What is it about?
Conceptual Metaphor Theory revolutionized the field by showing that metaphor is not just decorative language, but a fundamental part of everyday thinking. It argued that metaphors are built from repeated bodily experiences (correlation), not from pre-existing similarities. This paper re-examines that claim. It argues that similarity is, in fact, crucial to understanding metaphor, but we need a more sophisticated toolkit. The article introduces distinctions between low and high-level similarity, and structural versus non-structural similarity, to provide a clearer account of how different types of metaphors –from basic bodily correlations to complex analogies– actually work in our minds.
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Why is it important?
This work provides a crucial theoretical correction to a major theory in cognitive linguistics. By reintroducing and meticulously redefining “similarity,” it offers a more unified and powerful framework that can account for a wider variety of metaphorical phenomena, including complex analogies, that are difficult to explain through correlation alone. It challenges the field to move beyond the strict dichotomy of “correlation vs. similarity” and toward a more integrated model of how our bodily experiences and our abstract reasoning abilities work together to create meaning
Perspectives
Revisiting the concept of similarity felt like a return to a foundational principle of human cognition. It was intellectually rewarding to demonstrate that a richer, more nuanced understanding of resemblance can actually strengthen, rather than weaken, our account of embodied metaphor. This paper is a reminder that even in theoretical pursuits, the most elegant explanations often lie in reconciling seemingly opposing ideas into a more coherent whole.
Professor Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza
University of La Rioja
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Metaphor as a resemblance phenomenon, Cognitive Linguistic Studies, June 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/cogls.00110.rui.
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