Language and Culture As Mappings
In their 1980 work, Lakoff and Johnson closely examined a collection of basic conceptual metaphors, including:
- Love is a journey
- Life is a journey
- Social organizations are plants
- Love is war
The latter half of each of these phrases invokes certain assumptions about concrete experience and requires the reader or listener to apply them to the preceding abstract concepts of love or organizing in order to understand the sentence in which the conceptual metaphor is used.
There are numerous ways in which conceptual metaphors shape human perception and communication, especially in mass media and in public policy.
Lakoff and Johnson focus on English, and cognitive scholars writing in English have tended not to investigate the discourse of foreign languages in any great detail to determine the creative ways in which individuals negotiate, resist and consolidate conceptual metaphors. Andrew Goatly in his book Washing the Brain (2007) considers ideological conceptual metaphors as well as Chinese conceptual metaphors.
James W. Underhill, a modern Humboldtian scholar, attempts to reestablish Wilhelm von Humboldt's concern for the different ways languages frame reality, and the strategies individuals adopt in creatively resisting and modifying existing patterns of thought. Taking on board the Lakoff-Johnson paradigm of conceptual metaphor, he investigates the way in which Czech communists appropriated the concept of the people, the state and struggle. And the way German Communists harnessed concepts of eternity and purity. But he also reminds us that, as Klemperer, the main critic of Hitlerdeutsch, demonstrates, resisting patterns of thought means engaging in conceptual metaphors and refusing the logic that ideologies impose upon them. In multilingual studies (based on Czech, German, French & English), Underhill considers how different cultures reformulate key concepts such as truth, love, hate and war.
Read more about this topic: Conceptual Metaphor
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