I’m not sure how ‘burning’ these issues are as such but if they’re not, I’d propose that they deserve to have some kindling or other accelerant thrown on them.
1. What is the interaction between automatic metaphor processing and deliberate metaphor application?
Metaphors have always been an attractive subjects of study. But they have seen an explosionof interest since ‘Metaphors we live by’ by Lakoff and Johnson. In an almost Freudian turn, these previously seemingly superfluous baubles of language and mind, became central to how we think and speak. All of a sudden, it appeared that metaphors reveal something deeper about our mind that would otherwise remain hidden from view.
But our ability to construct and deconstruct metaphors was mostly left unexamined. But this happens ‘literally’ all the time. People test the limits of ‘metaphor’ through all kinds of dicoursive patterns. From, saying things like ‘X is more like Y’ to ‘X is actually Y’ or even ‘X is like Y because’.
How does this interact with the automatic, instantaneous and unconscious processing of language. (Let’s not forget that this is more common)
2. What is the relationship between the cognitive (conceptual) and textual metaphor?
Another way to pose this question is: What happens in text and cognition in between all the metaphors? Many approaches to the study of metaphor only focus on the metaphors they see. They seem to ignore all the text and thought in between the metaphorical. But, often, that is most of goes on.
With a bit of effort, metaphors can be seen everywhere but they are not the same kind of thing. ‘Time is money’, ‘stop wasting my time’, and ‘we spent some time together’ are all metaphorical and relying on the same conceptual metaphor of TIME IS A SOMETHING THAT CAN BE EXCHANGED. But they are clearly not doing the same job of work for the speaker and will be interpreted very differently by the listener.
But there’s even more at stake. Imagine a sentence like ‘Stop wasting my time. I could have been weeding my garden spending time with my children instead of listening to you.’ Obviously, the ‘wasting time’ plays a different role than in a sentence ‘Stop wasting my time. My time is money and when you waste my time, you waste my money.’ The coceptual underpinnings are the same, but way they can be marshalled into meaning is different.
Metaphor analysts are only too happy to ignore the context – which could often be most of the text. I propose that we need a better model for accounting for metaphor in use.
3. What are the different processes used to process figurative language
There are 2 broad schools of the psychology of metaphor. They are represented by the work of Sam Glucksberg and Raymond Gibbs. The difference between them can be summarised as ‘metaphor as polysemy’ vs ‘metaphor as cognition’. Metaphor, according to the first, is only a kind of additional meaning, words or phrases have. While the second approach sees it as a deep interconnected underpinning of our language and thought.
Personally, I’m much closer to the cognitive approach but it’s hard to deny that the experimental evidence is all over the place. The more I study metaphor, the more I’m convinced that we need a unified theory of metaphor processing that takes both approaches into account. But I don’t pretend I have a very clear idea of where to even start.
I think such a theory would also have to account for differences in how inviduals process metaphors. There are figurative language pathologies (e.g. gaps in ability to process metaphor is associated with autism). But clearly, there are also gradations in how well individuals can process metaphor.
Any one individual is also going to vary over time and specific instances in how much they are able and/or willing to consider something to be metaphorical. Let’s take the example of ‘education is business’. Some people may not consider this to be a metaphor and will consider it a straightforward descriptive statement along the lines of ‘dolphins are mammals’. Others will treat it more or less propositionally but will dispute it on the grounds that ‘education is education’, and therefore clearly not business. But those same people may pursue some of the metaphorical mappings to bolster their arguments. E.g. ‘Education is business and therefore, teachers need to be more productive.’ or ‘Education is not business because schools cannot go bankcrupt’.
Bonus issue: What are the cognitive foundations shared by metaphor with the rest of language?
This is not really a burning issue for metaphor studies so much as it is one for linguistics. Specifically semantics and pragmatics but also syntax and lexicography.
If we think of metaphor as conceptual domain (frame) mapping, we find that this is fundamental to all of language. Our understanding of attributes and predicates relies on the same ability to project between 2 domains as does understanding metaphor. (Although, there seems to be some additional processing burden on novel metaphors).
Even seemingly simple predicates such as ‘is white’ or ‘is food’ require a projection between domains.
Compare:
- Our car is white.
- Milk chocolate is white.
- His hair is white.
Our ability to understand 1 – 3 requires that we map the domain of the ‘subject’ on to the domain of the ‘is white’ predicate. Chocolate is white through and through whereas cars are only white in certain parts (usually not tires). Hair, on the other hand, is white in different ways. And in fact, ‘is white’ can never be fully informative when it comes to hair because there are too many models. In fact, it is even possible to have opposite attributes mean the same thing. ‘Nazi holocaust’ and ‘Jewish holocaust’ are both use to label the same event (with similar frequency) and yet it is clear that they refer to one event. But this ‘clarity of meaning’ depends on projections between various domains. Some of these include ‘encyclopedic knowledge’. For instance, ‘Hungarian holocaust’ does not possess such clarity outside of specialist circles.
It appears that understanding simple predicates relies on the same processes as understanding metaphor does. What makes metaphor special then? Do we perhaps need to return to a more traditional view of metaphor as a rhetorical device but change the way we think about language?
That is what I’ve been doing in my thinking about language and metaphor but most linguistic theories treat these as unremarkable phenomena. This leads them to ignore some pretty fundamental things about language.