Rather, it seems more accurate to suppose that the search processes required by analogy involve more than a search through the space of possible alignments between two representations, but also a search through the space of possible representations to align.

2.6 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY

      Black and Davidson each tell us that the meaning of metaphor is not to be found in word meanings, but in the world itself, or at least in our models of the world. Lexical semantics can only take an NLP system so far, and the crucial ingredient in any metaphor-processing system is its array of conceptual representations. The field of cognitive linguistics, as exemplified by the work of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff [Johnson, 1987, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980], goes further still in emphasizing the role of world knowledge. A metaphor-processing system—whether human or machine—must possess an embodied understanding of the world: it must understand the mind’s relation to the body and the body’s relation to the world. These relationships are not literal, but are themselves governed by foundational metaphors that are grounded in our physical understanding of space, orientation, movement, and containment. These schematic structures–embodied concepts such as Path and Container and the metaphors built on top of them—are independent of language. Indeed, Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphor is not primarily a linguistic phenomenon at all. Language is merely the stage on which metaphor does its most noticeable work.

      The conceptual perspective sees metaphors as more than the finished products of creative language but as the very building blocks of thought itself. Complex world-views can be constructed from these conceptual metaphors, just as complex metaphors can themselves be constructed from simpler, lower-level metaphors. Grady [1997] argues that physical embodiment is the key to acquiring the latter kind of metaphor, which he dubs “primary.” For instance, from a young age we come to associate—or as Johnson [1999] puts it, conflate—affection with physical closeness and shared bodily warmth, and continue throughout our lives to express affection through physical touch. It is unsurprising then that we develop the primary metaphor (EMOTIONAL) AFFECTION IS (PHYSICAL) WARMTH, which allows us to talk of close relationships as warm relationships, of distant relationships as cold relationships, of giving someone “the cold shoulder” or “a warm welcome.” Primary metaphors are not arbitrary: rather, just as they are born of past physical experience they also offer a useful prediction of future physical experience. Thus, we can expect a warm welcome to involve a physical embrace, while we can also expect those who give us the cold shoulder to keep their distance from us.

      So the physical world serves as a sand-box in which a cognitive agent learns to associate cause and effect and to fit cognitive structures to concrete reality. For instance, we learn that objects are usefully grouped into piles; that adding to a pile makes it bigger and higher; that taking from a pile makes it smaller and lower; and thus, more generally, that more of anything implies upward accumulation, while less of anything implies downward reduction. In other words, we learn that MORE IS UP and LESS IS DOWN. Likewise, our interactions with physical containers informs us of their affordances and limitations, and allows us to generalize a more abstract notion of containment that is conducive to cross-domain metaphorical reasoning. To appreciate the power of conceptual metaphors in a physical, non-linguistic setting, consider this tale of the Parsis and how they first came to settle in India. Time Out Guide to Mumbai offers a concise version of the legend:

      They [The Parsis] arrived in Gujarat in the eighth or ninth century and sought asylum from the local king. He is said to have sent them away with a glass of milk full to the brim—his way of saying that his kingdom was full. The Parsi elders conferred, added some sugar to the milk and sent it back—to suggest that they would mix thoroughly and sweeten the life of the community.

      So, with the right objects to hand, one does not need words to communicate with metaphors. The glass proves to be a remarkably versatile vehicle of meaning, for both the king’s message and that of the Parsi elders, because it instantiates a highly productive cognitive structure called the CONTAINER schema (see Johnson [1987]). The king uses the glass to represent a country: a country, like a glass, is a container, not just of liquids but of people and places and resources. Like a typical container, a country has physical boundaries that mark its extent; like a typical container, one can put things into a country or one can take them out again; and, like a typical container, a country can be full (of people) or it can be empty. Thus, the king uses a full glass of milk to convey the conceptual metaphor A COUNTRY IS A CONTAINER, but with the kicker “this one is full.” As the glass shuttles back and forth, it is used to carry subtly different meanings, each pivoting on the figurative affordances of the CONTAINER schema. The Parsis fashion their riposte from a different CONTAINER metaphor, LIFE IS A CONTAINER, one that can be figuratively filled with diverse events, relationships, and feelings. In contrast to the physical affordances of the COUNTRY IS A CONTAINER metaphor, which implies that countries are physical containers with physical limits on the amount of physical contents they can hold, LIFE IS A CONTAINER is a more abstract metaphor that places no such limits on its abstract contents. If LIFE IS A CONTAINER, it is a container with an unbounded capacity for emotional and cultural possibilities. The king and the Parsis are effectively playing a game of tropes, where the Parsis trump the king’s use of the CONTAINER schema with a more creative metaphor of their own.

      The CONTAINER schema is ubiquitous in language and thought. We talk of minds as containers of beliefs (perhaps