Metaphor: Psychological Aspects

Metaphor: Psychological Aspects 43 Blending; Metaphor: Psychological Aspects; Metaphor: Stylistic Approaches; Metaphors in English, French, and Spanish Medical Written Discourse; Metaphors in Political Discourse; Metaphors, Grammatical; Aristotle and Linguistics; Metonymy; Pragmatics and Semantics; Propositions; Quintilian (ca. 30–98 A.D.); Relevance Theory; Richards, Ivor Armstrong (1893–1979); Rousseau, JeanJacques (1712–1778); Semantics–Pragmatics Boundary; Truth Conditional Semantics and Meaning.

Bibliography Beardsley M (1962). ‘The metaphorical twist.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 22, 293–307. Berg J (1999). ‘Referential attribution.’ Philosophical Studies 96, 73–86. Black M (1962). Models and metaphor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cohen T (1976). ‘Notes on metaphor.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34, 249–259. Cooper D E (1986). Metaphor. Oxford: Blackwell. Crosthwaite J (1985). ‘The meaning of metaphors.’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63, 320–335. Davidson D (1978). ‘What metaphors mean.’ In Sacks S (ed.) On metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Farrell F B (1987). ‘Metaphor and Davidsonian theories of meaning.’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17, 625–642. Fogelin R (1988). Figuratively speaking. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gentner D (1982). ‘Are scientific analogies metaphors?’ In Miall D S (ed.) Metaphor: problems and perspectives. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press Inc. 106–132. Glucksberg S & Keysar B (1993). ‘How metaphors work.’ In Ortony A (ed.) Metaphor and thought, 2nd edn. New York: Cambridge University Press. 401–424. Goodman N (1968). Languages of art. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Grice H P (1975). ‘Logic and conversation.’ In Cole P & Morgan J L (eds.) Syntax and semantics 3: speech acts. New York: Academic Press. 41–58.

Hesse M B (1966). Models and analogies in science. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Hintikka J (ed.) (1994). Aspects of metaphor. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Hintikka J & Sandu G (1990). ‘Metaphor and the varieties of lexical meaning.’ Dialectica 44, 55–78. Johnson M (ed.) (1981). Philosophical perspectives on metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kittay E F (1987). Metaphor: its cognitive force and linguistic structure. New York: Oxford University Press. Lakoff G & Johnson M (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Leddy T (1983). ‘Davidson’s rejection of metaphorical meaning.’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 16, 63–78. Levin S R (1977). The semantics of metaphor. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Mac Cormac E R (1985). A cognitive theory of metaphor. Cambridge: MIT Press. Moran R (1997). ‘Metaphor.’ In Hale B & Wright C (eds.) A companion to the philosophy of language. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 248–268. Nogales P D (1999). Metaphorically speaking. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Radman Z (ed.) (1995). From a metaphorical point of view: a multidisciplinary approach to the cognitive content of metaphor. Berlin: de Gruyter. Re´canati F (1995). ‘The alleged priority of literal interpretation.’ Cognitive Science 19, 207–232. Richards I A (1936). The philosophy of rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle J R (1993). ‘Metaphor.’ In Ortony A (ed.) Metaphor and thought, 2nd edn. New York: Cambridge University Press. 83–111. Sperber D & Wilson D (1986). Relevance: communication and cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stern J (2000). Metaphor in context. Cambridge: MIT Press. Tirrell L (1991). ‘Reductive and nonreductive simile theories of metaphor.’ The Journal of Philosophy 88, 337–358.

Metaphor: Psychological Aspects R Gibbs, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The psychological study of metaphor has had a major impact on the interdisciplinary understanding of language and thought. Thirty years ago, the topic of metaphor was mostly seen as peripheral to the major focus of research in both linguistics and psychology, because metaphor was primarily viewed as a poetic device that is not representative of how people ordinarily speak or think. But in conjunction with the emergence of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s and

1980s (see Cognitive Linguistics), psychological research has demonstrated that metaphor is ubiquitous in discourse, can often be easily understood and produced in appropriate social and linguistic contexts, and perhaps most importantly, is both a type of language use and a fundamental scheme of thought. This entry describes the empirical evidence relevant for, and the theories building on, these claims.

The Ubiquity of Metaphor in Language Metaphor has traditionally been viewed as a distortion of both thought and language, because it involves

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the transfer of a name to some object to which that name does not properly belong. Speakers and writers presumably use metaphor as an ornamental feature for poetic and rhetorical purposes (e.g., to say what is difficult to state literally, to express meaning in a vivid manner), rather than to impart fundamental concepts. In each case of metaphorical language, a person aims to present some underlying analogy or similarity in the form of a condensed or elliptical simile. Thus, a metaphor of the ‘A is B’ form indirectly implies the speaker’s intended literal meaning ‘‘A is like B in certain respects.’’ For instance, the metaphor ‘The car beetles along the road’ describes the movement of the car as being like the movement of a beetle. Under this traditional view, metaphor should be infrequent in language, especially in scientific discourse, and people should have more cognitive difficulty when uttering and understanding metaphors than they do when using the equivalent literal speech. Psychological research has shown, however, that metaphor is a major part of both spoken and written language. Various studies have attempted to quantify the frequency of metaphor use in a variety of contexts. One detailed study examined the use of metaphor in transcripts of psychotherapeutic interviews, in various essays, and in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates and found that people used 1.80 novel and 4.08 frozen metaphors per minute of discourse (Pollio et al., 1977). If one assumes that people engage in conversation for as little as 2 hours per day, a person would utter 4.7 million novel and 21.4 million frozen metaphors over a 60-year life span! A different analysis of the metaphors produced in television debates and news commentary programs showed that speakers use one unique metaphor for every 25 words (Graesser et al., 1989). These, admittedly crude, analyses clearly demonstrate that metaphor is not the special privilege of a few gifted speakers, but is ubiquitous throughout both written and spoken discourse. However, a closer look at everyday language suggests that these empirical attempts to ‘count’ instances of metaphor vastly underestimate the pervasiveness of metaphor in people’s ordinary speech. Typical frequency counts of metaphor do not include analysis of conventional speech that is motivated by metaphoric modes of thought. Consider the following mundane expressions that people often use in talking about verbal arguments (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Your claims are indefensible. I’ve never won an argument with him. I demolished his argument. He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticisms were right on target. He shot down all of my arguments.

At first glance, none of these expressions appear to be very metaphoric, at least in the same way that an utterances such as ‘The sun is the eye of heaven’ might be. Yet, a closer look reveals the systematic metaphoric structuring whereby people think of arguments in terms of wars. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions, and we defend our own. We plan and use strategies. We might find certain positions undefensible, requiring us to take new lines of attack. Each of these things do not simply reflect the way we talk about arguments: we actually argue as if we were in a war. Our understanding of argument as war is active and widespread, but this concept is so deeply entrenched in our ordinary conceptual system that we tend to miss its metaphorical character. Cognitive linguistic research has suggested that there are perhaps hundreds of conceptual metaphors, such as ARGUMENTS ARE WARS, that structure our everyday experience, and that they are found in a wide variety of conceptual domains (Gibbs and Steen, 1999; Ko¨ vecses, 2002; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Linguistic analyses do not typically quantify the number of verbal metaphors, and the conceptual metaphors underlying them, that may be present in any one sample of speech or text. But one psychological study of the narratives women produced when describing their experiences recovering from cancer showed that conventional metaphoric language was employed more than 6 times per minute, and that only 22 conceptual metaphors underlay the vastly different metaphoric expressions these women produced, especially in their talk of emotion (Gibbs and Franks, 2002). Conceptual metaphors seem to be ubiquitous in the ways people talk of their experiences. One question that has generated a great deal of debate within psychology is whether these instances of conventional metaphor necessarily reflect anything about the metaphorical nature of many abstract concepts.

Metaphor Understanding: The Standard View The traditional belief that metaphor is deviant suggests that metaphors should be more difficult to interpret than literal speech. The most famous proposal along this line comes from H. Paul Grice’s theory of conversational implicature (Grice, 1989) (also see Grice, H. Paul (1913–1988); see Implicature). Grice argued that the inferences needed to understand

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nonliteral meaning are derived from certain general principles or maxims of conversation that participants in talk-exchange are mutually expected to observe (Grice, 1989) (see Maxims and Flouting). Among these are expectations that speakers are to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear in what they say. When an utterance appears to violate any of these maxims, as in the case of metaphor, listeners are expected to derive an appropriate ‘conversational implicature’ about what the speaker intended to communicate in context, given the assumption that he or she is trying to be cooperative (see Cooperative Principle). Grice (1989) more specifically suggested what has become known as the ‘standard pragmatic model’ for understanding indirect and nonliteral meanings, including metaphor. In this view, understanding metaphor is accomplished in a series of steps: (1) analyze the literal meaning of an entire expression, (2) compare this literal meaning to the context, (3) if the literal meaning is appropriate, then stop, otherwise (4) derive an alternative meaning that makes the speaker’s/writer’s utterance sensible in the context, given the cooperative principle. This rational account suggests, then, that metaphors are understood as conversational implicatures and should take additional time to comprehend over that needed to interpret literal speech that is appropriate to the context.

Psychological Tests of the Standard View How accurate is the standard view as a psychological theory of metaphor understanding? First, the results of many reading-time experiments in psycholinguistics show that people do not always require additional mental effort to comprehend many kinds of figurative utterances, as compared with so-called literal speech (Gibbs, 1994, 2002). Listeners/readers often take no longer to understand the figurative interpretations of metaphor (e.g., ‘billboards are warts on the landscape’), metonymy (e.g., ‘The ham sandwich left without paying’) (see Metonymy), sarcasm (e.g., ‘You are a fine friend’), idioms (e.g., ‘John popped the question to Mary’), proverbs (e.g., ‘The early bird catches the worm’), and indirect speech acts (e.g., ‘Would you mind lending me five dollars?’ see Speech Acts, Literal and Nonliteral) than to understand equivalent literal expressions, particularly if these are seen in realistic linguistic and social contexts. Appropriate contextual information provides a pragmatic framework for people to understand metaphoric utterances without any recognition that these utterances violate conversational norms. In fact, psychological studies have specifically shown

that people do not need to find a defective literal meaning before searching for a nonliteral meaning. For example, people apprehend the metaphoric meanings of simple comparison statements (e.g., ‘surgeons are butchers’) even when the literal meanings of these statements fit perfectly with the context (Glucksberg et al., 1982). Even without a defective literal meaning to trigger a search for an alternative meaning, metaphor can be automatically interpreted. These experimental findings from psycholinguistics are damaging to the general assumption that people understand metaphor as violations of conversational maxims. Similar psychological mechanisms appear to drive the understanding of both literal and metaphoric speech, at least insofar as early cognitive processes are concerned. Everyone agrees that people may sometimes take a good deal of time to process novel poetic metaphors, for example. Studies have shown, in fact, that conventional, or familiar, metaphors can be understood more quickly than novel expressions (Katz and Ferretti, 2001). Yet the additional time needed to understand novel metaphors is not necessarily due to a preliminary stage during which the literal meaning for an entire utterance is first analyzed and then rejected. Listeners may take longer to understand a novel expression, such as ‘The night sky was filled with molten silver,’ because of the difficulty in integrating the figurative meaning with the context, and not because listeners are first analyzing and then rejecting the expression’s literal meaning (Schraw, 1995). Many psychologists have gone on to argue that even if metaphor does not necessarily demand extra cognitive effort to understand, people may still analyze literal, conventional, or salient, aspects of word meaning during immediate metaphor comprehension (Blasko and Connine, 1993; Giora, 2001). Some studies, which measure the meanings activated during each part of the moment-by-moment process of linguistic understanding, suggest that comprehending familiar and novel metaphors engages different linguistic processes. Analysis of literal word meaning still precedes metaphorical meaning during novel metaphor understanding, with both types of meaning arising in parallel during familiar metaphor processing. Other studies that assessed people’s speeded judgments about the sensibility of different word strings at different moments find no difference in the comprehension speed for literal and figurative strings (McElree and Nordlie, 1999). This lack of timecourse differences is inconsistent with the claim that metaphoric interpretations are computed after a literal meaning has been analyzed, and suggest that literal and metaphoric interpretations are computed in parallel.

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Although these research findings imply that metaphor processing is not secondary to literal understanding, psycholinguists are, again, careful to note that people may be biased toward initially interpreting the literal, or salient, meanings of metaphoric statements in cases of novel metaphor (Giora, 2001). Yet others argue that even if some linguistic meanings (e.g., literal or metaphoric) are created sooner during metaphor processing, these findings do not imply that entirely different mental processes operate to produce these different meanings (Gibbs, 2002). Different kinds of meaning may arise from a single linguistic process. The fact that scholars label one kind of meaning ‘literal’ and another ‘metaphoric doesn’t necessarily indicate that different processes operate (such as a literal processing mode and a metaphoric processing mode) as people access these meanings (either in a serial or parallel manner). More recent theories of figurative language understanding, which are more general than metaphor theories per se, suggest that people may initially access a word’s interpretation that can be compatible with both its literal and metaphoric meanings (Frisson and Pickering, 2001). Over time, however, people use context to home in on the word’s appropriate metaphoric meaning, where the homing-in process is faster when the preceding context is strong, and slower when the preceding context is neutral. In this way, context does not operate to distinguish between different literal and metaphoric meanings, as assumed by most theories (such as in the standard model), but functions to change an underspecified, or highly general meaning, into a contextually appropriate, specific interpretation which may be metaphorical. A different theory embraces the notion of ‘constraint satisfaction’ to provide a comprehensive model of the different sources of information that constrain metaphor understanding (Katz and Ferretti, 2001). Under this view, understanding a metaphoric utterance requires people to consider different linguistic (e.g., people’s familiarity with words and phrases) and nonlinguistic (e.g., related to specific context) information that best fits together to make sense of what a speaker or writer is saying. These different sources of information are probabilistically evaluated, and combined to offer a most likely ‘winning’ meaning for a metaphor. A constraint satisfaction model may have the flexibility to account for a wide variety of metaphor processing data that seems to differ depending on the familiarity or conventionality of the expression, the context in which it is encountered, and the speaker’s/writer’s likely intentions in using metaphorical language. In summary, there has been a great deal of psychological research devoted to the general question of

whether metaphorical language requires additional cognitive effort to understand, compared to nonmetaphorical speech. The findings of these widely varying studies strongly imply that metaphors are not deviant and do not necessarily take more time to understand, but that more subtle factors, such as the familiarity of the expression and the context in which it is used, can shape the time-course of metaphor understanding. Many studies now situate metaphor understanding within a more comprehensive view of linguistic processing that does not posit specialized mechanisms for interpreting metaphors, even if these expressions often convey distinctive kinds of meanings (Kintsch and Bowles, 2002), and which specifically relies on cognitive mechanisms, such as suppression, that are employed widely in all aspects of language processing (Gernsbacher and Robertson, 1999).

Psychological Models of Metaphor Understanding A great deal of research has been devoted to the specific processes involved in understanding metaphorical meaning, beyond the general question of whether metaphors are more difficult to comprehend than literal speech. These studies have explicitly examined the ways that the A, or target, and B, or vehicle, terms interact to produce metaphorical meaning. A long-standing assumption in many academic fields is that we understand metaphors by recognizing the ways that topic and vehicle terms are similar. Thus, in understanding the metaphor ‘Juliet is the sun,’ listeners are presumed to figure out the properties of both Juliet and the sun that are similar. But psychological studies indicate that metaphor comprehension does not demand that the topic and vehicle terms share properties or associations (Camac and Glucksberg, 1984). This finding is supported by many studies showing that metaphors have directional meaning. If metaphorical meaning arises from the overlap of the semantic features of topic and vehicle, expressions such as ‘The surgeon is a butcher’ and ‘The butcher is a surgeon’ should have similar metaphoric meanings. But this is clearly not the case. The similarity that arises from the comparison of a topic and vehicle does not produce metaphorical meaning. Instead, similarity is created as an emergent property of understanding metaphor. Thus, many psychological studies have demonstrated that novel features emerge from metaphor comprehension that are not salient in one’s separate understanding of the topic or vehicle (Gineste et al., 2000). This idea is consistent with the popular, but somewhat vague, interactionist theory of metaphor (Black, 1979), which argues

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that the presence of the topic stimulates a listener to select one of the vehicle’s properties so as to construct a ‘parallel implication complex’ that may induce changes in one’s understanding of both the topic and vehicle. In general, psychological studies provide strong evidence supporting the idea that metaphor cannot be reduced to rule-governed extensions or variations of the topic’s and vehicle’s literal meanings. Psychologists disagree, however, about the cognitive mechanisms involved in feature emergence during metaphor understanding. The two main proposals state that metaphorical mappings between concepts from dissimilar domains can be accomplished by either comparison or categorization processes. Traditional comparison theories posit that metaphor understanding demands a mapping of low-salient features from the source domain with high-salient features of the target domain (Miller, 1979). But understanding many metaphors, such as ‘Men are wolves,’ seems to involve the activation of semantic features that are not typically associated with either the source or target domain until after the metaphor has been understood (Ortony, 1979). Gentner’s ‘structure-mapping’ theory of analogy and metaphor avoids this problem by suggesting that people begin processing a metaphor by first aligning the representations of the source and target domain concepts (see Gentner et al., 2001). Once these two domains are aligned, further inferences are directionally projected from the source to the target domain. Finally, new inferences arise within the target domain, reflecting relational, and not just feature-specific, aspects of the metaphor comprehension processes. Experimental evidence in support of this comparison view shows, for instance, that people infer relational, but not feature-specific, meanings when interpreting metaphors (Gentner et al., 2001). For instance, when people read ‘Plant stems are drinking straws,’ they infer that both plants and straws convey liquid to nourish living things, and not just that both plants and straws are long and thin (i.e., object commonalities). Other research indicated that metaphors that express relational information (e.g., ‘Plant stems are drinking straws’) are viewed as being far more apt than those that only map object features (‘Her arms were like twin swans’). An alternative view claims that metaphors are better understood via categorization processes, as class-inclusion, rather than comparison, statements (Glucksberg, 2001). For example, the statement ‘Yeltsin was a walking time bomb’ asserts that the former Russian President is a member of a category that is best exemplified by time bombs. Of course, time bombs can belong to several other categories, such as the weapons used by terrorists. But in the context of

talking about people, time bombs best exemplify the abstract category of ‘things that explode at some unpredictable time in the future and cause a lot of damage.’ In this way, metaphors reflect ‘ad hoc’ categories and refer at two levels: the concrete level (i.e., an explosive device) and a superordinate level (i.e., the properties of time bombs). One implication of the class-inclusion model is that it suggests that the topics and vehicles, or target and source domains, in metaphors play different but interactive roles in metaphor comprehension. For example, the word ‘snake’ evokes different meanings in the phrases ‘my lawyer is a snake’ and ‘the road was a snake.’ In this way, metaphor topics provide dimensions for attribution, while vehicles provide properties to be attributed to the topic. Psychological evidence supporting this position showed that in a reading-time study, presenting people first with a topic term that is highly constrained reduces the time needed for the subsequent processing of a metaphorical statement, in contrast to when people are first presented with a less-constrained topic (Glucksberg, 2001). Furthermore, presenting people with an unambiguous vehicle primes subsequent metaphor comprehension, in contrast to what happens when they are presented with an ambiguous vehicle term. This pattern of data illustrates how the level of constraint is an important feature of metaphor topics, while the degree of ambiguity is an important characteristic of metaphor vehicles. Comparison models of metaphor understanding are unable to explain the importance of constraint and ambiguity, because they assume that metaphor comprehension always begins with an exhaustive extraction of the properties associated with both topics and vehicles. Having advance knowledge about either the topic or vehicle should presumably, then, prime metaphor processing. However, the categorization view correctly predicts that only advanced knowledge about highly constrained topics and unambiguous vehicles facilitates metaphor comprehension, a finding that is most consistent with the claim that metaphor understanding involves creating a new, ad hoc category and not merely comparing one’s knowledge about topic and vehicle domains. A proposal titled the ‘career of metaphor’ theory combines aspects of both the comparison and categorization views (Gentner and Bowdle, 2001). This theory claims that there is a shift in the mode of mappings from comparison to categorization processes as metaphors become conventionalized. For instance, novel metaphors such as ‘Science is a glacier’ involve base terms, such as ‘glacier,’ with a literal source (i.e., ‘a large body of ice spreading outward over a land surface’), but no relational metaphoric sense (i.e., ‘anything that progresses slowly but steadily’). People

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comprehend novel metaphors as comparisons in which the target concept (e.g., ‘science’) must be structurally aligned with the literal base concept (e.g., ‘glacier’). In some instances, the comparison process may lead to the induction of a novel metaphor category. On the other hand, conventional metaphors can be understood either by comparison or categorization processes. For example, the metaphor ‘A gene is a blueprint’ has two closely related senses (e.g., ‘a blue and white photographic print detailing an architect’s plans’ and ‘anything that provides a plan’). The relations between these two senses make the conventional base term polysemous (i.e., semantically related literal and metaphoric meanings). As such, conventional metaphors may be understood by matching the target concept with the literal base concept (a comparison process) or by viewing the target concept as a member of the superordinate metaphoric category named by the base term (a categorization process).

Metaphor in Thought Most of the psychological research on metaphor has focused on how it is used and understood within language, and has assumed that metaphorical meaning is created de novo, and does not reflect preexisting aspects of how people ordinarily conceptualize ideas and events in terms of pervasive metaphorical schemes. But in the past 20 years, various linguists, philosophers, and psychologists have embraced the alternative possibility that metaphor is fundamental to language, thought, and experience. Cognitive linguists, for instance, claim that metaphor is not merely a figure of speech, but is a specific mental and neural mapping that influences a good deal of how people think, reason, and imagine in everyday life (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Evidence supporting this claim comes from linguistic research on the historical evolution of what words and expressions mean, the systematicity of conventional expressions within and across languages, novel extensions of conventional metaphors, studies on polysemous word meaning, and nonverbal behaviors such as gesture (Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999). However, psychologists have been critical of much of this work and its possible implications for theories about conceptual structure and metaphor understanding. First, most of the evidence for metaphorical thought, or conceptual metaphor, comes from purely linguistic analyses, and psychologists have expressed deep skepticism about these claims on both methodological and theoretical grounds, especially with regard to linguists’ heavy reliance on their own linguistic intuitions (Murphy, 1996). Second, some

psychologists argue that conceptual metaphor theory is unfalsifiable if the only data in its favor is the systematic grouping of metaphors linked by a common theme (Vervaeke and Kennedy, 1996). Consider again the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), which presumably motivates conventional expressions such as ‘He attacked my argument’ and ‘He defended his position.’ Cognitive linguistic research suggests that any expression about argument that does not fit the WAR theme is usually seen as evidence for another theme, such as WEIGHING, TESTING, or COMPARING. This implies that no linguistic statement can be brought forward as evidence against the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor, which makes the basic tenet of conceptual metaphor theory impossible to falsify. Finally, some psychologists argue that many conventional expressions viewed as metaphorical by cognitive linguists are really not metaphorical at all, but are treated by ordinary speakers/listeners as literal speech (Glucksberg, 2001). Simple expressions like ‘He was depressed’ are entirely literal, and may not be motivated by a conceptual metaphor such as SAD IS DOWN, because they only reflect something about the polysemous nature of meaning (e.g., ‘depression’ can be used to talk about either physical depression or emotional depression).

Psychological Studies on Conceptual Metaphor Despite the skeptical reaction of some psychologists to the idea of metaphorical thought, or conceptual metaphor, there is a great deal of psychological evidence supporting the claim that many aspects of people’s abstract concepts and reasoning processes are shaped by enduring conceptual metaphor. Studies show, for instance, that conceptual metaphors influence the ways people conceive of various abstract domains, such as emotions, minds, politics, advertising, scientific theories, the self, morality, learning, and problemsolving (Gibbs, 1994; see Steen and Gibbs, forthcoming, for reviews). Most of these studies demonstrate that providing people with a particular metaphorical construal of some domain (e.g., that EMOTIONS ARE CONTAINERS) can facilitate the way they learn new information, solve problems, and make decisions, if the newly encountered material has a similar metaphorical structure. At the same time, whereas switching from one conceptual metaphor to another may require more cognitive effort in some situations (Langston, 2002), people typically have multiple metaphorical ways of conceiving of most abstract ideas (e.g., THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, THEORIES ARE FABRIC (Gibbs, 1994). This multiplicity of metaphorical schemes

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provides another source of evidence for the idea that a good deal of ordinary thought is shaped by metaphor. Even if people seem able to think metaphorically about various domains, many psychologists and especially many psycholinguists are skeptical about whether conceptual metaphors are normally recruited during people’s ordinary comprehension of language (Glucksberg, 2001). These critics find it difficult to believe that conceptual metaphors play much of a role in how people interpret verbal metaphors such as ‘Surgeons are butchers’ or ‘Lawyers are snakes.’ To a large extent, the debate over conceptual metaphor settles into two camps: those scholars studying novel metaphors and those studying conventional language that may reflect different conceptual metaphors (e.g., ‘He attacked my argument’ for ARGUMENTS ARE WARS, ‘Our relationship hit a dead end street’ for LIFE IS A JOURNEY, and so on). Thus, different approaches to the psychology of metaphor understanding are oriented toward different types of metaphorical language. A likely possibility is that conceptual metaphor may have a strong influence on some aspects of verbal metaphor use, but not on others. In fact, there is a large body of evidence from psychological studies, employing different methods, that clearly demonstrates that (a) people conceptualize certain topics via metaphor, (b) conceptual metaphors assist people in tacitly understanding why metaphorical words and expressions mean what they do, and (c) people access conceptual metaphors during their immediate, online production and comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors. This work includes studies investigating people’s mental imagery for conventional metaphors, as in idioms and proverbs (Gibbs and O’Brien, 1990), people’s context-sensitive judgments about the figurative meanings of idioms in context (Nayak and Gibbs, 1990), people’s immediate processing of idioms (Gibbs et al., 1997), people’s responses to questions about metaphorical expressions about time (Boroditsky and Ramscar, 2002; Gentner et al., 2002), readers’ understanding of metaphorical time expressions (McGlone and Harding, 1998), and studies looking at the embodied foundation for conventional metaphoric language (Gibbs et al., 2004). To briefly give a few examples from these psycholinguistic experiments, studies show that people have a complex metaphorical understanding of many abstract domains, which partially motivates everyday reasoning and language use. For instance, people conceive of the domain of emotions metaphorically, based partly on their embodied experiences of emotions, such that they tacitly know that phrases like ‘blow your stack’ and ‘flip your lid’ are motivated by the conceptual metaphor of ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER. This metaphorical

understanding of anger influences people’s judgments about the degree to which someone experiences anger and about the best use of different metaphorical phrases in context (Nayak and Gibbs, 1990). At the same time, people’s tacit knowledge of conceptual metaphors constrains the specific mental images they can form for verbal metaphors, and the specific meanings they believe these metaphors express (e.g., that ‘blow your stack’ means to get very angry while the person is feeling internal pressure, and the expression of the anger is unintentional and forceful) (Gibbs and O’Brien, 1990). In fact, many conventional phrases and idioms, long thought to be dead metaphors, retain much of their metaphorical meaning precisely because they continue to be linked to enduring conceptual metaphors. Finally, priming studies suggest that reading a conventional metaphorical phrase, such as ‘John blew his stack,’ quickly accesses the conceptual metaphor (ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER) that partly motivates why this expression has the particular metaphorical meaning it conveys (Gibbs et al., 1997). Reading another expression with roughly similar metaphoric meaning, such as ‘John bit her head off,’ activates a different conceptual metaphor (ANGER IS ANIMAL BEHAVIOR), giving rise to the creation of these metaphorical expressions. The debate over the role that metaphorical thought may play in a psychological theory of verbal metaphor use will likely continue. Once more, it seems inevitable that several of the different approaches to metaphor within linguistics and psychology will become part of a more comprehensive theory of metaphor. Yet it is already evident that the traditional views of metaphor as deviant, ornamental aspects of language and thought no longer are tenable and that psychological studies have provided excellent reasons to believe that metaphor is a fundamental part of the ways people speak and think.

See also: Aristotle and Linguistics; Aristotle and the Stoics on Language; Cognitive Linguistics; Cognitive Pragmatics; Cooperative Principle; Grice, Herbert Paul (1913– 1988); Implicature; Maxims and Flouting; Medical Communication: Professional–Lay; Metaphor: Philosophical Theories; Metaphor: Stylistic Approaches; Metaphors in English, French, and Spanish Medical Written Discourse; Metaphors in Political Discourse; Metaphors, Grammatical; Metaphor and Conceptual Blending.

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