Waking and Sleeping Metaphors

Traditionally metaphors are characterised as either 'dead' or 'live'; live metaphors are used consciously and overtly and are the stuff of poetic allusions and overtly figurative speech; dead metaphors are those which, whilst they might have started out as linguistic flourishes, have lost this poetic aspect and exist simply as semiotic units of speech, random noises used as part of a computational, disembodied, symbol-manipulation system. More recent understandings of the working of metaphor and poetic cognition more generally suggests that this view of dead metaphors is incorrect. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics almost all complex thought is enabled through the use of metaphor and other poetic devices so that even metaphors which appear evacuated of conscious metaphorical content still carry this (or similar) content as part of their functioning within unconscious sense-making processes. A recently publication by Cornelia Muller reimagines this live/dead distinction as one more appropriately considered to be between metaphors which are 'awake' and those which are 'asleep'. Sleeping metaphors, like the stuff of dreams, forms the deep and largely silent substrate from which conscious thought emerges.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• thought
• metaphor
• dead
• live
• asleep
• awake
• dream
• dreaming
• consciousness
• Polanyi
• awareness
• cognition
• cognitive
• linguistics
• George
• Lakoff
• Mark
• Johnson