Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES Metaphor and Culture 1 I Culture as Meaning My goal in this essay is to examine some of the aspects of the relationship between metaphor and culture. In order to be able to do this, we have to be clear about what is meant by metaphor, on the one hand, and culture, on the other. Since my idea of metaphor is a particular version of the view proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, 2 and I am assuming some familiarity with their basic notions, I will not describe the theory at the beginning of this article. Some of the main ways in which my views concerning metaphor are different from theirs can be found in Metaphor in Culture 3 and the revised edition of my introductory text, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 4 However, some of these differences between their view and mine will become clear by the end of the article. But it is also essential that we have a clear understanding of what we mean by the concept of culture in the humanities and in the study of culture and society for the purposes of this essay. A good way of leading into this issue is to ask: What kind of work are we engaged in in the study of languages, literatures, and cultures? In the study of, say, English literature, we make sense of literary texts; in cultural studies, we interpret various kinds of cultural experience; in historical linguistics, we study the evolution of meaning; in FLT (foreign language teaching), we try to find the most efficient ways of acquiring meaning in a foreign language; in translation studies, we seek to understand how meaning is rendered in another language, and so on and so forth. Is there a unified way of handling such a diverse set of activities? Or to put the question differently, can we approach this diverse range of topics from a more unified perspective than is traditionally done and currently 1 I am grateful to Greta Olson and Daniel Casasanto for their helpful comments on this essay. Needless to say, all remaining errors or misconceptions are my responsibility. 2 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980). 3 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005). 4 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (2002; New York: Oxford UP, forthcoming). Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 4 available? I believe this is possible if we recognize that in all of these activities, we are engaged in what I will call “meaning making.” 5 The relationship between culture and language can be dealt with if we assume that both culture and language are about making meaning. This view of culture comes closest to that proposed by Clifford Geertz, who wrote: Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. 6 In this spirit, I suggest that we approach both culture and language as “webs of significance” that people both create and understand. The challenge is to see how they are created and understood—often in multiple and alternative ways. It is important to understand that I use Geertz’s idea for his emphasis on culture-as-webs-of-significance that makes it possible to think of culture as a non-monolithic social construction, and not because I necessarily agree with the entire theoretical baggage that comes with his theory. For example, Geertz did not, and obviously could not, have the sophisticated theory of meaning-making that we have today. The cognitive linguistic enterprise that started in the early 1980s provides exactly the apparatus with which we can describe how we make meaning. 7 Further, I do not accept the Geertzian idea that the analysis of culture cannot be an “experimental science.” Clearly, it can be (and should be), as demonstrated below. We have a culture when a group of people living in a social, historical, and physical environment makes sense of their experiences in a more or less unified manner. This means, for example, that they understand what other people say, they identify objects and events in similar ways, they find or do not find behaviour appropriate in certain situations, they create objects, texts, and discourses that other members of the group find meaningful, and so forth. In all of these and innumerable other cases, we have meaning-making in some form: not only in the sense of producing and understanding language but also in the sense of correctly identifying things, finding behaviour acceptable or unacceptable, being able to follow a conversation, being able to generate meaningful objects and behaviour for others in the group, and so forth. Meaning-making is a cooperative enterprise (linguistic or otherwise) that always takes place in a large set of contexts (ranging from immediate to background) and that occurs with varying degrees of success. People who can successfully participate in this kind of meaning-making can be said to belong to the same culture. Spectacular cases of unsuccessful participation in joint meaning making are called ‘culture shock.’ 5 Zoltán Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford UP, 2006). 6 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 5. 7 For a summary see Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture. Metaphor and Culture 5 II Brain / Mind, Meaning, and Culture What is required for meaning-making? The main meaning-making organ is the brain/ mind. The brain (and the nervous system in general) is the organ that performs the many cognitive operations that are needed for making sense of experience. These include categorization, figure-ground alignment, framing knowledge, metaphorical and metonymic understanding, conceptual integration, and several others. Cognitive linguists and cognitive scientists in general are in the business of describing these operations. Cognitive linguists believe that the same cognitive operations that human beings use for making sense of experience in general are also used for making sense of language. In the past half century, two general trends can be distinguished in the study of the human meaning-making apparatus. What is called the ‘first cognitive revolution’ is epitomized by Noam Chomsky’s work and is largely based on the ‘computer metaphor’ of the mind. By contrast, the ‘second cognitive revolution,’ which started in the late 1960s and early 70s, adopted the ‘embodiment premise.’ In the latter approach, the mind was seen as resulting from characteristics of the human body and its interaction with the environment. Very clear differences have emerged between what we can term “an objectivist view of the world” and what Lakoff and Johnson describe as “an experientialist view.” 8 In the objectivist view, thought is independent of the body. Thus, the mind is transcendent, in that it goes beyond the body. Thought is also abstract; it consists of the manipulation of abstract symbols. The mind is like an abstract machine, on the analogy of a computer that manipulates abstract symbols, where the mind is the software and the body (brain) is the hardware. As regards language, the question arises: Should we think of it as highly structured form, especially syntactic form, or as meaning and conceptualization? Is grammar best conceived as a structured set of forms, as in the syntactic rules of the Chomskyan kind, or as form that only serves the purpose of conveying our conceptualized knowledge of the world? Is language essentially the manipulation of abstract symbols, analogous to a computer, or is it predominantly a process devoted to the conceptualization and communication of meaning? In short, is language mostly a matter of form or that of meaning and conceptualization? Furthermore, we can ask: What is meaning? Can we define meaning in terms of truth conditions for the application of particular forms (e.g. words, sentences)? Do we know the meaning of the word snow or tree because we know the conditions on which the use of these words depends? Is there a 8 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 6 checklist of features that we need to know if we want to use words and larger groups of forms in an appropriate way? Or, alternatively, can we identify meaning with the concepts we have in our conceptual system? In this case, the issue becomes how our knowledge that forms the basis of concepts is represented in the mind. And then there is the even deeper question of how the forms (linguistic or otherwise) that we use become meaningful. Given a form (a sign), how does its meaning arise? Even more generally, we can ask how language acquires meaning. Is meaningfulness a matter of convention and reference (this sign will refer to this object, event, etc.), or something else? Is it conceivable, for example, that the human body plays a role in making forms and signs meaningful? In objectivist philosophy, meaning is a correspondence between symbols and things/ events in the world (or, more precisely, between symbols and elements in sets). Meaning can be defined by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Take the word square. It can be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. For something to be a square, it has to be characterized by four equal sides and four equal angles. If any of these features is absent, the thing is not a square. In addition, symbols become meaningful because of their conventional connections to things and events that make up the world. By contrast, in experientialist philosophy meanings are conceptual categories that are defined by a central member of a category - an abstract conceptual prototype. 9 Further, in this view, symbols become meaningful as a result of our embodied experiences. Take the simple example of the concept of ‘tree’ and let us see what makes this concept meaningful for us. Among other things, certain image schemas play an important role in this. We conceptualize trees as ‘tall’ and ‘vertical’ because of certain embodied experiences; namely, that the human body has an average height with respect to which trees can be said to be tall and that its prototypical position is perpendicular to the surface of the earth. We make use of such image schemas in our understanding of what trees are. Thus, meaning partially derives from embodiment, and thought that uses such conceptual categories can be said to be embodied. In this view, then, we can take culture to be a large set of meanings shared by a group of people. To be a member of a culture means to have the ability to make meaning with other people. This requires, of course, for people to have the organ of meaning-making, the brain, the cognitive processes of meaning-making, the body that makes linguistic and non-linguistic signs meaningful and that imbues with meaning all objects and events that are not signs themselves (e.g. a tree that we conceptualize as being vertical and tall), 9 See George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987); Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy; Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture. Metaphor and Culture 7 and the physical and social environment in which the brain and the body jointly evolve. Particular cultures consist of the particular meaning-making processes that a group of people employs and the particular sets of meanings produced by them; in other words, a particular conceptual system. The meaning-making organs of the body and brain are shared universally and thus they do not belong to particular cultures. They are thus responsible for universal meanings — meanings shared by all groups of people (though universal meanings always have culture-specific aspects to them). However, as objects, or targets of conceptualization, both the body and the brain may be imbued with culture-specific meanings in particular cultures. As noted above, a key component of meaning-making is the physical and social environment. Cultures differ considerably relative to their physical and social environment. What this means in our terms is that the environment contributes a large portion of the meanings that members of groups use to understand other aspects of their world. This influence of the environment is most obvious in metaphorical conceptualization. 10 Also in this view, language can be regarded as a repository of meanings shared by members of a culture. This lends language a historical role in stabilizing and preserving a culture—due, in part, to linguistic relativity, the notion that language shapes thought. Language is thus a part of culture because it gives us clues for meaning. At the same time, however, language often under-determines interpretation; we create particular meanings (construals) in and by means of context (in other cases, particular construals are explicitly indicated by language). In the course of their interaction for particular purposes, members of a culture produce particular discourses. Such discourses can be thought of as particular assemblies of meanings concerning particular subject matters. When discourses provide a particular perspective on especially significant subject matters in a culture and when they function as latent norms of conduct, the discourses can be regarded as ideologies, 11 which may have an impact on other discourses within the culture. Discourse in this sense is another source of making meaning. A large part of socialization involves the learning of how to make meaning in a culture. In sum, the view of culture as a system of meanings involves considerable variance among systems - both across and within cultures. We will see some examples for this claim in relation to metaphor in the remainder of the essay. 10 See Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture. 11 See e.g. Jonathan Charteris-Black, Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Andreas Musolff, Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates About Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Andrew Goatly, Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 8 III Imaginative Reason Perhaps the most distinguishing aspect of human reason in the experientialist view of the world is that it is imaginative. What this entails is that we can conceptualize the world in alternative ways. As was suggested above, language is structured by the same principles of operation as other modalities of the mind. However, these cognitive operations are not put to use in a universally similar manner; that is, there can be differences in which cognitive operations are used to make sense of some experience in preference to another and there can be differences in the degree to which particular operations are utilized in cultures. This leads to what is called “alternative construal,” as developed by Ronald Langacker in cognitive linguistics. 12 Alternative construal is simply the understanding of the “same” situation in multiple ways (e.g. by applying different cognitive mechanisms to the situation, such as metaphor versus metonymy). Moreover, the minds that evolve ‘on brains’ in particular cultures are shaped by the various contexts (historical, physical, discourse, etc.) that in part constitute cultures. 13 This leads to alternative conceptual systems. Two of the most obvious cognitive operations that can give rise to alternative construals of the world and alternative conceptual systems are framing and metaphor. Frames have to do with how we represent knowledge in the mind. Categories that encapsulate our knowledge of the world are mentally represented as “frames,” “schemas,” or “mental models”. 14 We can use the following working definition of frames: A frame is a structured mental representation of a coherent organization of human experience. Frames are important in the study of almost any facet of life and culture — and not just language. The world as we experience it is always the product of some prior categorization and framing by ourselves and others. A crucial aspect of framing is that different individuals can interpret the ‘same’ reality in different ways. This is the idea of ‘alternative construal’ mentioned above. Thus, meaning is relative to how we frame experience. If I say, “I paid five dollars for the drink,” I take the perspective of the buyer, but if I say, “I sold the drink for five dollars,” I take the perspective of the seller. 15 Different people can frame the same event in different ways, depending on their perspec- 12 See Ronald Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical Prerequisites, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987). 13 See Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture. 14 Robert Schank and Robert Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977); Charles Fillmore, “Frame Semantics,” Linguistics in the Morning Calm (Seoul: Hanshin Publishing, 1982) 111-37; Ronald Langacker, Foundations; Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. 15 See Fillmore. Metaphor and Culture 9 tive. In other words, meaning is not simply a matter of conceptual content, it is equally a matter of how we construe some conceptual content. Now there can be differences across and even within cultures in the use of this meaning-making device. An interesting example is provided by a study by Glick 16 conducted among the Kpelle of Liberia. Kpelle farmers consistently sorted objects into functional groups (such as knife and orange; potato and hoe), rather than into conceptual categories (such as orange and potato; knife and hoe). The former is what we would call ‘frame-based categorization,’ whereas the latter is ‘similarity-based one.’ On the whole, Westerners prefer to categorize objects based on similarity. When Glick asked the Kpelle how a fool would categorize the objects, they came up with such neat similarity-based piles. Clearly, cultures can differ in the use of meaning-making devices, and these differences may produce differences in the use of categories and language in general. Many of our most elementary experiences are universal. Being in a container, walking along a path, resisting some physical force, being in the dark, and so forth, are universal experiences that lead to ‘image schemas’ of various kinds. 17 The resulting image schemas (‘container,’ ‘source-path-goal,’ ‘force,’ etc.) provide meaning for much of our experience either directly or indirectly in the form of ‘conceptual metaphors.’ Conceptual metaphors may also receive their motivation from certain correlations in experience, when, for instance, people see correlations between two events (such as adding to the content of a container and the level of the substance rising), leading to the metaphor MORE IS UP . 18 When meaning-making is based on such elementary human experiences, the result may be (near-)universal meaning (content) — though under a particular interpretation (construal), that is, conceived of “in a certain manner,” to use Hoyt Alverson’s phrase. 19 The cognitive linguistic view of metaphor 20 that uses ‘primary metaphors’ as its fundamental construct assumes that primary metaphors are based on correlations in bodily experience and, hence, that these metaphors are embodied. 21 Since embodiment such as the correlation between amount and verticality, purposes and destinations, similarity and closeness, anger and 16 Joseph Glick, ”Cognitive Development in Cross-Cultural Perspective,“ Review of Child Development Research, ed. Frances Degen Horowitz (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975) 595- 654. 17 See Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987); Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. 18 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors. 19 Hoyt Alverson, ”Metaphor and Experience: Looking Over the Notion of Image Schema,“ Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 97. 20 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors; Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 21 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy. Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 10 heat, and the like, characterizes all human beings, the corresponding primary metaphors will be, or at least can potentially be, universal. In this view, nonuniversal aspects of metaphor are accounted for by the various ways in which primary metaphors are put together in different cultures to form “complex metaphors.” The main focus of research is, however, on universal aspects of metaphor. By contrast, another line of research within the cognitive linguistic paradigm takes as its point of departure the huge amount of variation we can find in metaphor, and places a great deal of emphasis on the attempt to account for such variation. As I have observed, the major driving force behind variation is context. 22 This is defined by a variety of contextual factors, such as differences in key concepts in a culture, in history, and in the environment. Thus, given conceptual metaphor theory, it appears that we can have two research interests, one primarily concerned with universality and another primarily concerned with variation. Taking into account the causes of universality and variation, we get two general lines of research: Embodiment - Universality Context - Variation In Metaphor in Culture, I made an attempt to reconcile the two programs by making the claim that when we comprehend something metaphorically in particular situations, we are under two kinds of pressure: the pressure of our embodiment and the pressure of context. I called this double pressure the “pressure of coherence,” that is, metaphorical conceptualizers trying to be coherent with both their bodies (i.e. correlations in bodily experience) and their contexts (i.e. various contextual factors), where the body and context function as, sometimes conflicting, forms of constraint on conceptualization. (This use of the word ‘pressure’ is not to be confused with the concept of ‘pressure’ as used, for example, in the conceptual metaphor ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER , to be discussed below.) IV Experientialism and Postmodernism Clearly, the idea of alternative construal and alternative conceptual systems is compatible with several postmodernist ideas about the nature of meaning. Most obviously, the cognitive linguistic (i.e. experientialist) idea of alternativity in understanding the world is similar to a social-constructionist and relativistic attitude in postmodernist-poststructuralist thought. The version of postmodernist thinking I specifically have in mind is the one that emphasizes the social construction of meaning, and the concomitant idea that if meanings 22 Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture. Metaphor and Culture 11 are socially constructed, then they are also variable according to culture, history, ideological persuasion, and so on. In short, they are relative to context. However, an important feature of experientialism seems to be in conflict with the notion of both alternativity in conceptualization in experientialism and the relativism of postmodernism. Experientialist philosophy is based on experimental cognitive science. This means that experientialism tries to base itself on psychologically real aspects of the mind. Since experientialist philosophy is experimental philosophy, psychologically real, cognitively valid experimental results that point to universal and essentialist aspects of human cognition potentially weaken not only the thesis of alternativity proposed by cognitive linguists and some cognitive scientists but also the constructionist and relativistic features of meaning emphasized by postmodern theorizing. We can see one such challenge in some recent experimental work on embodiment as it relates to metaphor. A particularly powerful demonstration of the embodiment hypothesis can be found in cognitive psychologist Daniel Casasanto’s recent work on the mental representation of abstract concepts. 23 The idea is simple: If the particular bodies we have play a role in how we mentally represent abstract concepts and result in particular abstract concepts, then different bodies should result in different abstract concepts. Casasanto examined the GOOD IS RIGHT and BAD IS LEFT conceptual metaphors, exemplified in English by such phrases as “He is my right-hand man.” These conceptual metaphors seem to be universal. As Casasanto suggests, it is likely that the apparent universality of the association of good things with the right side comes from the predominance of right-handed people worldwide, who perform actions with their right hands more fluently than with their left hands. In one of the experiments he conducted, subjects were asked to draw a good animal (representing good things) in either of the boxes placed on the right and left side of a cartoon figure. (The experimental design was actually more complicated, but I am leaving out some of the details.) The subjects were instructed that the cartoon figure likes certain animals and thinks they are good, but does not like others and thinks they are bad. If the bodyspecificity idea of the embodiment hypothesis is correct, then right-handed people will place good animals in the box to the right of the cartoon figure, whereas left-handed people will place them in the opposite box. And if embodiment does not play a role in the mental representation of abstract concepts, then both rightand left-handers will place the good animals on the right-hand side of the figure because of the linguistic conventions found in 23 Daniel Casasanto, “Embodiment of Abstract Concepts: Good and Bad in Rightand Left-handers,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming. Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 12 languages of the world (where good things are expressed as ‘right’ and bad ones as ‘left’). Sixty-seven percent of the right-handed participants put the good animals in the right-hand box and 74% of the left-handed ones in the box on the left of the cartoon character. In other words, the majority of both the rightand lefthanders performed the task consistently with their handedness: For the righthanders, good was right ( GOOD IS RIGHT ), whereas for the left-handers, good was left ( GOOD IS LEFT ). This result indicates that we conceptualize abstract concepts in body-specific ways. The embodiment hypothesis was thus confirmed. At the same time, however, the experimental results present a challenge both to the possibility of unlimited alternativity in conceptualization and, consequently, to that of unlimited social constructions. Such results appear to be more damaging to postmodernist views, though, than to the cognitive linguistic view of embodiment. The reason is that while postmodernist views embrace the idea of (at least potentially or theoretically) unlimited “ways of worldmaking,” in the cognitive linguistic approach ways of worldmaking are delimited by embodiment. Especially in the Lakoff-Johnson view, human thought and meaning emerge from embodied experience. 24 Cultural studies scholars might object that there is a huge amount of ‘cultural and historical baggage’ that comes with our Western conception of left and right and that this baggage is inseparable from (our conception of) the physical human body. But consider again how the experiment is set up. The two parts that the experiment attempts to separate make different predictions: Cultural experience should lead to GOOD being associated with RIGHT (conventional idioms in the English language and culture make this manifest) for both right-handers and left-handers (there are no idioms in English where GOOD is LEFT ), while physical experience should lead to GOOD associated with RIGHT in the case of right-handers and LEFT in the case of left-handers. If cultural experience is all-powerful, then both leftand right-handers should have associated GOOD with RIGHT and BAD with LEFT . But, as we have seen, for most left-handed people GOOD was LEFT . Thus, the result of the experiment clearly indicates, first, the separability of cultural experience from bodily experience and, second, that body-specificity leads to specificity in conceptualization. In other words, we have strong evidence for the embodied nature of thought. However, in some cognitive linguistic work embodiment is conceived somewhat mechanically; more specifically, along the lines that, given a particular target domain associated with a physical experience, that physical experience will mechanically determine which source domain is used to conceptualize the target domain. Several cognitive linguists have challenged this 24 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy. Metaphor and Culture 13 mechanical conception of embodiment. 25 Caroline Gevaert studied the historical development of the ANGER IS HEAT metaphor in great detail. 26 She found on the basis of a variety of corpora that heat-related words account for only 1.59% of all the words describing anger before 850. The number of heatrelated words for anger dramatically increases in the period between 850 and 950. Then the number of these words decreases between 950 and 1050 to 6.22% and then to 1.71% by around 1200, and then to 0.27% by around 1300. After 1300 the number starts growing again, and after 1400 it becomes dominant in texts that describe anger. These numbers indicate that the conceptualization of anger in terms of heat is not a permanent and ever-present feature of the concept of anger in English. How can this fluctuation occur in the conceptualization of anger over time? It cannot be the case that people’s physiology of anger changes every one hundred years or so. It is more plausible that universal physiology provides only a potential basis for metaphorical conceptualization — without mechanically constraining what the specific metaphors for anger will be. Heat was a major component in the concept of anger between 850 and 950, and then after a long decline it began to play a key role again at around 1400 — possibly as a result of the emergence of the humoral view of emotions in Europe. 27 We can notice the same kind of fluctuation in the use of the domain of ‘swelling,’ which corresponds to the ‘pressure’ component in the conceptualization of anger. Pressure was a major part of the conceptualization of anger until around 1300, but then it began to decline, only to emerge strongly again, together with heat, in the form of the HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER metaphor centuries later. In another publication, I referred to this phenomenon as ‘differential experiential focus,’ meaning that a particular abstract concept may have multiple bodily bases, such as body heat and pressure. 28 The general point is that universal embodiment associated with a target domain may consist of several distinct components, or of distinct aspects. The conceptual metaphors that emerge may be based on one component, or aspect, at a certain point of time and on another at another point of time. Which one is chosen depends on a variety of factors in the surrounding cultural context. Moreover, the conceptual metaphors may be based on one component, or aspect, in one culture, while on another component, or aspect, in another culture. 25 See Dirk Geeraerts and Stephan Grondelaers, ”Looking Back at Anger: Cultural Traditions and Metaphorical Patterns,“ Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, eds. John Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995) 153-80. 26 Caroline Gevaert, “The Anger Is Heat Question: Detecting Cultural Influence on the Conceptualization of Anger through Diachronic Corpus Analysis,” Perspectives on Variation: Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative, eds. Nicole Delbacque, Johan Van der Auwera, and Dirk Geeraerts (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005) 195-208. 27 See Geeraerts and Grondelaers. 28 See Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture. Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 14 V Embodiment, Metaphor, Culture What then is the relationship among embodiment, metaphor, and culture? Mostly based on my research on emotions, 29 my suggestion has been that when people metaphorically conceptualize a conceptual domain in a situation, they are under the “pressure of coherence.” 30 What this means is that they are to obey two simultaneous pressures (or constraints): the pressure that derives from the human body and the pressure of the global and local context in which the conceptualization takes place. In successful cases of being coherent within the constraints of the two pressures, we can come up with conceptual metaphors that successfully answer both forms of pressure. Not surprisingly, such metaphors are well-known and deeply entrenched ones in a culture, such as the conceptual metaphor we have seen above: THE ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER . What metaphors of this kind show is that very often we deal with what I elsewhere termed “body-based social constructionism.” 31 These are cases where both the body and the surrounding context play a motivating role in the emergence of the metaphor. In different languages and cultures, the details of this skeletal, generic-level metaphor motivated by universal bodily experience will be filled out in different ways. In some, the cause of the pressure comes from a heated fluid inside the container; in some the material that fills the container will not be fluid but gas; in some the container will be the stomach/ belly area and not the body as a whole, and so on. 32 In other words, we can find both universality and variation in the same metaphor. However, some conceptual metaphors will be cases of predominantly body-based metaphors. One of the best known conceptual metaphors in this group is KNOWING IS SEEING . The tight correlation between knowing, understanding, finding out something with being able to see it and examine it provides universal motivation for the existence of this metaphor. This does not have to mean that it actually exists in all languages and cultures or that there are no alternative conceptual metaphors that are available for the same purpose as this metaphor. As a third group, we can identify metaphors that have a predominantly cultural basis. Perhaps the most celebrated example here is the conceptual metaphor TIME IS MONEY . 33 The metaphor results (mostly) from the (once? ) prevailing philosophy of capitalism that associates (and correlates) the profit 29 Zoltán Kövecses, Emotion Concepts (Berlin/ New York: Springer Verlag, 1990); Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (2000; New York: Cambridge UP, 2003). 30 Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture 237. 31 See Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion 183. 32 See Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion and Metaphor in Culture. 33 See Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors. Metaphor and Culture 15 one can make with the amount of time needed to make a product. Notice, however, as this view of production and the correlation it relies on is accepted, the motivational basis of the metaphor will also be expanded to bodily experience: Given that things work this way, we will find the correlation between these experiences entirely natural. In sum, then, we have a gradient of metaphors as based on bodily experience to cultural experience. We can summarize this as follows: Bodily basis : Body-based social constructionism: Cultural basis At some level of analysis and in some rare (but valuable) instances (such as the GOOD IS LEFT conceptual metaphor), we find body and culture separated (in that there are no conventional linguistic or cultural idioms to reflect this particular conceptualization). But, as I briefly indicated, there appear to be no ‘pure’ cases. Bodily basis is almost always tinged with some cultural influence and cultural basis always becomes ‘real,’ ‘natural’ bodily experience. To put it differently, we are dealing with a cline from cases where the body dominates and culture is less noticeable through cases where the body and culture are present in more or less equal proportions to cases where culture predominates over the body. In other words, body and culture work jointly at all stages of the cline - one being inseparable from the other. And when, as exceptional cases, we find them separable, we get wonderful evidence for their inseparability as a rule. Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 16 Works Cited Alverson, Hoyt. “Metaphor and Experience: Looking over the Notion of Image Schema.” Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Ed. James W. Fernandez. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 94-117. Casasanto, Daniel. “Embodiment of Abstract Concepts: Good and Bad in Rightand Left- Handers.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Forthcoming. Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Fillmore, Charles. “Frame semantics.” Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Ed. The Linguistic Society of Korea. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing, 1982. 111-37. 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