Cognitive Metaphor Theory Revisited

This paper provides a framework which, being compatible with Lakoff and Johnson’s theory (1980), allows a description of metaphoric verbal utterances. The development of this theoretical expansion is encouraged by Lakoff and Johnson’s distinction between nonliteral and literal metaphoric expressions, and by the fact that they do not provide an explanation of the nonliteral metaphoric use of expressions as distinct from the literal metaphoric one. They simply say that metaphoric expressions are nonliteral when they are parts that are not used in our normal metaphoric concepts. This suggestion is included in our model, in which a metaphoric utterance is identified when the speaker perceives both a contextual abnormality and a conceptual contrast, and it is interpreted using, among other things, a pragmatic process of mapping to derive subpropositional metaphoric provisional meanings. This explanation of the metaphoric mechanism allows an explanation of the utterances in which nonliteral metaphoric expressions intervene without having to resort to a previous literal interpretation of these utterances. ∗ Finantial support for this research, which has been carried out in the Project ‘El significado y los procesos pragmáticos primarios y secundarios’, has been provided by DGICYT, code number BFF2003-07141. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the II Latin Meeting for Analytic Philosophy in Aix en Provence (13-15 November 2003). We are grateful to the participants of this Meeting, especially to Pierre Livet, our commentator in Aix, for their useful questions and remarks.