Metaphor And Metonymy

Guidelines: The assessment has two parts, a theoretical and a practical one. The paper should have not more than 2,000 words. If you use a text to analyse, it should not be counted within the word limit.


1. Choose a topic from the list below:


a. Categorization


b. Study of Word Meaning


c. Metaphor and Metonymy


d. Domains, frames andscripts


e. Conceptual Structure Model System (Talmy)


f. Cognitive Grammar (Langacker)






2. Write a bibliographical review on the topic chosen. Be extremely careful to comply with the rules of referencing and quoting.


3. Based on your theoretical proposal, analyze a text, a sample of students’ production, some teaching material, etc.


4. Finish yourpaper with a conclusion.






1. Metaphor and Metonymy




2. Bibliographical Review

When studying and analysing metaphors we can pose two central questions: “What are metaphors?” and‚ “What are metaphors for?” (Ortony 1993b: 15). The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to explain what metaphors are, what role they play in our daily life communication and how metaphors andcognition are related. On the other hand, we will attempt to illustrate how reality is construed by means of conceptual metaphors. In order to do so, we have extracted some verses of the Book of John from the Holy Bible because we believe that this book is the embodiment of faith manifested through literature. As we see it, there is “something” in these writings that all of us share and that leadsus to construe a mental representation of God that seems to be the same across cultures and throughout the times.

Traditionally, metaphors were the exclusive domain of rhetoric and were analysed as imaginative, poetic, ornamental devices. They were seen as a matter of language, not thought (Lakoff, 1993). Typically, the term metaphor was thus used to refer to the unexpected use of language inliterature (e.g. Shakespeare’s Life’s but a walking shadow), whereas conventional, familiarised metaphors (e.g. the foot of the mountain) were defined as “dead”, because the original semantic contradictions of such metaphors were not recognised as such by speakers. In more recent years, however, cognitive linguists have shown that these entrenched metaphors play a significant role in language.Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue that much of our everyday talk (and, hence, as they claim, much of our thought, and much of our reality) is structured metaphorically. This means that most of our abstract categories are organised cognitively by structures borrowed from more concrete categories. According to cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphors involve understanding one domain of experience interms of a very different domain of experience. They can be understood as a mapping from a source domain to a target domain (Reddy, 1979; Lakoff and Johnson, 1981; Lakoff, 1990, 1993; Turner, 1987, 1991). These mappings are realised linguistically. For instance, the conceptual metaphor LOVE-AS-JOURNEY is reflected in the linguistic expressions: “The relationship isn’t going anywhere”, “We are stuck”,“We may have to go our separate ways”.

According to Lakoff and Johnson, there are three different types of conceptual metaphors: Structural Metaphors, which refer to the organisation of one concept in terms of another (e.g. TIME IS MONEY), Orientational Metaphors, concerned with the (mostly spatial) organisation of a whole range of concepts (e.g. HAPPY IS UP/SAD IS DOWN) and OntologicalMetaphors, which relate to ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances (Lakoff / Johnson 1980) (e.g. INFLATION IS AN ENTITY). In this paper we shall focus on structural metaphors and orientational metaphors, however.

On the other hand, metonymy has received much less attention from cognitive linguists than metaphor, although it is probably even more basic...