More Than Cool Reason A Field Guide To Poetic Metaphor

Linguistic Society of America
Review
Author(s): Ray Jackendoff and David Aaron
Review by: Ray Jackendoff and David Aaron
Source: Language, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 320-338
Published by: Linguistic Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/415109
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REVIEW ARTICLE
More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. by GEORGELAKOFF
and MARK TURNER. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Pp. xii, 230.
$11.95.
Reviewed by RAY JACKENDOFF,Brandeis University,
and DAVID AARON, Wellesley College*
This book (MTCR) presents itself as 'analyzing the role of metaphor in poetry
... [taking] up general questions of the theory of metaphor... The book should
therefore prove valuable to students and researchers in literature, linguistics,
philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science' (xii).
The book is organized into four chapters. The first, 'Life, death, and time',
explores the range of metaphorical conceptions of these fundamental notions,
illustrated by analyses of passages from a wide variety of poems of different
periods. This introduction serves to motivate the second chapter, 'The power
of poetic metaphor'. This is the core of the book, presenting in detail the au-
thors' theory of poetic metaphor and comparing it with other approaches. Ch.
3, 'The metaphoric structure of a single poem', treats William Carlos Williams's
'The jasmine lightness of the moon' in depth as a further application of the
theory. The final chapter, 'The great chain of being', deals with a widespread
metaphor (or metaphor complex), shows its application in poems and proverbs,
and draws some general conclusions.
In the present review article we can only touch on some of the many pro-
vocative issues that the book raises from the points of view of linguistics and
literature. Our discussion focuses primarily on Ch. 2.
1. BASICCLAIMS. L&T make a number of claims, repeated throughout the

book, which form the basis of their approach to metaphor.
(1) A metaphor is not a 'figure of speech', a linguistic object. Rather, it is a
conceptual or cognitive organization expressed by the linguistic object. As a
consequence, many different linguistic expressions may evoke (or invoke) the
same metaphor.
(2) Metaphorical expressions pervade ordinary language; they are not just
used for artistic purposes. These everyday metaphors reveal cognitive and
cultural conceptions of the world.
(3) Metaphor in poetry is not a distinctly different phenomenon from met-
aphor in ordinary language. Rather, poetic metaphor exploits and enriches the
everyday metaphors available to any competent speaker of the language.
(4) The act of reading texts is a cognitive process of bringing one's construal
of the world to bear on the concepts evoked by the text.
Claims (1) and (2) are the central burden of Lakoff's earlier book with Mark
* We are grateful to George Lakoff, Mark
Turner, Sarah Thomason, and an anonymous reader
for many helpful comments on an earlier version of this review article. This research was supported
in part by NSF Grant IRI 90-46528 to Brandeis University.
320
REVIEW ARTICLE 321
Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson 1980); it is the application

to literary contexts that is novel here.
In general we find ourselves in agreement with these claims (although, as
will be seen in ?4, we find (2) considerably overstated); they constitute an
important statement of a 'cognitivist' view of literary interpretation. In partic-
ular, claim (3), the grounding of literary metaphor in 'everyday metaphor',
strikes us as especially interesting. However, as in the case of any large-scale
claim of this sort, the theory should be judged in terms of how satisfyingly the
details are fleshed out. If we point out weaknesses in L&T's presentation, it
is not with the aim of undermining their overall cognitivist perspective, but
rather to explore how a more convincing case could be constructed.
2. SCHOLARLYSTANCE. Before going into the substance of L&T's claims,

we must first make a few general remarks. The authors tell us that the book
is aimed above all at a nonspecialist audience ('We have tried to write the book
in a style accessible to undergraduates who are learning to read poetry in depth'
[xii]). However, the passage quoted at the beginning of this review suggests
that readers with a broad range of scholarly concerns are also being addressed.
Given the latter concern, and in view of the vast literature on metaphor-Black
1979 cites a list of references in Shibles 1971 containing some four thousand
titles-it is somewhat surprising to find in MTCR a bibliography of only four-
teen items, at least seven of which are by Lakoff or members of his circle.
Eleven further works are cited in a brief appendix entitled 'More on traditional
views'; only one of the authors of these eleven works (I. A. Richards) can be
remotely considered a literary theorist.
In the main text, references to the literature are even scantier. As far as we
can find, there is exactly one attribution to another scholarly work (130). Other
than this, the text does not distinguish points claimed to be original to this
book from points elaborated elsewhere by Lakoff and Turner and from points
derived from other authors. This makes it virtually impossible for curious read-
ers to gain a perspective of the place of this book in the field, other than by
searching randomly through the sources in the bibliography. This compromise
between the needs of informal exposition and scholarly discourse strikes us as
unsatisfactory. Perhaps the University of Chicago Press should bear some of
the blame for not suggesting one of the editorial techniques, common in popular
works on history and science, for presenting a text which does not burden the
informal reader with references and footnotes, but which provides detailed
endnotes for specialists.
The book contains some 26 pages criticizing other positions on metaphor,
which are identified only by such slogans as the Literal Meaning Theory, the
Pragmatics Position, the No Concepts Position, the Interaction Theory, the
Dead Metaphor Theory, and the It's All Metaphor Theory. This section con-
cludes with the following paragraph, which is indicative of L&T's attitude
towards scholarship (136):
'We have done our best to survey the principal traditional theories of metaphor and where
our views differ from them. Our survey differs from most other such surveys in two respects:
322 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991)
First, we have not tried to say who claims what, to associate particular authors with positions.
Our main interest has been in simply stating what the positions are....
As it happens, views approaching L&T's are not uncommon, even if the full
combination of claims (1)-(4) does not appear in any other source. For an
example out of L&T's bibliography, Black 1979 subscribes quite clearly to
claims (1) and (4) and produces some of the same arguments against alternative
views. For a case not mentioned by L&T, some of the essays in Fish 1980
present a view of literary interpretation quite congenial to claim (4). So it is
not as though L&T's cognitivist perspective is entirely original.
Within their discussion, L&T criticize what they call the 'Interaction Theory'
for claiming that metaphors merely compare two domains equally and pick out
similarities symmetrically (132); only in the appendix is Max Black cited as an
adherent of this approach (218). However, what Black 1979 calls the 'inter-
action theory' fully acknowledges the asymmetry of metaphor.
Similarly, Richard Rorty is presented in the appendix (218) as an advocate
of the 'No Concepts Position', a theory 'that views the meaning of expressions
in a language as independent of human cognition' (126). Our reading of Rorty
(1979, 1989) is quite the opposite: he argues that meanings are heavily depen-
dent on tacit cultural agreement. Rorty says (1989:21), '... since truth is a
property of sentences, and sentences are dependent for their existence upon
vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.'
It is hard to imagine a blunter statement of Rorty's cognitivist perspective-
just the opposite of L&T's characterization, and in fact rather close to L&T's
own position. Thus the book's all too cursory references to the literature are
in some cases misleading as well.
3. INTERPRETIVE
STANCE. The following passage is explicit about L&T's at-
titude toward the interpretation of poems (110):
'Poems stand on their own. They evoke our construals and those construals are of value,
whether they coincide with the author's or not. That is not to say that literary scholars should
not engage in historical study that attempts to home in on the author's intended construals,
to the extent that they can be pinned down. But that is a separate enterprise from what readers
normally do when they encounter works of literature.'
The goal of this passage, presumably, is to empower the novice reader-to
assure you that you don't have to be a literary and cultural expert in order to
be able to read poetry. Yet, as L&T point out elsewhere, one's literary and
cultural knowledge interact richly with the interpretation of poetry. For ex-
ample, L&T's detailed interpretation of William Carlos Williams's 'The jasmine
lightness of the moon' involves a global metaphor for Christianity. The only
overt clue for this interpretation is the word steeple, which evokes a church.
A reader culturally ignorant of this detail might guess instead that the references
to the crescent moon and the turquoise sky are meant to evoke Islam, for
instance. Similarly, a novice reader would be unaware of the fact that, at a
particular time in India, 'illicit sexual liaisons commonly took place in the tall,
thick reeds along river banks' (60)-a fact that is crucial to the interpretation
of two Sanskrit poems that L&T discuss. Thus it is surely an overstatement
to say that 'normal readers' need not be concerned with 'the author's intended
REVIEW ARTICLE 323
construals'-including the cultural associations the author meant to evoke-

and that this is only the province of 'literary scholars'. Except from a decon-
structionist viewpoint, which L&T certainly do not adopt, poems do NOT stand
on their own.
L&T recognize this point in a prominent passage at the close of Ch. 3 (159):
'It important to see, however, that all the detailed analysis we have given does not constitute
a literary-critical treatment of the poem. Various literary critics concern themselves with read-
ing a poem by bringing to bear a host of issues: the poem's historical context, the biography,
dialect, politics, or profession of the author, the tradition the poem comes from, the way it is
influenced by previous poems in that tradition, the genre of the poem, the connotations of
particular words ..., the ways and reasons poets get published or ignored, the issue of reputation
and canonization of the author and his tradition, issues of gender, and so on. What we are
concerned to provide throughout this book is instead a prerequisite to any such discussion,
namely, a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the role of metaphor in the way we understand
a poem.'
The difficulty we see with this passage is that it sets off the metaphorical anal-
ysis of a poem as a PREREQUISITE to a 'literary-critical treatment', which in turn
is characterized by an unstructured list of issues ranging from linguistic to
sociological, as though 'various literary critics' (notice lack of attribution) con-
sidered them equally central. As we have seen, L&T's actual analytic practice
in uncovering metaphorical interpretations makes free use of at least the lin-
guistic and cultural backgrounds of texts; their form of analysis certainly con-
stitutes a literary-critical treatment, though perhaps not a complete one.
Like L&T, we are altogether in favor of empowering readers; we are not
advocating a pas'sive surrender to critical authority as to how a poem is to be
read or what is important about it. But we do feel that a novice reader ought
to be encouraged to explore whatever can be found out about a text, within
the bounds of his or her own time and interest. While 'external' linguistic,
literary, critical, or cultural knowledge on their own cannot account for the
'meaning' of a poem, they all help one become a better reader-just as un-
derstanding metaphor does. We see no need to establish priorities, to call met-
aphor a 'prerequisite' to any of these other domains.'
4. WHATCOUNTS ASA METAPHOR? We now turn to L&T's claims. L&T con-
ceive of a metaphor as a mapping of conceptual organization from one domain,
the SOURCEDOMAIN,to another, the TARGET DOMAIN.Typically, elements of
' It is beyond the scope of this review article to evaluate the details of L&T's interpretations of
poems, but we suspect that many warrant closer scrutiny, even within L&T's own methodology.
For instance, L&T comment as follows on Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, which begins:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
'The first four lines evoke the PEOPLE ARE PLANTS metaphor, in which the stages of life
correspond to stages of the plant life cycle' (27). But in fact, it seems to us that the text of the
poem most explicitly maps the speaker into a time of year, not into a plant; the plants come in as
a way of identifying the season, which is then metaphorically related to the 'season' of the poet's
life.
the source domain are expressed in the text; the target domain may or may
not be mentioned in the text, but it is what the metaphor is 'really about'. For
example, in Shakespeare's phrase All the world's a stage, the source domain
is the conceptualization of the theater, as evoked by the term stage; the target
domain is life in general, as evoked by all the world. L&T sloganize such a
metaphor as LIFE IS A PLAY. In other cases, the target domain is covert.
For example, in Frost's Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-/I took the one
less traveled by, the source domain is one of taking ajourney; the target domain,
roughly the conduct of one's life, is entirely implicit, but it is what the poem
is 'about'. L&T call this metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. L&T take a concept
to be metaphorical just to the extent that it is not understood and structured
on its own terms, but rather in terms of the structure of an independent source
domain.
A major point of interest for L&T is the way the structure of the source
domain is applied to the target domain to create new inferential possibilities.
For instance, the phrase My career has hit a dead end invokes the LIFE IS
A JOURNEY metaphor. The schema of a journey includes a traveler and a
path; mapping this schema over to life involves identifying the 'traveler slot'
with that of the person whose life is being described, in this case myself. The
'path slot', however, has no immediately corresponding slot in the life schema,
so the metaphor creates a 'course of life slot' (63). To create an understanding
of the phrase, one then applies to this new slot in the target domain the infer-
ences characteristic of dead ends as paths, e.g. the structure of the path making
it impossible to go any farther in the same direction, the need to turn back and
find a different direction, a general negative evaluation of the situation, and so
forth.
L&T characterize metaphors as varying along two parameters. The first is
CONVENTIONALIZATION. A metaphoris CONVENTIONALIZED 'to the extent that
it is automatic, effortless, and generally established as a mode of thought among
members of a linguistic community' (55). So, for example, they characterize
the metaphor DEATH IS DEPARTURE as conventionalized in our culture,
though it may admit of unconventional expression for literary purposes. By
contrast, the metaphor LIFE IS A FIRE is less conventional. The second
parameter is CONCEPTUAL INDISPENSABILITY, or BASICNESS; it concerns the ex-
tent to which 'it is virtually unthinkable ... to dispense with [the metaphor
without] chang[ing] utterly the way we think...' (56). Examples given of ex-
tremely basic metaphors are PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS and TIME
MOVES.
An initial problem with L&T's metaphorical analyses concerns the proper
choice of schema.2 L&T often assert that a particular metaphorical schema
applies, but do not show why that schema, rather than something more general
or more specific, is the most appropriate. For instance, when L&T invoke the
schema LIFE IS A FIRE, why not LIFE IS SOMETHING THAT GIVES
OFF HEAT (more general) or LIFE IS A FLAME (more specific)? Intuitively,
2 This problem was pointed out by an anonymous reader.
REVIEW ARTICLE 325
their strategy seems to be to choose the most general schema that preserves
the details necessary for the metaphorical mapping; this is borne out in one
passage (174-76) where the choice is discussed explicitly in terms of Grice's
(unattributed) Maxim of Quantity. But the absence of a general discussion of
the problem leaves a major gap in the theory.
However, there is a more significant difficulty with their account. As L&T
point out, following Lakoff & Johnson 1980, their overall characterization en-
larges the scope of the term 'metaphor' well beyond the standard use of the
term. While we think many of their points are well taken, we believe their
characterization obscures certain important distinctions and stretches the no-
tion 'metaphor' to a number of cases that should be understood in other terms.
We now take up these issues in some detail.
Many previous discussions of metaphor have observed that metaphors are
usually manifested in a text by some overt incongruity. In the simplest cases,
such as All the world's a stage, the text, taken literally, is anomalous. In others
the incongruity is more subtle. For instance, in Frost's Two roads diverged in
a wood, and I-11 took the one less traveled by,l And that has made all the
difference, the incongruity, such as it is, is signaled by all the difference: why
should a navigational choice be so consequential? Change the phrase to And
that made a difference, and the metaphorical effect is hardly as strong; one
could easily imagine the poet literally talking about a walk in the woods.
A central issue for the traditional theory of metaphor, then, has been how
to account for such incongruity-what it is doing in a text and how we interpret
it. A common response (e.g. Davidson 1978, Sadock 1979, Searle 1979, Lappin
1981) is to suggest that the interpreter is using a literally false (or, more gen-
erally, incongruous) expression to mean something else. That is, the use of
metaphor is taken to be a particular kind of speech act, so that the theory of
metaphor belongs in the theory of pragmatics and speech acts rather than in
the theory of word and sentence meaning. Various advocates of this position
differ in details of how this overall conception is fleshed out, but the common
thread is clear.
L&T call this position the Literal Meaning Theory, and criticize different
versions of it at some length. They offer three arguments. First, ordinary lan-
guage is pervaded with metaphors which speakers do not consider literally false
or incongruous; hence one cannot contrast poetic metaphor with ordinary non-
anomalous literal language. Second, the standard philosophical conceptions of
truth and falsity do not apply to ordinary language in any event (Lakoff 1987)-
a judgment with which we concur (Jackendoff 1983, 1987)-so one cannot
contrast the 'literal truth' of nonmetaphorical language with the 'falsity' of
metaphorical language. And third, no sharp line can be drawn between linguistic
semantics (the study of 'sentence meaning') and pragmatics (the study of 'ut-
terance meaning'; Lakoff 1987, and again Jackendoff 1983), so one cannot
coherently assign 'ordinary language' to semantics and metaphor to pragmatics.
In short, the putative distinction between metaphor and the so-called literal
utterances of ordinary language founders.
However, on closer examination, L&T's argument doesn't really bear on
the intuitions behind the traditional position, but only on an account of them
situated within a truth-conditional semantics. We see no inherent difficulty in
granting that metaphors involve a special kind of speech act, while maintaining,
with L&T, that metaphors are not confined to literature but rather pervade
everyday speech as well. Similarly, even if judgments of truth and falsity are
not absolute, but are rather grounded in mental representation of the world,
this had better not undermine the possibility of judging that a particular utter-
ance or text presents an incongruity. For instance, such intuitions are a crucial
component in judging that someone is lying. Hence, the theory that meta-
phorical interpretations arise through pragmatic resolution of incongruity can
be maintained simultaneously with L&Ts cognitivist approach, and they give
no argument against such a possibility.
We believe that the traditional insight about the literal incongruity of met-
aphors is worth preserving. As a way of integrating it into a cognitivist ap-
proach, let us compare expressions that L&T count as metaphors ('LT-
metaphors') to expressions that, like LT-metaphors, involve a mapping be-
tween domains, but in addition bear a sense of incongruity ('I-metaphors'); the
latter would be more standardly acknowledged as metaphorical.
To test whether a sentence is an I-metaphor, we propose a rough diagnostic
that checks for both the presence of an incongruous mapping between domains
and the applicability of this mapping to the sentence in question. For instance,
consider two conventionalized metaphors of the sort L&T cite:
(1) a. Our relationship is at a dead end.
b. My computer died on me.
For L&T, these are realizations of the more general conceptual equations in
2.
(2) a. A RELATIONSHIP IS A JOURNEY
b. MACHINES ARE PEOPLE
Now consider the diagnostic sentences in 3.
(3) a. Of course, relationships are not journeys-but if they were, you
might say ours is at a dead end.
b. Of course, machines are not people-but if they were, you might
say my computer died on me.
These sentences are more or less overt explications of the metaphorical inter-
pretations of the sentences in 1: the first clause acknowledges the incongruity
of the mapping, and the second constructs a hypothetical invocation of the
mapping that motivates the metaphorical reading.
To see further how this diagnostic works, suppose one were to claim (coun-
terintuitively) that My dog ran down the street is I-metaphorical, on the (du-
bious) grounds that the predicate run only applies 'literally' to humans.
According to such an analysis, the sentence would be understood I-meta-
phorically by invoking the equation ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE. However, our
diagnostic shows that something is odd about this analysis:
(4) !Of course, animals aren't people-but if they were, you might say
my dog ran down the street.
REVIEW ARTICLE 327
Ex. 4 has the curious flavor of a non sequitur or perhaps a bad pun. The
incongruity of treating dogs as humans is acknowledged, but the relevance of
this mapping to the expression my dog ran down the street is totally unclear.
Our diagnostic thus confirms the intuition that the sentence is not an I-metaphor
derived from the equation ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE.
Given this diagnostic, we will now examine a number of LT-metaphors that
prove not to be I-metaphors.
4.1. LITERAL BELIEFS. L&T maintain (19-20) that a metaphorical conception
of death can be expressed as LIFE IS FLUID IN THE BODY; DEATH IS
LOSS OF FLUID.3 Consider the following expression from the Hebrew Scrip-
tures: For the life of a being [lit. flesh] is in the blood (Leviticus 17:11; cf. also
verse 14 and, for the Noachide law, Genesis 9:4). Equipped with L&T's
schema, which fits exactly, one might want to read this metaphorically. How-
ever, such an interpretation would be hard to defend, given what we know of
the ancient Hebrew belief system, which very specifically attributed certain
physical and psychic functions to different organs of the body. Indeed, the
topical context in Leviticus is a very literal prohibition against ingesting animal
blood. That is, this passage expresses not an I-metaphor but a LITERAL BELIEF.
By contrast, we assume that W. H. Auden's Vaguely life leaks away, cited by
L&T (19), is intended I-metaphorically. To use our diagnostic, the ancient
Hebrews would not be willing to assert the first clause of 5, but Auden would.
(5) Of course, life isn't a fluid-but if it were, you might say
. Jis in the blood [Leviticus]. l
tvaguely leaks away [Auden].J
As far as we can determine from L&T's discussion, though, both phrases are
to be regarded as LT-metaphors.
Similarly, consider L&T's discussion of the equation DEATH IS SLEEP
(18-19). The Hebrew liturgy preserves the following phrase, to be recited upon
awakening in the morning: I render thanks to you, Eternal King, who has
mercifully returned my soul to within me. There is significant evidence that
this is not meant I-metaphorically, but rather that the writer believed the soul
quite literally to depart from the body during sleep and to be restored upon
awakening. Conversely, death was considered a form of sleep, differentiated
only by its length and quality: resurrection in the earliest Judaic and Christian
sources was quite naturally viewed as awakening from this sleep. Many other
ancient cultures shared this notion as well (Frazer 1963:210-11). We cannot
be sure, then, that Aristophanes conceived of death I-metaphorically in the
passage cited by L&T (19), For what is Death but an eternal sleep?-or even
that Shakespeare did in Death's second self [i.e. sleep] that seals up all in rest
(29). L&T's equation DEATH IS DEPARTURE raises the same problem, for
many cultures view death literally as the soul (or person) passing on to its next
existence. Consequently, though this equation may constitute a fairly conven-
3 Actually, as pointed out by a reader, the slogan must be more precise: life cannot be any old
fluid in the body, say wine or urine; it must be a particular fluid-and death must be loss of this
fluid and no other.
tional I-metaphor for our culture, in other cultures an I-metaphorical interpre-

tation might be mistaken. However, L&T consider ALL conceptualizations of
death in terms of departures as LT-metaphorical.
How then do L&T distinguish what we are calling literal beliefs from what
we are calling I-metaphors? Their parameter of 'conventionalization' cannot
make the necessary distinction, since an expression such as Death is sleep may
be equally conventional in two cultures, but literal in one and I-metaphorical
in the other. Is the distinction then in 'basicness' or 'indispensability'? We will
see in a moment that it is probably not.
4.2. THEMATICPARALLELS.AS far as we can determine, L&T consider met-

aphor the principal cognitive mechanism available for cutting across disparate
domains. However, there are other possibilities, in particular with respect to
a number of L&T's 'basic metaphors'. Jackendoff 1976, 1978, 1983, 1990,
adapting work in Gruber 1965, proposes the 'Thematic Relations Hypothesis',
the claim that the conceptual structures expressed by natural language are
organized in terms of a set of abstract parameters that are most clearly revealed
in language about space, but that apply to many other semantic fields as well.
It is not that space is taken as a METAPHORthat supplements or enriches the
conceptualization of these fields; rather, this common organization is the ONLY
way we have of conceptualizing them. In other words, this basic skeletal or-
ganization of conceptual structure (a sort of semantic counterpart of X-Bar
theory) receives many parallel realizations, among them the conceptualization
of space.
Among the fields discussed by Gruber and Jackendoff is the Circumstantial
field, in which the parallel to a thing being in a spatial location is a character
participating in an action. This field is shown to underlie the analysis of as-
pectual verbs such as begin and cease, and to explain the generalization of the
verb keep from cases like Bill kept the books on the shelfto complement con-
structions like Bill kept Harry working/at work. The relation of this field to the
spatial field encompasses two of L&T's 'basic metaphors', STATES ARE LO-
CATIONS and PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS: being Circumstantially
in a state is the thematic parallel of being spatially in a location, and intending
to perform an action is the thematic parallel of intending to go to a location.
Notice what happens when our diagnostic for I-metaphors is applied to some
of the LT-metaphors that fall under these mappings:
(6) a. !Of course, purposes aren't destinations-but if they were, you
might say we haven't reached our goal of finishing this review
article.
b. !Of course, states aren't locations-but if they were, you might
say I've gotten through my depression.
These have the same curious effect as 4-quite different from the case of literal
belief in 5. Here the incongruity of the mapping is acknowledged rather than
denied, but its invocation seems beside the point: evidently the Circumstantial
domain is not being accessed by way of an I-metaphorical mapping from the
spatial domain.
REVIEW ARTICLE 329
L&T's 'basic metaphor' TIME MOVES has similar properties. As is well

known, it is a basic design feature of language that temporal expressions use
many of the same connectives and grammatical devices as spatial expressions,
for example in English the temporal use of in, on, at, through, etc., and the
strong grammatical parallelism between whenlnowlthen and where/here/there.
Many people (e.g. Anderson 1971, Talmy 1978) have observed that the proper
semantic account of these grammatical generalizations assimilates time in many
respects to spatial location. Jackendoff (1983:189-91) argues that this is another
example of the Thematic Relations Hypothesis. hence not an I-metaphor. As
evidence, notice that a typical LT-metaphor within this mapping yields a non
sequitur in our diagnostic frame:
(7) !Of course, times aren't locations-but if they were, you might say
we're getting close to Christmas.
Ex. 7 illustrates one of L&T's two realizations of TIME MOVES, one in which
times are reference points toward which one 'moves'. In the other, time is
conceived of as a medium in motion that passes one by; this too submits to
thematic analysis (Jackendoff 1983:191) and yields a non sequitur in our di-
agnostic:
(8) !Of course, time is not a medium in motion-but if it were, you might
say the year passed by quickly.
We conclude that, although the domains of space and time are indeed incon-
gruous, space is not used as an I-metaphorical basis for understanding time.
Another case involves the semantic field called 'Existential' in Jackendoff
(1983:202-3). This is a field which has a 'pseudo-space' of only a single figural
location, namely 'existence'. Things go in and out of existence, and we bring
things into existence and keep them in existence. There is essentially no other
way to express these concepts: the Existential field is yet another realization
of the Thematic Relations Hypothesis. Again our diagnostic yields a non se-
quitur:
(9) !Of course, existence isn't a place-but if it were, you might say that
a new idea has come into existence/*it.
This field provides the structure underlying L&T's 'basic metaphors' DEATH
IS DEPARTURE, LIFE IS BEING PRESENT, and BIRTH IS ARRIVAL,
which, as pointed out above, may be literal beliefs or I-metaphors, depending
on one's culture.
A fourth case is the equation FORM IS MOTION, which accounts for LT-
metaphors such as The road goes from New York to LA. Again, there is no
way to express spatial extent other than by using such expressions-virtually
all the extent verbs of English can also be used as motion verbs. This too is
argued in the cited sources to be a thematic parallelism rather than an I-met-
aphor, and our diagnostic confirms this:
(10) !Of course, form isn't motion-but if it were, you might say that the
road goes from New York to LA.
These observations show that there is an important division between LT-
metaphors that are based on mapping of incongruous domains and those that
are based on thematic parallelism; the latter are not I-metaphors. However,
thematic parallels may be exploited to form specialized mappings that underlie
genuine I-metaphors. For instance, L&T's equation LIFE IS A JOURNEY
may be seen as a more specialized case of the thematic parallel between Lo-
cation and Circumstance, in which the sequence of actions one performs par-
allels the path one traverses. This equation is the source of I-metaphors such
as the Frost quote above. In turn, this equation serves as the basis for subcases
such as DIFFICULTIES IN LIFE ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO TRAVEL,
PROGRESS IS THE DISTANCE TRAVELED, and DEATH IS THE END
OF LIFE'S JOURNEY. According to our analysis, then, the reason these latter
equations are so 'conceptually indispensable' is that they are particular cases
of a larger generalization behind the basic structure of any sort of thought,
literal or metaphorical.
For a further consequence of these observations, return to the LT-metaphors
that we called 'literal beliefs' in ?4.1. These expressions cannot be differentiated
from I-metaphors such as My computer died on the grounds of L&T's param-
eter of 'conventionality'; they are equally conventional. The only other pa-
rameter available to distinguish them is 'basicness'. But the behavior of a literal
belief in the diagnostic is quite different from that of the metaphors that L&T
term 'basic': compare 5 and 6. Hence there is no parameter available in L&T's
system to make the distinction between literal beliefs and conventionalized
I-metaphors.
4.3. FURTHERCASES. Finally, some of L&T's analyses strike us as simply
erroneous. Consider the 'basic metaphor' that L&T encode as EVENTS ARE
ACTIONS. The force of this equation is that an event can be taken to have a
volitional cause. In many situations, its use just amounts to an ordinary invited
inference; for instance, if the door opens we may guess that someone delib-
erately opened it. This suggests that EVENTS ARE ACTIONS is hardly a
metaphorical mapping, even an LT-metaphorical mapping. Rather, the meta-
phorical mapping in an LT- (and I-)metaphor like Death carried him away lies
only in personification of the cause. Indeed, using our diagnostic, we find that
only 1ld is a plausible explication of the metaphor:
(11) a. !Of course, events aren't actions-but if they were, you might
say Death carried him away.
b. !Of course, not all events are actions-but if they were, ...
c. !Of course, not all events have a volitional agent-but if they
did, ...
d. Of course, death isn't a person/an agent-but if it were, you might
say Death carried him away.
Similar arguments apply to HABITUAL BEHAVIOR IS AN ATTRIBUTE
(202), which seems less like a metaphor than a slogan for the heuristic principles
underlying any sort of category formation.
Consider also L&T's discussion of the loyalty of dogs (194): 'Dogs and lions
behave the way they do out of instinct, but we commonly understand their
behavior as if it were the product of some character trait of a human being.'
REVIEW ARTICLE 331
Hence, 'when we attribute such character traits to animals we are compre-

hending the behavior of those animals metaphorically in human terms.' (Similar
statements appear on 57 and 134.) It seems to us, however, that the attribute
'loyal to X' has a major component something like 'willingly stays with X when
X is in trouble'; this component applies equally in characterizing people or
dogs as loyal. If in addition people's loyalty has a moral component that
dogs lack, that doesn't seem to us necessarily to make the dog's loyalty
METAPHORICAL.4
This is not to say that ALL of L&T's metaphor schemas are better accounted
for as non-I-metaphors. Such equations as PEOPLE ARE PLANTS, MA-
CHINES ARE PEOPLE, and LIFE IS A FIRE seem to us genuine metaphors
in the standard sense. Nor do we wish to imply that the schemas discussed
above cannot be the grounding for genuine metaphors, by use of various further
devices such as personification.
However, it does seem clear that there are more distinctions in the conceptual
basis of metaphor than simple gradations from conventional and/or concep-
tually indispensable to unusual and/or special-purpose: important criteria such
as incongruity, literal vs. metaphorical belief, and thematic vs. metaphorical
parallelism must be addressed. We are therefore not convinced that the notion
of LT-metaphor characterizes a unified cognitive phenomenon. In fact, having
drained from the term 'metaphor' much of its traditional content, L&T have
created a theoretical construct so broad and unstructured that the term 'met-
aphor' may no longer be appropriate.
5. THE COGNITIVE BASIS FOR METAPHORICAL CONCEPTS. L&T'S excessively
broad notion of metaphor is complemented by a correspondingly narrow view
of the cognitive basis for concept formation. They divide concepts into those
that are metaphorical and those that are understood in their own terms or
'semantically autonomous'. Their notion of 'semantic autonomy' emerges from
passages like these:
'Semantically autonomous concepts ... are grounded in the habitual and routine bodily and
social patterns we experience, and in what we learn of the experience of others.' (113)
'[D]epartures, journeys, plants, fire, sleep, days and nights, heat and cold, possessions, bur-
dens, and locations are not themselves metaphorically understood, ... but rather by virtue of
their grounding in what we take to be our forms of life, or habitual and routine bodily and
social experiences.' (59)
'We acquire cognitive models in at least two ways: by our own direct experience and through
our culture. Thus, people who have never seen millstones can nonetheless learn, via their
culture, that they are used in mills to grind grain, and that they are the enormous round flat
stones that rotate about an axis.' (66)
The impression one gets from these passages is that the only sources of
nonmetaphorical conceptual structures are (a) sensorimotor experience, (b)
4 As an aside, it seems odd for people as cognitively oriented as L&T to reduce animal behavior
to instinct; perhaps this lies behind their denial of literal loyalty to dogs. When it comes to non-
sentient objects, our intuitions agree with L&T's: a car's or a computer's loyalty would be certainly
construed I-metaphorically.
experience of habitual or routine sensorimotor and social patterns, and (c) 'what
we learn from our culture', such as what millstones are. All abstract concepts,
for instance, are understood via metaphor. Further, L&T describe the learning
of 'basic' metaphorical mappings in terms of frequent associations (83):
'[I]n our everyday experience we constantly encounter cases where an increase in substance
(e.g., pouring more water in a glass) increases the height of the substance (e.g., the level of
the water in the glass). This provides us with a strong experiential basis for the basic metaphor
MORE IS UP...
'PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS has almost as strong a grounding in everyday expe-
rience. Regularly, throughout each day, the achievement of certain purposes requires going
to a certain location, as in going to get a glass of water... [W]e regularly experience the source
and target domain together...
This doctrine, despite the authors' professed cognitivist leanings, is char-
acteristically termed 'associationist', and it is quite at odds with contemporary
research on linguistic and cognitive development (see for instance Wexler &
Culicover 1980, Macnamara 1982, Landau & Gleitman 1985, Pinker 1989,
Markman 1990, Brown 1990-not to mention one of the early landmarks of
cognitive science, Chomsky 1959, as well as still earlier work such as Koffka
1935). In general, it has emerged from both theoretical and practical consid-
erations that the more richness and complexity one wishes to attribute to the
representations the mind has of the world, the richer and more complex must
be the underlying resources that one attributes to the mind prior to learning.
What resources do L&T actually presuppose in their account of the inter-
pretation of metaphors? At the very least, they claim that one's understanding
of the world is organized into structured schemas, which contain slots for the
various roles in the schema. But structured schemas containing slots are not
present in sensorimotor experience or in habitual or routine patterns; nor are
they taught. Moreover, the interpretation of metaphor requires that one have
access to forms of the source and target schemas sufficiently abstract to be
compared and mapped one onto the other. For instance, in order to associate
MORE with UP, the two domains must be placed in correspondence via a more
abstract structure that they share, something like a linear directed ordering.
But this schema is not present in any kind of experience; only INSTANCES of it
are. The capacity for abstraction must come from the mind's own resources.
Consider also metaphors that are not 'grounded in experience', such as PEO-
PLE ARE PLANTS. L&T tell us (84) only that this is not grounded either in
direct experience or 'strong commonplace knowledge'. Rather, 'youthful vigor
and the blossoming of plants ... are both instances of the same process that
occurs in all higher-level organisms: flourishing and maturation prior to repro-
duction'. Again, this requires extraction and comparison of properties of ob-
jects that are not found directly in experience. In short, it appears that in order
to support a theory of metaphor along the lines they propose, L&T must assume
a theory of concept formation richer and more abstract than one is led to assume
from the quotes above.
In addition, there is the further question of whether all abstract concepts are
understood metaphorically, permitting such a small 'semantically autonomous'
base. It is not clear how a child can 'get into' an abstract conceptual domain
REVIEW ARTICLE 333
without at least some minimal innate grounding that establishes the possibility
of the domain within the child's conceptual repertoire; but this is a complex
issue beyond the scope of the present review article.5 For our purposes, the
main point is that L&T attribute to the mind so little nonmetaphorical under-
standing that the breadth of LT-metaphor is necessary as a matter of course.
6. LITERARYCONCERNS.Everything said so far applies equally to poetic met-

aphor and the notion of 'everyday' metaphor described in Lakoff & Johnson
1980. We now turn to issues arising more specifically from poetic metaphor.
The issues divide roughly into two parts: (I) What makes poetic metaphor
different from everyday metaphor? (2) What does metaphor do cognitively and
affectively (emotionally) that makes it so important to poetic expression?
L&T's answer to (1) is that '[p]oetic thought uses the mechanisms of every-
day thought, but it extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways
that go beyond the ordinary' (67; cf. also 53-55). EXTENSION of an everyday
metaphor occurs when elements of the source domain are deployed that are
normally extrinsic to the mapping of the metaphor. They cite for instance Shake-
speare's line For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, in which
dreaming is not an intrinsic part of the metaphorical mapping from sleep to
death. ELABORATION
of a metaphor is similar, in that one fills in slots in unusual
ways, for instance conceiving of death as departure in a particular sort of
vehicle, say a raft. QUESTIONINGof a metaphor occurs when the poet presup-
poses a conventional metaphor and then casts doubt on it. Poetic metaphor
also undergoes COMPRESSION,being used more densely, pervasively, and al-
lusively than in ordinary language. However, perhaps the richest and most
significant difference lies in the poetic COMPOSITION
of metaphors, when mul-
tiple metaphors are used side by side, acting on each other and reinforcing
each other. For instance, a poem may make use of the metaphor TIME IS A
DEVOURER, then in turn personify Time and attribute complementary qual-
ities to it as a person, such as viciousness. Another kind of composition is the
juxtaposition of multiple metaphors with the same target domain, for instance
Shakespeare's use in sonnet 73 of A LIFETIME IS A YEAR, A LIFETIME
IS A DAY, LIFE IS A FIRE, and so forth. These all evoke a cyclical rise-fall
pattern, so they form a coherent complex of metaphors.
This enumeration of techniques employed in poetic metaphor is useful, as
far as it goes. It should be observed, though, that these techniques are not
peculiar to poetry; they exist in different proportions in literary prose, some
kinds of political polemic, and even stand-up comedy. It might be more ap-
propriate to characterize them as techniques for using metaphor artistically,
or in such a way as to draw the perceiver's conscious attention. Thus L&T's
5 The same issue is raised by Fodor (1975) in his attack on Piaget's cognitivist learning theory,
which also seeks to account for general intelligence in terms of the extension of sensorimotor
understanding. It would be of interest to pursue this intriguing parallel further; given L&T's minimal
concern with learning, though, such an inquiry would be more appropriate in the context of other
works, such as Lakoff 1987, 1990.
list of techniques does not differentiate poetic metaphor from other types,
though perhaps poetry best exemplifies all these techniques at once.
The effect of these techniques, say L&T, employing a simile that recurs a
number of times in the book, is that (72)
'[p]oetic composition is like musical composition. Just as the composer combines the simple
elements of tonality ... into musical phrases and musical movements of great richness and
complexity, so the poet combines ordinary concepts, everyday metaphors, and the most mun-
dane knowledge to form conceptual compositions, orchestrations of ideas that we perceive as
rich and complex wholes.'
What we think they are trying to evoke is that poetry has an aesthetic effect
by virtue of its structure. Curiously, though, there seems to be no significant
mention in the book of aesthetics or beauty. This brings us into the ambit of
question (2) above: What does metaphor do for us that makes it so important
to poetry?
L&T's overt answers to this question (e.g. 64-65) for the most part circle
around the power of poetic metaphors to give us new ways of understanding
the world and our lives: the rich structure of the source domain provides new
structure, new inferences, and new evaluations within the target domain. 'Po-
etry, through metaphor, exercises our minds so that we can extend our normal
powers of comprehension beyond the range of the metaphors we are brought
up to see the world through' (214). Again, this is right as far as it goes, but the
musical simile suggests that something else is going on: if the artistic compo-
sition of metaphors has an effect like that of music, it must do something for
us beyond helping us understand the world. One presumably reads poetry for
more than its informational and philosophical content. Where does the aesthetic
component shared by poetry and music come in?
We conjecture that the answer lies in the cognitive structures evoked by (I-)
metaphors. What is the outcome of creating a relationship between the incom-
mensurable source and target domains? L&T claim that it is an understanding
of the target domain in terms of the source domain. We suspect there is more,
something like a 'fusion' or 'superimposition' of the source and target domains.
Consider an image that personifies death as wearing a football uniform and
driving a red convertible, or Tom Lehrer's (1981:66) gruesome mixed metaphor
Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life, or the Navajo phrase quoted
by L&T (92), My horse with a mane made of short rainbows. In these images,
our sense is that we do not just carry knowledge of the source domain over
into the target domain. Rather, the entities of the source domain are vividly
present to us, but carry in addition extra identities, those of corresponding
entities in the target domain. The cognitive effect is not unlike that in dreams,
where we can experience a person who carries one individual's appearance
but at the same time is 'known' to be someone else.6 Thus a metaphor involves
a 'split reference', to use a term that Ricoeur 1978 attributes to Jakobson.
This hypothesis sharply differentiates metaphor from simile, where the
6
This idea is evoked but not developed by Davidson (1978:29), who begins by saying, 'Metaphor
is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the
interpreter as on the originator'.
REVIEW ARTICLE 335
source and target domains are merely compared, not superimposed. It also
explains why metaphors are untranslatable into rational terms, in particular
why paraphrases in terms of the target domain alone, like L&T's, often fall
flat.
According to this approach, the mental representation evoked by a metaphor,
as well as its affective power, are the result of superimposing the meanings of
the source and target domains. Fine details of a source image that do not find
precise correlates in the target domain still contribute to the meaning and affect
of the composite. Hence the proliferation of image detail in poetic metaphor
is motivated: it contributes to the richness of the interpretation.
But in addition, the superimposition operation itself has important effects.
The most obvious is the affect contributed by using one entity as a symbol for
another. This phenomenon is much more general than metaphor; it appears,
for example, in the widespread use of ritual objects as symbols for religious
abstractions. The object, just by virtue of being a symbol, is infused with a
deep meaningfulness and immediacy that extends to actions in which the object
is used.7 We have no explanation to offer for this affect, but it is clearly a part
of human cognitive and emotional life, and it contributes to the sense of con-
sequentiality and immediacy in poetic metaphor, what L&T might have in mind
with their phrase (65) 'the power of being there' (though their explanation
adverts to other factors).
A second effect of the superimposition operation is the sense of tension
conveyed by incongruously fusing two disparate domains. The interpreter seeks
to resolve this tension by finding points of contact or structural similarity be-
tween the two domains, so that they become point-by-point more congruent-
this is the mapping process described by L&T. Yet this in turn can lead to a
third effect, the production of further tensions, as the domains themselves are
refocused and restructured in order to bring about greater congruence-this
is the 'interaction' described by Black (1979) or the 'reverberation' described
by Ricoeur (1978).
As a result, a metaphor generates a rich complex of conceptual and affective
components; to use Ricoeur's term, it has a 'thickness'. In particular, the af-
fective quality engendered by multiple simultaneous structures and the tensions
among them is what makes poetic metaphor akin to music (see Jackendoff
1987:236-45 for brief discussion of sources of musical affect).
Finally, let us return to the question of why complex metaphor is charac-
teristic of literature, and of poetry in particular-why poets use the techniques
7 The authors advise us (personal communication, 1990) that Lakoff & Johnson (1980:40) speak
of the LT-metaphorical nature of religious symbolism, and that their characterization falls under
our description. However, we do not find in the cited passage any discussion of the characteristic
affect associated with such symbolism, the issue we are concerned with here.
In a similar vein, the authors contend (personal communication, 1990) that our notion of
SUPERIMPOSITION iS identicalwiththeirnotionof MAPPING; they intendthe latterin the mathematical
sense of a set of ordered pairs, where the first element of each pair is from the source domain and
the second is from the target domain. Howver, this is not the sense conveyed to us by the text,
and again it does not address the notion of affect, which is our focus at this point.
that L&T describe. The reason is that poetry is art, and as art it is subject to
different communicative conventions than ordinary discourse. The basic intent
of the communicative act in poetry is not to convey information clearly, con-
cisely, and nonredundantly, a la Grice 1975. Rather, it is, roughly, to evoke
in the perceiver an aesthetic response that arises from the information content
of the utterance and, significantly, from all aspects of the form in which the
information is conveyed (Jackendoff 1987:232-34). This communicative intent
rests on ordinary language, ordinary knowledge, and ordinary pragmatics, but
goes beyond them or supervenes on them (Ricoeur 1978:151, Schauber & Spol-
sky 1986).
The special conventions attached to literary interpretation are a major preoc-
cupation of literary theory (e.g. Mitchell 1985, Fish 1980). If the goal is to
understand POETIC metaphor and why it is special-why poets cultivate rich
and complex metaphors-such conventions must play an essential role. More
particularly, if the meaning of a metaphor is simply a mapping from the source
domain onto the target domain in order to convey a new understanding of the
target domain, it is not clear where the aesthetic effect comes from. But under
the richer account of metaphor we have suggested, the proliferation of meta-
phoric detail precisely serves the aesthetic purpose, in that it conveys not just
information but the affect and immediacy of imagery, of symbolism, and of the
interaction between the incommensurable source and target domains.
7. CONCLUSION. Overall, we find MTCR a valuable contribution. It is an
admirable attempt to bridge the gap between linguistics/cognitive science and
literature. Its essential thesis, that much literary metaphor is based on the
culturally conventional metaphors that pervade ordinary speech, is new and
striking. This thesis is not materially affected by the modifications to the theory
of metaphor we have suggested here, in particular by the addition of a criterion
of incongruity, a more restricted ambit for the term 'metaphor', and a more
sophisticated learning theory.
Yet the book ultimately leaves something of an empty feeling. This is not
because of particular mistakes it makes, which are honest and open to dis-
cussion. Rather, it seems to come from the book's sense of disconnection. For
one thing, the book is disconnected from the philosophical and critical literature
that would situate it in the larger world of ideas on the subject; given the quotes
extracted in ?2 and ?3, we infer that this disconnection is by design. But in
addition, we feel the book fails to make sufficient contact with the aesthetic
concerns that distinguish poetic metaphor from ordinary metaphor, and for this
reason we are not altogether persuaded that the work provides either beginning
students of literature or cognitive scientists with sufficiently refined tools for
understanding poetry.
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and Cognitive Science
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA 02254
David Aaron
Department of Religion
Wellesley College
Wellesley, MA 02181

More Than Cool Reason A Field Guide To Poetic Metaphor

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Linguistic Society of America

1. BASICCLAIMS. L&T make a number of claims, repeated throughout the

Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson 1980); it is the application

2. SCHOLARLYSTANCE. Before going into the substance of L&T's claims,

construals'-including the cultural associations the author meant to evoke-

2 This problem was pointed out by an anonymous reader.

tional I-metaphor for our culture, in other cultures an I-metaphorical interpre-

4.2. THEMATICPARALLELS.AS far as we can determine, L&T consider met-

L&T's 'basic metaphor' TIME MOVES has similar properties. As is well

Hence, 'when we attribute such character traits to animals we are compre-

6. LITERARYCONCERNS.Everything said so far applies equally to poetic met-

CHOMSKY,NOAM.1959. Review of B. F. Skinner, Verbal behavior. Lg. 35.26-58.

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