METAPHOR AND CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE

Abstract

Cognitive linguistics has long argued that metaphor does not belong exclusively to language, but rather that it is a competence that is based on the human ability to conceive one domain of experience in terms of another. Thus understood, metaphor cannot be anything but a conceptual phenomenon. Nevertheless, few cognitive linguists have taken any pains to catalogue metaphorical manifestations in nonlinguistic domains. In this paper, we suggest that it is indeed possible to find support that metaphor is a conceptual process in spheres of cognition that are not strictly linguistic in nature. To do so, we discuss various types of evidence, ranging from its role in logical-mathematical reasoning in children in the preoperational phase of development, the cognitive ergonomics of graphical user interfaces in computer programming, and some of the latest results from the field of cognitive psychology concerning whorfian effects in the conceptualization of time as well as the effects of space in emotional memory