Showing papers by "George Lakoff published in 1986"

Metáforas de la vida cotidiana

Abstract: • Para la m a y o r í a de la gente, la m e t á f o r a es un recurso de la i m a g i n a c i ó n poé t ica , y los ademanes r e tó r i cos , una c u e s t i ó n de lenguaje extraordinario m á s que ordinar io . E s m á s , la m e t á f o r a se contempla ca r ac t e r í s t i c amen te como u n rasgo só lo del lenguaje, cosa de palabras m á s que de pensamiento o acc ión . P o r esta r a z ó n , la mayor í a de la gente piensa que pueden a r r eg l á r selas perfectamente sin me tá fo ras . Nosot ros hemos llegado a la c o n c l u s i ó n de que la me tá fo ra , por el contrario, impregna la vida cotidiana, no solamente el lenguaje, sino t a m b i é n el pensamiento y la acc ión . Nuestro sistema conceptual ordinar io , en t é r m i n o s del cual pensamos y actuamos, es fundamentalmente de naturaleza metafór ica . L o s conceptos que rigen nuestro pensamiento no son s implemente asunto del intelecto. R i g en t a m b i é n nuestro funcionamiento cotidiano, hasta los detalles más mundanos. Nuestros conceptos estructuran lo que percibimos, c ó m o nos movemos en el mundo , la manera en que nos relacionamos con otras personas. A s í que nuestro sistema conceptual d e s e m p e ñ a un papel central en la def in ic ión de nuestras realidades cotidianas. Si estamos en lo cierto al sugerir que nuestro sistema conceptual es en gran medida me ta fó r i co , la manera en que pensamos, lo que experimentamos y lo que hacemos cada día también es en gran medida cosa de m e t á f o r a s .

A Figure of Thought

Abstract: Me tametaphorical Issues‘ By George Lakofi’ A Figure of Thought For two millenia we were taught a dogma that was largely unquestioned and came to be viewed as definitional. Metaphor was called a figure of speech. As such. it was taken to be a matter of special language: poetic or persuasive language. As a matter of language. rather than thought, it was viewed as dispensible. If you had something to say, you could presumably say it straightforwardly without meta- phor; if you chose metaphor it was for some poetic or rhetorical purpose, perhaps for elegance or economy, but not for plain speech and ordinary thought. Metaphor was seen as contrasting with ordinary, everyday literal language, language that could be straightforwardly true or false, that could lit the world directly or not. Teaching Berkeley undergraduates forces one to question traditional values — even if those values have stood for two thousand years. In 1978, I taught a small undergraduate seminar (there were five students) in which metaphor was one of a number of topics. I had received a pre-publication copy of the Ortony collection on Metaphor and Thought, and we were discussing the papers in the volume. One day one of the students came in too upset to function. She announced that she had a metaphor problem, and asked the small assembled group for help. Her boy- friend had just told her that their relationship qhad hit a dead-end streetq. lt being Berkeley in the '70's. the class came to the rescue. The metaphor makes sense, we soon figured out, only if you‘re traveling toward some destination. and only if love is viewed as a form of travel. if you happen onto a dead-end street when you're traveling toward a destination. then you can't keep going the way you've been going. You have to turn back. qWhat I really want,“ the woman said, “is for us to go into another dimension‘. There is nothing like a disappointing love-afl'air for calling a philosophy of long standing into question. Metaphor, on the traditional view, was supposed to be a matter of speech, not thought. Yet here was not just a way of talking about love as a journey, but a way of thinking about it in that way and of reasoning on the basis of the metaphor. In our culture, there is a full-blown love-as-journey meta- phor that is used for comprehending and reasoning about certain aspects of love relationships, especially those having to do with duration, closeness, difficulties, and common purpose. English is full of expressions that reflect the conceptualization of love as a journey. Some are necessarily about love; others can be understood that way: Look how far we ’ve come. It’s been a long, bumpy road. We can’t turn back now. We're at a crossroads. We may have to go our separate ways. We’re spinning our wheels. The relationship isn’t going anywhere. The marriage is on the rocks. These are_ordinary, everyday expressions. There is nothing extraordinary about them. They are not poetic, nor are they used for rhetorical efiect. The most This is a column which appears regularly in the journal Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, Hillsdale. NJ.: Erlbaum. 3S‘l

The Meanings of Literal

Abstract: In a simpler world, "Who's your mother?" has a simple answer. It is your female parent, the person who supplied the egg from which you were conceived, who carried and gave birth to you, who raised you, and who was married to your father. The word mother is defined relative to an idealized and oversimplified model of the world in which all those criteria converge to pick out a single person. But in a world in which there is in vitro fertilization in surrogate mothers, adoption by lesbian couples, as well as other vagaries of modern life, the criteria that are commonly assumed to come together to define "mother" may diverge radically. In such cases, there is no completely satisfactory way to choose: Both the woman who gives birth and the woman who supplies the egg have some claim to the title, as, of course, does the woman who raises the child. Any decision the courts make in defining motherhood in nonstandard cases is bound to conflict with our idealized model in which all the classical criteria for mother...

Argument Forms in Lexical Semantics

Abstract: Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986), pp. 442-454