PERSPECTIVE OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS
Nguyễn Thị Trung1
Abstract: Idioms play an important role in social interactions. The capture of idiom meanings is of great significance in facilitating language users to communicate more effectively and meaningfully. This paper presents an analysis of human body related idioms from cognitive linguistics perspective with a view to enabling learners of English to make sense of idioms’ figurative meanings.
Key words: idioms, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphors 1. Introduction
How to interpret the meaning of idioms in English is a matter of great concern as most of English learners find it hard to understand the meaning of many idioms in English. According to the so-called “classical view”, an idiom is a group of words in a fixed order with arbitrary meaning, that cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its components but that has a separate meaning of its own. As far as cognitive linguistics is concerned, however, most of idioms are thought to be products of human conceptualization process of the world; in other words, idioms are motivated rather than arbitrary as Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij and Elisabeth Piirainen (2005) stated. In this paper, some English idioms denoting parts of human body are analyzed in terms of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) frame of conceptual metaphor in order to give an insight into the predictability of their meanings.
2. Content
2.1. Conceptual Metaphor
2.1.1. Working Mechanism of Conceptual Metaphor
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) proposes in the book Metaphors we live by that metaphor can be found in ordinary everyday language and the metaphor employed in people’s daily life reflects their thinking systems, beliefs and concepts. Language users are usually uncognizant of the fact that the language they use for daily communication is metaphorical. This is different from literature which describes metaphor as a form of figurative language to provoke emotions and visualize images that are conveyed in poems, plays, stories and novels.
Lakoff and his colleagues use evidence from everyday conventional linguistic
expressions to infer the existence of metaphorical relations or mappings between conceptual domains in the human mind. Lakoff’s primary purpose in developing the conceptual theory of metaphor is to identify the relevant features of conventional figurative units and how metaphorical mappings between target domain and source domain have guided human thinking, reasoning and acting.
“…Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” say Lakoff and Johnson (1980:3)
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) give an example of metaphorical language use about the metaphorical concept TIME IS MoNEY to give us insight into the metaphorical nature of time used by English speakers. It is found that there are several expressions about time in English; for example, “You’re wasting my time” or “ I’ve invested a lot of time in her”.
It is interesting to find that everyday abstract concepts like time, emotion, states, thoughts, … turn out to be metaphorical. Time mentioned above is a valuable commodity. It is a limited resource that we use to accomplish our goals. We use our practical knowledge about money, about the limitation of resources and value to conceptualize time. Because of the way that the concept of work developed in Western culture is typically associated with the time it takes; time is precisely evaluated by the quantity, and the payment for hour, week, or year of work as usual.
In the view of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is defined as understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another domain. For instance, the metaphor involving understanding one domain “love” is conveyed in terms of a very different domain of experience “ journey”, which is realized by a process of mapping.
Each metaphor has a source domain (the comparison point), a target domain (the starting point), and a source-to-target mapping.
The source domain is a representation of word properties that native speakers have concepts about. It is typically less abstract and complex than the target domain.
In “Love is a journey”, the conceptual domain of “journey” is considered being less abstract than that of “love”.
What constitutes the “love is a journey” metaphor is the ontological mapping across conceptual domains, from the source domain of “journey” to the target domain of “love”. The metaphor is not only a matter of language, but of thought and reason as
well. The mapping is primary in that it endorses the use of the source domain language and inference patterns for target domain concepts. The mapping is conventional;
that is, it is a fixed part of our conceptual system, one of our conventional ways of conceptualising love relationships. (Lakoff, 1993:208)
The mapping is, therefore, the systematic set of correspondences that exists between constituent elements of the source domains and the target ones. In the example mentioned above, the mapping tells us precisely how love is being conceptualized as a journey.
2.1.2. Kinds of Conceptual Metaphors
According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), conceptual metaphors can generally be classified as orientational metaphor, structural metaphor, ontological metaphor, and container metaphor.
2.1.2.1. Orientational Metaphor
orientational metaphor is also called spatialization as it is related to our perception of space: up and down, in and out, front and back, on and off, deep and shallow, central and peripherial. Spatial orientations are directly grounded in the most basic experience of human beings and the experience in sensing orientations in the physical world.
Hence, it is natural that we use basic orientation concepts derived from our constant interactions with our environments and experience of this kind to conceive of more abstract concepts such as emotions, social status health condition, ideas, quantity, etc.
orientational metaphor maps the orientational concepts in the source domain onto the abstract target domain with a spatial orientation such as SAD IS DoWN. The fact that the concept “sad” is oriented down leads to English expressions like “He is down in the dumps.” which means “He is in a depressed mood”.
2.1.2.2. Structural Metaphor
Another group of conceptual metaphor is structural metaphor, which allows us to do much more than just orienting concepts, grouping them or quantifying them.
Structural metaphor enables us to use one highly structured and clearly delineated concept to structure another (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). In other words, in structural metaphor, one concept is understood and expressed in terms of another structured concept. Structural metaphor makes it possible to use the words related to one concept to talk about another concept.
Like orientational metaphor, the essence of structural metaphor is based on systematic correlations within our experience. For instance, the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR in which argument, a verbal exchange of dialogue and war, an armed conflict are two different phenomena. In this case, one concept metaphorically structured in terms of another enables us to conceptualize an argument in terms of something that we understand more easily, that is, armed conflict.
2.1.2.3. Ontological Metaphor
In addition to orientational metaphor and structural metaphor, ontological metaphor is another important form of conceptual metaphor. As human’s primary way of existence is substantial, our experience of physical objects and substances provides a further basis for understanding the world and ourselves beyond mere orientation.
Thanks to those experiences, we can pick out parts of those experiences and treat them as discrete entities or substances of a uniform kind. once we can identify our experiences as entities or substances, we can refer to them, categorize them, group them, and quantify them and, by this means, reason about them. ontological metaphor is, thus, essentially the process of reification of abstract nature and outline their boundaries in space. It is generated when our experience with physical objects and substances make it possible to understand abstract intangible concepts such as feelings, thoughts, ideas, emotions, psychological activities and states as concrete tangible entities and substances.
ontological metaphor serves diverse purposes. Take the experience of rising prices, which can be metaphorically viewed as an entity via the noun “inflation” as example. ontological metaphor gives a concept of “inflation” in such sentence as
“Inflation is lowering our standard of living” and “Inflation is hacking us into a corner”.
In these cases, viewing “inflation” as an entity allows us to refer to it, quantify it, identify a particular aspect of it, see it as a cause, and even believe that we understand it. Thus, ontological metaphor gives us the ability to talk about abstract phenomena thanks to the reified capacity of our perceptions.
2.1.2.4. Container Metaphor
Another kind is the container metaphor. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), human beings are physical containers with boundaries. This is also used for other physical objects and non-physical objects such as events, actions, emotions, activities, states with definite boundaries as well.
Each part of the human body is a container. For example, the head of the container of human brain, the highest authority which controls all human activities while the heart or liver contain human sentiments and will. Each container is a cognitive metaphor. In the English idiom “have a good head for”, the word “head” functioning as a container means “being smart or good at something”.
2.2. Human body related idiom analysis from cognitive linguistics perspective of conceptual metaphors
According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), our conceptual system plays a central part in defining our daily realities and most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one concept in terms of another.
Gibbs (1997: 142) states that ‘idioms do not exist as separate semantic units within the lexicon, but actually reflect coherent systems of metaphorical concepts’. In deed, idioms are formed together with the formation of concepts in human reasoning and behavior. An important premise of cognitive linguistics is “when engaging in any linguistic activity, we also unconsciously mobilize a lot of cognitive abilities and cultural knowledge, establish the interlacing relationships, and handle huge amount of information” (Fauconnier, 2004).
Lakoff (1987:446) suggests that people have in their minds large sets of conventional images of the world around them, depending upon which specific culture they belong to. once the cognitive map about relationship between the source concept and target concept is made, we can think about finding the similarities in people’s world recognition in order to predict the metaphorical meaning. He does not tend to confirm that the meaning of idioms is predictable just from the meaning of the words which constitute the idiom. However, when the cognitive images of the same object or phenomenon in different ethnic groups coincides, the ability to speculate on the meaning of idiom is quite high, especially with human body related idioms whose meanings are often more comprehensible due to the meaning of its constituent elements because we all share common conventional images of parts of our bodies.
one example can be found in the way we learn the meaning of the English idiom
“to put one’s head in a noose”. In order to interpret its overall meaning, we should first find from the idiom the key words, the words having cognitive images. In this case, the word with a cognitive image is the word “head”, normally conceptualized in our mind as signifying life. It is presumed from our conventional knowledge “to put one’s head in a noose” literally means setting one’s life at great risk. Thus, the meaning of this idiom can be inferred as “to get oneself into an extremely dangerous situation”. It is obvious that the human head and life share the same conceptual domain and the idiom can thus be partially comprehensible due to the meaning of word “head”, a constituent part.
Another example of conceptual metaphor which motivates many idioms in English is THE HEAD IS A CoNTAINER. Since we know that head can be hold to be the most significant part of the human body, the place of intellect and thought, we can say that THE HEAD IS A CoNTAINER FoR THoUGHTS.The conceptual metaphor facilitates the referring of the meaning of the idiomatic phrase “to use your head” as“to think about something to solve a problem”. It is clear that the conceptual domain of human “head”
partly motivates the creation and use of linguistic expressions. The English idiom “to have your head in the clouds”, meaning “you are physically present but your mind and thoughts are somewhere else” or “you are not paying attention to what is happening” is interpretable as a result of “head” and “cloud”, its constituent units. In order to interpret the meaning of the English idiom “to shake one’s head”, we can base on the conceptual metaphor DISAGREEMENT IS SHAKING oNE’S HEAD. our daily experience tells
us that the most usual conventional gesture for people to express disagreement with something is turning the head from one side to another. When seeing somebody shaking his head, we know that he is expressing his disapproval or disagreement with something or someone. With the help of our conventional knowledge and the conceptual metaphor DISAGREEMENT IS SHAKING oNE’S HEAD, the meaning of this idiom “to express disagreement” is interpretable.
Although the conceptual domain of the human face is not as significant as that of human head, when examined, it can reveal a lot of interesting outlook about the way people perceive the face. The face is likely to be the first thing people look at when they meet one another. It may be the best indicator of a person’s emotions.
The facial expressions help us to get a sense of someone’s feeling, whether happy or unhappy, angry or satisfied. It is likely that our perceptions of people’s faces and facial expressions will be stored in our minds as conceptual domains. The conceptual domain of the human face will include images of the shape, size, and parts of the face, as well as images of its functions which are reflected in the language people use when they speak about the face.
There are many idiomatic expressions in English which contain the word “face”
such as “to be faced with something”, which can be motivated by the conceptual metaphor CoNFRoNTING SoMEoNE oR SoMETHING IS LooKING AT THE FACE oF SoMEoNE oR SoMETHING. our general conventional knowledge helps us understand that when being confronted with a problem, we have to look at it realistically and start to solve it from the beginning. In the same way, when we need to negotiate something, we usually talk with other people directly in order to reach an agreement on a particular matter. As a result, the meaning of the English idiom “face- to- face” which refers to “in person” can be established.
Human eyes are considered an important means of interpersonal communication.
A person’s eyes reveal much about how people are feeling or what they are thinking.
The way human eyes conceptualized seems to be reflected in the language people use, particularly in idiomatic expressions. Therefore, it is extremely interesting to examine idiomatic phrases containing the word “eyes” to make sense of the figurative meaning of many expressions. Take the expression “to keep one’s eyes open” as an example.
It seems clear from our experience that when we have to pay attention to something, our gaze is directed towards that activity to fully supervise it. The idiomatic meaning of the expression “to be fully aware of something” is likely connected with the literal meaning by people’s conventional knowledge of one of the visible signs of full attention. The conceptual metaphor THE EYES ARE CoNTAINERS can motivate the idiomatic meaning of some idioms in English. The English idiom “to be able to tell from someone’s eyes” implies we can guess someone’s intentions or thoughts when looking into his or her eyes.
When examining English idioms containing the word “nose”, we can get the knowledge people have about the size, shape, position, and function of this part of the human body to find out how people build up this part of the body in real life. The meaning of the English idiom “to poke your nose into one’s affair” is “to interfere in another person’s private business” is likely to be assessable with the help of our conventional knowledge as well as on the conceptual metaphor To BE INTRUSIVE IS To STICK THE NoSE INTo SoMETHING. In addition, the comprehension of the English idiom “to keep someone’s nose to the grindstone” as “to keep someone working or studying hard” is arrived at due to our general established knowledge that when someone is concentrated on working or studying, his nose is almost touching
“the grindstone” signifying work in general.
The hands can be described as human indispensable tools. We use them to perform all kinds of activities including writing, holding things, manipulating things or communicating. The handshake is commonly done upon meeting, greeting, offering congratulations, expressing gratitude, or sealing an agreement. Hands have been widely used in our linguistic expressions, especially idioms. The way in which the hands are represented in language enables us to establish some kinds of conceptual basis for people’s perceptions of the size, shape, and parts, as well as the various uses and the gestures they are connected with. Hence, it is useful to look at the conceptual metaphors which underlie them to make sense of their figurative meanings. For instance, the meaning of the idiom “to give someone a hand” which indicates “to help someone”
seems clear to us because when being asked to assist someone, we ‘lend’ our hands to them in carrying out the activity. It is this subconscious knowledge which makes it possible to understand how the human hands are conceptualized in our mind.
In inspecting the English idiom “to join hands”, the conceptual metaphor CooPERATIoN IS HoLDING HANDS seems to connect the literal meaning of the idiom with its figurative counterpart, “to cooperate”. Another example is the idiom “left hand does not know what the right hand is doing”. We know that when we perform a manual activity, we usually use both our hands in coordination in order to achieve the best results. When only one hand is used, we cannot easily gain our achievements as usual.
3. Conclusion
It is obvious that conceptual metaphor occupies a crucial role in the way in which people conceptualize the world around them. In the light of cognitive linguistics, most of our thinking is metaphorical and our everyday experience is reflected in the language we use. This gives an invaluable insight into the case of idiomatic language which can be widely seen as metaphorical.
From the analysis above, the meanings of many idioms making use of parts
constituent units through cognitive mechanism as we all share conventional perceptions of the size, shape, and functions of human body part. As a result, if we are cognizant of the conceptual metaphors which underlie languages in general and idioms in particular, we will be able to make much better use of idioms in communication.
REFERENCES
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[9] Lý Toàn Thắng (2005), Ngôn ngữ học tri nhận: Từ lý thuyết đại cương đến thực tiễn tiếng Việt, Nxb Khoa học Xã hội, Hà Nội.
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TRI NHẬN VỀ ẨN DỤ Ý NIỆM
NGUYEN THI TRUNG Quang Nam University Tóm tắt: Thành ngữ đóng vai trò quan trọng trong giao tiếp xã hội. Việc nắm bắt ý nghĩa thành ngữ hết sức cần thiết, hỗ trợ người sử dụng ngôn ngữ giao tiếp hiệu quả hơn và có ý nghĩa hơn. Bài viết này trình bày sự phân tích thành ngữ chỉ bộ phận dựa trên quan điểm của ngôn ngữ học tri nhận nhằm giúp người học tiếng Anh có thể hiểu được nghĩa biểu trưng của thành ngữ.
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