A corpus study of metaphors and metonyms in English and Italian

Abstract

A powerful claim of conceptual metaphor theory is that the most central metaphors are grounded in bodily experience. It might be expected that these metaphors would be shared by different languages. In this paper, we use large computerised corpora of English and Italian to examine the power of conceptual metaphor theory to explain the non-literal senses of lexis from the field of the human body. We find a number of equivalent expressions across the two languages which seem to be traceable to the body-mind mappings described in work by Sweetser [From Etymology to Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990] and others. We also find that metonymy is a significant force for generating non-literal expressions, and that a large number of expressions are apparently generated by a combination of metaphor and metonymy [Cogn. Linguist. 1 (1990) 323]. This cross-linguistic study suggests that while universal bodily experience may motivate many figurative expressions, the process is sometimes complex, and will not necessarily result in equivalent expressions in different languages, for cultural and linguistic reasons.

Introduction

For researchers in language description, the work of Lakoff and his followers (e.g. Lakoff, 1987, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) has potentially great explanatory power. One implication is that the different senses of a polysemous word are not arbitrary historical developments, but can be traced to an underlying conceptual metaphor. Their model (often termed “conceptual metaphor theory”) thus offers an explanation for why two distinct semantic fields can be talked about using many of the same words and expressions: each of these pairs of words and expressions can be seen as the realisation of a conceptual metaphor that connects the two domains at the level of thought. For instance, lexical items from the field of light, such as radiant or bright are also used in the field of emotion to describe happiness, realising the conceptual metaphor happiness is light (Kövecses, 1991).

Because conceptual metaphor theory claims to describe central processes and structures of human thought, it is not language-specific and should have explanatory power for languages other than English; it is therefore of potential use in cross-linguistic research. Although Lakoff (1993) rarely refers to languages other than English, his discussion of the theory is suggestive. He claims that the most central metaphors are grounded in our human physical experience (1993: 240), and as evidence for this position, argues that where the same conceptual metaphors exist in different languages, they tend to function in similar ways. For instance, he claims that in languages where directions are used to talk metaphorically about quantities, the equation is always up with more and down with less, never the reverse. Gibbs, 1993, Gibbs, 1994 also argues for the experiential basis of central metaphors. He examines linguistic metaphors used to talk about anger and claims that many of these are realisations of the conceptual metaphor anger is heated fluid in a container. Examples that reflect this metaphor are She got all steamed up and I was fuming (1994: 203). He claims that we each perceive our own body as a container and when we become angry we experience physical sensations of heat and internal pressure, and therefore, the metaphor has an experiential motivation. This would imply that the same conceptual metaphor and similar linguistic realisations might be found in other cultures and languages.

There have been a number of cross-linguistic studies which have investigated the possibility that metaphors are not language-specific. Sweetser has carried out research on conceptual metaphors of perception across a number of languages, finding that they are highly consistent (1990). Detailed comparisons of individual languages suggest that emotion metaphors are also shared. For instance, Yu (1995) analysed Chinese metaphors for anger and found that the heat and pressure elements of the metaphor are the same as those in English described by Gibbs (1994); the only difference between the two languages is that gas is used instead of fluid to characterise anger in the Chinese metaphor. Emanatian (1995) studied metaphors in Chagga, a language spoken in Tanzania, and found lexicalisations of lust is fire, a metaphor in English identified by Lakoff (1987). Kövecses examined metaphors for happiness in Hungarian and found many commonalities with English and Chinese (2002). The similarities between metaphorical mappings found by these researchers, across unrelated languages, show that at least some conceptual metaphors are widely shared.

Researchers have not found complete consistency however. Deignan et al. (1997) investigated metaphors in Polish and English by asking English-speaking Polish informants to gauge the translatability of English metaphors into Polish. They found a number of close equivalents across the two languages, but they also found cases where linguistic metaphors varied. In some cases it seemed likely that this was because the linguistic expressions are different surface realisations of the same conceptual metaphor. However, they also found cases where apparently different conceptual metaphors were used. This last finding might be reconcilable with the contemporary theory, if it were argued that the language-specific conceptual metaphors they found are in some way less fundamental than those that they found in both languages (but this is a somewhat circular argument). Boers and Demecheleer (1997) studied metaphors in economics texts in English, French and Dutch, and found differences in the frequencies of various metaphors across the three languages, differences which they ascribed to cultural factors. It seems then that there is evidence that some metaphors are common to a number of languages, but a great deal more work is needed to determine the extent and relative frequencies of shared metaphors.