Metaphors We Live Twice: A Communicative Approach Beyond the Conceptual View

This chapter aims to introduce metaphors from two different perspectives: cognitive-linguistic and communicative. In presenting these views, we refer to Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphors (1980) which influenced the evolving field of metaphor studies and its applications to related disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, politics, education, arts, and media. We argue that the theory of conceptual metaphors conflated the communicative dimension of metaphor with its linguistic and cognitive layers. Other trends in metaphor studies have emerged since and suggested that the communicative dimension of metaphor cannot be reduced to its conceptual and/or linguistic component (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1986; Cameron & Low 1999; Carston 2010; Steen 2011a). Our work aims at making metaphors ‘live twice’, by answering two main questions: does the communicative dimension of metaphor have specific features that disallows complete reduction to its linguistic and cognitive dimensions? If indeed that is the case then how could these specific properties of communication change our view regarding the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of metaphor? All papers collected in this volume seek to answers these questions, offering new research perspectives, irreducible to the points of view prevailing in the conceptual theory of metaphor.