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 Book review

Kövecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (2nd ed.).

New York: Oxford University Press. 375 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-537494-0
(Paperback).
Reviewed by Fiona MacArthur (Departmento de Filogia Inglesa,
Universidad de Extremadura, Spain)

Metaphor has generated a huge amount of research and an immense literature in

the last thirty years, and it is a daunting task to attempt to summarize this field of
enquiry in order to provide a lucid, comprehensive and accessible introduction for
the novice reader. Kövecses carried off this challenge with style and ease in 2002,
offering in the first edition of “Metaphor: A Practical Introduction” clear explana-
tions of the often extremely complex concepts involved in a cognitive linguistic
approach to metaphor. Now, the significant advances in this field have made it
necessary to extensively revise and update the original work, yielding a second
edition which is some ninety pages longer than the first, and which includes two
completely new chapters. Much of the content of the original chapters has been
expanded to include new points of view as well as new exercises and references
to further readings. The second edition thus consists of nineteen chapters, each of
which ends with a clear summary of its contents, references to further readings,
and a number of practical exercises. The solution to these exercises, along with a
glossary, bibliography, a general index and a metaphor and metonymy index, are
to be found at the end of book, making this an accessible volume, which it is not
necessary to read from beginning to end in order for it to be useful. Each chapter
discusses a particular topic in sufficient detail to be used alone as an introduction
to that topic; and where reference is made to ideas explained in other chapters,
these are either signalled in the text or explained and illustrated fully enough to
make the chapter self-explanatory. Nevertheless, the volume as a whole is carefully
designed to introduce the reader to the complex issues discussed in an incremen-
tal fashion, with each chapter building on earlier ones, and with similar examples
used to illustrate discussion of different topics. This provides a great deal of cohe-
sion to the work, as Kövecses refers to the same conceptual metaphors or his own
findings on emotion concepts and their metaphorical construal in different chap-
ters to illustrate his discussion of topics ranging from metaphor or metonymy to
idioms or the universality of conceptual metaphors.
In the Preface to this new edition, Kövecses identifies a number of areas in
which developments in metaphor theory have been notable, some of which come

Metaphor and the Social World 1:1 (2011), 113–118.  doi 10.1075/msw.1.1.10mac
issn 2210–4070 / e-issn 2210–4097 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
114 Book review

from the field of cognitive science (the neural theory of metaphor, for example, or
conceptual integration) and others from applied fields such as corpus linguistics or
discourse analysis, and says that “[a]ll of these areas are now discussed” (p. vi) in
the second edition. Certainly, a glance through the References section reveals how
the field of metaphor studies has moved on and how the author has kept abreast of
these changes: there are numerous references to authors and approaches that were
barely mentioned in the first edition. However, the treatment of these advances in
our understanding of metaphor is somewhat uneven throughout the book. This is
partly a natural consequence of the constraints placed on an introductory volume
such as this, but it is also a consequence of the general orientation of the work,
which remains firmly grounded in the cognitive linguistic tradition of metaphor
studies. As was pointed out by reviewers of the first edition of the book (Forcev-
ille, 2003; Steen, 2003), the first edition could more accurately have been called
“Cognitive metaphor: A Practical Introduction”. And despite the author’s attempts
to incorporate findings from applied metaphor research, this is true also of the
second edition.
For the purposes of summarizing the contents and commenting on changes
in this new edition of the work, the book can be roughly divided into two parts:
Chapters 1 to 11, which introduce and explain the basic premises of a cognitive
linguistic approach to metaphor, and Chapters 12 to 19, which explore a number
of topics in relation to the main themes of the book. In Chapters 1 to 5, Kövecses
introduces the reader to the general theory of conceptual metaphor and the types
found. Given that most of the evidence provided in these chapters for positing the
evidence of conceptual metaphors is polysemy or the systematic use of language
forms from one semantic field (for example, that of journeys or buildings) to refer
to other semantic fields (for example, life or arguments), an apparently impor-
tant addition to Chapter 1 is a description of MIP, or the procedure developed by
the Pragglejaz group for identifying metaphors in language use (Pragglejaz, 2007).
However, although Kövecses offers an illustration of how the method might work
in practice when applied to a de-contextualized utterance (p. 5), most of the exam-
ples provided of how conceptual metaphors are instantiated in language in this and
subsequent chapters are exactly the same as those cited in the first edition of the
book. Furthermore, many appear not to have been subjected to the rigorous proce-
dure that allows researchers to confidently identify the core or basic sense of a word
which informs a metaphorical mapping. For example, is the basic or core sense of
‘demolish’ related to war or buildings? The author identifies ‘I demolished his ar-
gument’ as realizing the conceptual metaphor an argument is war (p. 6), but dic-
tionaries suggest that the core sense refers to the complete destruction of a build-
ing. Likewise, do metaphorical expressions such as ‘I couldn’t keep my happiness
to myself’, ‘She gave way to her feelings of happiness’, ‘His feelings of joy broke loose’

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

All rights reserved
 Book review 115

and ‘He could not hold back tears of joy’ provide robust evidence that speakers of
English systematically understand happiness as a captive animal (p. 98)? Undoubt-
edly, the notion of restraint or even ‘captivity’ is suggested by these expressions,
but whether this can be related to animals or other entities (for example, people or
fluids) is not clear from the examples given. In a more carefully revised edition that
paid greater attention to the details of language, the author might also have wished
to re-consider his contention that ‘have a cow’ instantiates a conceptual metaphor
in which “the baby animals that come out of the grown animal correspond to an-
ger” (p. 125). Leaving aside the fact that only two expressions are cited to support
this assertion (one of which, ‘have kittens’, only refers to anger in American Eng-
lish), ‘have a cow’ does not appear to realize the mapping proposed, because in the
source domain it is the cow (the grown animal) that gives birth to a baby animal
(a calf) and thus the metaphorical expression have a cow states something that is
quite impossible in the source domain if ‘have’ is taken here to mean ‘give birth to’.
While this is not the place to provide alternative explanations for the motivation
of these and other metaphorical expressions found in the volume, it should be
pointed out that, since the linguistic foundations for establishing taxonomies of
conceptual metaphors has been the subject of much scholarly discussion in recent
years (for example, Ritchie, 2003; Semino, 2005, 2008), some of which is cited here,
it is somewhat surprising to find that in a substantially revised and updated edition
of the work, Kövecses should be paying only lip service to the need to identify the
core senses of words and phrases when identifying a metaphor.
However, while reliable procedures for identifying metaphors in language ap-
pear to have had little impact on the author’s own approach to metaphor in the
second edition of the book, contributions from other fields are better represented
and integrated in this new version. Chapter 3 contains new material in the form
of a summary of work in psycholinguistics that supports the general claim that
metaphor is a cognitive rather than simply a linguistic phenomenon, and a sub-
stantial addition to Chapter 5, which explains how metaphor may manifest itself
in non-linguistic forms, is an extensive summary of recent findings by researchers
such as Cienki (1998), Cienki and Müller (2008), Forceville (2005), or Forceville
and Urios-Aparisi (2009) on multimodal metaphor. Likewise, in Chapter 6, ‘The
basis of metaphor’, the author supplements the original contents with an outline of
the neural theory of metaphor, as developed by Feldman (2006), or Lakoff (2008),
which claims to be able locate metaphors in the brain. The addition of a completely
new chapter in the first half of the book (Chapter 8, ‘Cognitive models, metaphors
and embodiment’) allows the author to explore emotion concepts in greater depth
and relate them to prototypical cognitive/cultural models and the embodiment
hypothesis; and to develop the idea that the concept of happiness is not a disem-
bodied abstraction, but rather grounded in human experience.

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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116 Book review

In Chapters 12 to 18, Kövecses widens the scope of the book and explores a
number of loosely related topics, such as metonymy, idioms, or cultural diversity
and universality in the metaphorical construal of abstract concepts. Among the
numerous additions to this section of the book, particularly noteworthy is the
addition to Chapter 15, which considers idioms and how recognition of the meta-
phorical or metonymic motivation for many such units may have pedagogical im-
plications for foreign language learning and teaching. Here, the second edition of-
fers a summary of work carried out by Boers and his colleagues (e.g., Boers, 2000;
Boers & Lindstromberg, 2008) which has empirically demonstrated the value of
encouraging learners to engage deeply with metaphors in a foreign language, in
order to foster their understanding and recall of large numbers of figurative multi-
word expressions. In Chapter 17, Kövecses turns his attention again to the cogni-
tive operations that underlie the comprehension of metaphoric language, describ-
ing blending or conceptual integration as developed by Fauconnier and Turner
(2002), focusing on recent developments to the theory in this substantially rewrit-
ten chapter. The author regards conceptual integration as a necessary supplement
to conceptual metaphor theory, because it “can account for several metaphori-
cal and non-metaphorical aspects of online understanding” (p. 282). It should be
noted, however, that, unlike in Chapter 3, no psycholinguistic evidence is cited
to support this rather strong claim. Another noteworthy addition to this section
is Chapter 18: ‘Metaphor in discourse’. This is a particularly valuable addition to
the volume because thus far metaphor has mostly been explored in the context
of single deconextualised utterances. Here, Kövecses turns his attention to meta-
phorical coherence within and across discourse events and considers how meta-
phorical creativity in texts may be induced by a number of different factors arising
from the nature of the topic being talked about or the social, cultural or physical
context in which it is produced. The chapter also includes a section on work done
by Cameron and her colleagues (e.g., Cameron, 2007) on metaphor in face-to-face
conversation, suggesting that a discourse dynamic approach to metaphor analysis
adds an important dimension to understanding how the systematic use of meta-
phor in conversation may lead to the establishment of conceptual metaphors as
the result of people’s repeated experience of similar discourse events.
In the last chapter, ‘How does it all hang together’, Kövecses manages to pull off
the difficult task of bringing together the various strands explored throughout the
book, locating metaphor at the super-individual level, or how cognitive linguists
have been able to identify conceptual metaphors on the basis of decontextualised
utterances; the individual level, or how psychologists find that metaphors are un-
derstood or represented in the minds of individuals; and the sub-individual level,
or how universal sensorimotor experiences motivate many conceptual metaphors.
Again, we find substantial additions to the chapter, as the author considers the

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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 Book review 117

issues raised by different theories of metaphor (standard conceptual, blending,

categorization, neural, or Kövecses’ own notion of the ‘main meaning focus’ of
metaphors). This leads him to suggest a number of areas that are in need of further
research, for, as he says, “what we have learned in the past ten years has just given
us more to do in the future” (p. 321).
In short, many of the hallmarks of the first edition of Metaphor: A Practical In-
troduction are evident in the second edition, above all the book’s highly accessible,
instructive format and style. At the same time, in the quest for greater coverage,
some of the inner coherence of this Introduction appears to have been lost in this
second edition, as some of the advances mentioned in the Preface, as well as in the
course of the book, seem to plainly contradict some of the major claims still upheld
here. Among these are the findings in discourse analysis or corpus linguistics that
have challenged the taxonomies of conceptual metaphors proposed by Kövecses
and other cognitive linguists. Far from providing irrelevant details, studies such as
those of Deignan (2005), Musolff (2006), Ritchie (2003), or Semino (2005) have
done much to temper and refine our understanding of conceptual mappings, but
these appear to have had a minimal impact on the present volume, although they
are cited. One can only hope that in future editions of this undoubtedly valuable
work greater attention will be given to the details offered, with the interests of
the novice reader firmly in mind. As has been pointed out, closer attention to
the details of the linguistic evidence used to illustrate several of the conceptual
metaphors cited in the book might well have highlighted the need to revise some
of the mappings proposed. This would, in turn, better enable the novice to carry
out the tasks of identifying and classifying the metaphorical expressions proposed
in the exercises at the end of different chapters. Likewise, more attention should
have been paid to final revisions to the ‘Metaphor and metonymy index’, where
incorrect page references for several of the entries lead the reader to the wrong
section of the book. Notwithstanding these criticisms, however, the second edition
of Kövecses’ successful introduction to metaphor studies has gained in breadth of
coverage, without any loss of clarity of exposition. This is a major achievement in
a field with diverse research methodologies and diverse findings, and one which
should not be underestimated.

References

Boers, F. (2000). Metaphor awareness and vocabulary retention. Applied Linguistics, 21(4), 553–
572.
Boers, F., & Lindstromberg, S. (Eds.) (2008). Cognitive linguistic approaches to teaching vocabu-
lary and phraseology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

All rights reserved
118 Book review

Cameron, L. (2007). Patterns of metaphor use in reconciliation talk. Discourse and Society, 18,
197–222.
Cienki, A. (1998). Metaphoric gestures and some of their relations to verbal metaphoric expres-
sions. In J.-P. Konig (Ed.), Discourse and cognition: Bridging the gap (pp. 189–204). Stanford,
CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Cienki, A., & Müller, C. (Eds.) (2008). Metaphor and gesture. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Deignan, A. (2005). Metaphor and corpus linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Ben-
jamins.
Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hid-
den complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Feldmann, J. (2006). From molecule to metaphor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Forceville, C. (2003). Review of the book Metaphor: A practical introduction, by Z. Kövecses.
Journal of English Linguistics, 31 (2), 178–183.
Forceville, C. (2005). Visual representations of the idealized cognitive model of anger in the
Asterix volume La Zizanie. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 69–88.
Forceville, C., & Urios-Aparisi, E. (Eds.) (2009). Multimodal metaphor. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Lakoff, G. (2008). The neural theory of metaphor. In R. W. Gibbs (Ed.), The Cambridge hand-
book of metaphor and thought (pp. 17–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Musolff, A. (2006). Metaphor scenarios in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 21(1), 23–38.
Pragglejaz Group (2007). MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in dis-
course. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1), 1–39.
Ritchie, D. (2003). ‘argument is war’ — Or is it a game of chess? Multiple meanings in the
analysis of implicit metaphors. Metaphor and Symbol, 18(2), 125–146
Semino, E. (2005). The metaphorical construction of complex domains: the case of speech activ-
ity in English. Metaphor and Symbol, 20(1), 35–69
Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Steen, G. (2003). Review of the book Metaphor: A practical introduction, by Z. Kövecses . Lan-
guage and Literature, 12(3), 278–281.

Author’s address
Fiona MacArthur
Departmento de Filogia Inglesa
Universidad de Extremadura
Spain
fionamac@unex.es

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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