Conceptual metaphor

In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the price of peace is rising") or the understanding of time in terms of money (e.g. "I spent time at work today").

A conceptual domain can be any mental organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, often perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain.^[1][2] This theory gained wide attention in the 1990s and early 2000s, although some researchers question its empirical accuracy.^[3]

The conceptual metaphor theory proposed by George Lakoff and his colleagues arose from linguistics, but became of interest to cognitive scientists due to its claims about the mind, the brain and their connections to the body. There is empirical evidence that supports the claim that at least some metaphors are conceptual.^[4] However, the empirical evidence for some aspects of the theory has been mixed. It is generally agreed that metaphors form an important part of human verbal conceptualization, but there is disagreement about the more specific claims conceptual metaphor theory makes about metaphor comprehension. For instance, metaphoric expressions of the form X is a Y (e.g. My job is a jail) may not activate conceptual mappings in the same way that other metaphoric expressions do. Furthermore, evidence suggests that the links between the body and conceptual metaphor, while present, may not be as extreme as some conceptual metaphor theorists have suggested. ^[5]

Furthermore, certain claims from early conceptual metaphor theory have not been borne out. For instance, Lakoff asserted that human metaphorical thinking seems to work effortlessly,^[6] but psychological research on comprehension (as opposed, for example, to invention) has found that metaphors are actually more difficult to process than non-metaphoric expressions.^{[citation needed]} Furthermore, when metaphors lose their novelty and become conventionalized, they eventually lose their status as metaphors and become processed like ordinary words (an instance of grammaticalization).^{[citation needed]} Therefore, the role of the conceptual metaphor in processing human thinking is more limited than what was claimed by some linguistic theories.^{[5][need quotation to verify]}