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The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and ThoughtRaymond W. Gibbs Jr.
The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought offers the most comprehensive collection of essays in multidisciplinary metaphor scholarship that has ever been published. These essays explore the significance of metaphor in language, thought, culture, and artistic expression. There are five main themes of the book: the roots of metaphor, metaphor understanding, metaphor in language and culture, metaphor in reasoning and feeling, and metaphor in nonverbal expression. Contributors come from a variety of academic disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, literature, education, music, and law.
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This page intentionally left blank The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought offers the most comprehensive collection of essays in multidisciplinary metaphor scholarship that has ever been published. These essays explore the significance of metaphor in language, thought, culture, and artistic expression. There are five main themes of the book: the roots of metaphor, metaphor understanding, metaphor in language and culture, metaphor in reasoning and feeling, and metaphor in nonverbal expression. Contributors come from a variety of academic disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, literature, education, music, and law. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of The Poetics of the Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding; Intentions in the Experience of Meaning; and Embodiment and Cognitive Science. He is co-editor of Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics and of Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader and is editor of the journal Metaphor and Symbol. His research interests include psycholinguistics, figurative language, and pragmatics. The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought Edited by RAYMOND W. GIBBS, JR. University of California, Santa Cruz CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521841061 © Cambridge University Press 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2008 ISBN-13 978-0-511-43673-4 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-521-84106-1 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-60086-6 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents Contributors PART I: INTRODUCTION Metaphor and thought: The state of the art Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. PART II: page ix 3 THE ROOTS OF METAPHOR 1 The neural theory of metaphor George Lakoff 17 2 Philosophy's debt to metaphor Mark Johnson 39 3 Rethinking metaphor Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner 53 4 How metaphors create categories – quickly Sam Glucksberg 67 5 A deflationary account of metaphors Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson 84 PART III: METAPHOR UNDERSTANDING 6 Metaphor as structure-mapping Dedre Gentner and Brian Bowdle 7 How the mind computes the meaning of metaphor: A simulation based on LSA Walter Kintsch 109 129 v vi CONTENTS 8 Is metaphor unique? Rachel Giora 143 9 Metaphor, imagination, and simulation: Psycholinguistic evidence Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., and Teenie Matlock 161 10 Metaphor comprehension and the brain Seana Coulson PART IV: 177 METAPHOR IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 11 Metaphor and talk Lynne Cameron 197 12 Metaphor and education Graham Low 212 13 Metaphor in literature Elena Semino and Gerard Steen 23 2 14 Metaphor from body and culture Ning Yu 247 15 Metaphor, semantics, and context Josef Stern 262 16 Corpus linguistics and metaphor Alice Deignan 280 17 Metaphor and poetic figures Yeshayahu Shen 295 PART V: METAPHOR IN REASONING AND FEELING 18 Metaphor and artificial intelligence: Why they matter to each other John A. Barnden 3 11 19 Conceptual metaphor, human cognition, and the nature of mathematics Rafael Núñez 339 20 What is the "color" of law? Steven L. Winter 3 63 21 Metaphor and emotion Zoltán Kövecses 3 80 22 Putting it in context: Metaphor and psychotherapy Linda M. McMullen 3 97 23 Metaphor and psychoanalysis Antal F. Borbely 412 24 Crossing the senses in metaphorical language Cristina Cacciari 425 CONTENTS PART VI: vii METAPHOR IN NONVERBAL EXPRESSION 25 Metaphor and art John M. Kennedy 447 26 Metaphor in pictures and multimodal representations Charles Forceville 462 27 Metaphor, gesture, and thought Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller 483 28 Metaphor and music Lawrence M. Zbikowski 5 02 Author index 5 25 Subject index 537 Contributors John A. Barnden School of Computer Science The University of Birmingham Birmingham, United Kingdom Antal F. Borbely New York Psychoanalytic Institute New York, NY, USA Brian Bowdle Department of Psychology Grand Valley State University Allendale, MI, USA Cristina Cacciari Department of Biomedical Sciences University of Modena Modena, Italy Lynne Cameron Centre for Language and Communication The Open University Milton Keynes, United Kingdom Alan Cienki Department of Language and Communication Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Seana Coulson Department of Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA, USA Alice Deignan School of Education University of Leeds Leeds, United Kingdom Gilles Fauconnier Department of Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA, USA Charles Forceville Department of Media Studies University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands ix x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Dedre Gentner Department of Psychology Northwestern University Evanston, IL, USA Teenie Matlock Cognitive Science Program University of California, Merced Merced, CA, USA Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. Department of Psychology University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA, USA Linda M. McMullen Department of Psychology University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, SK, Canada Rachel Giora Department of Linguistics Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv, Israel Cornelia Müller Department of Cultural Studies European University Viadrina Frankfurt Oder, Germany Sam Glucksberg Department of Psychology Princeton University Princeton, NJ, USA Mark Johnson Department of Philosophy University of Oregon Eugene, OR, USA John M. Kennedy Department of Psychology University of Toronto at Scarborough Toronto, ON, Canada Rafael Núñez Department of Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA, USA Elena Semino Department of Linguistics and English Language Bowland College Lancaster University Lancaster, United Kingdom Walter Kintsch Institute of Cognitive Science University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA Yeshayahu Shen Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv, Israel Zoltán Kövecses Department of American Studies Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Hungary Dan Sperber Institut Jean Nicod (EHESS/ ENS/ CNRS) Paris, France George Lakoff Department of Linguistics University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA, USA Gerard Steen Department of English Language and Culture Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Graham Low Department of Educational Studies University of York York, United Kingdom Josef Stern Department of Philosophy University of Chicago Chicago, IL, USA LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Mark Turner Department of Cognitive Science Case Western University Cleveland, OH, USA Deirdre Wilson University College London London, United Kingdom and CSMN, University of Oslo Oslo, Norway Steven L. Winter Wayne State University Law School Detroit, MI, USA Ning Yu Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics University of Oklahoma Norman, OK, USA Lawrence M. Zbikowski Department of Music University of Chicago Chicago, IL, USA xi The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought Part I INTRODUCTION Metaphor and Thought The State of the Art Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. Metaphor and Thought: The State of the Art The publications of the first and second editions of Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge University Press) in 1979 and 1993 , respectively, under the editorship of Andrew Ortony, were monumental events in the world of metaphor research. The 1979 edition was the first interdisciplinary volume devoted to metaphor that included contributions from notable scholars in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and political science. Many of the articles in that volume are now classics and continue to be frequently cited among active metaphor researchers. Several other articles from scholars in linguistics and psychology were added to the 1993 edition, which too has been widely read and discussed. But much has changed in the world of metaphor since 1993 . There is now a huge body of empirical work from many academic disciplines that clearly demonstrates the ubiquity in metaphor in both everyday and specialized language. Most importantly, there is also significant research indicating the prominence of metaphor in many areas of abstract thought and in people's emotional and aesthetic experiences. Metaphor is not simply an ornamental aspect of language, but a fundamental scheme by which people conceptualize the world and their own activities. The primary purpose of the Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought is to describe some of the key developments in contemporary metaphor research that detail the contribution of metaphor to human cognition, communication, and culture. There are several distinguishing features of this handbook. First, metaphor scholarship has significantly advanced from purely speculative accounts of how metaphor works and is understood, primarily based on the analysis of a few, isolated linguistic examples. There is now much greater attention to the ways that context shapes metaphor use and understanding. Much of this work comes from experimental studies, but an increasing number of corpus studies, both small and large scaled, demonstrate some of the complexities associated with making general claims about the structure and 3 4 RAYMOND W. GIBBS, JR. function of metaphors in language and thought. Indeed, many of the chapters in this volume address the benefits and limitations of different methods for doing metaphor analysis, both at a local level for identifying individual instances of metaphor in language and nonverbal expression and at a global level for reliably inferring larger-scale patterns of metaphorical thought from public manifestations of metaphor. More generally, the vast literature on metaphor has used a variety of analytic techniques to investigate empirically the broad extent of metaphor in human life. Second, there is now a greater emphasis on situating metaphor studies within broad, comprehensive models of human cognition, communication, and culture. Although metaphor is clearly an important topic in its own right, the empirical study of metaphor has broader implications for theories of mind and meaning, especially in showing the prominence of metaphorical thought in everyday life. But theories of metaphor are now, more than ever, linked to detailed theoretical frameworks that aim to describe the underlying nature of language, thought, and communication. Many of the authors in this volume view metaphor as part of a larger system of human cognition and communicative practices and consequently do not believe that verbal and nonverbal metaphor requires extraordinary human effort to be produced and understood. Moreover, seeing metaphor as a natural outcome of human minds also points to new ways in which metaphor is related to a variety of other linguistic forms and cognitive activities. Third, and related to the previous point, metaphor scholarship now focuses greater attention to how metaphor comes into being in both thought and communication. The traditional interest in metaphor centered on the question of how people understand novel metaphorical language, with the implicit assumption that the creation of these poetic figures was attributed to special individuals with significant artistic talents. But the articles in this collection place greater emphasis on where metaphors come from (e.g., brains, bodies, and culture), why metaphor is so prominent in language and thought, and how public manifestations of metaphor (e.g., language, art, music) are specifically constrained by different communicative and emotional forces. In this way, the scope of metaphor studies has expanded enormously in recent years to cover the spectrums from brains to culture and from language and gesture to art and music. Fourth, the incredible rise in the sheer number of scholarly works on metaphor in different academic fields illustrates a heightened sensitivity to metaphor. This increased attention demonstrates how scholars in virtually every discipline (e.g., mathematics, law, music, art) can contribute to understanding the functions and meanings of metaphor. Thus, research on metaphor is now as multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary, as perhaps any topic being studied in contemporary academia. One result of this explosion of research on metaphor is a marvelous interaction between basic and applied scholarship, such that findings on the ways that metaphors are employed in realworld contexts offer important constraints on general theories of metaphor. Metaphor does not always appear in nice, neat packages that can be easily plucked out from some context for analysis. Speakers use metaphorical language, and engage in metaphorical thought, in complex, often contradictory patterns that make simple conclusions about both the ubiquity and structure of metaphor difficult to make. Rather than retreat back to made-up, isolated examples, many contemporary scholars exhibit great enthusiasm for uncovering the messy reality of metaphor use and the implications of such findings for comprehensive theories of metaphor. Fifth, the interdisciplinary nature of metaphor studies now allows for greater recognition of the complex ways that metaphor arises from the interaction of brains, bodies, languages, and culture. Most earlier work conducted within traditional disciplinary frameworks aims to singularly locate metaphor as part of, for example, language (linguistics), mind (psychology), or culture (anthropology), with few scholars ever acknowledging the ubiquity METAPHOR AND THOUGHT of metaphor in other domains of experience such as gesture, art, and music. This often created unproductive tension between metaphor scholars as individuals defended their own "turf " and methods as being the best way to understand the essence of metaphor and its interpretation. Contemporary metaphor scholarship, as seen in many of the present chapters, has properly shown how the analysis of specific metaphoric language in context, for instance, reveals the simultaneous presence of neural, linguistic, psychological, and cultural forces. This complexity, again, makes it difficult to offer sweeping, simplistic conclusions about metaphor, where it comes from and how it is used by real human beings in naturalistic contexts. But this trend to seek out language–mind–culture interactions in metaphor studies offers the best hope for understanding the prominence of metaphor in human understanding, yet one that appreciates the subtleties of human meaningmaking practices shaped by a variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic sources. Finally, several chapters in this volume give witness to the struggle that I refer to as the "paradox of metaphor," in which metaphor is creative, novel, culturally sensitive, and allows us to transcend the mundane while also being rooted in pervasive patterns of bodily experience common to all people. Traditional metaphor scholars, and metaphor enthusiasts, typically resist arguments, and empirical findings, either suggesting the conceptual roots or embodied foundation for metaphorical thought and language. These critics see metaphor as a special rhetorical device that enables us to transcend momentarily above the ordinary literal world. Linking metaphor to the body, or entrenched conceptual thought, as in the idea of "conceptual metaphor," seems to some as far too reductive and dismissive of the power of metaphoric language to reshape our imagination. Yet advocates of entrenched patterns of metaphorical thought readily acknowledge metaphor's ability in both verbal and nonverbal forms to create new modes of understanding often accompanied by special aes- 5 thetic pleasures. In many instances, however, creative, poetic metaphors are extensions of enduring schemes of metaphorical thought and not necessarily created de novo. Understanding how metaphor is both fundamental to many aspects of thought and yet special for creative language and artworks is a challenge taken up by several authors in this volume. My hope is that readers interested in the aesthetic qualities of metaphor will take the time to explore some of the proposals on the conceptual and embodied grounding for metaphorical thought and will see how this research draws connections between what is simultaneously ordinary and spectacular about metaphor. All of the authors contributing to this volume are distinguished scholars from different academic fields who have done important work on metaphor and related poetic figures. The interdisciplinary world of metaphor scholarship is so large, with literally hundreds of excellent researchers making new discoveries all the time. A handbook like this one can only provide a forum for a small subset of this outstanding group of researchers, but I am pleased to present the new thoughts of the present contributors because their work is among the most widely recognized and discussed within the field. Not surprisingly, there are many areas of disagreement among the present contributors both in terms of the methods employed to do metaphor analysis and the resulting theories proposed to account for different aspects of metaphor in language, thought, and culture. Yet I am happy with this diversity of methods and theories because the topic of metaphor and thought is not one that is likely to be comprehensively characterized by any one perspective. Contributors to this handbook were encouraged to write about their latest ideas but to do so in a way that readers new to the topic, or less familiar with the research on some facet of metaphor, will be readily able to recognize the significance of these ideas and proposals for ongoing thinking and research on metaphor. The handbook is divided into five general sections: (1) the roots of metaphor, (2) metaphor 6 RAYMOND W. GIBBS, JR. understanding, (3 ) metaphor in language and culture, (4) metaphor in reasoning and understanding, and (5 ) metaphor in nonverbal expression. I hasten to note, however, that each chapter in the volume addresses major foundational themes on the relations between metaphor, thought, and understanding. A brief overview of each contribution is presented. The Roots of Metaphor The first section offers several contrasting visions on where metaphor comes from and how metaphor serves as the often unknowing foundation for human thought. George Lakoff 's chapter describes new advances in the brain sciences and neural computation relevant to metaphor ("The Neural Theory of Metaphor"). Links between brain and body are central to understanding the nature of thought, and metaphor is no exception. The neural theory follows developments in simulation semantics in which the neural circuitry characterizing the meanings of words, like "grasp," is also activated when one imagines or perceives grasping. This sense of meaning as mental stimulation is applied to the creation and use of metaphorical patterns such as those associated with "grasping concepts." The neural theory therefore offers a coherent set of explanations for why there should be conceptual metaphors in the first place, how metaphorical inferences work, how metaphors differ from blends, and how primary and complex metaphors contribute to our understanding of abstract concepts and the meanings of words, complex expressions, and grammatical constructions. Metaphor scholars need not conduct neural computational work themselves, and Lakoff offers insights on how to apply the broad scope of the neural theory to address fundamental issues on metaphorical thought and language. Mark Johnson's chapter describes the importance of metaphor for the study of philosophy ("Philosophy's Debt to Metaphor"). Not only is metaphor a topic that has long interested philosophers, but philosophers use the same conceptual resources of metaphor as do any human being, often without any awareness, and indeed outright rejection, of the fact that they are doing so. Johnson shows how perennial questions in philosophy – What is mind and how does it work? What does it mean to be a person? What is the nature of reality? Is there such a thing as free will? What things or actions are morally good? – are all dependent on metaphor for their answers. Philosophical reasoning and theories often rest on a foundation of simple and complex metaphors. Johnson concludes that giving proper acknowledgment to metaphor, and metaphoric thinking, is essential to future progress in philosophy. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's chapter outlines recent theoretical advances on metaphor within conceptual blending theory ("Rethinking Metaphor"). Through a detailed analysis of the T I M E I S S P A C E metaphor, they demonstrate how metaphor interpretation requires elaborate integration networks and various techniques for building particular networks such as cobbling and sampling, compression, emergent structure, and overarching goals. These permanent features of cognition are not special to metaphor but can give rise to counterfactuals, analogies, categorizations, and metonymies. Nonetheless, the general framework of conceptual blending theory is capable of explicating various complexities of metaphorical thought and meaning that are difficult to describe within more traditional theories. Sam Glucksberg's chapter describes empirical research in favor of the idea that metaphors are comprehended through both categorization and comparison processes ("How Metaphors Create Categories – Quickly"). He first rejects the traditional assumptions that literal meanings are necessarily processed either before or in parallel to nonliteral meanings given experimental findings that when available, metaphorical meanings are automatically determined. Glucksberg then considers the idea that metaphors are understood entirely by METAPHOR AND THOUGHT comparison processes but claims instead that both literal and figurative comparison statements, including some similes, can be understood as implicit categorizations. Metaphors and similes are not identical because these two forms often communicate very different meanings for the same topic and vehicle terms. From this evidence, Glucksberg concludes that both categorization and comparison processes are used in metaphor and simile understanding, with apt metaphors working best as categorizations because the vehicle concept is an ideal example of the category it represents. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson outline their "relevance theory" perspective on metaphor in their chapter ("A Deflationary Account of Metaphors"). Under this view, speaking metaphorically is an example of "loose talk" that often is the best way to achieve optimal relevance. Even though verbal metaphors do not represent a completely accurate state of affairs, listeners are able to infer efficiently the appropriate contextual meanings of metaphors by creating ad hoc concepts following the principle of optimal relevance. Ad hoc concept construction is a process that is typical of metaphorical interpretations, but it is not exclusive to metaphors. In general, relevance theory maintains that metaphors are nothing special in terms of their processing, even if metaphors often convey special cognitive effects or meanings not easily communicated by more direct speech. Metaphor Understanding The second group of chapters presents various theories of how metaphors are understood based on different computational, behavioral, and neuroscience research. Dedre Gentner and Brian Bowdle argue in their chapter that metaphors and similes are understood with processes of similarity and analogy ("Metaphor as Structure-Mapping"). They describe how processes of structural alignment, inference projection, progressive abstraction, and re-representation of different domains 7 are critical to immediate processing of both metaphors and similes. Moreover, widespread conceptual metaphors may be best characterized as extended structuremappings between domains. Gentner and Bowdle then present their "career of metaphor" theory which claims that metaphors and similes typically evolve from being understood as novel comparison statements to being interpreted as category-inclusion statements in which the vehicle terms serve as the best instances of ad hoc categories. The "career of metaphor" hypothesis aims to offer a unified framework for understanding metaphor, analogy, and similarity. Walter Kintsch's chapter offers a computational theory of metaphor understanding based on the technique of "latent semantic analysis," or LSA ("How the Mind Computes the Meaning of Metaphor: A Simulation Based on Latent Semantic Analysis"). LSA operationalizes meaning in terms of high-dimensional semantic space, measured in terms of word co-occurrence, irrespective of their symbolic relationships, and is based on a corpus of 11 million words. Word senses within LSA are not fixed but emergent from both the context-free vector that represents a word in LSA space and the context in which a word is used. This model allows Kintsch to predict the metaphorical or literal meanings of various noun-is-a-noun phrases that accord with human participants' interpretations and aptness judgments. Simple metaphorical and literal language is therefore not understood by different processes as both can be comprehended by a model of human knowledge based on how word meanings are represented that is objective and comprehensive. Rachel Giora's chapter explores psycholinguistic studies on whether people engage in different psychological processes understanding literal and nonliteral language use ("Is Metaphor Unique?"). Her discussion analyzes various theoretical models of figurative language interpretation, with special attention to metaphor, which make different predictions on both the early processes and late products of understanding. 8 RAYMOND W. GIBBS, JR. Giora forcefully argues that metaphor does not require distinct psychological processes to understand but that the salience of an utterance's meaning primarily determines the speed with which it is understood, not whether it is literal or figurative. She goes on to suggest how the salient–nonsalient continuum accounts for many empirical findings in the experimental literature not explainable by alternative theories and provides insights into the aesthetic appreciation of poetic metaphor. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., and Teenie Matlock's chapter argues that part of our ability to make sense of metaphorical language, both individual utterances and extended narratives, resides in the automatic construction of a simulation, whereby we imagine performing the bodily actions referred to in the language ("Metaphor, Imagination, and Simulation: Psycholinguistic Evidence"). They describe empirical evidence from cognitive science showing the importance of embodied simulations in different cognitive activities and discuss very recent findings from psycholinguistics on metaphoric language interpretation that is consistent with the idea that our bodily imaginations are actively recruited in metaphor use. This process of building a simulation, one that is fundamentally embodied in being constrained by past and present bodily experiences, has specific consequences for how verbal metaphors are understood and how cognitive scientists, more generally, characterize the nature of metaphorical language and thought. Seana Coulson reviews the major empirical findings on the neurological substrate of metaphor comprehension ("Metaphor Comprehension and the Brain"). Her discussion suggests that too much of this research assumes metaphor to be a homogenous category (e.g., metaphor and idioms are often grouped together), and that, somewhat surprisingly, there has been no empirical study of the effect of conceptual metaphors on the neurological processes involved in metaphoric language understanding. Coulson urges scientists to not simply seek the neural substrates of metaphor in tra- ditional language areas of the brain. Much recent research and theory points to how metaphor relies on interactions between auditory, visual, kinesthetic areas of the brain, and the entire human body in the physical–cultural world more generally. Metaphor in Language and Culture The third group of chapters examines the prominence and functions of metaphor in different contexts, including different languages and cultures. Lynne Cameron explores the ways that metaphor shapes, and is shaped by, ongoing talk ("Metaphor and Talk"). Her analysis reveals that metaphors are sporadic in discourse, sometimes appearing in thick clusters and sometimes absent altogether. Cameron discusses some of the ways that metaphor is signaled in talk and allows conversational participants to manage their interactions and come to joint understandings of various ideas, while in other instances, people's talk suggests their entirely different metaphoric understandings of ideas and events. She also strongly argues that claims about conceptual metaphor are too often divorced from real language use, and that each individual may have different versions of conceptual metaphors given their respective culturally contextualized experiences and interactions. Graham Low's chapter considers the impact of metaphor on teaching and learning, as well as on concepts of educational change ("Metaphor and Education"). He criticizes some notable past theories of educational concepts and processes, such as the idea of "generative metaphor," for failing to empirically demonstrate that people actually conceptualize situations in metaphoric, as opposed to metonymic, terms. Theoretical proposals about metaphor in education must not, therefore, be made apart from rigorous empirical analyses that are sensitive to context-sensitive differences between metaphor and metonymy. Low then examines the role of metaphor in foreign-language teaching and raises some METAPHOR AND THOUGHT critical questions about the indiscriminate application of cognitive theories of metaphor to classroom situations. He urges that educators pay greater attention to how metaphor is used at a discourse, and not just vocabulary, level, and that more discussion should be given to exactly what teachers want students to learn through their exposure to metaphor. Elena Semino and Gerard Steen consider in their chapter the ubiquity and functions of metaphor in literature ("Metaphor in Literature"). They note the paradox of metaphor in literature being both continuous and discontinuous with metaphorical language use in non-literary contexts. On the one hand, many literary metaphors are based in common metaphorical schemes of thought seen in non-literary discourse (e.g., political speeches and scientific writings), while, on the other hand, some literary metaphors are unique to their specific contexts in both form and functions. Semino and Steen explain how both points of view have validity and that understanding the distribution, function, and effects of metaphor in literature will require supplementary information from both corpus-linguistic and psycholinguistic studies. Ning Yu describes how metaphor emerges from the interaction between body and culture in his chapter ("Metaphor from Body and Culture"). He provides a detailed analysis of body-part terms for "face" in Chinese and English to show how metaphors are typically grounded in bodily experiences that are shaped by cultural understandings. Yu also shows how a decompositional analysis based on the distinction between primary and complex metaphors allows us to determine which aspects of metaphor are bodily or culturally based. Primary metaphors, derived from bodily experience, are likely to be widespread and universal, while complex metaphors, based on basic metaphoric and metonymic mappings and cultural beliefs, are likely to be more culturally specific. Josef Stern's chapter considers whether and how a semantic theory can account for the meanings of metaphors ("Metaphor, 9 Semantics, and Context"). Stern responds to two skeptical challenges to a semantic theory of metaphor regarding the difference between what words literally mean and can be used to say and the contextdependence of metaphorical meaning. He advances a semantic theory that elaborates how metaphor depends on the literal and how context has different roles in the communication of metaphorical meaning. More generally, Stern offers a philosophical account of how the semantic structures of metaphor help us understand its cognitive significance beyond its propositional content in context. Alice Deignan introduces the important advances on metaphor in corpus research ("Corpus Linguistics and Metaphor"). She presents detailed analyses showing how many classic cases of both linguistic and conceptual metaphor, often arising from consideration of single texts or analysts' own intuitions, are not exhibited in the same patterns when viewed from the perspective of large corpora studies. In some instances, data from experimental psycholinguistics on metaphor understanding may not accurately reflect what people ordinarily do because the metaphors studied do not follow typical collocational and syntactic patterns. Deignan argues that metaphor scholars must therefore be more sensitive to naturalistic language patterns in constructing experimental tests and broader theories of metaphor and suggests ways that corpora linguistics can aid researchers in achieving this goal. Yeshayahu Shen describes the relation of metaphor to several other poetic figures, notably, simile, zeugma, and synaesthetic metaphors, in his chapter ("Metaphor and Poetic Figures"). He aims to answer the difficult question – how can many novel figurative expressions whose meanings are difficult to describe often be so easy to understand? Shen argues that the cognitive "directionality" principle (i.e., metaphorical source domains tend to represent conceptually more accessible, concrete, and salient concepts than do target domains) accounts for various empirical findings on the distribution and comprehension of poetic figures. 10 RAYMOND W. GIBBS, JR. This work complements research on conceptual metaphor theory and experimental psycholinguistic studies of figurative language by demonstrating how the meanings and systematicity of many novel, poetic figures arise from the interaction of different linguistic conventions and fundamental cognitive principles. Metaphor in Reasoning and Feeling The fourth section of chapters highlights the role of metaphor in different forms of reasoning and in human feeling and expression. John A. Barnden's chapter offers an overview of why metaphor is central to many applications of work in artificial intelligence (AI) ("Metaphor and Artificial Intelligence: Why They Matter to Each Other"). He argues that metaphorical mappings can best be described in computational terms that concretely outline what gets mapped, the effects these mappings achieve, and how to avoid unwanted side effects of these mappings. Moreover, AI work shows the importance of reasoning about beliefs and uncertainty in metaphorical thinking and verbal metaphor interpretation, and how metaphor is integrated with metonymy in much inferential understanding. AI provides an excellent set of tools for doing metaphor research that requires scholars to be explicit about underlying mechanisms of thought and language central to metaphor theory. Rafael Núñez's chapter presents the case for an embodied, metaphorical understanding of many mathematical concepts ("Conceptual Metaphor, Human Cognition, and the Nature of Mathematics"). He offers an analysis of how various mathematical ideas are described in terms of metaphorical language and argues that such talks reflect metaphorically alive structuring of abstract concepts and thus are not dead metaphors. Núñez goes on to show how metaphoric gestures employed when people talk about mathematics provides important evidence on the psychological reality of metaphorical mathematics. Overall, mathematics arises naturally from the interactions of our brains, bodies, and experiences with the world, and conceptual metaphor has a big part in the creation and maintaining of abstract mathematical ideas. Steven L. Winter's chapter ("What Is the 'Color' of Law?") presents an in-depth analysis of the metaphor "color of law" (i.e., referring to official misconduct or the way the trappings of office provide individuals with the power and prestige of the state) to show how both historical and contemporary legal theory is guided by metaphoric conceptualizations. Contrary to the widely held belief in legal circles that metaphors are to be avoided, with legal reasoning being best served by ideas that are propositional and defined by necessary and sufficient criteria, Winter argues that the cognitive theory of metaphor challenges the beliefs that linguistic meaning is arbitrary and a matter of speakers' self-consciously held intentions. Meaning is configured by embodied and social experiences that are framed and constrained by metaphoric processes. Recognition of metaphorical thought, and the methods of conceptual metaphor analysis, demonstrates how legislative statutes express significant aspects of our social reality that cannot be devalued by reductive approaches to legal reasoning. Zoltán Kövecses's chapter examines the questions of whether emotion metaphors are unique to emotions and whether emotion metaphors are universal ("Metaphor and Emotion"). Based on detailed, crosslinguistic analyses, he claims that emotion metaphors primarily arise from the genericlevel metaphor C A U S E S A R E F O R C E S , and that certain specific source domains (e.g., O P P O N E N T , N A T U R A L F O R C E , H E A T ), apply to a wide range of target concepts other than emotion. Furthermore, even though many emotion metaphors are grounded in universal bodily experiences, there is significant cultural framing of these experiences that lead to variation in the kinds of source domains in emotion metaphors across different cultures. Linda M. McMullen writes on the role that metaphor plays in psychotherapy METAPHOR AND THOUGHT ("Putting It in Context: Metaphor and Psychotherapy"). She argues that most claims about the effect of metaphorical language in psychotherapeutic outcomes ignore the contextualized nature of metaphor in client and therapist talk. Isolating specific metaphors for analysis has made metaphor seem too powerful in some cases and benign in other situations. McMullen calls for empirical investigations of metaphor that properly acknowledge the conversational exchanges and cultural contexts in which they are part. Only by putting metaphor in context can we fully understand what metaphors do for us in psychotherapy and other situations. Antal F. Borbely's chapter describes the importance of metaphor in the concepts and practice of psychoanalysis ("Metaphor and Psychoanalysis"). Although psychoanalysts have long debated the role of metaphor in psychoanalysis, Borbely offers a new understanding of metaphor and its interaction with metonymy within psychoanalysis by situating his overview in terms of contemporary advances in metaphor research over the past two decades. By demonstrating how key psychodynamic concepts such as trauma, defense, transference, and interpretation are grounded in fundamental metaphoric and metonymic principles, this chapter provides for new links between psychoanalysis and research from cognitive science. Cristina Cacciari's chapter addresses the topic of synaesthetic metaphor, where it comes from, and how it is understood ("Crossing the Senses in Metaphorical Language"). She argues that perceptually based metaphorical expressions (e.g., "cold silence") are grounded in the structure of perceptual experiences and the human sensory system. Contemporary research in cognitive and neuropsychology lends support to this idea, with most people being able to use synaesthetic metaphors quite easily. However, some individuals have special abilities to create and exploit cross-sensory mappings (i.e., blending sounds with colors), which also provide extraordinary evidence for how sensory experiences, supported by neural mechanisms, are fundamental to metaphorical mappings in thought and language. 11 Metaphor in Nonverbal Expression The final section describes several important research trends on metaphor in different forms of nonverbal expression. John M. Kennedy's chapter discusses how metaphor, and other related tropes, can be realized in art objects, such as paintings ("Metaphor and Art"). He first notes that metaphors are abundant in art with metaphoric pictures often playing on the activity of picturing as a way of using a pictorial device to make a point about the topic. Metaphoric pictures are especially notable because, as Kennedy claims, the mind does not use images that most directly illustrate the thought. Kennedy introduces some contrasts between verbal and pictorial metaphors, describing, for example, how some successful verbal metaphors can make poor pictorial ones and vice versa. This chapter generally celebrates the perceptual nature of metaphoric thought and the ways that art allows people to play with metaphoric possibilities. Charles Forceville's chapter discusses the meanings and functions of metaphor in pictures and other multimodal forums ("Metaphor in Pictures and Multimodal Representations"). He describes how metaphors in pictures, advertisements, and films share many of the same qualities observed in linguistic metaphor, including how conceptual metaphors appear to motivate many aspects of nonlinguistic metaphor. However, the study of pictorial and multimodal metaphor also raises important questions about the identification of source and target domains in all metaphorical mappings. Forceville aptly considers some of the communicative purposes of multimodal metaphors and suggests they may have more emotional impact than linguistic metaphors, and aid both local and global narrative coherence, even in cases where the creator of a picture or film, for instance, did not consciously intend these metaphors to be understood as such. Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller argue in their chapter that gestures offer important insights into the metaphorical nature 12 RAYMOND W. GIBBS, JR. of language, thought, and cultural ideas ("Metaphor, Gesture, and Thought"). They describe a variety of linguistic, psychological, and anthropological evidence showing how detailed analyses of gesture offer support for the claim that metaphor is a general, pervasive cognitive principle, and that many metaphoric mappings, such as those evident in metaphoric gestures, are processed online during face-to-face talk. Cienki and Müller discuss some methodological issues related to studying metaphoric gestures in naturalistic settings, including the problem of correctly identifying and labeling underlying conceptual metaphors. Their chapter emphasizes that metaphor is best conceived of as a cognitive activity that occurs online in the process of speaking and is therefore clearly an example of dynamic embodied cognition. Lawrence M. Zbikowski's chapter provides a historical and conceptual survey of metaphor and music ("Metaphor and Music"). He argues that music is a manifestation of human cognitive capacities and tied to other aspects of human experience, such as the expression of emotion. Through his analysis of various musical compositions, Zbikowski proposes that even if music and language have different cultural functions, they both rely on embodied imageschematic structures for the expression of meaning. Musical events correlate with bodily experiences associated with many other modalities, such as vision, taste, and proprioception. In general, this chapter illustrates how the study of music, as a distinct nonlinguistic medium, provides important insights into metaphorical thinking processes. The Future The state of the art in metaphor studies is a rich, colorful mosaic of ideas and research activities. Predicting the future of metaphor studies is clearly a risky business given the tremendous diversity of work now being done and as evidenced in this collection. But there are several themes that are touched on in this volume which are likely to become of even greater interest as topics of discussion and debate in the future. Let me briefly mention a few of these and their implications for metaphor research. One issue that often arises in informal discussions of metaphor studies has to do with the reliability and generality of individual scholars' analyses of metaphor. First, how representative are particular isolated examples of verbal metaphor, for instance, of the ways people ordinarily speak of the topic/concept? Second, how reliable are analyses of individual linguistic metaphors in terms of whether they are really metaphoric as opposed to metonymic, for instance? Third, exactly how did an analyst of metaphor draw the inference that a particular pattern of metaphorical thought exists from the examination of several or many instances of individual verbal metaphors? Scholars' intuitions are clearly relevant for making claims about the nature of metaphor, what it means, and how they are possibly understood. But some metaphor scholars express concern about the variability of analysts' intuitions in making judgments about linguistic and even nonlinguistic (e.g., gesture, music, art) matters. Many metaphor scholars now seek to establish more objective criteria for determining instances of metaphor and for drawing links between patterns of metaphoric language use and metaphorical thought. Establishing reliable, and replicable, criteria for identifying metaphor in behavior and for drawing links between metaphorical language/behavior and metaphorical thought is likely to be a major focus of concern in future metaphor studies. A related emerging concern for empirical studies of metaphor focuses on the true frequency of metaphors in language and other media. Claims about the importance or ubiquity of particular metaphorical patterns, in either language or thought, are often made without adequate empirical support, such as reporting the frequencies with which different metaphors are found in particular texts, or comparing the findings from one's own textual analysis of metaphor with those seen in large corpora. METAPHOR AND THOUGHT In general, there is likely to be a heightened interest in methodological questions for defining the existence of metaphor in language and thought. My hunch is that resolutions to some of the theoretical debates about metaphor and thought will partly depend on the way scholars respond to these methodological concerns. Finally, the chapters in this handbook speak loudly about the problems associated with making claims about the existence of metaphor in brains, minds, and culture from the analysis of metaphoric language. Does the analysis of metaphoric language, gesture, or artwork indicate that some metaphorical schemes of thought exist within idealized speaker-hearers, the conscious minds of real speakers, or the subpersonal unconscious minds, even their brains, of people as they speak, gesture, and create artworks? To what extent does the existence of a particular metaphorical way of think- 13 ing necessarily relate to brains, minds, and cultures? As mentioned earlier, many articles in this volume acknowledge the importance of brains, minds, language, and culture in both enduring and novel patterns of metaphorical thought. But teasing apart these various influences, and seeing more precisely how they interact, is likely to be a major theme of future metaphor research. Once more, much attention must be given to the exact methods metaphor scholars employ to analyze public manifestations of metaphor and infer patterns of metaphorical thought. We now know enough to feel confident in asserting that metaphor is a major player in human cognition, communication, and culture. But a future challenge for all metaphor scholars is to have greater clarity about what kinds of empirical evidence is needed, and how it is to be obtained and analyzed, to properly characterize the reach and limits of the metaphorical mind. Part II THE ROOTS OF METAPHOR CHAPTER 1 The Neural Theory of Metaphor George Lakoff The neural revolution is changing our understanding of the brain and the mind in radical ways, and that is no less true in the theory of metaphor. It is more than 27 years since Mark Johnson and I wrote Metaphors We Live By in 1979. Though the fundamental outlines of what we discovered remain as valid today as they were then, developments in brain science and neural computation have vastly enriched our understanding of how conceptual metaphor works. This is an intermediate report, as of November 2006. You may well ask why anyone interested in metaphor should care about the brain and neural computation. The reason is that what we have learned about the brain explains an awful lot about the properties of metaphor. For example, have you ever asked why conceptual metaphor exists at all, why we should think metaphorically, why metaphors should take the form of crossdomain mappings? Have you thought about how our metaphor system is grounded in experience or about why certain conceptual metaphors are widespread around the world or even universal? Have you wondered about how complex poetic metaphors are built up out of simpler metaphors? Have you wondered about how whole systems of philosophical or mathematical thought can be built up out of conceptual metaphors? The neural theory explains all this. It explains more as well: Why metaphorical language should take no longer to process than nonmetaphorical language. Why some sentences of the form X is Y, make sense as metaphors and why others fail. How conceptual metaphors can play a role in abstract concepts. These and other wondrous properties of conceptual metaphors fall out once one considers metaphor theory from the perspective of the brain. In 1988, Jerome Feldman came to the University of California, Berkeley, as director of the International Computer Science Institute, and he and I formed the NTL (Neural Theory of Language) group. Feldman is one of the founders of the theory of neural computation, and we have been working together since then. Feldman's landmark book From Molecules to Metaphors surveys much of the work of our group, and is a must-read for metaphor theorists. As a 17 18 GEORGE LAKOFF background both to reading that book and to our discussion of metaphor, I offer a brief and overly simple introduction to NTL. A Brief Introduction to NTL Every action our body performs is controlled by our brains, and every input from the external world is made sense of by our brains. We think with our brains. There is no other choice. Thought is physical. Ideas and the concepts that make them up are physically "computed" by brain structures. Reasoning is the activation of certain neuronal groups in the brain given prior activation of other neuronal groups. Everything we know, we know by virtue of our brains. Our physical brains make possible our concepts and ideas; everything we can possibly think is made possible and greatly limited by the nature of our brains. There is still a great deal to be learned about how the brain computes the mind. NTL combines what is known scientifically with linking hypotheses based on neural computation. The Shaping of the Brain We are born with an enormously complex brain with hundreds of precisely and beautifully structured regions and highly specific connectivity from every region to many other regions. Each neuron has connections to between 1,000 and 10,000 other neurons. Between birth and age five, roughly half of the neural connections we are born with die off. The ones that are used stay; the others die. That is how the brain is shaped, and such a shaping is necessary if the brain is to learn to do the huge number of things it does. The flow of neural activity is a flow of ions that occurs across synapses – tiny gaps between neurons. Those synapses where there is a lot of activity are "strengthened" – both the transmitting and receiving side of active synapses become more efficient. Flow across the synapses is relatively slow compared to the speed of computers: about five one-thousandths of a second (5 millisec- onds) per synapse. A word recognition task – Is the following word a word of English? – takes about half a second (5 00 milliseconds). This means that word recognition must be done in about 100 sequential steps. Since so much goes into word recognition, it is clear that much of the brain's processing must be in parallel, not in sequence. This timing result also shows that well-learned tasks are carried out by direct connections. There is no intervening mentalese. Neuronal Groups Jerome Feldman and colleagues, in the 1970s, developed an account of "structured connectionism" – not PDP connectionism! In PDP connectionism, all computation is distributed over an entire network and nothing is "localized"; that is, no meaning for function can be assigned to any single neuron or any small collection of neurons in the network. Only very restricted parts of the brain work that way. On the other hand, structured connectionism takes into account the local structure that exists in the brain. Neuronal groups (of size, say, between, 10 and 100 neurons) are modeled as "nodes" which are meaningful and which enter into neural computation. Since each neuron can have between 1,000 and 10,000 neural connections, nodes can "overlap." That is, the same neuron can be functioning in different neuronal groups, or "nodes." The firing of that neuron contributes to the activation of each node it is functioning in. Though single neurons either fire or not, neuronal groups contain neurons that fire at different times, making the group active to a degree, depending on the proportion firing at a given time. The modeling of neural computation is done over networks with nodes, connections, degrees of synaptic strength, and time lapses at synapses. Embodiment and Simulation Semantics The link between body and brain is central to the concept of semantics-as-simulation in NTL. Suppose you imagine, remember, THE NEURAL THEORY OF METAPHOR or dream of performing certain movements. Many of the same neurons are firing as when you actually perform that movement. And suppose you imagine, remember, or dream of seeing or hearing something. Many of the same neurons are firing as when you actually see or hear that thing. Mirror neurons occur in fiber bundles connecting premotor/SMA cortex (which choreographs actions) with the parietal cortex (which integrates perceptions). The same mirror neurons fire when you perform an action or you see someone else performing that action. The mirror neurons are thus "multimodal"; that is, they are active not only when acting or perceiving the same action but also when imagining that you are perceiving or performing an action. Now a word like "grasp," applies both to performing and perceiving grasping; that is, it is multimodal. Simulation semantics is based on a simple observation of Feldman's: if you cannot imagine someone picking up a glass, you can't understand the meaning of "Someone picked up a glass." Feldman argues that, for meanings of physical concepts, meaning is mental simulation, that is, the activation of the neurons needed to imagine perceiving or performing an action. One thing we know is that not all imagination or memory is conscious, and so not all mental simulations are. That is why we typically have no conscious awareness of most such simulations. A meaningful node is a node that when activated results in the activation of a whole neural simulation and when inhibited inhibits that simulation. Inferences occur when the activation of one meaningful node or more results in the activation of another meaningful node. NTL, following the theory of simulation semantics, suggests that the neural circuitry characterizing the meaning of "grasp" is the neural circuitry in the mirror neurons that are activated when imagining either performing or perceiving grasping. The meaning of concrete concepts is directly embodied in this manner. There is now considerable evidence that perceiving language activates corresponding motor or 19 perceptual areas. For example, He kicked the ball activates the foot area of the primary motor cortex. Activation and Inhibition A flow of ions across a synapse may either contribute to the firing of the postsynaptic neuron or may help to inhibit such firing, depending on whether the charges of the ions are positive or negative. The activation of neural simulations constitutes meaningful thought. We obviously don't think all possible thoughts at once. Indeed, most possible thoughts are either unactivated or positively inhibited most of the time. Mutual Inhibition Two neuronal groups can be connected so that each inhibits the activation of the other when there is an active flow of ions of the opposite charge. This is called "mutual inhibition" This occurs, for example, when there are two inconsistent, but equally available, ways of looking at a situation. This is common in politics, where a strict conservative worldview is typically inconsistent with a nurturant progressive worldview. That is, they are mutually inhibitory. But many people have both worldviews active in different areas of their lives and can think of a given situation first from one worldview and then from the other. When one is activated, the other is inhibited. Spreading Activation: Neurons That Fire Together Wire Together Spreading activation at the behavioral level has been the mainstay of psycholinguistics for decades – NTL models link this behavior to neural structure. When two neuronal groups, A and B, fire at the same time, activation spreads outward along the network links connecting them, which we experience as a chain of thought. During learning, spreading activation strengthens synapses along the way. When the activation spreading from A meets the 20 GEORGE LAKOFF activation spreading from B, a link is formed, and the link gets stronger the more A and B fire together. This is a basic mechanism by which the brain is shaped through experience. Neural Maps We are born with neural circuitry that effectively activates a "map" of one part of the brain in another part of the brain. For example, the 100 million neurons coming out of the retina grow connections before birth from the retina to other areas, including the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain. These connections form a "topographic map" of the retina in V1. That is, the connections preserve topology (relative nearness), though not absolute orientation or absolute distance. When neurons next to each other coming from the retina fire, the corresponding neurons fire in V1 and are next to each other in V1. Len Talmy (2000) has observed that spatial relations in human languages preserve topology as well. For example, containers remain containers no matter how their boundaries are stretched or contracted, and paths remain paths, no matter how they wind around. Terry Regier (1997) has constructed computational neural models of topographical maps of the visual field that can compute image-schemas with topological properties and accurately learn the words for a nontrivial range of spatial relations in a variety of languages. Neural Binding Imagine a blue square. We know that color and shape are not computed in the same place in the brain: they are computed in quite different areas. Yet the blue square appears to us as a single whole, not as separate squareness and blueness. The name given to this phenomenon is "neural binding." Neural binding is responsible for two or more different conceptual or perceptual entities being considered a single entity. There are three types of neural bindings: 1. Permanent obligatory bindings, for example, in your stored mental image of a parrot, the feathers are green. There is a permanent obligatory binding in the neural representation for the parrot image, between the neuronal groups that characterize feather shapes and those, elsewhere in the brain, that characterize the green color. 2. Permanently-ready-but-conditional bindings, like the bindings in the neural structure for an election-night map on which any given state can be either red or blue depending on the outcome of the vote. 3 . Nonce bindings that occur on the fly as they happen to arise in context. It is not known just how neural binding operates in the brain. One hypothesis is that neural binding is the synchronous firing of nodes. Lokendra Shastri has modeled the computational structure necessary to carry out binding in such a theory. Neural Choreography In general, the premotor cortex and supplementary motor area (SMA) choreograph specific actions, like grasping. Grasping has a neural structure of its own. There are, in addition, neural connections between the premotor/SMA and the primary motor cortex – M1. M1 is laid out topographically according to the neurons as they are connected to the body. For example, neurons connected to the hand are in the same region of M1, with neurons connected to the index finger next to neurons connected to the middle finger. The whole body is topographically connected to the neurons in M1. Each M1 neuronal group can perform only a simple action, like opening the elbow or pointing the index finger. To pick up a bottle, those simple M1 actions must be sequenced and choreographed. The premotor cortex/SMA does the choreography, having learned neural circuits that fire in complex sequential patterns. As each THE NEURAL THEORY OF METAPHOR premotor/SMA neuron fires, a connection to M1 makes the right M1 neurons fire, which in turn moves certain muscle groups in the body. Picking up a bottle is like an exquisite ballet with choreographic instructions being carried by the connections to the neurons in M1, which individually control each little movement. When the bindings are in place, the premotor/SMA circuitry + bindings + primary motor circuitry acts seamlessly like a single simple circuit. Circuit Types NTL modeling assumes that, as our neural circuitry is being shaped by experience, certain relatively simple basic types of neural circuits emerge, as follows. The research includes ways in which circuits with these properties can be formed. What is important for the study of thought is not the study of precise neural circuitry but rather the study of the kinds of computations that neural circuitry can carry out. An important topic in the neural theory of language is exactly what kinds of circuit types are necessary for human thought – for frames, image-schemas, conceptual metaphor, lexical items, grammatical constructions, and so on. Neural bindings play a crucial role, forming complex circuits by binding nodes in one circuit type to nodes in another circuit type. The winner-take-all circuit: r Two or more subcircuits, say A and B, with mutually inhibiting connections between them. r When A is firing B cannot fire, and conversely. Winner take all circuits apply, for example, to high-level "worldview" circuits that make sense in a single way of a wide range of experiences – in politics, these might be conservative and progressive worldviews. You might understand a range of experiences using one worldview or the other, but not both at once. 21 A gestalt circuit: r A collection of nodes, say, A, B, C, and D and a "gestalt node" G. r When G is firing, all of A, B, C, and D fire. r When a sufficient set of A, B, C, or D is firing, G fires, which results in all other nodes firing. One especially salient node can be sufficient in some cases, or there can be a threshold and any total activation summed over all the nodes above the threshold results in G firing. r When G is inhibited, at least one of the other nodes is inhibited. Gestalt circuits characterize the structure of frames, where the semantic roles and the scenarios are gestalt elements. In a gestalt, the whole is more than just the sum of its parts. Accordingly, in a gestalt circuit, the whole – G – cannot be inhibited and all of its parts activated. The activation of even some of the salient parts activates the whole, and the activation of the whole activates all the parts. Linking circuit: r Two nodes, A1 and A2, a linking node L, and an activating connection C from A1 to A2. r When A1 and L are firing, A2 is firing. But when A2 is firing, A1 need not be firing. Thus, linking is asymmetric. r When A1 is firing and L is not, the connection C is not active. (That is, L "gates" the connection C.) r When A1 and A2 are both firing, L is firing and the connection C is active. Note: A1 can fire without A2 firing (if L is not firing), and A2 can fire independently of A1. Linking circuits are used in metonymy: within a frame F, one semantic role A may "stand for" another B. A metonymy is characterized by (1) a linking circuit, with nodes A, B, and X a connection C linking A to B asymmetrically, and a linking node L gating the connection C from A to B, and a context X gating the L and (2) a gestalt consisting of 22 GEORGE LAKOFF gestalt node G and nodes F, A, B, X, and L. For example, in The ham sandwich wants his check, the frame F is the restaurant frame, the ham sandwich plays the role Dish, his refers to the entity that plays the role Customer, and L characterizes the metonymic link from the Dish to the Customer, and X is the condition that the waiter/waitress identifies the Customer B primarily in terms of the Dish B. Two-way linking circuits: A two-way circuit linking nodes A1 and A2 is composed of two opposite one-way linking circuits, with a gestalt node forming a gestalt of the two linking circuits. r Nodes A1 and A2. Connections C1 and C2. Linking nodes L1 and L2. Gestalt node G. r First linking circuit: From A1 to A2 via connection C1, with linking node L1. r Second linking circuit: From A2 to A1 via connection C2, with linking node L2. r Gestalt circuit: Nodes L1 and L2 with gestalt node G. r When G is activated, both links are activated. When G is inhibited, both links are inhibited. Two-way linking circuits provide the kinds of connectivity used in grammatical constructions and lexical items, where there is a two-way connection between a lexical meaning and a lexical form. In a two-way linking circuit, a gestalt node plays traffic cop, directing activation and inhibition. Mapping circuit: r Two groups of nodes: A1, B1, C1, D1, E1 and A2, B2, C2, D2, E2. r Linking nodes LA, LB, LC, LD, LE in linking circuits that, respectively, link A1 to A2, B1 to B2, and so on. r A gestalt circuit with nodes LA, LB, LC, LD, and LE with M as the gestalt node. r When M is inhibited, the linking circuits are all inhibited. r When M is activated, all the linking circuits from A1 to A2, B1 to B2, and so on are activated. Note: The mapping is asymmetric. Mapping circuits characterize conceptual metaphors. Two-way mapping circuits (maps with two-way linking circuits) characterize the structure of grammatical constructions. Mapping circuits are also used as part of the asymmetric connections across mental spaces. A mental space is a neural simulation S that can be activated by a single gestalt node G with semantic roles A, B, . . . in the simulation. A cross-space map has two mental spaces: G1 consisting of simulation S1 with semantic roles (or referents) A1, B1, . . . , and G2 consisting of simulation S2 with semantic roles (or referents) A2, B2, . . . . G1 and G2 are linked by a cross-space connection made up of (1) a gestalt node G, consisting of a space-builder B, (2) a linking circuit L with a connection C from G1 to G2, and (3 ) a mapping circuit M mapping semantic roles (or referents) A1, B1, . . . in simulation S1 to semantic roles (or referents) A2, B2, . . . in simulation S2. For example, take the sentence If Clinton had been president of France, there would have been no scandal over his affair. The mental spaces are G1 = The U.S. during Clinton's presidency with A1 = Clinton and S1 = his affair in the U.S., and G2 = France at that time, A2 = A Clinton-correlate and S2 = A2 is president of France who has an affair in France with no scandal; L1 is the circuit that links A1 (the real Clinton) with A2 (the Clinton correlate = Clinton). Neural binding may be added to linking in such cases to provide a cross-space identity instead of merely a cross-space correlate. For example, consider If Clinton campaigns for his wife, she will win. Here Clinton in the conditional space is the same as Clinton in the reality space. There is not only a Clinton-toClinton link defining a cross-space correlate, there is also a binding, making the correlate the same person. In this description, the neural binding is "extra," in addition to the linking. But the THE NEURAL THEORY OF METAPHOR binding actually makes the case cognitively simpler in that there are fewer distinct entities to keep track of. Complexity in the formal description of circuits can often correspond to simplicity in the way the brain works. Extension circuit: r A group of connected nodes, A, B, C, D, and E. r Nodes D and E , which are mutually inhibitory with D and E, respectively. r An extension node, X. r When either D or E is firing, X is not. r When X is firing, both D and E are firing, and consequently D and E are not. This results in two circuit-alternatives: A, B, C, D, E, not X or A, B, C, D , E , X. Extension circuits characterize radial categories (see Lakoff, 1993 , case study 3 ). X-schema circuit: r A gestalt node r State nodes r Action nodes r Connections, both activating and inhibiting r Timing nodes X-schemas, or "executing schemas," do things via bindings that activate other circuits. Every action node is preceded and followed by a state node, with activation spreading from states to actions to states. Timing nodes coordinate the lengths of states and actions (which may be instantaneous or elongated). Iterated actions are formed by loops from the state following an action to the state preceding the action. Conditional actions are formed by gatings – cases where activations from both nodes A and A are needed to activate node B. The gestalt node activates the initial state and the final state inhibits the gestalt node. Actions typically have initial and final states, initiating and concluding actions, central actions, and may have purposes. A purposive action is one with a desired state. The pur- 23 pose is met if the desired state is active after the central action, and if so, the action is concluded. Each action can be neurally bound to the gestalt node of another complex Xschema to produce quite complex actions. X-schemas characterize the structures of states and actions, referred to as "aspect" in linguistics. Aspects can be durative or instantaneous, stative or active, completive or open-ended, iterative or noniterative. When connected to the body via the primary motor cortex, premotor/SMA Xschemas can carry out actions. X-schemas can also define scenarios within frames or narratives and carry out chains of reasoning, by sequentially activating mental simulations. Conceptual Blends Conceptual blends are neural bindings across distinct structures. We will discuss this further later. The point of these characterizations of circuit types is that, in NTL, one has to be explicit about the computational properties of neural circuitry. Any cognitive analysis must be able to be carried out by the brain and by the relatively simple circuit types of this sort, or complex circuits formed by bindings. As we shall see, different mental operations require different types of neural circuitry that perform very specific neural computations. Neural Systems Are Best-Fit Systems It is a common cognitive phenomenon that a fact that fits an overall conceptual organization is remembered better than a fact in isolation or one that contradicts an overall conceptual organization. Ideas make sense when they fit a whole system of ideas. Similarly, a linguistic compound makes sense when it fits into a coherent context. Take the classic example of "pumpkin bus" – coined on a school outing. There were two buses and the road home passed a pumpkin patch. One of the buses was designated to stop there for students who wanted to buy a pumpkin. It was called the 24 GEORGE LAKOFF "pumpkin bus," and the compound was instantly understandable because it fit the context. Compare two sentences: "Bill drank a soda" and "Bill drank an elephant." To get the meaning of the sentences, you need to do a mental simulation, in which Bill is drinking and a frame is activated in which a soda is bound to the patient role in the frame of drinking, which requires that it be a liquid and consumable, which it is. In "Bill drank an elephant," again the drink frame requires a consumable liquid. Since an elephant is neither – binding the concept of an elephant to the patient's role in the drink scenarios runs up against neural inhibition. However, context may change things. Elephant is a brand of Danish beer, and so the sentence may refer to Danish drinking experience. Or second, one could imagine a context in which an elephant was sacrificed by being cut up and put in a blender and liquefied so that one could drink it. What determines "fit"? Maximizing the number of overall neural bindings, including context and overall knowledge, without contradiction, that is, without encountering any mutual inhibition. A node A fits a complex network B better than complex network B if the strength of neural bindings one can create between A and B without mutual inhibition is greater than with B . Image-Schemas and Cogs Terry Regier (1997) has constructed a neural computational model for how a range of spatial relations concepts could be computed by the brain. Narayanan (1997) has constructed a neural computational model of the structure of events, that is, X-schemas. Dodge and Lakoff (2006) have speculated on many of the details involved. Gallese and Lakoff (2005 ) have shown that certain action circuitry has the structure of frames. They have further speculated that the meanings of grammatical elements and constructions are characterized by "Cogs," that is, secondary neural structures (e.g., premotor/SMA cortex) that bind to structures in primary cortex (e.g., motor and visual). This would explain why grammatical meanings are "abstract" in the sense that they have a very general structure but lack specific details. We are now ready to discuss how all of this changes old metaphor theory into the neural theory of metaphor: NTM. THE OLD THEORY Metaphors We Live By was written in 1979, before the era of brain science and neural computation (also see Lakoff, 1993 ). Nonetheless, certain results from that era have stood the test of time: r Metaphors are conceptual mappings; they are part of the conceptual system and not mere linguistic expressions. r There is a huge system of fixed, conventional metaphorical mappings. r The system exists physically in our brains. r Certain metaphors are grounded via correlations in embodied experience (e.g., More Is Up is grounded via the correlation between quantity and verticality – you pour more water in the glass and the level goes up). r Metaphorical mappings are typically across conceptual domains (as in Affection Is Warmth). r Mappings (as in A Competition Is a Race) may also be from a specific case (a race) to a more general case (a competition). r Mappings operate on source domain frame and image-schema structure. r Via metaphorical mappings, source domain structures (image-schema and frame structures) are used for reasoning about the target domain. Indeed, much of our reasoning makes use of conceptual metaphors. r Metaphorical mappings are partial. r Metaphorical language makes use of conceptual metaphors. r Many different linguistic expressions can express some aspect of the same metaphor. r A conceptual metaphor may be used in understanding a word, even if that word is not realized in the source domain of the metaphor. THE NEURAL THEORY OF METAPHOR r Most conceptual metaphors are part of the cognitive unconscious, and are learned and used automatically without awareness. r Novel metaphorical language makes use of the existing system of conventional metaphors. r We commonly take our conceptual metaphors as defining reality, and live according to them. r Target domain entities and target domain predications can result from metaphors. r Two of the relevant sources of data are generalizations over inference patterns (in the source and target domains) and generalizations over lexical items (that can be used of both source and target domains). These results will be familiar to any student of conceptual metaphor. To those who have read "The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor," another result that has stood the test of time will be familiar: r Complex metaphors are made up of simpler metaphors and commonplace frames. For example, Love Is a Journey is composed of such conceptual metaphors as Purposes are Destinations Difficulties are Impediments to Motion A Relationship is a Container Intimacy is Closeness plus commonplace knowledge that: literal frame-based A Vehicle is an Instrument for Travel, A Vehicle is a container in which the travelers are close together, People are expected to have life goals, Lovers ideally have compatible life goals. These are put together in such a way that: The life goals are destinations; The lovers are travelers trying to reach those destinations; 25 Their relationship is a vehicle such that the lovers are in the relationship They are close; and The relationship (when working) helps them achieve life goals; and The relationship difficulties are impediments to motion (e.g., a long, dusty road; being on the rocks or off the track). Such compositional structures were noticed during the 1980s. It was also noticed that such structural composition was accomplished through "bindings" – identifications of one element with another. Thus, the life goals of the ideal lovers are "bound" to the life goals that are understood as destinations. A vehicle used for travel is typically a container, which is bound to the container in the metaphor that A Relationship is A Container. It was also noticed that an optimization principle was at work in forming such composite metaphors: r Maximize the overall strength of bindings. Destinations occur in a travel frame. There are Travelers in that frame. Given that the Life Goals of the Lovers are bound to the Life Goals understood as Destinations, the optimization principle leads to the binding of the Lovers with Life Goals to the Travelers going to Destinations, to yield the metaphorical mapping that Lovers Are Travelers. Those bindings make possible certain metaphorical inferences: source domain inferences that are mapped combine with target domain knowledge via binding to produce new inferences: If lovers are "stuck" in relationship, if the relationship isn't "going anywhere," then they are not making progress toward common life goals. If the lovers are "going in different directions," then they may not be able get to the same destinations, which means metaphorically that their common life goals may be inconsistent. The NTL perspective provides a very different way of thinking about such complex metaphors. The "maximize bindings" 26 GEORGE LAKOFF principle is simply a consequence of the fact that the brain is a best-fit system. Inferences are new activations that arise when bindings occur. We can now explain why the Love Is a Journey metaphor exists, why Lovers should be Travelers, why Relationships are Vehicles, and why the Lovers' common life goals are Destinations. In a system where Lovers ideally have compatible Life Goals, and Goals (that is, Purposes) are Destinations, then (binding Life Goals and Goals) Lovers ideally have compatible destinations, which induces (via best fit) the metaphors that Lovers are Travelers and Lovers ideally have compatible Destinations. Consider our existing conceptual system where A Relationship is a Container, A Vehicle is a Container in which the Travelers are close together, Intimacy is Closeness, Lovers are intimate, A Vehicle is an Instrument for Travel, and Lovers are Travelers. Binding containers to containers, vehicles to vehicles, and travelers to travelers and bringing those bindings together with the metaphorical mapping that Lovers are Travelers yields (by best fit) A Relationship is a Vehicle that Lovers are in. In short, the Love is a Journey metaphor arises naturally via best fit from the rest of the system. To see the real importance of such an observation, let us look at primary metaphors and how they are acquired. Primary Metaphors The neural theory of metaphor got its real impetus from three Berkeley dissertations done in 1997 – by Srini Narayanan, Joe Grady, and Christopher Johnson. Narayanan's dissertation was key. He modeled metaphors as neural mappings and formulated certain metaphors for international economics. He then showed that the results of source domain inferences from the domain of physical motion and action are mapped onto the international economics target domain, interact with the logic of the target domain, and produce metaphorical inferences. Johnson studied metaphor acquisition in young children and found three stages: (1) source domain only; (2) in domains where the source and target domains were both active ("conflated"), children learned to use source domain words with target domain meanings and grammar, then later (3 ) used the words metaphorically. Putting together the Johnson and Narayanan results yields the following hypothesis: in situations where the source and target domains are both active simultaneously, the two areas of the brain for the source and target domains will both be active. Via the Hebbian principle that Neurons that fire together wire together, neural mapping circuits linking the two domains will be learned. Those circuits constitute the metaphor. Grady called such metaphors "primary metaphors" and observed that they are learned by the hundreds the same way all over the world because people have the same bodies and basically the same relevant environments. Therefore, we will have very much the same experiences in childhood in which two domains are simultaneously active, and so we will learn neural metaphorical mappings linking those domains naturally, just by functioning in the world. Just living an everyday life gives you the experience and suitable brain activations to give rise to a huge system of the same primary metaphorical mappings that are learned around the world without any awareness. By best fit, different cultural frames will combine with those primary metaphors and give rise to different metaphor systems. The Love Is a Journey metaphor is a good example. The primary metaphors that ground the Love Is a Journey metaphor are r Purposes are Destinations: Every day there is a correlation between achieving a purpose and reaching a destination, as when you have to go to the refrigerator to get a piece of fruit or a cold beer. r Difficulties are Impediments to Motion: A difficulty is something that inhibits your achievement of some purpose, THE NEURAL THEORY OF METAPHOR which is metaphorically reaching a destination. Hence, difficulties are conceptualized metaphorically as impediments to motion to a destination. r A Relationship is a Container (a Bounded Region of Space): People who are closely related tend to live, work, or otherwise spend time in the same enclosed space – your family in your home, your coworkers at the office, and so on. r Intimacy is Closeness: The people you are most intimate with are typically the people you have spent time physically close to: your family, spouse, lover, and so on. In each case, a correlation in experience is realized in the brain as the co-activation of distinct neural areas, which leads to the formation of circuits linking those areas. A Structural Prediction. The neural theory says that complex metaphors that are extensions of existing primary metaphors bound together should be easier to learn and understand than conceptual metaphors that are totally new – since they just involve new binding and other connecting circuitry over existing conceptual metaphors. They should also seem more natural. Take, for example, the sentence My job is a jail. 1. A jail restricts someone's freedom of motion to desired external destinations, thus producing frustration and other negative emotions. 2. The metaphors that Achieving a Purpose is Reaching a Destination and Actions are Motions exist in our conceptual system. 3 . Binding the restriction on freedom of motion to Actions are Motions, we infer a restriction on freedom of action. 4. Binding desired external destinations to Achieving a Purpose is Reaching a Destination, we infer achieving external purposes. 5 . My Job is a jail metaphorically infers that my job restricts my freedom of action in achieving external purposes, thus producing frustration and other emotions. 27 Thus, given the existing system, maximization of binding produces the meaning of the sentence. We predict that this should be easy to understand and to process. Compare this sentence with a sentence like My job is an aardvark. An aardvark is an African animal with a long proboscis that eats ants by sticking its proboscis in anthills. There are no primary metaphors in our normal conceptual systems that provide a natural metaphorical interpretation for this sentence. However, that sentence can be metonymic, say, when said by a zookeeper whose job is taking care of an aardvark. The metonymy is In the Animal Keeper Frame, The Animal stands for The Job of Taking care of that Animal. The neural theory in general predicts that the most immediate component metaphors for a complex metaphor will be activated and used in the mapping. In short, in most cases, new conceptual metaphors that are easy to learn and make sense of are using conceptual mappings that preexist, frame-based knowledge that preexists, and adding connections in the form of circuitry that binds, links, maps, extends, and forms gestalts. A Processing Prediction. The neural theory of metaphor makes an important prediction in the case of conventional conceptual metaphorical mappings that are realized by fixed brain circuitry. When you hear a metaphorical expression, the literal meanings of the words should activate the source domain circuitry and the context should activate the target domain circuitry, and together they should activate the mapping circuit. The result is an integrated circuit, with activation of both source and target domains and processing over both at once. Thus, understanding language that makes use of a conventional conceptual metaphor should take no longer than normal frame-based nonmetaphorical processing. This result has been shown repeatedly, as in the example, My job is a jail. The neural theory thus contradicts old two-step theories (before conceptual metaphor theory) that claim that the source domain is processed first and then the mapping operates to process the target domain. 28 GEORGE LAKOFF Time of processing studies contradict this view. Asymmetry. Each neuron fires asymmetrically, with the flow of ions from the cell body down the axon, spreading out from there. Different neurons have different firing capacities, depending on the receptors at the synapses that regulate ion flow. Those neurons that fire more tend to develop greater firing capacities. And those involved in physical bodily functioning tend to fire more. For this reason, the metaphorical maps learned are asymmetric and tend to have physical source domains (though some have social source domains). The literature abounds with obvious examples. r More Is Up: Our bodies are constantly monitoring physical height more than computing abstract quantity. r Affection Is Warmth: Temperature is always there to be monitored; affection isn't. r Intimacy Is Closeness: We constantly monitor how close we are to objects, more than we judge intimacy. The preponderance of our system of primary metaphors is acquired in childhood, and childhood experience has an important influence on the system of primary metaphors that we learn. Consider the following important examples: r Governing Institutions are Families: Our first experience with being governed is in our family. Thus, the social domain of the family will be used more when the metaphor is learned. r Speech Act Force is Physical Force: Parents teach their young children by manipulating their bodies as they give directives. Thus, verbal directives are learned as having a "force." r Arguments are Struggles: All small children struggle with their parents when their parents guide them physically in teaching them how to behave. Early verbal arguments are commonly about meeting behavioral expectations. As we grow up and learn about wars and battles, the source domain of struggle is specialized and expanded to battles and wars. During learning, much of the abstract domain is structured by fixed projections from the embodied domain. When processing source domain words in the context of a target domain subject matter, the fixed connections result in co-activation of the two domains. Thus, source domain activations arising from inferences are projected onto the target domain via the preestablished mapping. The Use of Conceptual Metaphors The preneural theory of conceptual metaphor was vague on a number of details. Metaphors were cross-domain mappings – from a frame in one domain to another domain, also structured by frames. Such mappings were seen as applied to target domain situations as understood in the context of commonplace information. Inferences were mapped from the source to target situation, with as much as possible frame and image-schema structure "preserved" from the source domain. Thus, in use, you had: r The metaphorical mapping (from source domain frame to target domain frame). r The specific situation being discussed, fitting the target domain. r Target domain commonplace information. r Source domain commonplace information. Metaphorical inferences took (1) source domain inferences, (2) mappings of the results of such inferences to the target domain frames; (3 ) combining of those mapped inferences with target domain information to give new "metaphorical" inferences. The neural theory of metaphor provides an explanatory mechanism for metaphorical inferences that can be modeled precisely (Narayanan, 1997) using neural THE NEURAL THEORY OF METAPHOR computational modeling. At the heart of the modeling of metaphorical inferences is the notion of mental simulation, which represents specific situations. Let us look first at inferences in NTL, and then at metaphorical inferences. Inferences A meaningful node in a neural circuit is a node that can activate a mental simulation. An inference occurs when: r the activation of a collection of meaningful nodes (the antecedent situation) in a neural circuit leads to the activation of one or more other meaningful nodes (the consequence); r when the activation of the antecedent nodes is necessary for the consequence; r and when the inhibition of one or more consequence nodes results in the inhibition of one or more antecedent nodes. Inferences are simply consequences of the meaningfulness of nodes in simulation semantics, the spreading of activation, and best-fit constraints (the consequences fit the antecedents best). Recall that the maximization of binding is one of the characteristics of the best-fit property of any neural system. In short, maximizing binding can lead to inferences. Metaphorical Inferences A metaphorical inference occurs when: r a metaphorical mapping is activated in a neural circuit, r there is an inference in the source domain of the mapping, r and a consequence of the source domain inference is mapped to the target domain, activating a meaningful node. For example, suppose the sentence is We're driving in the fast lane on the freeway of love. In the travel domain, driving in the fast lane on the freeway activates the inferences that 29 1. the vehicle the travelers are in is going a lot faster than usual, 2. the driving is exciting, and 3 . it can be dangerous (the travelers can suffer physical harm). "Freeway of love" activates the target domain of love and source domain of travel, resulting in the activation of the Love Is a Journey metaphorical mapping. The metaphorical inferences are that: M1. the relationship the lovers are in is developing a lot faster than usual, M2. the development of the relationship is exciting, and M3 . it can be dangerous (the lovers can suffer psychological harm). These inferences are activated when the circuitry is activated in the processing of the sentence. The totality of source domain inferences does not have to proceed before any of the target domain inferences. Mapping "Gaps" A mapping gap occurs when there is a metaphorical mapping, but part of the source domain frame has no correlate in the target domain. For example, take the sentence I gave Sam that idea. In this metaphor, the communication of an idea is the transfer of an object from the speaker to the hearer. A. Source domain knowledge: the giver loses the object when he gives it to the recipient. B. Target domain knowledge: the speaker does not lose the idea when he gives it to the listener. Because we know (B) about the target domain, no mapping from (A) to (B) can be learned. Thus, what appears to be a "gap" is not a gap; it is just that an impossible mapping does not take place in the learning of the metaphor. Recall that the learning of the metaphor involves repeated co-activation of the corresponding source and target nodes, and the absence of such 30 GEORGE LAKOFF co-activation implies that no such maps are learned. Image-Schema "Preservation" As Regier (1995 , 1997) and Dodge and Lakoff (2006) have argued, primitive imageschemas (e.g., container, source-path-goal, degree of closeness, direction, and amount of force) are computed by brain structures that are either innate or form early. Action schemas and frames are structured using such primitive image-schemas. For example, putting in makes use of the container schema, the source-path-goal schema, a force schema, a direction schema, and an aspectual schema. Metaphorical putting in – as in The Founding Fathers put freedom of speech into the Constitution – uses physical putting-in as a source domain. The inference patterns of those schemas as bound together in the source domain are then used in metaphorical inferences. For example, if you put something into a physical container, it isn't there before you put it in and it is there afterward and it remains there until something happens to remove it. That is also true of the freedoms the Founding Fathers put into the Constitution. In preneural theories of conceptual metaphor, we spoke of "preservation" of source domain image-schemas. In the neural theory, it is the use of source domain imageschemas in inferences about target domain situations. Mental Spaces A "mental space" from an NTL perspective is a mental simulation characterizing an understanding of a situation, real or imagined. The entire space is governed by a gestalt node, which makes the mental space an "entity" which, when activated, activates all the elements of the mental space. Blending What is called "blending" is a matter of neural binding. Consider the monk blend. There are two mental spaces each structured by frames. In each, there is a mountain and a path. On day 1, the monk walks up the path to the top of the mountain, sleeps overnight there, and on day 2, the monk walks down the same path to the bottom Day 1 is one mental space; day 2 is another. The blend consists of bindings and a gestalt circuit. The mountain on day 1 is bound to the mountain on day 2, the path on day 1 to the path on day 2, the monk on day 1 to the monk on day 2. A gestalt node forms a single blend out of the two spaces with the bindings. Question: Is there a single place on the path where the monk is located at the same time on both days? Answer: Yes. Where he meets himself. We have formed a single integrated circuit containing both mental spaces, with two instances of the monk, one going up and the other coming down the mountain. Being on the same path, the up-going monk will "meet" the down-going monk in the simulation created by the bindings at some place and time. Note that there is no metaphor here. Metaphors versus Blends A metaphor is a mapping. A blend is an instance of one or more neural bindings. Metaphors don't occur in isolation nor do bindings. A contextual interpretation of an utterance includes both general knowledge and target domain knowledge. The overall use of metaphor involves some bindings and inferences in the source domain, bindings and inferences in the target domain, activation of metaphoric maps, and the activation of other connected nodes that characterize related knowledge (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002; Grady et al., 1999). What is called the "blend" is other overall set of bindings in the simulation that characterizes the meaning of the sentence. To see the difference between metaphors and blends, consider the metaphor More Is Up. In a sentence like The temperature went up, we are understanding quantity in terms of verticality. But they are different things. Amount of heat in itself is not vertical. THE NEURAL THEORY OF METAPHOR But in a thermometer oriented vertically, the mercury goes up physically as the temperature increases (metaphorically goes up). The thermometer is an object that, in its very physical construction, is intended to be understood in terms of both a binding and a metaphor. The metaphor, but not the blend, is in the sentence The temperature went up. Thus, metaphors exist separate from blends. Such metaphoric blends are formed when a source and a target element of a metaphor are bound together via neural binding. Let's consider another contrast. Suppose you are explaining arithmetic to a child. You draw a line. And you say, "Think of a number as being a point on this line. Say this is zero. And to get to one you take a step from 0 to 1, located here on the line. To add 3 to 1 you take three steps from 1, like this, and you get to 4. To subtract 1 from 4, you take a step backward, and you get to 3 ." And so on. Here, you are just using the metaphor that numbers are points on a line. It is just a metaphor. No blending. But if you go to the Cartesian plane where you have a number line, then you not only have the metaphor of numbers as points on a line, but you have a binding as well: the number and the point on the line are identical – the same entity! This metaphorical blend is actually in the mathematics of the Cartesian plane. Again, a mere metaphor (understanding the target in terms of the source) is crucially different from that metaphor plus a binding of source entities to target entities. Optimality in Blending A great deal follows from the understanding of blending as neural binding, given that neural systems work by spreading activation and best-fit principles. Best-fit principles include the maximization of binding, and the maximal use of conventional frames, metaphors, commonplace knowledge, and context. Maximizing neural binding means a maximal integration of all these elements and "emergent" inferences resulting from the "mixing" of inference-determining elements (e.g., from source and target domains). 31 The result is a set of predictions about blends – exactly the well-known properties of optimal blends: r Integration: The scenario in the blended space should be a well-integrated scene. Each neural binding across conceptual structures serves to "integrate" those conceptual structures. r Web: Tight connections between the blend and the inputs should be maintained, so that an event in one of the input spaces, for instance, is construed as implying a corresponding event in the blend. Such correspondences are given by maps, either metaphorical maps or maps connecting mental spaces (that is, simulations). r Unpacking: It should be easy to reconstruct the inputs and the network of connections, given the blend. Neural bindings have the property that they can be "relaxed"; that is, the bound structures can be conceptualized without the binding, as when you can separate off the blueness of a blue square and think of it as red. r Topology: Elements in the blend should participate in the same sorts of relations as their counterparts in the inputs. This follows immediately since a structure with an added neural binding has all the relations as the structure without that neural binding. r Good Reason: If an element appears in the blend, it should have meaning. And if it arises by inference, it will be tied into the logic of the blend. Since blends apply to simulations, and simulations have meaning, this follows immediately. r Metonymic Tightening: Relationships between elements from the same input 32 GEORGE LAKOFF should become as close as possible within the blend. For instance, western images of personified Death often depict the figure as a skeleton, thus closely a