Mental Metaphors from the Master Metaphor List: Empirical Examples and the Application of the ATT-Meta System

The main aim of this report is to provide a measure of objective evaluation of ATT-Meta, a system we have implemented for conducting some of the reasoning needed in the understanding of metaphorical utterances. The report thereby also provides some evaluation of the overall theoretical approach informing ATT-Meta (Barnden & Lee, 2001). The evaluation of ATT-Meta consists of showing, at least in embryo, how the system can deal with example metaphorical utterances that rest on some of the conceptual metaphors in the Master Metaphor List developed at Berkeley (Lakoff, 1994). We will call conceptual metaphors “metaphorical views” as we find this term clearer. The List lists 207 metaphorical views used in contemporary American English. The examples we deal with are derived from ones we found by searching the Collins COBUILD Bank of English. We do not claim that all aspects of the examples are covered, but we do show how ATT-Meta can draw important information about the target domains involved in the examples. We call such items of information “[target-domain] informational contributions.”