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Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language
Edited by Annalisa Baicchi
[Figurative Thought and Language 9] 2020
► pp. 13–44

Metaphor thoughtfully

| University of Birmingham
Some Cognitive Linguistic theorizing and related psychological experimentation points to the active use of metaphorical, source/target relationships (mappings) in the mind even when external metaphorical communications are absent. However, some ramifications of this need attention. This article explores how people might mentally add metaphor while understanding discourse, i.e., mentally couch their understanding in metaphorical terms not used by the discourse itself. This could even involve giving a literal sentence a metaphorical understanding. Metaphor addition is suggested by psychological evidence of bidirectionality in metaphor, where there is not only the normal, “forwards” transfer of information from source to target but also “reverse” transfer. In a different vein, the article deepens the author’s previous Anti-Analogy-Extension Thesis whereby source-domain items that are not mapped into the target can nevertheless be crucial in indirectly illuminating the target, and therefore arguably crucial in representing it. This results in an unusually holistic and fictionalist view of mental representation.
Keywords: metaphorical mappings, metaphor in thought, bidirectionality, mental representation, fictionalism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Some cautionary remarks
  • 3.The potential usefulness or otherwise of metaphorical thoughts
  • 4.The addition of metaphor in understanding
  • 5.Discourse coherence through metaphorization
  • 6.The Anti-Analogy-Extension Thesis
  • 7.A type of holism
  • 8.Further discussion
    • 8.1Handling metaphor with fictions
    • 8.2Holism and indirectness of representation again
    • 8.3The source of action
    • 8.4Back to bidirectionality
  • 9.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.9.01bar
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