CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS – A COGNITIVE APPROACH

Abstract

This paper investigates the foundations of meanings in the view to proposing and achieving methodological models for the research of conceptual metaphors. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the existence of two basic models mapped according to the way they interact with each other, through cognitivist and functional methodology, in order to examine how meaning appears, how it is processed, received, interpreted and further communicated. The meaning of the linguistic expressions of a language is subject to change through time. Linguistic expressions modify their meaning for sociolinguistic reasons related to phenomena such as the use of language and contact between languages and for cognitive reasons such as the flexibility of languages and the acquisition process.

Headnote

Abstract: This paper investigates the foundations of meanings in the view to proposing and achieving methodological models for the research of conceptual metaphors. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the existence of two basic models mapped according to the way they interact with each other, through cognitivist and functional methodology, in order to examine how meaning appears, how it is processed, received, interpreted and further communicated. The meaning of the linguistic expressions of a language is subject to change through time. Linguistic expressions modify their meaning for sociolinguistic reasons related to phenomena such as the use of language and contact between languages and for cognitive reasons such as the flexibility of languages and the acquisition process.

Keywords: semantics, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphors

Introduction

Cognitivism combines several scientific fields: cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology, artificial intelligence modeling, philosophy, neuroscience, and linguistics which investigates the nature of cognitive processes (human mind's mechanism).

Starting from the semantic principles of Charles J. Fillmore and connecting them to applied linguistics, this book aims to provide a cognitive perspective of semantics at lexical and sentential levels, which includes a deep analysis of the way they are organised into conceptual frames. Metonymy and metaphor are analysed as semantico-syntactic patterns in order to demonstrate their relevance through logical association between concepts and also their meaning's dependence to the knowledge of the real world.

The fundamental principles of cognitive linguistics as a complete linguistic theory that opposes traditional semantic theories focused on the componential description of meaning and its logical structure.

Language and Cognition

The study of information processing, construction of mental models of the world, and the arrangement of systems ensure various types of cognitive acts. Understanding through them the formation of thoughts expressed in natural language and creating a model capable of producing communication or other aspects of human cognition is enabled, as the mental activity is governed by certain schemes, programs, plans, or strategies.

Cognitive linguistics highlights the fact that we understand social reality through models. From Holland & Quinn (1987), Lakoff (1996) and Palmer (1998) to Dirven et al. (2001a, 2001b), linguists have demonstrated that the technical tools of cognitive linguistics can be used to show that our perspectives on social reality are shaped based on thought patterns. Language is thus considered a social and cultural reality. What patterns shape our conception of language? What are the paradigms we use to think about language, not only as linguistic structure, but also as linguistic variation?

The most important achievement of modern linguistics is that language is no longer considered a new paradigm in terms of its participation in human cognitive activity. It is a means of transmitting thought, the essence of linguistic communication. The ways of linguistic representation of ideas are a major concern as language is the main means of fixing, storing, processing and transmitting knowledge. Monographs published in recent years contain important theoretical provisions on the question of how our knowledge of the world is stored, how it is structured in language in the process of communication. This series of issues deals with Cognitive Linguistics.

The most important object of study in cognitive linguistics is the concept. Concepts are mental entities that have a name in language and reflect a person's cultural and national idea of the world. Concepts are a concentration of people's culture and experience, but at the same time, the concept is something through which a person himself enters the culture and, in some cases, influences it. The key concepts of culture are the main units of the world picture, the constants of culture, which are significant both for an individual linguistic personality and for the linguistic community as a whole. A system of meanings is created that relates to what the individual knows and thinks about the world by operating with symbols since the results of cognitive activity are fixed in language. W Humboldt considered language as a continuous creative activity at the basis of all other types of human activity.

The concept models described in linguistic literature with different degrees of completeness are explained by the stage of cognitive formation and this description methodology can highlight them for stylistic analysis.

In philosophy, the branch called epistemology which deals with the theory of knowledge. Therefore, it can be argued that cognitivism has an enduring tradition that can be traced back to Antiquity. As it has been proven, the different nature of realities (such as things, phenomena, and events) determines their different display in the mind. Some are presented in the form of visual images, others in the form of concepts, and others in the form of symbols as a perception of the world, within a complex system of concepts.

The cognitive paradigm of concept formation

Significant information obtained in the course of human cognitive activity and the products of its processing find its expression in linguistic forms, so that cognitive processes become linguistic processes, which is a key to understanding human behavior.

For example, metaphorization - the main mental operation, a way of knowing and explaining the world - is associated with the process of reflecting and designating new knowledge through the old. A person does not so much express his thoughts with the help of metaphors as he thinks in metaphors, and therefore they involve self-interpretation: semantic field, grid of meanings, hybrid semantics, semantic space, the connection of different theories, the center of the semantic field. That is a cognitive mechanism that provides almost endless production and understanding of meanings in speech.

Conceptual metaphor is a suitable tool of analysis of diverse cultural and social phenomena, and thus the application of this study on anthropological and sociological topics is possible. To that extent, its value is also in bringing linguistic topics closer to these disciplines. It can be better understood when studied withing the theory of cognitive linguistics, especially the issues focused on semantics, especially in the works of George Lakoff, M. Johnson and M. Turner. Viewed from a cognitive-linguistic perspective, the interpretation of conceptual metaphors as mere mechanisms of a semantic-grammatical nature. This also highlights the limitations of the theory on conceptual metaphors, whilst there is a diversity of features that require a more detailed and deeper analysis in accordance with the main tenets of the cognitive theory. While traditional approaches to language approached metaphor primarily as a stylistic and rhetorical figure of language, and thus as a peripheral phenomenon of narrow linguistic research, in recent linguistic theory metaphor is placed at the center of these research. Ever since the publication of the book "Metaphors we live" by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson in the 1980s, the theory of conceptual metaphor shows that the metaphorical organisation of language structures (especially the one found in everyday language), reflects a specific relationship between language, thought and cultural phenomena.

The most fundamental values in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in the culture. (Lakoff & Johnsen, 2003: 23)1.

Thus, metaphor becomes an inevitable phenomenon in the study of conceptual and semantic structures of a language, and its description a relevant topic of research in the field of linguistics and cognitive sciences. A considerable number of works have been published on the topic of conceptual metaphor, and summarizing them for the purpose of reviewing the main theoretical and methodological assumptions is not an easy task at all, thereby emphasizing the long-standing tradition of cognitive-linguistic research.

If one is interested in why language is structured in the way it is and why it functions in the way it does, metaphor and iconicity are important issues to be explored in detail and in depth. Iconicity is therefore presented here as a manifestation of the motivated nature of the linguistic sign. (Hiraga, 2005: 14)2.

Language not only mediates the transmission and reception of information, knowledge, and messages, but also processes the information received by the individual from the outside, i.e. builds specific language frameworks. Thus, language creates opportunities for ordering and systematising knowledge in the memory, for building a linguistic image of the world characteristic of the individual's ethno-cultural environment.

Concepts coding through informational activities

Cognitive linguistics was formed in controversy with structural linguistics, but it does not contradict the structural approach, moreover, it assumes and uses it to some extent, so that the structural approaches to language contribute to highlighting the springs of thinking and expressing ideas.

However, the inadequacy of an immanent approach to the linguistic system, ignoring the active nature of language and its involvement in thought processes, has been proven by modern linguistics since the end of the 20th century, which occurred with a change in value orientations.

When receiving new information, a person correlates it with what he already has in mind, thus generating new meanings. The operational units of memory become the operating tool in cognitive linguistics - frames (stereotyped situations, scenarios), concepts (the totality of all meanings understood by the word), gestalts (holistic preconceptual images of fragments of the world), etc. Consequently, cognitive linguistics aims to shape the image of the world, as well as the structure of linguistic consciousness. The conceptual structures built through language refer to the enunciated and reorganized experience. The same verbal expression can refer to different concepts of the same conceptual system, which reflects the ambiguity of linguistic expressions because they correspond to a certain concept or their structure. Therefore, the understanding of a linguistic expression is considered as its interpretation in a certain conceptual system, and not in terms of a certain set of semantic objects.

Concepts reduce the diversity of observed and imagined phenomena to something unified, bringing them under a single heading. They allow the storage of knowledge about the world and prove to be the basic building blocks of the conceptual system, contributing to the processing of subjective experiences by summing up information in certain categories and classes developed by society. Two or more different objects can be considered instances and representatives of the same class/ category. Only because the concepts are heterogeneous, they can be classified into superconcepts (time, space), macroconcepts (elements), basic concepts (house) and microconcepts (reading). They are distinguished by a measure of social prestige and importance in culture. This explains the increasingly complex approaches to learning foreign languages today.

Information and knowledge structures

Thinking is based on internal (mental) representations such as frames, plans, scenarios, models and other knowledge structures. We therefore think in concepts, which are produced due to the ability to dassify and categorize life objects and phenomena, as global quanta of well-structured knowledge. The products of categorization (categories) are part of our cognitive apparatus and can be understood as mental concepts stored in long-term memory. Intellectual tasks such as recognizing images and understanding a communication are solved based on available knowledge.

The notion of conceptual or cognitive models has its origin in psychology. The functioning of language is based on psychological mechanisms, because language is the most important link in the accumulation and preservation of the classified experience of human interaction with the world. And since the basis of all experience is perception and memory, the study of knowledge and language is impossible without taking into account the characteristics of perceptual processes that are studied in psychology. However, linguistics and psychology differ in methodology. One of the disciplines that uses cognitive concepts and conceptual categories is semantics, for example, the concept of prototype applicable in cognitive semantics. However, the lexical system of a language is not limited to intrastructural relations. Every country and culture has its own version of cognitivism. The development of this type of linguistics is owed to the research by linguists J. Lakoff, R. Langacker, and T. van Dijk.

Our successful functioning in the world involves the application of the concept of causation to ever new domains of activity -through intention, planning, drawing inferences, etc. The concept is stable because we continue to function successfully in terms of it. Given a concept of causation that emerges from our experience, we can apply that concept to metaphorical concepts. (Lakoff & Johnsen, 2003: 72)3.

Frame Semantics

In frame semantics, metaphor is clearly classified into cognitive processes of great importance for the structure of our mind. The works of L. Talmy, C. Fillmore and W. Chafe in the 1980s were milestones in the development of cognitive grammar. Although cognitive linguistics emerged and developed most actively in the United States, Europe also developed its own line of research. One of the main issues was that of understanding and extracting information from speech or text, as well as the problem of mental lexicon (knowledge of words) in cognitive semantics, within which prototypical semantics and frame semantics were developed parallelly. Linguistic variation, a characteristic related to language dynamics, is in opposition to the idea of a paradigm, models or patterns of conceptualization of the social and cultural reality that the language represents for a community of speakers.

The research on semantic frames is intended to be a tool for examining the foundations of meaning through a corpus-based functional analysis of single-word lexemes and phrasal lexemes, phrases, sentences and other compounds/lexical constructions (such as idioms and any multi-word combinations). It also investigates how they are related to a specific syntactic structure on sets of lexemes with similar functionality in various lexical fields.

The complementarity of propositional content often hides a contrast that may create ambiguities. Structural representations of lexemes can be in the form of syntax-semantic mergers like metonymy and oxymoron. The oxymoron also possesses the ability to highlight conceptual conflict within a statement, since the level of semantic incompatibility reaches the highest degree, exalting at the same time the suggestiveness of that image. the epistemological function of metonymy and oxymoron cognitive mechanisms contained in the operation of the metaphor, and it becomes intensively researched with the diffusion George Lakoff's findings on conceptual metaphor.

Conclusion

The emergence of tropes is due to a relationship that is established between the initial idea that accompanies the word and the new concept that is added to it. These relationships are reduced to the following three: correlation (or correspondence), connection, and similarity. The research of this topic is worthy of further exploration for the purpose of achieving a more profound understanding of the English lexicon. It can also provide a disambiguation method or pattern for a more accurate translation of literary texts that contain idioms or figures of speech as metaphor and metonymy, extending to the applicative analysis of metaphors, metonymies and oxymorons as forms of creativity.

Footnote

1 George Lakoff & Mark Johnsen, Metaphors we live by. London: The university of Chicago Press, 2003, pp.23.

2 Hiraga, К. Masako, Metaphor and Iconicity. A Cognitive Approach to Analysing Texts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 14.

3 George Lakoff & Mark Johnsen, Metaphors we live by. London: The university of Chicago Press, 2003, pp.72.

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