jackendoff's review of lakoff and turner

Linguistic Society of America

Review: [untitled]Author(s): Ray Jackendoff and David AaronReviewed work(s):

More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor by George Lakoff ; MarkTurner

Source: Language, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 320-338Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/415109Accessed: 13/05/2010 01:21

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REVIEW ARTICLE

More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. by GEORGE LAKOFF and MARK TURNER. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Pp. xii, 230. $11.95.

Reviewed by RAY JACKENDOFF, Brandeis University, and DAVID AARON, Wellesley College*

This book (MTCR) presents itself as 'analyzing the role of metaphor in poetry ... [taking] up general questions of the theory of metaphor... The book should therefore prove valuable to students and researchers in literature, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science' (xii).

The book is organized into four chapters. The first, 'Life, death, and time', explores the range of metaphorical conceptions of these fundamental notions, illustrated by analyses of passages from a wide variety of poems of different periods. This introduction serves to motivate the second chapter, 'The power of poetic metaphor'. This is the core of the book, presenting in detail the authors' theory of poetic metaphor and comparing it with other approaches. Ch. 3, 'The metaphoric structure of a single poem', treats William Carlos Williams's 'The jasmine lightness of the moon' in depth as a further application of the theory. The final chapter, 'The great chain of being', deals with a widespread metaphor (or metaphor complex), shows its application in poems and proverbs, and draws some general conclusions.

In the present review article we can only touch on some of the many pro- vocative issues that the book raises from the points of view of linguistics and literature. Our discussion focuses primarily on Ch. 2.

1. BASIC CLAIMS. L&T make a number of claims, repeated throughout the book, which form the basis of their approach to metaphor.

(1) A metaphor is not a 'figure of speech', a linguistic object. Rather, it is a conceptual or cognitive organization expressed by the linguistic object. As a consequence, many different linguistic expressions may evoke (or invoke) the same metaphor.

(2) Metaphorical expressions pervade ordinary language; they are not just used for artistic purposes. These everyday metaphors reveal cognitive and cultural conceptions of the world.

(3) Metaphor in poetry is not a distinctly different phenomenon from metaphor in ordinary language. Rather, poetic metaphor exploits and enriches the everyday metaphors available to any competent speaker of the language.

(4) The act of reading texts is a cognitive process of bringing one's construal of the world to bear on the concepts evoked by the text.

Claims (1) and (2) are the central burden of Lakoff's earlier book with Mark

* We are grateful to George Lakoff, Mark Turner, Sarah Thomason, and an anonymous reader for many helpful comments on an earlier version of this review article. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant IRI 90-46528 to Brandeis University.

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Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson 1980); it is the application to literary contexts that is novel here.

In general we find ourselves in agreement with these claims (although, as will be seen in ?4, we find (2) considerably overstated); they constitute an important statement of a 'cognitivist' view of literary interpretation. In particular, claim (3), the grounding of literary metaphor in 'everyday metaphor', strikes us as especially interesting. However, as in the case of any large-scale claim of this sort, the theory should be judged in terms of how satisfyingly the details are fleshed out. If we point out weaknesses in L&T's presentation, it is not with the aim of undermining their overall cognitivist perspective, but rather to explore how a more convincing case could be constructed.

2. SCHOLARLY STANCE. Before going into the substance of L&T's claims, we must first make a few general remarks. The authors tell us that the book is aimed above all at a nonspecialist audience ('We have tried to write the book in a style accessible to undergraduates who are learning to read poetry in depth' [xii]). However, the passage quoted at the beginning of this review suggests that readers with a broad range of scholarly concerns are also being addressed. Given the latter concern, and in view of the vast literature on metaphor-Black 1979 cites a list of references in Shibles 1971 containing some four thousand titles-it is somewhat surprising to find in MTCR a bibliography of only four- teen items, at least seven of which are by Lakoff or members of his circle. Eleven further works are cited in a brief appendix entitled 'More on traditional views'; only one of the authors of these eleven works (I. A. Richards) can be remotely considered a literary theorist.

In the main text, references to the literature are even scantier. As far as we can find, there is exactly one attribution to another scholarly work (130). Other than this, the text does not distinguish points claimed to be original to this book from points elaborated elsewhere by Lakoff and Turner and from points derived from other authors. This makes it virtually impossible for curious readers to gain a perspective of the place of this book in the field, other than by searching randomly through the sources in the bibliography. This compromise between the needs of informal exposition and scholarly discourse strikes us as unsatisfactory. Perhaps the University of Chicago Press should bear some of the blame for not suggesting one of the editorial techniques, common in popular works on history and science, for presenting a text which does not burden the informal reader with references and footnotes, but which provides detailed endnotes for specialists.

The book contains some 26 pages criticizing other positions on metaphor, which are identified only by such slogans as the Literal Meaning Theory, the Pragmatics Position, the No Concepts Position, the Interaction Theory, the Dead Metaphor Theory, and the It's All Metaphor Theory. This section con- cludes with the following paragraph, which is indicative of L&T's attitude towards scholarship (136):

'We have done our best to survey the principal traditional theories of metaphor and where our views differ from them. Our survey differs from most other such surveys in two respects:

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First, we have not tried to say who claims what, to associate particular authors with positions. Our main interest has been in simply stating what the positions are....

As it happens, views approaching L&T's are not uncommon, even if the full combination of claims (1)-(4) does not appear in any other source. For an example out of L&T's bibliography, Black 1979 subscribes quite clearly to claims (1) and (4) and produces some of the same arguments against alternative views. For a case not mentioned by L&T, some of the essays in Fish 1980 present a view of literary interpretation quite congenial to claim (4). So it is not as though L&T's cognitivist perspective is entirely original.

Within their discussion, L&T criticize what they call the 'Interaction Theory' for claiming that metaphors merely compare two domains equally and pick out similarities symmetrically (132); only in the appendix is Max Black cited as an adherent of this approach (218). However, what Black 1979 calls the 'interaction theory' fully acknowledges the asymmetry of metaphor.

Similarly, Richard Rorty is presented in the appendix (218) as an advocate of the 'No Concepts Position', a theory 'that views the meaning of expressions in a language as independent of human cognition' (126). Our reading of Rorty (1979, 1989) is quite the opposite: he argues that meanings are heavily dependent on tacit cultural agreement. Rorty says (1989:21), '... since truth is a property of sentences, and sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.' It is hard to imagine a blunter statement of Rorty's cognitivist perspective- just the opposite of L&T's characterization, and in fact rather close to L&T's own position. Thus the book's all too cursory references to the literature are in some cases misleading as well.

3. INTERPRETIVE STANCE. The following passage is explicit about L&T's attitude toward the interpretation of poems (110):

'Poems stand on their own. They evoke our construals and those construals are of value, whether they coincide with the author's or not. That is not to say that literary scholars should not engage in historical study that attempts to home in on the author's intended construals, to the extent that they can be pinned down. But that is a separate enterprise from what readers normally do when they encounter works of literature.'

The goal of this passage, presumably, is to empower the novice reader-to assure you that you don't have to be a literary and cultural expert in order to be able to read poetry. Yet, as L&T point out elsewhere, one's literary and cultural knowledge interact richly with the interpretation of poetry. For example, L&T's detailed interpretation of William Carlos Williams's 'The jasmine lightness of the moon' involves a global metaphor for Christianity. The only overt clue for this interpretation is the word steeple, which evokes a church. A reader culturally ignorant of this detail might guess instead that the references to the crescent moon and the turquoise sky are meant to evoke Islam, for instance. Similarly, a novice reader would be unaware of the fact that, at a particular time in India, 'illicit sexual liaisons commonly took place in the tall, thick reeds along river banks' (60)-a fact that is crucial to the interpretation of two Sanskrit poems that L&T discuss. Thus it is surely an overstatement to say that 'normal readers' need not be concerned with 'the author's intended

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construals'-including the cultural associations the author meant to evoke- and that this is only the province of 'literary scholars'. Except from a decon- structionist viewpoint, which L&T certainly do not adopt, poems do NOT stand on their own.

L&T recognize this point in a prominent passage at the close of Ch. 3 (159): 'It important to see, however, that all the detailed analysis we have given does not constitute a literary-critical treatment of the poem. Various literary critics concern themselves with reading a poem by bringing to bear a host of issues: the poem's historical context, the biography, dialect, politics, or profession of the author, the tradition the poem comes from, the way it is influenced by previous poems in that tradition, the genre of the poem, the connotations of particular words ..., the ways and reasons poets get published or ignored, the issue of reputation and canonization of the author and his tradition, issues of gender, and so on. What we are concerned to provide throughout this book is instead a prerequisite to any such discussion, namely, a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the role of metaphor in the way we understand a poem.'

The difficulty we see with this passage is that it sets off the metaphorical analysis of a poem as a PREREQUISITE to a 'literary-critical treatment', which in turn is characterized by an unstructured list of issues ranging from linguistic to sociological, as though 'various literary critics' (notice lack of attribution) considered them equally central. As we have seen, L&T's actual analytic practice in uncovering metaphorical interpretations makes free use of at least the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of texts; their form of analysis certainly con- stitutes a literary-critical treatment, though perhaps not a complete one.

Like L&T, we are altogether in favor of empowering readers; we are not advocating a pas'sive surrender to critical authority as to how a poem is to be read or what is important about it. But we do feel that a novice reader ought to be encouraged to explore whatever can be found out about a text, within the bounds of his or her own time and interest. While 'external' linguistic, literary, critical, or cultural knowledge on their own cannot account for the 'meaning' of a poem, they all help one become a better reader-just as understanding metaphor does. We see no need to establish priorities, to call metaphor a 'prerequisite' to any of these other domains.'

4. WHAT COUNTS AS A METAPHOR? We now turn to L&T's claims. L&T con- ceive of a metaphor as a mapping of conceptual organization from one domain, the SOURCE DOMAIN, to another, the TARGET DOMAIN. Typically, elements of

' It is beyond the scope of this review article to evaluate the details of L&T's interpretations of poems, but we suspect that many warrant closer scrutiny, even within L&T's own methodology. For instance, L&T comment as follows on Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, which begins:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

'The first four lines evoke the PEOPLE ARE PLANTS metaphor, in which the stages of life correspond to stages of the plant life cycle' (27). But in fact, it seems to us that the text of the poem most explicitly maps the speaker into a time of year, not into a plant; the plants come in as a way of identifying the season, which is then metaphorically related to the 'season' of the poet's life.

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the source domain are expressed in the text; the target domain may or may not be mentioned in the text, but it is what the metaphor is 'really about'. For example, in Shakespeare's phrase All the world's a stage, the source domain is the conceptualization of the theater, as evoked by the term stage; the target domain is life in general, as evoked by all the world. L&T sloganize such a metaphor as LIFE IS A PLAY. In other cases, the target domain is covert. For example, in Frost's Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-/I took the one less traveled by, the source domain is one of taking ajourney; the target domain, roughly the conduct of one's life, is entirely implicit, but it is what the poem is 'about'. L&T call this metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. L&T take a concept to be metaphorical just to the extent that it is not understood and structured on its own terms, but rather in terms of the structure of an independent source domain.

A major point of interest for L&T is the way the structure of the source domain is applied to the target domain to create new inferential possibilities. For instance, the phrase My career has hit a dead end invokes the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. The schema of a journey includes a traveler and a path; mapping this schema over to life involves identifying the 'traveler slot' with that of the person whose life is being described, in this case myself. The 'path slot', however, has no immediately corresponding slot in the life schema, so the metaphor creates a 'course of life slot' (63). To create an understanding of the phrase, one then applies to this new slot in the target domain the inferences characteristic of dead ends as paths, e.g. the structure of the path making it impossible to go any farther in the same direction, the need to turn back and find a different direction, a general negative evaluation of the situation, and so forth.

L&T characterize metaphors as varying along two parameters. The first is CONVENTIONALIZATION. A metaphor is CONVENTIONALIZED 'to the extent that it is automatic, effortless, and generally established as a mode of thought among members of a linguistic community' (55). So, for example, they characterize the metaphor DEATH IS DEPARTURE as conventionalized in our culture, though it may admit of unconventional expression for literary purposes. By contrast, the metaphor LIFE IS A FIRE is less conventional. The second parameter is CONCEPTUAL INDISPENSABILITY, or BASICNESS; it concerns the extent to which 'it is virtually unthinkable ... to dispense with [the metaphor without] chang[ing] utterly the way we think...' (56). Examples given of ex- tremely basic metaphors are PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS and TIME MOVES.

An initial problem with L&T's metaphorical analyses concerns the proper choice of schema.2 L&T often assert that a particular metaphorical schema applies, but do not show why that schema, rather than something more general or more specific, is the most appropriate. For instance, when L&T invoke the schema LIFE IS A FIRE, why not LIFE IS SOMETHING THAT GIVES OFF HEAT (more general) or LIFE IS A FLAME (more specific)? Intuitively,

2 This problem was pointed out by an anonymous reader.

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their strategy seems to be to choose the most general schema that preserves the details necessary for the metaphorical mapping; this is borne out in one passage (174-76) where the choice is discussed explicitly in terms of Grice's (unattributed) Maxim of Quantity. But the absence of a general discussion of the problem leaves a major gap in the theory.

However, there is a more significant difficulty with their account. As L&T point out, following Lakoff & Johnson 1980, their overall characterization en- larges the scope of the term 'metaphor' well beyond the standard use of the term. While we think many of their points are well taken, we believe their characterization obscures certain important distinctions and stretches the notion 'metaphor' to a number of cases that should be understood in other terms. We now take up these issues in some detail.

Many previous discussions of metaphor have observed that metaphors are usually manifested in a text by some overt incongruity. In the simplest cases, such as All the world's a stage, the text, taken literally, is anomalous. In others the incongruity is more subtle. For instance, in Frost's Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-11 took the one less traveled by,l And that has made all the difference, the incongruity, such as it is, is signaled by all the difference: why should a navigational choice be so consequential? Change the phrase to And that made a difference, and the metaphorical effect is hardly as strong; one could easily imagine the poet literally talking about a walk in the woods.

A central issue for the traditional theory of metaphor, then, has been how to account for such incongruity-what it is doing in a text and how we interpret it. A common response (e.g. Davidson 1978, Sadock 1979, Searle 1979, Lappin 1981) is to suggest that the interpreter is using a literally false (or, more generally, incongruous) expression to mean something else. That is, the use of metaphor is taken to be a particular kind of speech act, so that the theory of metaphor belongs in the theory of pragmatics and speech acts rather than in the theory of word and sentence meaning. Various advocates of this position differ in details of how this overall conception is fleshed out, but the common thread is clear.

L&T call this position the Literal Meaning Theory, and criticize different versions of it at some length. They offer three arguments. First, ordinary language is pervaded with metaphors which speakers do not consider literally false or incongruous; hence one cannot contrast poetic metaphor with ordinary non- anomalous literal language. Second, the standard philosophical conceptions of truth and falsity do not apply to ordinary language in any event (Lakoff 1987)- a judgment with which we concur (Jackendoff 1983, 1987)-so one cannot contrast the 'literal truth' of nonmetaphorical language with the 'falsity' of metaphorical language. And third, no sharp line can be drawn between linguistic semantics (the study of 'sentence meaning') and pragmatics (the study of 'utterance meaning'; Lakoff 1987, and again Jackendoff 1983), so one cannot coherently assign 'ordinary language' to semantics and metaphor to pragmatics. In short, the putative distinction between metaphor and the so-called literal utterances of ordinary language founders.

However, on closer examination, L&T's argument doesn't really bear on

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the intuitions behind the traditional position, but only on an account of them situated within a truth-conditional semantics. We see no inherent difficulty in granting that metaphors involve a special kind of speech act, while maintaining, with L&T, that metaphors are not confined to literature but rather pervade everyday speech as well. Similarly, even if judgments of truth and falsity are not absolute, but are rather grounded in mental representation of the world, this had better not undermine the possibility of judging that a particular utterance or text presents an incongruity. For instance, such intuitions are a crucial component in judging that someone is lying. Hence, the theory that metaphorical interpretations arise through pragmatic resolution of incongruity can be maintained simultaneously with L&Ts cognitivist approach, and they give no argument against such a possibility.

We believe that the traditional insight about the literal incongruity of metaphors is worth preserving. As a way of integrating it into a cognitivist approach, let us compare expressions that L&T count as metaphors ('LT- metaphors') to expressions that, like LT-metaphors, involve a mapping between domains, but in addition bear a sense of incongruity ('I-metaphors'); the latter would be more standardly acknowledged as metaphorical.

To test whether a sentence is an I-metaphor, we propose a rough diagnostic that checks for both the presence of an incongruous mapping between domains and the applicability of this mapping to the sentence in question. For instance, consider two conventionalized metaphors of the sort L&T cite:

(1) a. Our relationship is at a dead end. b. My computer died on me.

For L&T, these are realizations of the more general conceptual equations in 2.

(2) a. A RELATIONSHIP IS A JOURNEY b. MACHINES ARE PEOPLE

Now consider the diagnostic sentences in 3.

(3) a. Of course, relationships are not journeys-but if they were, you might say ours is at a dead end.

b. Of course, machines are not people-but if they were, you might say my computer died on me.

These sentences are more or less overt explications of the metaphorical interpretations of the sentences in 1: the first clause acknowledges the incongruity of the mapping, and the second constructs a hypothetical invocation of the mapping that motivates the metaphorical reading.

To see further how this diagnostic works, suppose one were to claim (coun- terintuitively) that My dog ran down the street is I-metaphorical, on the (du- bious) grounds that the predicate run only applies 'literally' to humans. According to such an analysis, the sentence would be understood I-metaphorically by invoking the equation ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE. However, our diagnostic shows that something is odd about this analysis:

(4) !Of course, animals aren't people-but if they were, you might say my dog ran down the street.

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Ex. 4 has the curious flavor of a non sequitur or perhaps a bad pun. The incongruity of treating dogs as humans is acknowledged, but the relevance of this mapping to the expression my dog ran down the street is totally unclear. Our diagnostic thus confirms the intuition that the sentence is not an I-metaphor derived from the equation ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE.

Given this diagnostic, we will now examine a number of LT-metaphors that prove not to be I-metaphors.

4.1. LITERAL BELIEFS. L&T maintain (19-20) that a metaphorical conception of death can be expressed as LIFE IS FLUID IN THE BODY; DEATH IS LOSS OF FLUID.3 Consider the following expression from the Hebrew Scrip- tures: For the life of a being [lit. flesh] is in the blood (Leviticus 17:11; cf. also verse 14 and, for the Noachide law, Genesis 9:4). Equipped with L&T's schema, which fits exactly, one might want to read this metaphorically. How- ever, such an interpretation would be hard to defend, given what we know of the ancient Hebrew belief system, which very specifically attributed certain physical and psychic functions to different organs of the body. Indeed, the topical context in Leviticus is a very literal prohibition against ingesting animal blood. That is, this passage expresses not an I-metaphor but a LITERAL BELIEF.

By contrast, we assume that W. H. Auden's Vaguely life leaks away, cited by L&T (19), is intended I-metaphorically. To use our diagnostic, the ancient Hebrews would not be willing to assert the first clause of 5, but Auden would.

(5) Of course, life isn't a fluid-but if it were, you might say . Jis in the blood [Leviticus]. l

tvaguely leaks away [Auden].J As far as we can determine from L&T's discussion, though, both phrases are to be regarded as LT-metaphors.

Similarly, consider L&T's discussion of the equation DEATH IS SLEEP (18-19). The Hebrew liturgy preserves the following phrase, to be recited upon awakening in the morning: I render thanks to you, Eternal King, who has mercifully returned my soul to within me. There is significant evidence that this is not meant I-metaphorically, but rather that the writer believed the soul quite literally to depart from the body during sleep and to be restored upon awakening. Conversely, death was considered a form of sleep, differentiated only by its length and quality: resurrection in the earliest Judaic and Christian sources was quite naturally viewed as awakening from this sleep. Many other ancient cultures shared this notion as well (Frazer 1963:210-11). We cannot be sure, then, that Aristophanes conceived of death I-metaphorically in the passage cited by L&T (19), For what is Death but an eternal sleep?-or even that Shakespeare did in Death's second self [i.e. sleep] that seals up all in rest (29). L&T's equation DEATH IS DEPARTURE raises the same problem, for many cultures view death literally as the soul (or person) passing on to its next existence. Consequently, though this equation may constitute a fairly conven-

3 Actually, as pointed out by a reader, the slogan must be more precise: life cannot be any old fluid in the body, say wine or urine; it must be a particular fluid-and death must be loss of this fluid and no other.

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tional I-metaphor for our culture, in other cultures an I-metaphorical interpretation might be mistaken. However, L&T consider ALL conceptualizations of death in terms of departures as LT-metaphorical.

How then do L&T distinguish what we are calling literal beliefs from what we are calling I-metaphors? Their parameter of 'conventionalization' cannot make the necessary distinction, since an expression such as Death is sleep may be equally conventional in two cultures, but literal in one and I-metaphorical in the other. Is the distinction then in 'basicness' or 'indispensability'? We will see in a moment that it is probably not.

4.2. THEMATIC PARALLELS. AS far as we can determine, L&T consider metaphor the principal cognitive mechanism available for cutting across disparate domains. However, there are other possibilities, in particular with respect to a number of L&T's 'basic metaphors'. Jackendoff 1976, 1978, 1983, 1990, adapting work in Gruber 1965, proposes the 'Thematic Relations Hypothesis', the claim that the conceptual structures expressed by natural language are organized in terms of a set of abstract parameters that are most clearly revealed in language about space, but that apply to many other semantic fields as well. It is not that space is taken as a METAPHOR that supplements or enriches the conceptualization of these fields; rather, this common organization is the ONLY way we have of conceptualizing them. In other words, this basic skeletal organization of conceptual structure (a sort of semantic counterpart of X-Bar theory) receives many parallel realizations, among them the conceptualization of space.

Among the fields discussed by Gruber and Jackendoff is the Circumstantial field, in which the parallel to a thing being in a spatial location is a character participating in an action. This field is shown to underlie the analysis of as- pectual verbs such as begin and cease, and to explain the generalization of the verb keep from cases like Bill kept the books on the shelf to complement con- structions like Bill kept Harry working/at work. The relation of this field to the spatial field encompasses two of L&T's 'basic metaphors', STATES ARE LO- CATIONS and PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS: being Circumstantially in a state is the thematic parallel of being spatially in a location, and intending to perform an action is the thematic parallel of intending to go to a location. Notice what happens when our diagnostic for I-metaphors is applied to some of the LT-metaphors that fall under these mappings:

(6) a. !Of course, purposes aren't destinations-but if they were, you might say we haven't reached our goal of finishing this review article.

b. !Of course, states aren't locations-but if they were, you might say I've gotten through my depression.

These have the same curious effect as 4-quite different from the case of literal belief in 5. Here the incongruity of the mapping is acknowledged rather than denied, but its invocation seems beside the point: evidently the Circumstantial domain is not being accessed by way of an I-metaphorical mapping from the spatial domain.

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L&T's 'basic metaphor' TIME MOVES has similar properties. As is well known, it is a basic design feature of language that temporal expressions use many of the same connectives and grammatical devices as spatial expressions, for example in English the temporal use of in, on, at, through, etc., and the strong grammatical parallelism between whenlnowlthen and where/here/there. Many people (e.g. Anderson 1971, Talmy 1978) have observed that the proper semantic account of these grammatical generalizations assimilates time in many respects to spatial location. Jackendoff (1983:189-91) argues that this is another example of the Thematic Relations Hypothesis. hence not an I-metaphor. As evidence, notice that a typical LT-metaphor within this mapping yields a non sequitur in our diagnostic frame:

(7) !Of course, times aren't locations-but if they were, you might say we're getting close to Christmas.

Ex. 7 illustrates one of L&T's two realizations of TIME MOVES, one in which times are reference points toward which one 'moves'. In the other, time is conceived of as a medium in motion that passes one by; this too submits to thematic analysis (Jackendoff 1983:191) and yields a non sequitur in our diagnostic:

(8) !Of course, time is not a medium in motion-but if it were, you might say the year passed by quickly.

We conclude that, although the domains of space and time are indeed incongruous, space is not used as an I-metaphorical basis for understanding time.

Another case involves the semantic field called 'Existential' in Jackendoff (1983:202-3). This is a field which has a 'pseudo-space' of only a single figural location, namely 'existence'. Things go in and out of existence, and we bring things into existence and keep them in existence. There is essentially no other way to express these concepts: the Existential field is yet another realization of the Thematic Relations Hypothesis. Again our diagnostic yields a non sequitur:

(9) !Of course, existence isn't a place-but if it were, you might say that a new idea has come into existence/*it.

This field provides the structure underlying L&T's 'basic metaphors' DEATH IS DEPARTURE, LIFE IS BEING PRESENT, and BIRTH IS ARRIVAL, which, as pointed out above, may be literal beliefs or I-metaphors, depending on one's culture.

A fourth case is the equation FORM IS MOTION, which accounts for LT- metaphors such as The road goes from New York to LA. Again, there is no way to express spatial extent other than by using such expressions-virtually all the extent verbs of English can also be used as motion verbs. This too is argued in the cited sources to be a thematic parallelism rather than an I-metaphor, and our diagnostic confirms this:

(10) !Of course, form isn't motion-but if it were, you might say that the road goes from New York to LA.

These observations show that there is an important division between LT- metaphors that are based on mapping of incongruous domains and those that

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are based on thematic parallelism; the latter are not I-metaphors. However, thematic parallels may be exploited to form specialized mappings that underlie genuine I-metaphors. For instance, L&T's equation LIFE IS A JOURNEY may be seen as a more specialized case of the thematic parallel between Lo- cation and Circumstance, in which the sequence of actions one performs parallels the path one traverses. This equation is the source of I-metaphors such as the Frost quote above. In turn, this equation serves as the basis for subcases such as DIFFICULTIES IN LIFE ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO TRAVEL, PROGRESS IS THE DISTANCE TRAVELED, and DEATH IS THE END OF LIFE'S JOURNEY. According to our analysis, then, the reason these latter equations are so 'conceptually indispensable' is that they are particular cases of a larger generalization behind the basic structure of any sort of thought, literal or metaphorical.

For a further consequence of these observations, return to the LT-metaphors that we called 'literal beliefs' in ?4.1. These expressions cannot be differentiated from I-metaphors such as My computer died on the grounds of L&T's parameter of 'conventionality'; they are equally conventional. The only other parameter available to distinguish them is 'basicness'. But the behavior of a literal belief in the diagnostic is quite different from that of the metaphors that L&T term 'basic': compare 5 and 6. Hence there is no parameter available in L&T's system to make the distinction between literal beliefs and conventionalized I-metaphors.

4.3. FURTHER CASES. Finally, some of L&T's analyses strike us as simply erroneous. Consider the 'basic metaphor' that L&T encode as EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. The force of this equation is that an event can be taken to have a volitional cause. In many situations, its use just amounts to an ordinary invited inference; for instance, if the door opens we may guess that someone delib- erately opened it. This suggests that EVENTS ARE ACTIONS is hardly a metaphorical mapping, even an LT-metaphorical mapping. Rather, the metaphorical mapping in an LT- (and I-)metaphor like Death carried him away lies only in personification of the cause. Indeed, using our diagnostic, we find that only 1 ld is a plausible explication of the metaphor:

(11) a. !Of course, events aren't actions-but if they were, you might say Death carried him away.

b. !Of course, not all events are actions-but if they were, ... c. !Of course, not all events have a volitional agent-but if they

did, ... d. Of course, death isn't a person/an agent-but if it were, you might

say Death carried him away. Similar arguments apply to HABITUAL BEHAVIOR IS AN ATTRIBUTE (202), which seems less like a metaphor than a slogan for the heuristic principles underlying any sort of category formation.

Consider also L&T's discussion of the loyalty of dogs (194): 'Dogs and lions behave the way they do out of instinct, but we commonly understand their behavior as if it were the product of some character trait of a human being.'

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Hence, 'when we attribute such character traits to animals we are compre- hending the behavior of those animals metaphorically in human terms.' (Similar statements appear on 57 and 134.) It seems to us, however, that the attribute 'loyal to X' has a major component something like 'willingly stays with X when X is in trouble'; this component applies equally in characterizing people or dogs as loyal. If in addition people's loyalty has a moral component that dogs lack, that doesn't seem to us necessarily to make the dog's loyalty METAPHORICAL.4

This is not to say that ALL of L&T's metaphor schemas are better accounted for as non-I-metaphors. Such equations as PEOPLE ARE PLANTS, MA- CHINES ARE PEOPLE, and LIFE IS A FIRE seem to us genuine metaphors in the standard sense. Nor do we wish to imply that the schemas discussed above cannot be the grounding for genuine metaphors, by use of various further devices such as personification.

However, it does seem clear that there are more distinctions in the conceptual basis of metaphor than simple gradations from conventional and/or conceptually indispensable to unusual and/or special-purpose: important criteria such as incongruity, literal vs. metaphorical belief, and thematic vs. metaphorical parallelism must be addressed. We are therefore not convinced that the notion of LT-metaphor characterizes a unified cognitive phenomenon. In fact, having drained from the term 'metaphor' much of its traditional content, L&T have created a theoretical construct so broad and unstructured that the term 'metaphor' may no longer be appropriate.

5. THE COGNITIVE BASIS FOR METAPHORICAL CONCEPTS. L&T'S excessively broad notion of metaphor is complemented by a correspondingly narrow view of the cognitive basis for concept formation. They divide concepts into those that are metaphorical and those that are understood in their own terms or 'semantically autonomous'. Their notion of 'semantic autonomy' emerges from passages like these:

'Semantically autonomous concepts ... are grounded in the habitual and routine bodily and social patterns we experience, and in what we learn of the experience of others.' (113)

'[D]epartures, journeys, plants, fire, sleep, days and nights, heat and cold, possessions, bur- dens, and locations are not themselves metaphorically understood, ... but rather by virtue of their grounding in what we take to be our forms of life, or habitual and routine bodily and social experiences.' (59)

'We acquire cognitive models in at least two ways: by our own direct experience and through our culture. Thus, people who have never seen millstones can nonetheless learn, via their culture, that they are used in mills to grind grain, and that they are the enormous round flat stones that rotate about an axis.' (66)

The impression one gets from these passages is that the only sources of nonmetaphorical conceptual structures are (a) sensorimotor experience, (b)

4 As an aside, it seems odd for people as cognitively oriented as L&T to reduce animal behavior to instinct; perhaps this lies behind their denial of literal loyalty to dogs. When it comes to non- sentient objects, our intuitions agree with L&T's: a car's or a computer's loyalty would be certainly construed I-metaphorically.

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experience of habitual or routine sensorimotor and social patterns, and (c) 'what we learn from our culture', such as what millstones are. All abstract concepts, for instance, are understood via metaphor. Further, L&T describe the learning of 'basic' metaphorical mappings in terms of frequent associations (83):

'[I]n our everyday experience we constantly encounter cases where an increase in substance (e.g., pouring more water in a glass) increases the height of the substance (e.g., the level of the water in the glass). This provides us with a strong experiential basis for the basic metaphor MORE IS UP...

'PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS has almost as strong a grounding in everyday experience. Regularly, throughout each day, the achievement of certain purposes requires going to a certain location, as in going to get a glass of water... [W]e regularly experience the source and target domain together...

This doctrine, despite the authors' professed cognitivist leanings, is char- acteristically termed 'associationist', and it is quite at odds with contemporary research on linguistic and cognitive development (see for instance Wexler & Culicover 1980, Macnamara 1982, Landau & Gleitman 1985, Pinker 1989, Markman 1990, Brown 1990-not to mention one of the early landmarks of cognitive science, Chomsky 1959, as well as still earlier work such as Koffka 1935). In general, it has emerged from both theoretical and practical consid- erations that the more richness and complexity one wishes to attribute to the representations the mind has of the world, the richer and more complex must be the underlying resources that one attributes to the mind prior to learning.

What resources do L&T actually presuppose in their account of the interpretation of metaphors? At the very least, they claim that one's understanding of the world is organized into structured schemas, which contain slots for the various roles in the schema. But structured schemas containing slots are not present in sensorimotor experience or in habitual or routine patterns; nor are they taught. Moreover, the interpretation of metaphor requires that one have access to forms of the source and target schemas sufficiently abstract to be compared and mapped one onto the other. For instance, in order to associate MORE with UP, the two domains must be placed in correspondence via a more abstract structure that they share, something like a linear directed ordering. But this schema is not present in any kind of experience; only INSTANCES of it are. The capacity for abstraction must come from the mind's own resources.

Consider also metaphors that are not 'grounded in experience', such as PEO- PLE ARE PLANTS. L&T tell us (84) only that this is not grounded either in direct experience or 'strong commonplace knowledge'. Rather, 'youthful vigor and the blossoming of plants ... are both instances of the same process that occurs in all higher-level organisms: flourishing and maturation prior to repro- duction'. Again, this requires extraction and comparison of properties of objects that are not found directly in experience. In short, it appears that in order to support a theory of metaphor along the lines they propose, L&T must assume a theory of concept formation richer and more abstract than one is led to assume from the quotes above.

In addition, there is the further question of whether all abstract concepts are understood metaphorically, permitting such a small 'semantically autonomous' base. It is not clear how a child can 'get into' an abstract conceptual domain

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without at least some minimal innate grounding that establishes the possibility of the domain within the child's conceptual repertoire; but this is a complex issue beyond the scope of the present review article.5 For our purposes, the main point is that L&T attribute to the mind so little nonmetaphorical understanding that the breadth of LT-metaphor is necessary as a matter of course.

6. LITERARY CONCERNS. Everything said so far applies equally to poetic metaphor and the notion of 'everyday' metaphor described in Lakoff & Johnson 1980. We now turn to issues arising more specifically from poetic metaphor. The issues divide roughly into two parts: (I) What makes poetic metaphor different from everyday metaphor? (2) What does metaphor do cognitively and affectively (emotionally) that makes it so important to poetic expression?

L&T's answer to (1) is that '[p]oetic thought uses the mechanisms of everyday thought, but it extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways that go beyond the ordinary' (67; cf. also 53-55). EXTENSION of an everyday metaphor occurs when elements of the source domain are deployed that are normally extrinsic to the mapping of the metaphor. They cite for instance Shake- speare's line For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, in which dreaming is not an intrinsic part of the metaphorical mapping from sleep to death. ELABORATION of a metaphor is similar, in that one fills in slots in unusual ways, for instance conceiving of death as departure in a particular sort of vehicle, say a raft. QUESTIONING of a metaphor occurs when the poet presup- poses a conventional metaphor and then casts doubt on it. Poetic metaphor also undergoes COMPRESSION, being used more densely, pervasively, and al- lusively than in ordinary language. However, perhaps the richest and most significant difference lies in the poetic COMPOSITION of metaphors, when multiple metaphors are used side by side, acting on each other and reinforcing each other. For instance, a poem may make use of the metaphor TIME IS A DEVOURER, then in turn personify Time and attribute complementary qual- ities to it as a person, such as viciousness. Another kind of composition is the juxtaposition of multiple metaphors with the same target domain, for instance Shakespeare's use in sonnet 73 of A LIFETIME IS A YEAR, A LIFETIME IS A DAY, LIFE IS A FIRE, and so forth. These all evoke a cyclical rise-fall pattern, so they form a coherent complex of metaphors.

This enumeration of techniques employed in poetic metaphor is useful, as far as it goes. It should be observed, though, that these techniques are not peculiar to poetry; they exist in different proportions in literary prose, some kinds of political polemic, and even stand-up comedy. It might be more appropriate to characterize them as techniques for using metaphor artistically, or in such a way as to draw the perceiver's conscious attention. Thus L&T's

5 The same issue is raised by Fodor (1975) in his attack on Piaget's cognitivist learning theory, which also seeks to account for general intelligence in terms of the extension of sensorimotor understanding. It would be of interest to pursue this intriguing parallel further; given L&T's minimal concern with learning, though, such an inquiry would be more appropriate in the context of other works, such as Lakoff 1987, 1990.

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list of techniques does not differentiate poetic metaphor from other types, though perhaps poetry best exemplifies all these techniques at once.

The effect of these techniques, say L&T, employing a simile that recurs a number of times in the book, is that (72)

'[p]oetic composition is like musical composition. Just as the composer combines the simple elements of tonality ... into musical phrases and musical movements of great richness and complexity, so the poet combines ordinary concepts, everyday metaphors, and the most mun- dane knowledge to form conceptual compositions, orchestrations of ideas that we perceive as rich and complex wholes.'

What we think they are trying to evoke is that poetry has an aesthetic effect by virtue of its structure. Curiously, though, there seems to be no significant mention in the book of aesthetics or beauty. This brings us into the ambit of question (2) above: What does metaphor do for us that makes it so important to poetry?

L&T's overt answers to this question (e.g. 64-65) for the most part circle around the power of poetic metaphors to give us new ways of understanding the world and our lives: the rich structure of the source domain provides new structure, new inferences, and new evaluations within the target domain. 'Po- etry, through metaphor, exercises our minds so that we can extend our normal powers of comprehension beyond the range of the metaphors we are brought up to see the world through' (214). Again, this is right as far as it goes, but the musical simile suggests that something else is going on: if the artistic composition of metaphors has an effect like that of music, it must do something for us beyond helping us understand the world. One presumably reads poetry for more than its informational and philosophical content. Where does the aesthetic component shared by poetry and music come in?

We conjecture that the answer lies in the cognitive structures evoked by (I-) metaphors. What is the outcome of creating a relationship between the incommensurable source and target domains? L&T claim that it is an understanding of the target domain in terms of the source domain. We suspect there is more, something like a 'fusion' or 'superimposition' of the source and target domains. Consider an image that personifies death as wearing a football uniform and driving a red convertible, or Tom Lehrer's (1981:66) gruesome mixed metaphor Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life, or the Navajo phrase quoted by L&T (92), My horse with a mane made of short rainbows. In these images, our sense is that we do not just carry knowledge of the source domain over into the target domain. Rather, the entities of the source domain are vividly present to us, but carry in addition extra identities, those of corresponding entities in the target domain. The cognitive effect is not unlike that in dreams, where we can experience a person who carries one individual's appearance but at the same time is 'known' to be someone else.6 Thus a metaphor involves a 'split reference', to use a term that Ricoeur 1978 attributes to Jakobson.

This hypothesis sharply differentiates metaphor from simile, where the

6 This idea is evoked but not developed by Davidson (1978:29), who begins by saying, 'Metaphor is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator'.

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source and target domains are merely compared, not superimposed. It also explains why metaphors are untranslatable into rational terms, in particular why paraphrases in terms of the target domain alone, like L&T's, often fall flat.

According to this approach, the mental representation evoked by a metaphor, as well as its affective power, are the result of superimposing the meanings of the source and target domains. Fine details of a source image that do not find precise correlates in the target domain still contribute to the meaning and affect of the composite. Hence the proliferation of image detail in poetic metaphor is motivated: it contributes to the richness of the interpretation.

But in addition, the superimposition operation itself has important effects. The most obvious is the affect contributed by using one entity as a symbol for another. This phenomenon is much more general than metaphor; it appears, for example, in the widespread use of ritual objects as symbols for religious abstractions. The object, just by virtue of being a symbol, is infused with a deep meaningfulness and immediacy that extends to actions in which the object is used.7 We have no explanation to offer for this affect, but it is clearly a part of human cognitive and emotional life, and it contributes to the sense of con- sequentiality and immediacy in poetic metaphor, what L&T might have in mind with their phrase (65) 'the power of being there' (though their explanation adverts to other factors).

A second effect of the superimposition operation is the sense of tension conveyed by incongruously fusing two disparate domains. The interpreter seeks to resolve this tension by finding points of contact or structural similarity between the two domains, so that they become point-by-point more congruent- this is the mapping process described by L&T. Yet this in turn can lead to a third effect, the production of further tensions, as the domains themselves are refocused and restructured in order to bring about greater congruence-this is the 'interaction' described by Black (1979) or the 'reverberation' described by Ricoeur (1978).

As a result, a metaphor generates a rich complex of conceptual and affective components; to use Ricoeur's term, it has a 'thickness'. In particular, the affective quality engendered by multiple simultaneous structures and the tensions among them is what makes poetic metaphor akin to music (see Jackendoff 1987:236-45 for brief discussion of sources of musical affect).

Finally, let us return to the question of why complex metaphor is characteristic of literature, and of poetry in particular-why poets use the techniques

7 The authors advise us (personal communication, 1990) that Lakoff & Johnson (1980:40) speak of the LT-metaphorical nature of religious symbolism, and that their characterization falls under our description. However, we do not find in the cited passage any discussion of the characteristic affect associated with such symbolism, the issue we are concerned with here.

In a similar vein, the authors contend (personal communication, 1990) that our notion of SUPERIMPOSITION iS identical with their notion of MAPPING; they intend the latter in the mathematical sense of a set of ordered pairs, where the first element of each pair is from the source domain and the second is from the target domain. Howver, this is not the sense conveyed to us by the text, and again it does not address the notion of affect, which is our focus at this point.

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that L&T describe. The reason is that poetry is art, and as art it is subject to different communicative conventions than ordinary discourse. The basic intent of the communicative act in poetry is not to convey information clearly, con- cisely, and nonredundantly, a la Grice 1975. Rather, it is, roughly, to evoke in the perceiver an aesthetic response that arises from the information content of the utterance and, significantly, from all aspects of the form in which the information is conveyed (Jackendoff 1987:232-34). This communicative intent rests on ordinary language, ordinary knowledge, and ordinary pragmatics, but goes beyond them or supervenes on them (Ricoeur 1978:151, Schauber & Spol- sky 1986).

The special conventions attached to literary interpretation are a major preoc- cupation of literary theory (e.g. Mitchell 1985, Fish 1980). If the goal is to understand POETIC metaphor and why it is special-why poets cultivate rich and complex metaphors-such conventions must play an essential role. More particularly, if the meaning of a metaphor is simply a mapping from the source domain onto the target domain in order to convey a new understanding of the target domain, it is not clear where the aesthetic effect comes from. But under the richer account of metaphor we have suggested, the proliferation of metaphoric detail precisely serves the aesthetic purpose, in that it conveys not just information but the affect and immediacy of imagery, of symbolism, and of the interaction between the incommensurable source and target domains.

7. CONCLUSION. Overall, we find MTCR a valuable contribution. It is an admirable attempt to bridge the gap between linguistics/cognitive science and literature. Its essential thesis, that much literary metaphor is based on the culturally conventional metaphors that pervade ordinary speech, is new and striking. This thesis is not materially affected by the modifications to the theory of metaphor we have suggested here, in particular by the addition of a criterion of incongruity, a more restricted ambit for the term 'metaphor', and a more sophisticated learning theory.

Yet the book ultimately leaves something of an empty feeling. This is not because of particular mistakes it makes, which are honest and open to discussion. Rather, it seems to come from the book's sense of disconnection. For one thing, the book is disconnected from the philosophical and critical literature that would situate it in the larger world of ideas on the subject; given the quotes extracted in ?2 and ?3, we infer that this disconnection is by design. But in addition, we feel the book fails to make sufficient contact with the aesthetic concerns that distinguish poetic metaphor from ordinary metaphor, and for this reason we are not altogether persuaded that the work provides either beginning students of literature or cognitive scientists with sufficiently refined tools for understanding poetry.

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Ray Jackendoff Program in Linguistics

and Cognitive Science Brandeis University Waltham, MA 02254

[Received 6 June 1990: revision received 18 March 1991.]

David Aaron Department of Religion Wellesley College Wellesley, MA 02181

jackendoff's review of lakoff and turner

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