I argue that the origin of the apparent systematicity found in families of related metaphors lies not in ontologically-rich skeletal source domain schemas with slots that map to target domain correspondents. This suggests a rigidity which is inappropriate, and misses significant cross- metaphor generalisations. Instead, I claim that metaphors utilise just a few core source-target correspondences. Users can extend and elaborate upon these, and by doing so give the impression of a systematic exploitation of a domain, by incorporating into the utterance any aspect of the user’s encyclopaedic knowledge that can be linked to the core correspondences. However, this linkage is subject to the constraint that any conclusions then drawn about the source domain meaning must ultimately be grounded in specific types of information or meaning that transfer invariantly between source and target as adjuncts to the core correspondences. It is in these invariant mappings that systematicity is to be found.
2024. Moving Figures and Grounds in music description. Cognitive Linguistics 35:1 ► pp. 109 ff.
Lancaster, Mason D.
2021. Metaphor Research and the Hebrew Bible. Currents in Biblical Research 19:3 ► pp. 235 ff.
Naicker, Suren
2019. An Analysis of Northern Sotho Idioms with Reference to Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Language Matters 50:1 ► pp. 115 ff.
Fischer, Eugen
2018. Two analogy strategies: the cases of mind metaphors and introspection. Connection Science 30:2 ► pp. 211 ff.
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