Conceptual makeup of metaphors: metaphoric sources and targets in their bidirectional interplay

Abstract

Metaphor has been widely researched within the realm of Cognitive Linguistics, having as major landmarks Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s Mental Space based analysis. Nevertheless, specific aspects that pertain to the dynamic character and flexibility of metaphorical relations, enabled by the concepts involved, remain rather un-treated in literature thus far. In this light, the aim of the present work is to propose a model that may account for a more dynamic process of integration in metaphoric constructions. Major attention is paid to the participation of the target as a conceptual entity capable of selecting aspects of the source in order to elaborate a final interpretation. To this end, the study designed a set of five metaphors whose constitutive concepts were inverted and mixed up in all possible combinations. The pairs generated were presented to 150 participants, who were divided into 6 groups of 25 people, and each participant provided an interpretation for 15 different combinations, ending in a total of 2250 answers. Based on this large number of answers, an elaborated and detailed account of the metaphors’ mechanics was pursued. The quantitative analysis of the results yielded measures of the difficulty and easiness of interpretation, concentration of responses and dispersion as well as frequency of sanctioned domains across the metaphoric pairs. The aforementioned indicators were in turn thoroughly correlated with the conceptual makeup of both sources and targets. Subsequently, the qualitative analysis of the results show that intrinsic characteristics of the concepts such as the level of schematicity, entrenchment and concreteness, play a fundamental role in the construction of meaning. Following the consequences of the findings, it is concluded that metaphorical interpretation is the product of a bidirectional interplay between the source and target concepts. Also, metaphorical interpretation is not an absolute conceptual construct but metaphorical answers can be placed along a scale of interpretations that represents different levels of metaphoricity.