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Review of Cognitive Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Metaphor as a key tool in personal development discourse

An extended conceptual metaphor theory approach to the study of Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The new psychology of success

ORCID logo | Hubei University of Automotive Technology
| Hubei University of Automotive Technology

In recent years, personal development has driven increasing interest, and the study of metaphor has expanded to various discourse types. This study aims to explore the metaphors in personal development discourse and determine their schematicity hierarchies, using Carol Dweck’s (2016) book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success as a case study. Metaphor Identification Procedure VU (Steen et al., 2010) is used to identify metaphors in the book and Zoltan Kövecses’s (2020) Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory is used to establish the relationship between the metaphors identified and primary metaphors. The findings show that topics such as mindset, growth mindset, fixed mindset, success, and failure instantiate correlation and resemblance metaphors. In addition, all the correlation-based metaphors identified in the corpus possess full schematic hierarchies. It entails that they all consist of image schema, domain, frame and mental space levels. Moreover, the findings reveal that in different metaphorical expressions, the same image schema-level metaphor is likely to activate different domain, frame and mental space-level metaphors. Finally, some image schema-level metaphors share the same domain-level metaphor in different schematicity hierarchies, whereas others activate different domain-level metaphors in different schematicity hierarchies.

Keywords: conceptual metaphor, Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory, personal development discourse, schematicity hierarchy, mindset
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Metaphors in psychological discourse
    • 1.2Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (ECMT)
  • 2.Methods
  • 3.Findings
    • Mindset metaphors
    • Growth-mindset metaphors
    • Fixed-mindset metaphors
    • Success metaphors
    • Failure metaphor
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 9 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00165.meg
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