METAPHOR AND SYMBOLIC ACTIVITY, 11(3), 207-216 Copyright © 1996, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, In. METAMETAPHORICAL ISSUES Proverbs and the Metaphorical Mind Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Herbert L. Colston, and Michael D. Johnson Department of Psychology University of California, Santa Cruz ‘A major difficulty in studying figurative thought and language from an interdisciplinary perspective is that scholars can misunderstand the goals, ‘methods, and terminology of researchers in academic fields different from their ‘own, Our understanding of how people think, speak, and understand figuratively has indeed greatly benefited from interdisciplinary investigations published in Metaphor and Symbolic Activity. However, unfortunate misunderstandings of interdisciplinary ideas do arise, especially when scholars attempt to relate data from one field to theories proposed in neighboring disciplines. A 004 illustration of this problem is seen in an article recently published in this journal by Honeck and Temple (1994) on proverb understanding. Honeck and Temple tackled a complex set of ideas from cognitive linguistics by Lakoff and Turner (1989), dubbed the great chain metaphor theory (GCMT), and compared this work to their own approach on proverb understanding, called the extended conceptual base theory (ECBT). Honeck and Temple centered their comparison of GCMT and ECBT on five issues (perspective, creativity, automatic vs. controlled processing, pragmatics, and empirical adequacy) and concluded that proverb understanding is best explained by the ECBT. Our aim in this article is to take issue with some of the arguments and conclusions of Honeck and Temple (1994) on proverb comprehension. We do so with the goal of trying to clarify some of the misunderstandings that Honeck and ‘Temple had with the work of Lakoff and Turner (1989) in the hope that proverb scholars will incorporate the insights on proverbs that Lakoff and Turner provided into their own respective studies on proverb interpretation. Pethaps more important, we also wish to expose some of the theoretical and methodological commitments ‘Requests for reprints should be sent to Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Department of Psychology, Clark Kerr Hall, University of Califomia, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA. 95064.208 — GIBBS, COLSTON, JOHNSON made by both cognitive linguists (such as Lakoff and Turner) and experimental psycholinguists (such as Honeck and Temple) that inform—and sometimes lead to misunderstandings in—the interdisciplinary study of language and thought. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE TWO THEORIES The GCMT attempts to understand the limitations that seem to exist in the interpretations of proverbs. Why is it that some interpretations of proverbs seem so apt and natural, whereas others are not? Consider the example from Asian Figures by Merwin (1973): Blind blames the ditch There is a certain knowledge structure that is used in understanding what this, proverb means called the generic-level schema of the proverb. The generic-level schema is automatically invoked by the relations inherent in the text of the proverb and creates general “slots” that represent these relations at a superordinate level. For the aforementioned proverb, the schema is as follows (Lakoff & Tumer, 1989): There is a person with an incapacity. He encounters a situation in which his incapacity in that situation results in a negative consequence. He blames the situation rather than his own incapacity He should have held himself responsible, not the situation. (p. 163) This is a very general schema for characterizing an open-ended class of situations. Note what happens, though, when we apply the “Blind/blames the ditch” proverb to a situation such as when a presidential candidate knowingly commits some personal impropriety, and his or her candidacy is destroyed as a result of the press reporting of this impropriety (as occurred in 1988 with Gary Hart). The candidate blames the press for reporting the story rather than blaming himself or herself for committing the impropriety. If the judgment of the presidential candidate’s actions is expressed as “Blind!blames the ditch,” a “GENERIC IS SPECIFIC” metaphoric mapping is created that has several specific entailments: ‘The blind person corresponds to the presidential candidate. The blindness corresponds to the inability to understand the consequences of his or her personal impropriety. Falling into the ditch corresponds to committing the impropriety and having, it reported by others. Being in the ditch corresponds to being out of the running as a candidate. Blaming the ditch corresponds to blaming the press coverage.PROVERBS AND MINDS 209 Judging the blind person as foolish for blaming the ditch corresponds to judging the candidate as foolish for blaming the press coverage. ‘The mapping of the generic schema for “Blind/blames the ditch” onto the specific situation of the presidential candidate's impropriety provides for a mean- ing of the proverb that is quite specific and concrete but not at all arbitrary ‘These specific meanings arise from the way the slots are filled in the generic-level schema created by the proverb. Consequently, the invariant mapping of the “SPECIFIC” onto the “GENERIC” in this case shows why the “Blind/blames the ditch” proverb is not understood as meaning something like I took a bath or Blind people go to the post office. Instead, the idea that people have the “GENERIC IS SPECIFIC” metaphor as patt of their ordinary conceptual systems motivates why proverbs are created and mean what they do to most speakers. Lakoff and Tumer (1989) also argued that the great chain of being—a cultural model that holds that people, animals, plants, complex objects, and natural physical things have a hierarchical arrangment—places further constraints on the types of mappings that occur when proverbs are created and used. The ECBT postulates four phases in the process of interpreting proverbs. During the problem recognition phase, the listener recognizes the discrepancy between the proverb-as-literal statement and its context. During the literal trans- formation phase, the literal proverb information is elaborated and reorganized. ‘These elaborative processes typically result in two or more contrastive ideas. For example, in “A peacock shouldn't look at its legs,” the contrast between the beauty of a peacock and the ugliness of its legs is recognized as potentially referring to some contrast in the communicative situation. The basis for creating an analogical relation between the contrasting set of ideas is done in the third, figurative phase. This solution usually creates a conceptual base that is necessarily abstract and general because the contrasting ideas cannot be reconciled on a literal basis. Finally, in the instantiation phase, the conceptual base is extended to new events. For example, people who understand “A peacock shouldn’t look at its legs” should recognize the similarity of meaning between this proverb and other linguistic expressions such as The dandy-looking man wasn't aware that he had some annoying habits. The similarity between instances of the conceptual base is not due to inherent or directly given properties of the instances themselves. Rather, similarity is derived via the mediating mechanism of a conceptual base. In general, the ECBT sees proverb understanding as. a problem-solving task that does not require access to preexisting conceptual metaphors or any other specialized mechanism. Over the last 20 years, Honeck and his associates have presented a variety of data from empirical studies that presumably support different predictions of the ECBT, especially having to do with the idea that people understand proverbs as having meanings that are encoded in a conceptual base that is abstract, nonlinguistic, and nonimagistic (see Honeck & Temple, 1994, for references).210° GiBBs, COLSTON, JOHNSON WHAT IT MEANS TO UNDERSTAND A PROVERB | Part of the problem in trying to evaluate the GCMT in terms of existing psy- chological data, such as that provided by Honeck and Temple (1994), is that cognitive linguists and psychologists—especially psycholinguists—have different ideas about what it means to understand a proverb. Honeck and Temple main- tained that the GCMT is too structuralist, too mechanistic, and relies too heavily on the use of prepattemed knowledge to account for proverb comprehension, whereas the ECBT more adequately views proverb comprehension as a process of computational problem solving. For example, Honeck and Temple strongly argued that proverb understanding cannot depend on automatic processes that tap into prestored metaphorical mappings, in the way that the GCMT assumes, given that proverbs are typically understood quite slowly. The ECBT, according to Honeck and Temple, provides a better explanation for how proverbs are understood because it hypothesizes that these expressions are processed in a series of stages starting with a literal analysis of the proverb and ending with some recognition of figurative meaning. To what extent does proverb comprehension rely on automatic mental processes that utilize preexisting metaphorical knowledge? Is proverb compre- hension better understood as a matter of problem solving? We can better evaluate Honeck and Temple’s (1994) and Lakoff and Turner's (1989) respective claims by stepping back and considering five hypotheses on the role that metaphorical knowledge might play in proverb understanding. 1, Metaphorical thought plays some role in the original creation of proverbs in cultural settings but does not motivate contemporary speakers’ use and un- derstanding of proverbs. 2. Metaphorical thought motivates the figurative meanings for proverbs that have currency within contemporary linguistic communities or may have some role in an idealized speaker's or hearer’s understanding of proverbs. However, metaphorical thought does not actually play any part in an individual speaker's, ability to make sense of proverbs or to process these sayings. 3. Metaphorical thought motivates an individual speaker's use and under- standing of why various proverbs mean what they do but does not play any role in people’s ordinary online production or comprehension of proverbs. 4, Metaphorical thought plays an important part in how people first learn the figurative meanings of many proverbs but does not have a role in people's ordinary use and understanding of proverbs once these sayings become highly familiar. 5. Metaphorical thought functions automatically in people's immediate (“on- line”) use and understanding of proverbs. The difficulty in evaluating the GCMT and ECBT is that they are proposed to address different kinds of hypotheses about proverb understanding. The GCMTPROVERBS AND MINDS 211 clearly attempts to provide linguistic evidence on Hypotheses 1 through 3. Lakoff and Turner's (1989) work directly addressed aspects of how proverbs are originally created in cultural communities, how metaphorical thought motivates why proverbs have the meanings they have in modern language use, and why ‘many proverbs in context make sense in having the figurative meanings they have for individual language users. However, Lakoff and Tumer (1989) did not provide any evidence on whether metaphorical thought plays a role in how people learn proverbs or immediately produce and comprehend these sayings in everyday discourse. This is not surprising given that Lakoff and Turmer, as cognitive linguists, did not conduct experiments with the appropriate methodologies to tap into very fast, mostly unconscious, mental processes that operate when proverbs are comprehended. To adequately test Hypotheses 4 and 5, one must use various experimental paradigms employed in psycholinguistics to examine if metaphorical thought, influences learning and immediate comprehension of proverbs. We believe that conducting psycholinguistic studies to investigate Hypotheses 3 through 5 is worthwhile given the linguistic evidence Lakoff and Turner provided on Hypotheses 1 through 3 as well as the experimental findings from various preliminary studies on the role of conceptual metaphor in people’s mental imagery for proverb (Gibbs, Strom, & Spivey-Knowlton, in press), the work on inferences people draw when understanding proverbs (Gibbs & Beitel, 1995), and the large body of psycholinguistic evidence demonstrating that metaphorical knowledge partly motivates people's understanding of idiomatic expressions (Gibbs, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994; Gibbs & Nayak, 1991; Gibbs & O’Brien, 1990; Nayak & Gibbs, 1990). There are several methodological commitments that cognitive linguists adopt that shaped Lakoff and Tumer’s (1989) GCMT of proverb understanding —the ‘most important of which for our discussion is that the conceptual and experiential basis of linguistic categories and constructs is of primary importance, Language structure and behavior are not studied as if they were autonomous from ordinary thought but as reflections of general conceptual organization, categorization principles, and processing mechanisms (Lakoff, 1990). This research strategy provided a considerable body of evidence showing that many aspects of language use and structure are intimately connected to people’s everyday conceptual systems and that much of our ordinary cognition is constituted by metaphor, metonymy, and other figurative modes of thinking (Gibbs, 1994; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987). However, most psycholinguists do not explore the possibility that conceptual knowledge motivates the existence and use of many linguistic structures. Honeck and Temple (1994), for example, never conducted any research specifically devoted to looking at whether metaphorical knowledge—such as the mappings in the “GENERIC IS SPECIFIC” metaphor and other conceptual metaphors— have any role in proverb understanding. Consequently, it is not at all surprising that Honeck and ‘Temple concluded that the ECBT provides a superior account of proverb understanding than do different aspects of the GMCTT. If Honeck and212 GIBBS, COLSTON, JOHNSON ‘Temple had actually conducted experiments to investigate whether metaphorical thought played some role in proverb understanding, they might have come up with an entirely different conclusion than the one reached in their article. Honeck and Temple (1994) were quite correct in questioning Lakoff and ‘Turner's (1989) claims that various metaphorical mappings get computed automat- ically and effortlessly during proverb understanding. However, the issue of whether metaphorical mappings are automatically used in proverb understanding is com- plex because the very notion of automaticity may relate to each of the five hypotheses listed previously about metaphor and proverb understanding. For example, it is quite possible that metaphorical thought may play no role in immediate proverb comprehension (contrary to Hypothesis 5), but people may still employ metaphorical schemes quite automatically in many other aspects of everyday thought. Lakoff and Turner’ s analysis of several systematic metaphorical mappings as motivating the meanings and use of many proverbs constitutes one kind of evidence in favor of the automatic, pervasive use of metaphor in human cognition. This does not mean, once again, that these metaphorical schemas are ordinarily accessed each and every time a proverb is read or heard. Tht is, the fact that people create proverbs with the figurative meanings these sayings have and the fact that proverbs make sense to most contemporary speakers in having the meanings they have (and not other meanings) is not arbitrary but reflects the active, automatic presence of metaphorical modes of cognition. Itis somewhat unfortunate that Lakoff and Turner referred to metaphorical thought as automatic given the ‘more technical and narrow understanding of this concept in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics as an antonym of “strategic.” None of this diminishes the importance of metaphorical thought in certain aspects of how proverbs are created, used, and understood. Even though Honeck and Temple (1994) raised an important issue in their discussion of automatic processes in proverb understanding, the data they provided in support of their claim really has no bearing on the problem. They claimed that the fact that people often take several seconds to read proverbs necessarily indicates that metaphorical mappings must not be automatically employed during proverb comprehension. However, the total time it takes people to read proverbs may mask several underlying processes that automatically operate, such as different metaphorical mappings processes, when proverbs are understood (cf. Gibbs & Gerrig, 1989). Again, to make any claim as to whether metaphorical thought does or does not play some automatic role in immediate proverb comprehension demands that online experiments be conducted that specifically test this hypothesis (Hypothesis 5). PROBLEMS WITH THE ECBT The ECBT was seen by Honeck and Temple (1994) as providing the best explanation for what people do when they immediately comprehend proverbs. However, we must raise several additional questions about the evidence theyPROVERBS AND MINDS 213 described in favor of the ECBT. First, it is not clear that understanding proverbs ordinarily requires four separate phases, including a phase where the listener always recognizes some discrepancy between a proverb’s literal meaning and the context. Although this proposal might explain how people first learn the meanings of some ‘unfamiliar proverbs, such a model makes an inaccurate prediction about normal proverb understanding, namely that proverbs should always take longer to process than literal paraphrases. There is a large body of evidence from psycholinguistics on figurative language processing that is clearly contrary to this prediction (Gibbs, 1993, 1994). People may occasionally take quite some time to read novel proverbs, yet this does not mean that proverbs must always take longer to read than literal statements, as would be predicted by the standard pragmatic model favored by Honeck and Temple. Furthermore, the new evidence Honeck and Temple provided does not actually test the predictions of the standard pragmatic model For instance, they described a study in which participants had to choose which of two contexts ‘was most appropriate for a proverb. The results showed that people take longer to pick a figurative context than a literal one. Yet, this finding does not bear on the issue of how people immediately process proverbs in discourse because it only taps into participants’ conscious decisions about the appropriateness of different con- texts for proverbs. Several other experiments by Honeck and associates also do not directly relate to the problem of proverb comprehension (see Honeck & Temple, 1994, for references). Many of the studies cited in support of the ECBT employed a cued-recall method to show that abstract cues facilitate memory for proverbs. However, many studies in the late 1970s and 1980s questioned the utility of cued-recall procedures for evaluating what people do when they process language or form mental representations for linguistic material (cf. McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992). These studies suggested that results obtained with cued-recall procedures may reflect post hoc retrieval processes, such as context checking, rather than immediate inference processes that occur when people ordinarily comprehend language. For this reason, the evidence showing that proverb understanding results in an abstract, nonimagistic representation may not fully demonstrate how people make sense of why proverbs mean what they do, how proverbs are learned, or how people immediately comprehend proverbs. Finally, Honeck and Temple (1994) provided evidence on people’s written interpretations of proverbs in support of the ECBT and against the GCMT. They found that people do not generally provide very good interpretations for proverbs and that their paraphrases do not necessarily refer to human affairs. Honeck and ‘Temple argued that the GCMT would predict that proverbs should refer only to human affairs given the great chain metaphor and that people should provide relatively constrained, apt interpretations for proverbs given the specialized meta- phorical mappings that operate when proverbs are understood. Lakoff and Turner (1989) certainly acknowledged that the great chain ‘metaphor makes proverbs especially useful for talking about human affairs, but214 GIBBS, COLSTON, JOHNSON they did not claim that proverbs exclusively refer to human events. There is plenty of enthnographic evidence demonstrating that proverbs reflect concerns about human events and nature (Mieder, 1993). The data on variability in proverb interpretations Honeck and Temple (1994) offered also do not bear on the empirical adequacy of the GCMT. Honeck and Temple compared people’s interpretations against a standard for each of 12 proverbs and found that people mostly provide less than good paraphrases for these sayings. How these data support the ECBT but not the GCMT is not clear. First, what was the standard meaning Honeck and Temple determined for each proverb? Even proverb dictionaries vary a great deal in how they define the meanings of proverbs and mostly illustrate a proverb’s meaning by placing it in a context. Second, asking people to write out paraphrases for proverbs is not the best method for examining the inferences people tacitly make for what proverbs mean. Even Honeck and Temple agreed that creating general, abstract meanings for proverbs in an irrelevant context is a very different task from that which confronts listeners who hear proverbs in appropriate situational contexts. Regularity in people’s proverb understanding can, however, be detected given more indirect, experimental methods. Several studies examining people's mental imagery for proverbs and their agreement with specific inferences about what proverbs (as opposed to literal paraphrases) mean demonstrate that people interpret proverbs not as having vague, abstract meanings but as having very specific interpretations (Gibbs & Beitel, 1995; Gibbs et al., 1994). These specific meanings for proverbs reflect the complex entailments that arise from the metaphorical mappings of dissimilar source and target domains underlying proverbial meaning. For example, “A rolling stone gathers no moss” is motivated by two, common metaphorical mappings: “LIFES A JOURNEY” and “PEOPLE ARE INANIMATE OBJECTS.” The conceptual mapping of information from source domains onto target domains in different discourse contexts gives rise to numerous specific entailments that listeners or readers will typically infer. Thus, one study showed that listeners inferred that, when “A rolling stone gathers no moss” is said about a particular person, he or she may be restless because of some external event that causes him or her to unintentionally go from one situation to another in a haphazard manner. People may not infer the same entailments each and every time they come across a proverb, and there may be significant individual differences in exactly which entailments are recovered. However, people will understand proverbs as having more complex meanings than do literal paraphrases because of the complex entail ments that arise from a proverb’s underlying conceptual metaphor. Honeck and Temple’s (1994) conclusion about the poor quality of people’s open interpre tations for proverbs as evidence against the GCMT and for the ECBT is unwar ranted given that people can tacitly recognize that proverbs have complex, concrete meanings. Part of the problem proverb lexicographers face in constructing proverb dictionaries is that they must rely on their own intuitions and cannot tap into what people tacitly know about proverbial meaning in the way that certain methodologies from psycholinguistics are able to do.PROVERBS AND MINDS 215 CONCLUSIONS. Our aim in this article was to point out just some of the difficulties in assessing proverb understanding from an interdisciplinary perspective. We acknowledge the contributions that Honeck and Temple (1994) made in comparing psycho- linguistic evidence against cognitive linguistic analyses of proverbs. However, Honeck and Temple misunderstood the goals and methods of cognitive linguistics and assumed that Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) views on the role of metaphorical thought in proverb understanding were intended as a theory of immediate proverb comprehension. As we argued, people may indeed automatically access preex- isting patterns of metaphorical thought when proverbs are processed online. However, the jury is stil out on this question until the appropriate experiments are conducted. At the same time, we believe that a psychological theory of proverb interpretation must explain aspects of how proverbs are created in cultural context from various pragmatic and conceptual necessities, how people make sense of why proverbs have the specific meanings they do, and how people immediately process proverbs in everyday discourse. The GCMT, to date, pro- vides the most comprehensive view to explain these different aspects of proverb understanding, There is obviously much theoretical and empirical work to do on proverbs in the future, We urge psychologists and other proverb scholars to recognize some of the links between culture, the metaphorical mind, and figurative language understanding as well as to recognize the necessity of conducting appropriate experiments to examine these links. REFERENCES Gibbs, R. (1990). Psycholinguistic studies on the conceptual basis of idiomaticty. Cognitive Linguistics, 1, 417-45) Gibbs, R. (1992), What do idioms really mean? Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 485-506. Gibs, R. (1993), Processes and products in making sense of tropes. In A. Ontony (Ed), Metaphor ‘and thought: Vol. 2 (pp. 252-276). New York: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, R. (1994). The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press. 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Chicago: University of Chicago Press Lakoff, G. (1990). The invariance hypothesis: Is abstract reason based on image-schemas? Cognitive Linguistics, 1, 39-14, Lakoff, G,, & Turner, M. (1989). No cool reason: The power of poeric metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MeKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (1992). Inferences during reading. Psychological Review, 99, 440-A66. Merwin, W. (1973), Asian figures. New York: Atheneum. Mieder, W. (1993). Proverbs are never out of season. New York: Oxford University Press. Nayak, N., & Gibis, R. (1990). Conceptual knowledge in the interpretation of idioms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 119, 315-330.Copyright © 2002 EBSCO PublishingCopyright of Metaphor & Symbolic Activity is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. 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