Publications
Publication details [#14350]
Silvestre López, Antonio José. 2020. Conceptual Metaphor in Meditation Discourse: An Analysis of the Spiritual Perspective. GEMA online: Journal of Language Studies 20 (1) : 35–53. 19 pp. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
ISBN
25502131
Abstract
Meditation has spread beyond the frontiers of religion to go global in other areas of social
practice, including secular and spiritual-but-not-religious contexts. Conceptual metaphor, as
proposed by Lakoff (1993) has been described as a powerful mechanism to facilitate the
communication of first-person experiences connected to religious and lay contemplative
practice, including meditation and enlightenment, as reported in several studies. Despite the
detachment of the spiritual-but-not-religious movement from other areas of practice, the
question of how metaphor is used in discourse about meditation within this perspective has not
been addressed. This paper investigates the role of conceptual metaphor in spiritual-but-notreligious meditation discourse through a bottom-up qualitative analysis of a corpus of talks
about meditation given by three highly-recognized spiritual teachers. Results chart the topics
that are addressed more frequently through metaphor in the corpus (metaphor target domains),
describe the range of areas of experience (source domains) used to characterise metaphorically
the three most frequent target domains (THOUGHT, THE PRESENT MOMENT, MEDITATOR), and
discuss fundamental differences in non-deliberate and deliberate conceptual metaphor use with
the help of a selection of examples from the corpus. The findings provide evidence of relevant
metaphors used to model the experience and practice of meditation in spiritual-but-notreligious settings and how they are rendered in discourse. Comparisons with metaphorical
models already identified in religious and secular discourse contexts are also established, with
a special focus on the models that have been transferred from traditional religious meditation
spheres to current contexts of social practice.