= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TheOtherDave comments on Living Metaphorically - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (76)
It doesn't seem to me that the OP predicts identical metaphorical categorization across all cultures/languages, but in either case you don't in fact find it. Actually, see Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things for a detailed exploration of metaphorical categorization in a relatively "uncontaminated" linguistic environment.
Thanks for the recommendation.
I didn't mean "identical" so much as "very similar". The vast majority of human cultures have experiences like "parents are big and important", "heavy lifting is burdensome", "bed is comfy, tree is shady" and the like. Since the underlying machinery doing the "necessary" categorizing is shared, it seems that these metaphors not being largely similar across cultures is indicative of culture itself playing a strong role in how we choose/use metaphors.
I suppose it's a minor win for the theory so long as all cultures use some metaphors for abstract concepts (as opposed to specialized terms/jargon), but the post seems to argue for them stemming from universal sensorimotor experiences, so if these experiences are truly at the heart of the phenomenon, I would expect to see a lot of cross-cultural similarity.
Culture itself most assuredly plays a strong role in how we choose/use metaphors.
Looking for universal metaphors might be interesting. I'm reasonably confident that "warm = nurturing" across a wide range of cultures, for example, or "path = plan"; I am less (but still significantly) confident about "big" = "important", even less confident about "more = up", etc.
If we broaden the thesis to include non-identical metaphors, my confidence increases wildly. For example, I'm extremely confident that every human culture has some metaphor for "plan" that involves a process for getting from an initial to a final state.