The social-cognitive dynamics of metaphor performance

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Cognitive Systems Research 9 (2008) 64–75 www.elsevier.com/locate/cogsys

The social-cognitive dynamics of metaphor performance Action editor: Christian Onof Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.

a,*

, Lynne Cameron

b,1

a

b

Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA Centre for Language and Communication, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, United Kingdom Received 25 April 2007; accepted 20 June 2007 Available online 15 August 2007

Abstract This paper describes some of the social-cognitive dynamics in people’s production and understanding of metaphoric language. We adopt a dynamical systems approach to outline how different social and cognitive processes operates simultaneously as talk unfolds along different nested time-scales, which interact in complex, nonlinear ways to shape ‘‘metaphor performance’’. Adopting a dynamic systems approach demonstrates how elements of metaphor performance that have been previously thought of as fixed or static are re-interpreted as potential emergent stabilities in the dynamical systems. This approach is applied to the analysis of a single conversation between two participants to get an overall impression of the interaction between these various forces when metaphor is produced and understood and to illustrate the stability and variability in metaphor performance.  2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Metaphor performance; Dynamic systems theory; Systematic metaphor

1. Introduction Any extended analysis of everyday talk reveals the presence of stretches of language that convey metaphorical meaning. Consider, as one example, the following remarkable conversation between Jo Berry, whose father, Sir Anthony Berry, was killed by a bomb in 1984, and Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb on behalf on the Irish Republican Army during their conflict with the British government. Jo Berry had asked to meet Pat Magee in order to understand more about why the bombing happened, and they first met in 1999, after Pat Magee was released from prison under a peace agreement. Extract 1 comes from the first of the conversations and shows Jo explaining why she wanted to meet Pat. She refers to

*

Corresponding author. Fax: +1 831 459 3519. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R.W. Gibbs Jr.), L.J.Cameron@ open.ac.uk (L. Cameron). 1 Tel.: +1 908 653843. 1389-0417/$ - see front matter  2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cogsys.2007.06.008

moment of the bombing in line 91 and to meeting Pat in lines 103 and 104. Extract 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

1 Jo

Pat Jo

Pat Jo

. . .I knew, . . .(2.0) back in the moment, wh- what I wanted to do, . . . was bring as much – . . .(2.0) something – . . . as much positive out of it as I could. . . . you know, [hmh] . . .(1.0) [and] I – and I saw very clearly. . . .(1.0) that the – . . .the end of that journey, would be, . . .sitting down and, . . .talking to the people who did it. . . . hmh . . . that just came in a moment,

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107 108 109

and then went away, and then – . . . there’s been a long long .. 16 years of [getting to this point]. 110 Pat [hmh hmh] There are several instances of metaphorically used words and phrases in this excerpt, which we have underlined. For instance, ‘‘back in’’ in line 91 conveys the idea of Jo’s remembering the bombing as if she were physically moving back into a specific spatial location. The idea of being able to ‘‘bring’’ ‘‘something’’ ‘‘out of it’’ refers to Jo’s mental reconstructing the bombing in terms of movement from one physical location to another, but this time in the possession of an important object (i.e., a new understanding). We also see in lines 99–101 that Jo conceives this process of reconciliation, and sitting down to talk with Pat, as the endpoint of a physical journey along some path where the psychological goal is understood as a destination (i.e., endpoint) on the path. Why do speakers, like Jo, talk in these metaphorical ways, and what motivates them to utter the particular words they do to achieve different communicative effects? Is the use of metaphoric words and phrases idiosyncratic or can it be explained in some principled manner? The vast interdisciplinary research on metaphor use and understanding suggests that there are multiple reasons for why people speak metaphorically. Quite roughly, the possible reasons for speaking metaphorically refer to bodily, cognitive, linguistic, social, and cultural variables. For instance, people may employ certain metaphoric words and phrases because they typically think about particular, usually abstract, domains in metaphoric terms (cognitive), because there is no way to express specific meanings in a language without using metaphor (linguistic), because they wish to impress or persuade another person by the words used (social), and/or because their cultural beliefs and norms are conventionally encoded in specific metaphorical themes (cultural). Much of the contemporary scholarship in metaphor studies debates these, and other, possible reasons for why people use metaphorical language and how they interpret metaphors in discourse. This has led to a vast complex of alternative methods, empirical findings, and theories of metaphor use, with individual metaphor scholars exhibiting the strong tendency to focus on certain aspects of metaphor and adopt one perspective on metaphor use (e.g., cognitive or linguistic) while downplaying or ignoring others (e.g., social or cultural). We believe that all these varying perspectives on metaphor have the potential to offer important insights into the use and understanding of metaphor in discourse. But the vast number of possible factors involved in metaphor use, and their complex interactions, makes it difficult to adjudicate between competing theories. Our aim is in this article is to suggest a different way of looking at metaphor by embracing a dynamical systems approach that better captures the total ecology of human behavior, and more

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specifically metaphor performance. The key to this idea is the recognition that metaphor performance is shaped by discourse processes that operate in a continual dynamic interaction between individual cognition and the social and physical environment. Dynamical approaches to human action attempt to describe how the body’s continuous interactions with the world, including other people, provide for coordinated patterns of adaptive behavior. Simple and complex behaviors are higher-order products of self-organization processes that emerge from both intra and interpersonal interactions. We argue that the complexities of metaphoric language use (i.e., how people coordinate with each other through metaphor) emerge from self-organizational processes that operate along a range of different time-scales, from the millisecond to the evolutionary, and across a range of scales of social group size, from the individual and dyad to the speech community. The phenomena of metaphor performance are, we suggest, best studied in terms of continuously dynamic discourse processes. This framework for studying metaphor recasts some traditional questions about metaphor use and understanding and suggests the need for a closer link in characterizing social and cognitive processes in human behavior. 2. Forces that shape metaphor use Consider again Jo’s comment to Pat, ‘‘I saw very clearly that the end of that journey’’ when referring to her eventual face-to-face meeting with Pat. Empirical research from various disciplines, with a heavy emphasis on psychology, has identified a number of important factors that appear to shape the circumstances under which a metaphoric statement like this is produced and understood. These factors are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but generally refer to different information that presumably shapes the content and use of metaphors in discourse. Consider just a few of these factors. 2.1. Enduring metaphorical concepts One of the major developments in metaphor research over the past 30 years is the 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 (Gibbs, 1994, 2006; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Individual ‘‘conceptual metaphors’’, such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, map relational information from a source domain (e.g., JOURNEY) onto a typically more abstract target domain (e.g., LIFE), which gives rise to a host of meaning correspondences or inferences (e.g., people are travelers, problems are physical obstacles to travel, goals are destinations, and so on). Specific conventional expressions refer to aspects of these meaning correspondences (e.g., ‘‘I’m off to a good start,’’ ‘‘I’ve hit a major roadblock in my pursuit

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of a PhD’’, and ‘‘I’m getting to the finish line on my thesis’’). Cognitive linguistic studies suggest that conceptual metaphors influence the ways people conceive and talk about numerous abstract domains, such as emotions, minds, politics, advertising, scientific theories, the self, morality, learning, and problem-solving, shape the historical evolution of what words and expressions mean, people’s interpretations of novel extensions of conventional metaphors, the related meanings of polysemous words, and nonverbal behaviors such as gesture (Gibbs, 1994, 2006; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Psychological studies, employing different experimental methods, demonstrate that (a) conceptual metaphors assist people in tacitly understanding why metaphorical words and expressions mean what they do, and (b) that people often access conceptual metaphors during their immediate, online production and comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors (Gibbs, 2006). For instance, Jo’s previous experience of conceiving of her own mental processes as being like a physical movement (i.e., THINKING IS MOVEMENT) provides part of the motivation for her saying, ‘‘that just came in a moment and then went away.’’ We are unaware of Jo’s past history and patterns of thinking, but the frequent use of speech like Jo’s may reflect an enduring conceptual metaphor that is a salient part of how the language community thinks and speaks. 2.2. Previously understood metaphorical utterances In addition to the possibility that people may access preexisting metaphorical concepts which may be part of their long-term knowledge for different domains, they may also be momentarily primed to speak in a specific metaphorical way because of what someone else has said in the past about some topic and what that person has most immediately said in the conversation. Thus, research shows that the presence of some linguistic metaphor (e.g., ‘‘I saw very clearly’’) may make salient an underlying conceptual metaphor (e.g., UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING), which may partly frame, or prime subsequent speech (i.e., social accommodation) (Gibbs, 1994). Thus, in a later part of Jo and Pat’s conversations, Pat talks about others getting a ‘‘distorted picture of me,’’ with Jo subsequently using ‘‘see’’ in several turns to indicate the related metaphorical scheme of KNOWING SOMETHING IS SEEING THAT THING. 2.3. Body movements and gesture A related set of findings shows that speakers’ immediate bodily positions (e.g., Pat and Jo sitting next to one another face-to-face) and actions also convey certain ways of metaphorically conceiving of specific topics that may enhance their production of concurrent metaphorical language and listeners’ understanding of metaphorical utterances (Cienki & Mueller, in press). Studies of people, both experts and novices, speaking about abstract topics (e.g.,

mathematics, physics) show that appropriate physical gestures are often employed to articulate something about the topic at hand (Roth & Lawless, 2002). These gestures embody (‘‘give a body to’’) abstract, metaphorical ideas, and sometimes precede the language spoken to enhance listeners’ understandings of speakers’ complex, abstract communicative intentions (Alibali, Heath, & Myers, 2001). Similarly, people may reach out their hand and grasp the air as, or before, saying, ‘‘I finally grasped that concept’’ to facilitate addressees’ comprehension of the metaphorical idea of grasping a concept (Wilson & Gibbs, 2007). 2.4. Gender and occupation Psychological research has identified several personality and social traits that influence metaphor production and understanding. For instance, men tend to use metaphor in describing other people’s emotions, while women use metaphoric speech more in talking about their own feelings (Kreuz & Link, 2005). Thus, the fact that Jo speaks in certain metaphorical ways may reflect a more general tendency on the part of women, at least in some cultures, to talk this way, especially when referring to their own emotions. Moreover, people in certain occupations, such as the clergy and teachers, have been shown to use metaphorical language more so than individuals in other occupations, and listeners appear to use this information in quickly determining whether a person is speaking with metaphorical intentions (Katz, 2005). 2.5. Adjusting intimacy and distance Various authors have argued that metaphoric language promotes intimacy among group members, while simultaneously excluding those who cannot make sense of the in-group metaphorical language (Gibbs, 1994; Horton, 2007). Jo’s use of certain conventional metaphors may be consciously or unconsciously employed to cultivate a more intimate connection between herself and Pat, and may, for example, be an attempt on Jo’s part to have Pat understand the emotional pain she has experienced in regard to her father’s murder, as well as the emotional struggle she has had in getting to this point in the reconciliation. 2.6. Conventional talk in specific socio-cultural groups Certain topics may be conventionally referred to in different metaphoric ways by specific socio-cultural groups. For example, in later portions of Jo and Pat’s conversation Pat talks of the IRA in terms of it as a ‘movement’ and its conflict with the British government as ‘the struggle’. These terms emerged in the discourse of the IRA and over time became identified with the IRA as a group. These metaphoric words and phrases may be related to larger metaphorical themes that cut across many domains (e.g., any group of individuals may collectively be thought of in

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metaphorical ways in terms of their ‘‘struggles’’ as if these were physical interactions). 2.7. Specific language and culture The specific language spoken clearly determines whether a person uses metaphoric language in referring to particular ideas and events. For example, English and Spanish have different metaphoric means for expressing metaphorical ideas about path, manner, and end-result conceptualisations. Moreover, different languages verbally manifest in slightly different ways the same underlying conceptual metaphor, such as the different ways that Hungarian and English instantiate the LOVE RELATIONSHIP IS A JOURNEY metaphor (Ko¨vecses, 2005). Different cultures may also place varying values on different entities and events. For instance, horses play different roles in England and Spain, which provides a reason for why horses serve as very different metaphorical vehicles in English than in Spanish (Deignan, 2003). For the above conversation, Jo’s metaphoric words are spoken given tacit assumptions about what knowledge she shares with Pat, and her beliefs that Pat will interpret what she says against that information within their common ground. For instance, Jo’s use of ‘‘end of that journey’’ presupposes a shared socio-cultural understanding with Pat that thought processes could be likened to physical journeys. In a larger sense, the entire point of conversations, especially those that are explicitly focused around reconciliation, is to negotiate a new common ground between speakers where thoughts and attitudes are at least mutually understood. 2.8. Summary For the most part, metaphor scholars, especially within psychology, have focused on establishing the importance of these different independent variables in individual acts of metaphor production and understanding. Metaphor scholars in all disciplines typically highlight those factors of most interest to their respective disciplines (e.g., cultural factors within anthropology) in explaining metaphorical meaning and use. Few attempts have been made to examine the joint influence of these different personal, linguistic, cognitive, affective and social, variables on metaphor performance. At the same time, some metaphor scholars have fallen into the trap of assuming an ‘‘effects = mental structure’’ link in which an experimental effect (e.g., showing that people are sensitive to conceptual metaphors in discourse) is thought to immediately indicate an underlying mental/cognitive structure (i.e., a conceptual metaphor) that mediates the effect. This has led to a vast proliferation of different, and competing, mental representations in theories of metaphor, and figurative language, use. There is little consideration of the possibility that even if such mental structures exist that they may only be partially recruited during metaphor performance. For instance, metaphor performance

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may be influenced by understandings of conventional metaphorical mappings without all aspects of that knowledge (i.e., the rich set of entailments arising from source-to-target domain mappings) being accessed during speaking and listening. Finally, many scholars use their analysis of individual metaphorical statements to suggest that metaphor is ‘‘pervasive’’ in both language and thought. Yet there is insufficient empirical attention given to the diverse patterns of metaphor use in discourse that on the one hand seem stable in places and non-existent in others. How can we best characterize this seemingly unpredictable pattern of metaphor behavior? 3. The dynamical alternative Some psychologists and philosophers have strongly proposed in recent years that psychological theories should be analogous to theories of complex dynamical system that have broad appeal in biology, physics and other natural sciences. Dynamical approaches emphasize the temporal dimension of social and cognitive processes and the ways in which an individual’s behavior emerges from the interaction of brain, body, and environment, including interactions with other persons. Simple and complex behavior patterns, including metaphor performance in discourse, are higher-order, emergent products of self-organizing processes. Thus, purposive behavior arises from the usually nonlinear interaction of a system’s components rather than from specialized cognitive or neurological mechanisms. Consider for instance, an analogy of the design of human minds being like the architecture of a termite nest rising several feet above the ground, often reminiscent of typical buildings for humans (Oudeyer, 2006). Termites build their complex nests not because each one has some overall architectural concept for the nest’s design and the steps needed to build it. Instead, each termite engages in very simply behaviors such as ‘‘If I come along a lump of earth, pick it up, and place it where the pheromone signal is strongest’’. The eventual superstructure that is built is the result of dynamic interaction in the specific environment of thousands of individual termites and not as a projection to the macroscopic level (i.e., the nest) of information encoded at the microscopic level (e.g., the minds of individual termites). This is an instance of reciprocal causality given the downward force that an emergent feature exerts on lower-level behaviors. In a similar way, many aspects of adaptive intelligent human actions, including metaphor performance, may arise as products of self-organization without there necessarily being specialized internal mental representations (e.g., densely encoded conceptual metaphors and their various entailments) that serve as the causal basis for complex behaviors (e.g., speaking metaphorically). Self-organization can occur within individuals’ mind, as when coherent knowledge structures emerge from dynamic activation and inhibition of lower-level cognitions, and also among a group of individuals, as in the emergence of status hierarchies, and across populations

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of individuals, as when clusters of shared beliefs and other cultural norms emerge from communication and influence among those individuals. A crucial feature of a dynamical system is its balance of stability and variability – one reason we believe that the variability in metaphor performance (e.g., metaphors appearing as clusters and then seemingly disappearing), like many other aspects of human behavior, is best understood in dynamical terms. Much of the study of dynamical stability and variability focuses on the internal and external forces (i.e., couplings between brain, body and world) that shape behavioral trajectories as they unfold in a system. The behavior of a system over time is often portrayed as a continuous tracing of a line in a three-dimensional space. Time is represented in the continuing trace, and other variables are embodied in the different axes. The term phase space refers to the set of possible states of the system. As the system changes states over time, it traces a trajectory in its phase space landscape – a path of the successive states it occupies. When a system’s behavior is observed over an extended period, it sometimes happens that certain regions of the phase space are occupied often, others occasionally, and others never. An area of phase space the system occupies or approaches more frequently than others is called an attractor. An attractor exerts a kind of pull on the system, bringing the system’s behavior close to it. Each attractor can be seen as a basin or valley in the phase space landscape, its region of attraction. Trajectories that enter the basin or valley move toward that attractor. Most psychological models assume that attractors are created by repeated experiences of a particular state so that the state becomes ‘‘engraved’’ in the person’s relevant psychological system. A shift from one attractor to another is called a ‘‘phase transition’’ or ‘‘phase change’’. For example, looking at an ambiguous figure, such as a Necker cube or the classic vase/face silhouette produces bistable behavior as the image shifts back and forth when you look at it. This shifting in the figure’s appearance (e.g., between a vase and a silhouette) is consistent with a dynamical account of a nonlinear trajectory settling into one attractor basin and then into the other, repeatedly (Spivey, 2007). In systems with more than one attractor, the system’s trajectory typically approaches each one periodically but is never fully captured by any of them. Plotting the behavior of such a system over time shows a tendency to approach the various attractors, but often unpredictably. Shifts from one attractor to another may even seem random. A central part of a dynamical account of human behavior is that the majority of the trajectory’s time is spent in intermediate regions of state space that gravitate toward multiple semi-stable attractor basins. Characterizing the trajectory of metaphor performance in the phase space of a conversation demands recognition that social and cognitive processes are always taking place at many time scales, from milliseconds to months and years. Some dynamic processes occur over short time spans as patterns emerge within moment-to-moment and hour-

to-hour thoughts, feelings and social behaviors, while others processes unfold over the course of individuals’ lives, and so guide development and change in personality, social cognitions, and social interactions throughout the lifespan. Dynamic processes also operate on populations over a much longer, evolutionary timeframe (e.g., the ability to draw analogies), and so have influenced the nature and organization of cognitive and behavioral mechanisms common across human populations. There is also an intrinsic connection between intra-individual dynamics and the dynamic interactions between individuals. Individuals in an interaction are not static or passive entities, but instead represent separate systems capable of displaying rich dynamics, and that the synchronization of their respective dynamics produces a higher order system with its own dynamic properties. Of course, the idea of systems traveling through highdimensional state space along trajectories is just a convenient (and metaphorical) way of describing what is going on in the brains and bodies of people as they interact with each other and the environment. Psychologists and others have conducted both experimental and simulation studies to reveal the presence of nonlinear dynamics in different aspects of cognitive, social, and affective behavior. One method for understanding the dynamics of metaphor performance extends Slobin’s idea that speaking exhibits a special kind of thought that is ‘‘intimately tied to language’’ or ‘‘thinking for speaking’’ (Slobin, 1996, p. 75). More specifically, metaphor performance in discourse extends Slobin’s idea to ‘‘talking-and-thinking-in-interaction’’ to uncover the dynamics of in-the-moment spoken discourse (Cameron, 2003). If we see individuals engaged in conversation as dynamical systems, then patterns observed in metaphor performance can be seen as stabilities emerging from the dynamics and variability of discourse. These stabilities in performance can emerge at all levels and scales of the coupled system (Cameron, in press-a). For example, we should find systematic use of metaphor resulting from conventionalized metaphor use common to all speakers of a language. At a more specific level, participants’ membership of certain socio-cultural groups may give rise to certain patterns of metaphor use. At the levels of the episode and discourse event, particular metaphors may come to be used systematically between the individuals as they arrive at shared agreement on how to refer to topics through ‘conceptual pacts’ (Brennan & Clark, 1996). 4. Attractors in metaphor performance This section sets out a dynamical systems interpretation of aspects of metaphor performance using further data from the reconciliation conversations. Our argument is that metaphor performance occurs as an outcome of activity on multiple, interacting scales of time and of group size. Part of the power of dynamics systems theory is that all scales of a system are amenable to explanation through

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the same general principles of change, self-organization and emergence. It would be possible to start at any of the various scales and analyze metaphor performance but we have chosen to take as focal level the microgenetic timescale in which two people engage in talking-and-thinking together. Applying dynamical systems ideas to metaphor in discourse then allows us to connect this microgenetic or local scale of talk in the moment to that of the discourse event, and the same principles can then be invoked to explain conventionalization of metaphor across larger scales of time and group size. We first examine metaphor performance at the microgenetic scale as two individuals engage in conversation on a timescale of minutes and seconds. The second moves to a larger scale of group size and we consider how metaphor works in socio-cultural groups of various types over a longer timescale. The third zooms out further still, exploring metaphor performance across a speech community and over a timescale of years, decades and longer. At each level of scale, we make connections back to metaphor performance in the microgenetic moment. 4.1. Metaphor performance in face-to-face conversation People engaged in face-to-face thinking-and-talking can be seen as coupled dynamical sub-systems that combine to create a larger system. Applying the idea of the phase space landscape, their conversation is then a trajectory across an evolving landscape that adapts and changes continuously as the two systems co-adapt (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, in press). On this landscape, metaphors can appear and disappear. Some metaphors may come to be used as shared ways of talking-and-thinking (or ‘language-conceptual pacts’ if we adapt Brennan and Clark’s term) and these can be seen as stabilizing in the landscape into attractor valleys that the trajectory of talk returns to several times. Extract 2 is taken from a second recorded conversation between Jo and Pat. The talk is transcribed in intonation units, with each line of transcription reflecting on average around 2 s of talk (Stelma & Cameron, 2007). The line numbers thus place the intonation unit in the dynamics of the discourse event; extract 2 begins about 20 min into the talk. The words and phrases underlined are the vehicle terms of the metaphors, i.e. those used metaphorically in this context (details on how these are identified can be found in Cameron, 2003). The extract includes a change of discourse topic around lines 664 and 665, which is managed by Jo. Up to this point, Pat talks about how the two of them came to be together in a reconciliation meeting, using similar JOURNEY metaphors to those seen in the first extract. Extract 2 644 645 646

Pat

. . .(1.0) 1984, when your father was killed, or when I killed your father,

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. . . when the republican movement killed your father. 648 . . .(3.0) er, 649 my journey, 650 . . .(1.0) preceded that you were catapulted into this struggle. 651 . . . I think, 652 er, 653 . . .(1.0) my journey preceded that. 654 . . .(1.0) but, 655 . . .(1.0) our journey began that moment. 656 . . . and here we are. 657 . . .today. 658 sixteen years later. 659 seventeen years later. 660 . . .(1.0) it’s quite a remarkable journey. 661 I think. 662 er, 663 Jo . . .(2.0) you – 664 Pat [er] 665 Jo [you] said that, 666 . . .(2.0) the price that er – 667 . . . you paid, 668 for taking up violence, 669 was part – 670 . . . partly losing some of your humanity. 671 Pat . . . hmh 672 Jo . . . and that now you’re..refinding that. 673 . . .(1.0) through . . . other meetings with – 674 . . .(1.0) ehm, 675 other victims, 676 and loyalists,

647

In talk, metaphors often show themselves only through the use of a vehicle term, with the other part of the metaphor (the Topic term) left implicit in the surrounding talk (Cameron, in press-a). So Pat speaks of ‘‘my journey’’ (649) but does not voice a literal equivalent of this, as happens in a classic A is B metaphor such as‘‘life is a journey.’’ Metaphor performance is thus manifested through successive metaphor vehicles in the transcribed talk. In the flow of talk on the microgenetic scale, metaphors shift and develop as people negotiate meaning, extend their ideas, or exploit potential opened up by the use of a Vehicle term (Cameron, in press-b). We can see in extract 2, how the journey metaphor Vehicle, used previously in the talk to refer to Jo’s effort to understand her father’s murder, is successively re-used and adapted to refer to two further topics: Pat’s early history of politicization ‘‘my journey’’ 649, 653 the process of meeting and reconciliation ‘‘our journey’’ 655, 660

Similarly, the metaphor of ‘‘losing’’ (670) is changed into a contrasting metaphor ‘‘refinding’’ (672). These micro-level shifts and changes in the dynamics of linguistic metaphor provide the basis of various phenomena of

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self-organization and emergence on higher scales and levels (Cameron, in press-a). To investigate these processes of co-adaptation and self-organization, vehicle terms are first grouped on the basis of their semantic connectedness, so that terms like ‘‘came,’’ ‘‘went’’, ‘‘my journey’’, ‘‘getting to this point’’ are grouped together because they share the sense of movement. Vehicle groupings identified across a discourse event (the vaguer term is used in preference to the more problematic ‘domain’) do not pre-exist in a stable and static form, but are emergent, semantic spaces ‘carved out’ as the talk proceeds, built up and shaped through the dynamics of the discourse. Of course, vehicle terms like ‘‘came’’, ‘‘went’’, and ‘‘my journey’’ are highly conventional instances of metaphor. But conventional metaphors may be best understood as emergent properties of an entire dynamical system rather than as bits of information, encoded in memory, that are retrieved in certain circumstances. Under this alternative view, conventional metaphors do not have similar meanings in different contexts, but are dynamically re-created depending on the particular dynamical histories of the participants. A brief analogy helps clarify our conception of vehicle groupings, and conventional metaphors more generally. Consider the idea of vehicle groupings in the context of shooting pool, where the cue ball on the table represents the current state of the system, and the target ball (the one you’re aiming at) as the next upcoming attractor (adapted from Spivey, 2007). Good pool players consider not only how to sink the target ball, but also where the cue ball will go afterwards, precisely because each shot is taken in context and not from some neutral spot as at the very start of a pool game. Employing conventional metaphors, such as certain vehicle groupings, is also shaped by where the system is at the very moment of speaking. Speakers never retreat to a neutral position for their next words, but are primed to speak in certain ways given the ongoing dynamics of the discourse. Therefore, precisely where in state space the previous word(s) left the system has a powerful influence on the trajectory it takes to get to the location in state space corresponding to the production (and for the listener, the interpretation) of the next words. Over the timescale of a conversation, or other discourse event, some metaphor groupings become systematic and emerge as particularly important in the shared talking-and-thinking between the two speakers. This is again similar to the positioning of the cue ball in the middle of any pool game where the next shot taken depends on the very specific dynamics of the game. No two shots are completely alike because of the changing nature of each game, exactly in the same way that no two uses of a vehicle term are identical and simply retrieved from memory. The metaphor ‘‘price to pay’’ is used to illustrate this. In the first recorded conversation between Jo and Pat, Pat twice used this phrase in talking about the outcome of

his decision to use violent means, as shown in extract 3 (a) and (b): Extract 3 (a) 1–1173 there’s always a price to pay for it. in terms of my humanity (b) 1–1317 there’s always a price to pay for decisions like that

We should note at this point that a dynamical perspective rules out the possibility of (b) being simply a repetition of (a). Metaphors are not discrete object-like entities that can be ‘handed’ from one person to another but are seen as uses of language that are soft-assembled in the flow of talk. When a speaker, as a coupled system, re-uses a previously used lexical item, time has moved on, the discourse environment has changed, and both speakers are changed by their experience of the first use. Because it is uttered at a different point in time, a subsequent use is always distinct from a previous use, and its contextual meaning is always distinct from its previous contextual meaning. The differences may be minimal – at the very least the phonology cannot be physically identical – or may be more significant, as happens when a subsequent use acts to recall earlier discourse activity. The two uses of ‘‘price to pay for’’ in Extract 3 differ minimally in their form but the second use occurs in a discourse environment that includes the fact of the first use and the impact that had on the speakers. For example, after the ‘‘price to pay for’’ phrase in its first use, Patrick Magee speaks of ‘‘my humanity’’. The second use (b) does not include those words, but there may be an echo of them activated in his or Jo’s memory as relevant contextual information. In fact, the two phrases co-occur when the linguistic metaphor was used again by Jo Berry in talk several months later, Extract 4. She rephrases the linguistic metaphor to ‘‘the price that you paid for . . .’’ as she quotes Pat’s earlier statement in a pre-sequence that builds up to a further question. Extract 4 665 Jo 666 667 668 669 670

[you] said that, . . .(2.0) the price that er – . . . you paid, for taking up violence, was part – . . .partly losing some of your humanity

We can track the history of the linguistic metaphor in the dynamics of the talk and begin to see how metaphor performance in the microgenetic moment connects to longer term metaphor use. Extracts 5a–h show all the uses of the metaphor in three meetings between Jo Berry and Pat Magee over a period of two and a half years, in the order in which they occurred: Extract (a) (b) (c) (d)

5 1–1173 1–1317 2–666 2–888

Pat: Pat: Jo: Pat:

a price to pay a price to pay the price that you paid that’s always had a price

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(e)

2–892

Pat:

(f) (g) (h)

2–1140 2–3376 2–3378

Pat: Pat: Pat:

you’re going to come face-toface with that price there’s a price but at what price? what price?

To this set, can be added related metaphors that also connect the (mostly implicit) Topic – the outcome of decisions to use violent means for political ends – with vehicles connected to cost, accounting or debt: (i) (j) (k) (l)

1–1420 2–1913 3–666 3–692

Pat: Pat: Pat: Pat:

(m) 3–1155

Jo:

(n) (o)

Jo:

3–1163

the bottom line put a line under the past there’s no way of purging that debt there has to be some form of account taken there’s a cost that goes on for decades the cost of – it’s just too huge

The accumulated set of connected metaphors can be grouped as an emergent ‘systematic metaphor’ (Cameron, 2007): {THE NEGATIVE OUTCOME OF USING VIOLENCE IS A PRICE TO PAY} The words in the label are selected to include and cover all instances while using terms that stay as close as possible to the words of discourse participants. In the formulation, italics small capitals are used to differentiate systematic metaphor from conceptual metaphor, while the brackets reflect the idea that a systematic metaphor is a collection of related instances of metaphor performance. Systematic metaphors are dynamical phenomena relating to specific discourse events and participants, and evolve with the discourse. They connect the microgenetic level of talk with the longer discourse event. For the analyst they serve as a way of condensing discourse data, but they may be more than just an aggregation of linguistic metaphors created by the analyst, since they may also function for discourse participants as emergent stabilities in the trajectory of the coupled system of spoken interaction. Truly emergent phenomena do not just emerge upwards out of the microgenetic moment of use but also operate downwards from the higher level, ‘enslaving’ systems at lower levels in a process of reciprocal causality. A systematic metaphor is emergent in this sense if it comes to constrain participants in their talking-and-thinking, so that other ways of metaphorizing the idea drop away in favor of this particular metaphor. Jo’s use of Pat’s ‘‘price to pay’’ metaphor, seen in extract 4, and the collection of instances in extracts 5a–h show the metaphor emerging (and being used in its shortened form ‘‘price’’) as the shared way of talkingand-thinking about the idea of the consequences and outcomes of life decisions. Systematic metaphors from a discourse event will vary in frequency, in their range of vehicle lexis and grammatical forms, and in significance. Among the most significant

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are those that emerge over the timescale of the talk as key ways of framing major topics. These can be extracted to capture the metaphorical flavor of a discourse event. For example, the four most significant systematic metaphors in analysis of Jo and Pat’s conversations were as follows (Cameron, 2007): reconciliation is a journey understanding the Other requires connection reconciliation happens through listening to the Other’s story reconciliation involves changing a distorted image of the Other.

The term ‘the Other’ is used to reflect the initially oppositional roles of the two speakers, who come to the conversation from very different experiences and positions. Some systematic metaphors, e.g. understanding is seeing, are found in all types of discourse and parallel familiar conceptual metaphors. However, commonly found vehicle domains, like seeing, may also be used with particular topics in more specific and focused systematic metaphors within a particular discourse event. The metaphor of the ‘‘distorted picture’’ used by Pat to refer to an incorrect or incomplete understanding of his motives, recurred throughout the data in various forms: if you’re not seeing a human being in front of you . . . if all you’re seeing is an enemy until we do see each other in our true light. . . . we’re always going to be dealing with some reduction or a caricature it’s easy to lose sight of the enemy’s humanity it’s never the whole picture sometimes you get a glimpse. . .of the other person’s humanity

In these instances, seeing metaphors are used in negative forms to create a contrast between the limited understanding of the Other before meeting and the fuller understanding that results from talking together. ‘‘Losing sight of the whole picture’’ is used as a metaphor for the de-humanizing of the Other in conflict. This important systematic metaphor was labeled reconciliation involves changing a distorted image of the Other in order to capture the specific nature of the metaphor for the two speakers in their particular discourse space. Systematic metaphors, as described in this section, are evolving, adapting dynamic phenomena, emerging from the microgenetic level of talk onto the discourse event level. Through the process of emergence, systematic metaphors can come to operate socio-cognitively and affectively as a type of language-conceptual pact in the discourse event. They are attractors in the trajectory of the talk, which returns to the basin of attraction with each re-visiting of the topic in terms of one or other of the connected vehicles. The degree to which participants return to this metaphor, and not to other possible choices, reflects the stability of the systematic metaphor attractor, shown visually on a phase space landscape as its depth and steepness. As an emergent grouping of connected linguistic metaphors used in a discourse event, a systematic metaphor is a temporary

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stabilization in the dynamics of the discourse, with varying degrees of variation and the possibility of further evolution as discourse continues. 4.2. Metaphor performance and socio-cultural groups The reconciliation conversations between Jo and Pat took place over a number of years so that the two participants came to know each other well and developed their own ways of talking-and-thinking about issues important to them. In this, they functioned like a small socio-cultural group which evolves ways of talking over time, including what we might call ‘group metaphor.’ For example, extract 2 shows Pat talking about ‘‘the republican movement’’ (647). This phrase refers to the Irish Republican Army, an illegal political group dedicated to removing Northern Ireland from the control of the UK government. The IRA used violence in Northern Ireland and England to try to achieve their aims, including the bombing that resulted in the death of Jo Berry’s father. The phrase ‘‘the movement’’ became the conventionalized metaphorical way of referring to the organization, and their political activity, including the use of violence, was talked about as ‘‘the struggle.’’ While such terms may sometimes be deliberately selected, they often emerge as attractors in the discourse of a group over a period of time. Convergence by group members on particular ways of using language is likely to contribute to building solidarity within the group, and new members will acquire the talk of the group as part of their initiation into membership. Within-group solidarity may also be increased if the language also acts to exclude non-group members. Since metaphorical phrases such as ‘‘the movement’’ and ‘‘the struggle’’ emerged from language within the IRA, using them would mark speakers out as sympathizers with the aims of the group or possible members. People who did not support the IRA would avoid using these terms in order to avoid any suggestion of alignment with their aims. In-group language systems can be seen as producing stabilized social cognitive attractors that represent certain ways of talking or terms for ideas, concepts and constructs important to the group. Yet there is always the possibility that perturbations to the system dynamics of a group may shift the trajectory away from certain attractors. In social groups, perturbation may occur as a result of deliberate intervention around language use. A nice instance of this is seen with the term ‘‘struggle.’’ In the first conversation studied, all instances of the term, bar one, were in the conventionalized form (definite article ‘‘the’’ + optional adjective e.g.‘‘armed’’ + ‘‘struggle’’) of IRA-group talk and came from Pat. The single exception was when Jo used the word in a poem that she had written in advance of meeting Pat and that she read aloud to him (extract 6):

Extract 6 1–660 Jo 661 662 663 664

I feel that my heart heals, as Ireland heals. . . .(1.0) I am sorry for the suffering imposed, . . . by my s- tribe, . . .(2.0) I acknowledge your struggle,

Notice that the form has changed in a small but significant way, with a shift from deliberate article ‘‘the’’ to the personalized possessive pronoun ‘‘your’’ + ‘‘struggle.’’ This change shifts the word away from the group talk, thereby loosening some of its associations and connotations. Jo continues the shifting and loosening process in their later conversation in an episode (extract 7) where she actively deconstructs an earlier positioning of Pat and herself, from perpetrator and victim to a more shared position. Extract 7 2–239 Jo 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266

the more I hear of your story, . . .(2.0) er, you know, the less, . . .(1.0) I am seeing you, . . .(1.0) as the perpetrator. . . .(1.0) and, . . . the more, . . . I am seeing you, . . . er, . . . (1.0) someone who’s – . . . (3.0) had, . . . a lot of struggle, . . . (1.0) and a lot of reasons to do what you’ve done. . . . (2.0) and the more, I am feeling, . . . (1.0) part of, . . . that struggle. . . . (1.0) and that, . . . it’s a joint responsibility. . . . (2.0) that is not, . . . (1.0) that I am the victim, and you’re the perpetrator. . . . (1.0) but that we’re part of, . . . (1.0) a community, a society. . . . (1.0) which has, . . . allowed this to happen.

In line 251, Jo attributes ‘‘a lot of struggle’’ to Pat, again changing the form away from the stabilized and groupmarked ‘‘the struggle.’’ Even more significantly, she then includes herself in ‘‘that struggle’’ in lines 255–6, the first time that the word has been used in reference to herself rather than to Pat or to the republican movement more generally. The microgenetic moment of perturbation seems to shift the system of their talking-and-thinking, with three

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further instances of non-group talk ‘‘struggle’’ occurring in the conversation, two of them from Pat, shown in extracts 8a–c: Extract 8 (a) 2–737 738 739 740 741 742 743 744 (b) 2–2325 2326 2327 2328 (c) 2-3611 3612 3613 3614

Pat . . . sometimes you get a – like a glimpse. even in the midst of – er, a lot of struggle. . . . of the other person’s humanity. but there’s also a mechanism there that, . . . I think locks it out. Jo

I don’t feel I’m scared of anyone’s pain. . . . (1.0) I can listen to people’s pain. . . . I can listen to their struggles. . . . (1.0) I can understand . . . people’s . . . anger and violence.

Pat . . . (2.0) nationalists were disempowered and excluded. and, they needed to, . . . (1.0) struggle to fight that.

The phrase that was stabilized into a conventional form and meaning through IRA group talk seems to have been shifted out of this social cognitive attractor in the talk of the dyad. It has been returned to the wider system of the language of the speech community (see next section). In the process of being shifted, the word has also been ‘disarmed’ or ‘neutralized’ as its group-specific connotations have been removed or toned down. We have seen how metaphor performance at the microgenetic scale connects with performance at the longer timescale of the discourse event through the emergence of systematic metaphors in particular discourse events, and how performance by individuals and the dyad connects with performance at the larger scale of the socio-cultural group. In the next sub-section, we move to yet higher scales of time and group size.

flexible word-meaning links that incorporate particular affective and pragmatic values with particular lexico-grammatical forms and cultural preferences, and seem to work as emergent attractors in the dynamics of speech community talk. As an example of metaphoreme, Cameron and Deignan used <(not) walk away from>, where the triangular brackets indicate a tendency or preference, and the brackets around indicate the action was mostly not taken. The verb ‘‘walk away from’’ was investigated in both the reconciliation conversation data and at the level of the speech community more generally, using the spoken corpus of the Bank of English (15 million words) as a source of evidence. From the corpus analysis, the metaphorical use of the verb across the speech community appeared to have stabilized around certain features, which were reflected in the specific conversations (extract 9). Extract 9 1–2612 2613 2614 2615 2616 2617 2618 2619 •

•

• •

4.3. Metaphor performance in the speech community At the scale of the speech community (i.e. all those people who share a common language), a system dynamics perspective on metaphor performance can be brought to bear on the emergence of conventionalized metaphors, such as ‘‘I saw very_clearly’’ (extract 1, line 101) to mean ‘‘I understood’’. In developing a dynamic systems explanation of the widespread presence in a language of fixed and semi-fixed metaphorical expressions, Cameron and Deignan (2006) introduced the term ‘metaphoreme’ to label a tendency or pattern in social cognitive and language dynamics. A metaphoreme is a bundle of stabilized but

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•

Pat . . . I was at a pretty low ebb. . . . and I was actually at that stage – er, . . . (1.0) prepared to walk away from the struggle. simply because I was – er, . . . (1.0) what X – totally fatigued and mentally drained.

as in extract 9, people use‘‘walk away from’’ to talk metaphorically about some action or choice that could have been taken but usually wasn’t, i.e. not to describe what they did, but to describe what they might have done, but chose not to. the objects of the verb, i.e. the things that might have been ‘‘walked away from,’’ usually had some hold on the person which made the leaving difficult or traumatic in some way. In extract 9, this was the political commitment that Pat had made. In the corpus, this was often some kind of commitment or responsibility. the choice ‘‘not to walk away’’ was usually the more difficult option. because the choice to ‘‘walk away from’’ was usually not taken, the verb was often not inflected, either because it was in its root form as part of a negative statement or because it was in a modal form. In extract 9, ‘‘prepared to walk away from’’ is a modal form. very often an adverb, such as ‘’’simply’’ or ‘‘never’’, intensified the choice to ‘‘walk away from.’’ In extract 9, ‘‘actually’’ is used before the phrase and ‘‘simply’’ is used after it; both serve to intensify the nature of the decision.

These patterns of use when put together show something more than just a fixed phrasal expression. The affective and the linguistic work together in offering speakers preferred forms together with optional ‘extras’ that enable them to

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metaphorically express the idea of making a decision to leave a particular social situation. These preferences and options constitute the metaphoreme <(not) walk away from >. The metaphoreme is an emergent attractor in the social cognitive dynamics of speech community language use. It displays reciprocal causality in the way the emergent structure of a termites’ nest shape individual termit behavior: multiple individual uses of language generate the metaphoreme while the metaphoreme also influences individual uses of language. In a specific instance of use, the metaphoreme exerts a ‘downwards force’ on speakers, who can adapt it for their circumstances but who are to some extent limited by its stabilized state. Any single adaptation for use can, however, start the system moving again and push the metaphoreme into a new pattern. So when Pat comes to talk about a difficult choice he has to make, the metaphoreme <(not) walk away from> is ready for use, and ‘comes to mind’. The final shape of the phrase will be fixed as it is spoken. While non-metaphorical uses of language also stabilize into particular form-meaning-affect bundles, they exhibit much greater variation in use than do metaphoremes, which seem to be quite tightly restricted (Deignan, 2005). We saw a similar phenomenon with the metaphor ‘‘a price to be paid for’’ in extract 5, where the forms, meanings, negative evaluation and uses stabilized in a fairly restricted way. Once this kind of stabilization has occurred in a language, the use of a metaphoreme will carry with it much useful information to indicate how it should be interpreted. The constraining of language choices available to participants in future discourse through the stabilization of metaphoremes at speech community level is one way in which we can take metaphor ‘‘out of the head and put . . . it into the cultural world’’ (Gibbs, 1999, p. 145). 5. Implications for metaphor research and theory A dynamic approach to metaphor performance has several implications for metaphor research and theory. First, a dynamical perspective shows how various cognitive, linguistic, social and cultural forces simultaneously shape, along different time-scales, people’s use and understanding of metaphoric discourse (also see Ko¨vecses, 2005 for discussion of how differential experiences and cognitive styles affect metaphor performance). Metaphor performance shares many of the characteristics of any self-organizing system in exhibiting both moments of stability and instability, as speakers express themselves as best they can in the heat of the moment, with varying systematic patterns of metaphor emerging over time. The dynamics of real-world metaphor performance in this way illustrates the tremendous interplay of the so-called ‘‘social’’ and ‘‘cognitive’’ forces in human thought and interaction, enough so that it makes little sense to simply demark the social from the cognitive in theories of human behavior. Moreover, as our analysis of Jo and Pat’s talk

suggests, what is typically considered to be ‘‘social’’ at the very least must be seen as three different interacting dynamical systems operating at the dyad, social group, and speech community levels. Second, the inclusiveness of many cognitive, linguistic, and social factors in motivating dynamic patterns of metaphor use suggests that people need not access or recruit full-fledged conceptual metaphors, or any other specific piece of knowledge such as speaker occupation, as an automatic part of their ordinary metaphor use. Conceptual metaphors, for instance, may be best thought of as basins of attraction in the phase space of the talking-and-thinking of a discourse community, which emerge from many different forces, ranging from neural to cultural, and are not fixed, stable entities encoded in the minds of individuals. In fact, our examination of the dynamics of metaphor performance in Jo and Pat’s conversations illustrates that little of the stability is necessarily linked to simple conceptual metaphors, as traditionally proposed by cognitive linguists. This conclusion does not invalidate psycholinguistic evidence suggesting that people apply their knowledge of some conceptual metaphors in certain instances of verbal metaphor production and understanding (Gibbs, 1994, 2006). But the psycholinguistic research only demonstrates in very general terms that past metaphorical understandings influence current aspects of verbal metaphor use, and has not explored the possibility that more specific systematic metaphors may have an important influence on metaphoric language performance. The discourse analysis presented here demonstrates that rather specific systematic metaphors, such as RECONCILIATION INVOLVES CHANGING A DISTORTED IMAGE OF THE OTHER, is more evident than are more general conceptual metaphors like UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING. Systematic metaphors may work at a preferred or optimum level along a specific – general continuum to best suit human discourse processing. One lesson from this study is that understanding metaphor performance requires us to explore instability in metaphor use, and not simply focus on systematic relations between isolated metaphorical statements. The theoretical equipment of the discourse dynamics approach (Cameron, 2007) has been used to explain the emergence of certain metaphorical ways of talking-and-thinking that spread across socio-cultural groups and become part of the linguistic and cognitive resources of members of those groups. An advantage of this type of explanation is that it allows reciprocal causality, both upwards from the individual through emergence and downwards as socio-cultural norms influence individuals, replacing the downwards only explanation that language use is motivated by conceptual metaphor. Finally, a dynamical perspective suggests that the intention to speak metaphorically, as opposed to using some other form of language, results from a person’s self-organizing tendency even before the intention to do so reaches awareness. A dynamical account of speaking in particular

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ways, such as to utter a metaphorical expression starts with the idea that self-organized dynamical structures are globally stable, even when there is disorder at lower levels. Yet complex adaptive systems, such as Jo’s, can be driven from equilibrium toward instability because of the interaction of external circumstances and the systems’ own internal dynamic processes. For example, Jo’s desire to convince Pat of her emotional difficulty likely precipitates instability at the neurological, cognitive, social, and linguistic levels. By forming an intention, say to convince Pat of her beliefs by saying something to him, a cognitive phrase change takes places that dissipates the disequilibria. Beyond restoring dynamic equilibrium, the new intention’s restructured contextual constraints reorganize the semantic space into a more differentiated and complex set of options. In this way, by formulating a prior intention, people avoid the need to consider and evaluate multiple possibilities for action, in this case determining what to say and how to say it. Once Jo forms the intention to let Pat know of her thoughts about reconciliation, the resulting cognitive reorganization circumscribes her talking metaphorically in saying ‘‘the end of that journey,’’ instead of making some other kind of remark. Thus, Jo’s ‘‘choice’’ of saying ‘‘end of that journey’’ rather than doing or saying something else can be ‘‘decided’’ by the interaction between her dynamics and the environment as the process ‘‘moves downstream’’ (to use the dynamical metaphor of moving through ‘‘landscapes’’). None of this, however, requires that she form an explicit intention requiring explicit deliberation to speak metaphorically. She can just decide to communicate her recent thought processes and the environmental constraints take care of the fine-grained details of how this intention is manifested in real-world behavior. References Alibali, M. W., Heath, D. C., & Myers, H. J. (2001). Effects of visibility between speaker and listener on gesture production: Some gestures are meant to be seen. Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 169–188. Brennan, S., & Clark, H. (1996). Conceptual pacts and lexical choices in conversation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22(6), 1482–1493. Cameron, L. (2003). Metaphor in Educational Discourse. London: Continuum.

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