Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor - Softcover

Kovecses, Zoltan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0190656719 ISBN 13: 9780190656713

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

In Where Metaphors Come From, Zoltán Kövecses proposes a metaphorical grounding that augments and refines conceptual metaphor theory according to which conceptual metaphors are based on our bodily experience. While this is certainly true in many cases of metaphor, the role of the body in metaphor creation can and should be reinterpreted, and, consequently, the body can be seen as just one of the several contexts from which metaphors can emerge (including the situational, discourse, and conceptual-cognitive contexts) - although perhaps the dominant or crucial one.

Kövecses is a leader in CMT, and his argument in this book is more in line with what has been discovered about the nature of human cognition in recent years; namely, that human cognition is grounded in experience in multiple ways - embodiment, in a strict sense, being just one of them (see Barsalou, 2008; Gibbs, 2006; Pecher and Zwaan, 2005). In light of the present work, this is because cognition, including metaphorical cognition, is grounded in not only the body, but also in the situations in which people act and lead their lives, the discourses in which they are engaged at any time in communicating and interacting with each other, and the conceptual knowledge they have accumulated about the world in the course of their experience of it.

About this title

About the Author

Zoltán Kövecses is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190656719
• ISBN 13: 9780190656713
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 234