ANTECEDENTES

In summary, the CMT has changed the tradition of studying metaphors from rhetorical language perspective to enthusiasm in exploring metaphors from the cognitive perspective. According to the CMT, our thought and action is underlain by the conceptual system that is metaphorical in nature. In order to illustrate this point,

Lakoff and Johnson (1980a) introduced the notion of the conceptual metaphor, defined as the mapping of the source domain onto the target domain. The mapping process is guided by the invariance principle, which emphasizes the consistency between the source domain and target domain and helps to constrain and direct the between-domain correspondences. In addition, the embodiment hypothesis emphasizes that metaphors are mostly based on correspondences in our experiences rather than on similarity and that people’s metaphor systems are central to their understanding of experience and to the ways they act on this understanding. (Lakoff, 1993) It cleans up the way for them to understand how image schemata, which are comparatively more concrete patterns of the source domain, are employed to understand more abstract target domains.

Despite its distinguished position as the most influential contemporary theory of metaphor, the CMT has also been strongly criticized over the years by researchers from various disciplines. The major criticisms come from Alverson (1991), Quinn (1991), and Geeraerts and Grondelaers (1995) who argued that the CMT does not take enough consideration of the cultural heritage of metaphors. Further, Murphy (1996) also attacked the CMT for its lack of empirical evidence. In the following part, some of the criticisms are presented in a brief way:

Quinn (1991) argued from the cultural anthropologist perspective that metaphors do not structure people’s understanding as the CMT supposes but are chosen to “satisfy mapping onto already existing understanding”. By employing eight metaphorical categories (sharedness, lastingness, mutual benefit, compatibility, difficulty, effort, success/failure and risk) in discussing marriage in American culture, she pointed out that those ideas are not imbedded in any single metaphor, although they are communicated through metaphors. These metaphors are preferred because they reflect the existent cultural beliefs or cultural models of marriage. In this sense, the understanding of a concept is driven by culture rather than by conceptual metaphors.

Murphy (1996) criticized Lakoff and Johnson for basing their CMT theory merely on linguistic evidence because such reliance is both equivocal and circular. Confirming the plausibility of the CMT requires more non-linguistic evidence. What the CMT school claimed as empirical evidence, such as the psycholinguistic experiments on idioms comprehension (Gibbs, 1993; Gibbs and O’Brien, 1990; Nayak and Gibbs, 1990) was also questioned by Murphy as unreliable evidence for the CMT. In

addition, Murphy also pointed out that the phenomena of multiple metaphors for a single domain is actually contrary to the spirit of the conceptual metaphor view. Furthermore, Murphy challenged the CMT theory by saying that it fails to explain why the arbitrary choice of metaphors in everyday speech and many of the metaphors that we use to describe the same concept are inconsistent with each other.

Gevaert (2001, 2005) found it hard to accept that the conceptualization of anger in heat is due to our actual physiology in anger as the CMT argues. According to her investigation through various corpora, the heat-related anger conceptualization changed considerably throughout time. Before 850 AD, only 1,58% of all words employed to describe anger were heat- related words. Between 850 AD and 959 AD, heat-related words describing anger dramatically increased in number. Then they decreased between 950 AD to 1050 AD to 6.22%, to 1.71% by around 1200 AD, and then to 1.36% by around 1300 AD. After 1300 AD, the number started to grow again. Those findings led her to question the embodiment hypothesis. According to the embodiment hypothesis, the conceptualization of anger in heat is a mechanical consequence of people’s physiology in anger. Since people’s physiology in anger does not change every hundred years, it is hard to explain how the constant physiology in anger can cause the unstable conceptualization of anger.

Although Zinken (2003, 2004) agreed with the CMT that metaphors are vital in people’s conceptualization, he questioned the mono-directional causal chain assumed in CMT - from sensori-motor experience to image schemata to abstract concepts to linguistic expressions. He argued that this process actually reduces the human conceptualization to cognitive structures that all primates are capable of acquiring, namely simple schemas such as path or container (Zinken, 2003). He proposed paying more attention to the socio-cultural aspects of understanding metaphors. Therefore, he advocated using the view of the ethnolinguistic school of Lublin (ESL) to study metaphors. According to Zinken (2003, 2004), compared with the CMT, the ESL enjoys more advantages for studying conceptualization in action and for integrating metaphors as important aspects of conceptualization into a general framework of studying language and conceptualization.

Fauconnier and Turner (1998) criticized the CMT that its two-domain model is not sufficient to account for a good theory of the development of metaphorical mapping and instead proposed the conceptual integration for explaining the metaphorical mapping.

The two-domain model of metaphor (e.g., CMT) with its invariance principle is not a theory of the development of metaphoric mappings. In our view, the development of a conventional metaphoric mapping involves conceptual integration. In cases where useful inferences or structure have been projected from the blend to the target so that the mapping from source to target becomes thoroughly conventional, and the blend is no longer a working place, it is possible to overlook both blend and generic space.

(Fauconnier and Turner, 1998: 181)

Going with Fauconnier, Grady et al. (1999) further argued that the emergent property of the blend could hardly be explained by the CMT. “This emergent property of the blend cannot be captured so explicitly within a CMT style analysis focusing on correspondences and projections from source to target.” (Grady et al., 1999: 105)

On one hand, those criticisms have pointed out some weaknesses of the CMT. On the other hand, it is these critics who are providing insights for the new development of the CMT. Kövecses (2000, 2001 and 2005) suggested that an extended version of the CMT can successfully handle much of the criticism. According to him, the extended version of the CMT includes the following notions: a theory of metaphor variation, a three-level view of metaphor, the recognition of the bottom-up vs. top- down distinction and the notion of the meaning focus of the source domain.