Paper 5: Conceptual Metaphor

Paper 5: Conceptual Metaphor

Most people only think about metaphor when they think about literature. You can see the power of metaphor in a poem: “My love is a rose.” However, if we look at the language that we use everyday, we will notice that metaphor is very common, and in fact, metaphor affects the way that we think.

Here is an example of a metaphor in everyday English. If you are visiting a friend, and you need to leave, you might say, “I have to take off.” This is an airplane metaphor. You have to “fly” away from your friend’s house to somewhere else.

Metaphor can be even more important. If I say, “Taipei is the heart and soul of Taiwan,” I am using two metaphors to describe what Taipei’s relationship to Taiwan is. What does it mean to say that Taipei is the “heart” and the “soul” of Taiwan? How is that different from saying that Taipei is the “brain” of Taiwan?

For this paper, you will discuss a common metaphor in either English or Chinese or Taiwanese or Cantonese or Hakka (you will have to translate, of course). You will analyze how the metaphor affects the way people think. A famous example by Lakoff and Johnson is the metaphor, “Argument is war.” In American English, we say things like, “He destroyed my argument” or “I couldn’t defend myself against his argument.” How does that metaphor affect Americans? Because we see argument as a war, we see argument as something that we “win” or “lose;” we can’t look at an argument as a way of sharing ideas because two parties at war do not share: they only attack each other.

There are a number of ways to approach this paper. First, you can look at just one metaphor in one of the languages that you speak if you can write enough about just one metaphor. Second, you can look at a series of related metaphors to look at patterns. (For example, you could look at metaphors that compare people to food. Young people in Taiwan are sometimes called “strawberries,” for example. Are there similar “people=food” metaphors? What do they mean?) Third, you can analyze the conceptual metaphors in a work of popular media; you could look at a popular song or a television program.

Your introduction will name the metaphors that you want to discuss. Your thesis statement will briefly say what you think is special or important about these metaphors. In your body, you will talk about these metaphors, and you will prove that your ideas about them are correct. In the conclusion, you will discuss why it is important to be aware of how language affects the way that people think.