Publications

Publication details [#664]

Müller, Cornelia. 2011. Are ‘deliberate’ metaphors really special?: Deliberateness in the light of metaphor activation. Metaphor and the Social World 1 (1) : 61–66. 6 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Abstract

The author, in line with Gibbs, raises questions about the notion of “deliberateness” in metaphor research. She argues that there are empirical results (most from psychological experiments but also from cognitive linguistic research) showing that there is a form of creative and active metaphorical thinking which is neither conscious nor deliberate. However, and in contrast with Gibbs, the author favors a more dynamic view on metaphor processing (in detriment to the binomials “deliberate vs. conventional” or “conscious vs. unconscious”), where deliberate and fully conscious and more conventional manifestations of metaphor would be at opposite extremes of the same continuum. In consequence, differences between both status would be no longer categorical, but only a matter of degree.