A Categorical Perspective On Metaphor

Metaphor is a pervasive characteristic of human thought and language. Studies of metaphor haveundergone roughly two stages: metaphor as linguistic entities and metaphor as a cognitive mechanism.Cun~nt1y, metaphor is an interdisciplinaiy topic that is overwhelmingly approached by cognitive psychologists,psycholinguists and, in particular, cognitive linguists. What is more significant; there has been a shill inmetaphor research 揻rom language to categories?Cacciaii & Glucksberg, 1994: 461). Categorization has cometo be recognized as an essential aspect of metaphor.Traditional theories on categorization in both philosophy and psycholog~ despite their ontological andepistemological significance and valuable insights into human cognition, shed little light on metaphoricalcategorization. The Conceptual Base View of categorizalion, which began as an attempt to explain how peoplecould make conceptual connections between novel proverbs and their inteipretations, connections lbat 揳ppearto transcend the capabilities of available linguistically motivated psycholinguistic theories?Ilofflnan &Honeck, 1987: 136), serves as the hitheito most appropriate theoiy applicable to the categorical aspect ofmetaphor. It can be summarized in the way below (Honeck, 1985; Honeck et al., 1987; Hoffiuian & Honeck,1987): (a) categories and in particular abstract categories are organized around conceptual bases; (b) aconceptual base is an abstract entity rather than a set of matching features, a prototype or a known exemplar; (c)a conceptual base is general and amodal because it integrates cross-modal information; (d) a conceptual base isnonlinguistic and nonimagistic but rather the foundation for both verbal and imagistic experience; (e) aconceptual base is generative and therefore categorizes an indefinitely large group of instances or events that areliterally and referentially distinguishable and yet which, from the perspective of the inteipretei; shaxe some soitof featureless family resemblance; (f) comprehension of common proverbs, and for that matter, many types offigurative language formulae such as metaphor, idioms, allusions, etc. involves featureless family resemblanceinstead of the mapping of literal features; it is based on categories that are abstractly related and deeplyembedded in cultural contexts.The Conceptual Base View of categorization, though originally proposed for proverb comprehension andproduction, is applicable to metaphorical categorization on the grounds of the sinictural, functional and74A Categorical Perspective on Metaphorcategorical similarities between metaphor and pmverb, the fhvourable results fi~m psychological research onmetaphor, the divergence between CBVC and traditional psychological vie~ on categorization, and thecompatibility of CBVC with Lakoff and his colleagues?view of conceptual metaphor. Furthermore, theConceptual Base View converges with the interaction view of metaphor with relation to conceptual basis,experiential basis and reorganization of categories. Metaphorical categorization, central to metaphor productionand comprehension and essential to human cognition and language in general, does not take place bycomputing the features possessed by the topic and the vehicle categories involved in a metaphor. Instead, thetwo categories are unified via a conceptual base. Metaphorical categorization is also based on the experiencesof cognitive agents both ontogenetically and anthmpogenetically. In addition, it not only manipulatessimilarities and categories already there but creates similarities and categories as well. The essence of metaphor,as Lakoff and his colleagues argue, is to understand one domain of experience in temis of another. Thecognitive forte engendered by metaphor arises out of the interaction between the topic category and the vehiclecategory in the process of metaphor production and comprehension. In the process of metaphorical interaction,the vehic...