Today many metaphor researchers work in the framework of cognitive linguistics. The cognitive linguistics revolution began in 1980 with the publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. In their book, Lakoff and Johnson amassed an amazing number of examples showing that the way we talk about abstract domains appears to be systematically structured by the way we talk about certain more concrete domains. Thus, we talk about theories and arguments as if they were buildings: theories can have support and arguments can be demolished. These observations gave rise to the theory of conceptual metaphor which moved metaphor out of language into our conceptual organization. According to Lakoff and Johnson, linguistic expressions such as ‘to demolish a theory’ or ‘the foundation of a theory’ are not isolated expressions but parts of the conceptual metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS.

Metaphor, theory of metaphor, political language

Charteris-Black, Jonathan. (2005). Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. London: PalgraveMacmillan.

Means, David. (2005). “The Secret Goldfish.” in The Best American Short Stories, ed. Katrina Kenison and Michael Chabon, Boston:Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Renton, N. E. (1990). Metaphorically Speaking, A Dictionary of 3,800 Picturesque Idiomatic Expressions. New York: Warner Books.

Ricoeur, Paul. (1977). The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language London: University of Toronto Press.

Johnson, A. T. 1996. Comprehension of metaphors and similes: A reaction time study. Metaphor & Symbolic Activity