Cultural Metaphors Essay

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The word “metaphor” originates from the Greek word “metaphora” in which “meta” means “to cross”, and “phor” – “to carry”. Overall, the whole word means to transfer from one thing to another.Traditionally, metaphor is considered a merely a matter of literacy, a rhetorical device and language decoration. The conceptual metaphor, whose background was first founded by George Lakaff and Mark Johnson in 1980 states that metaphor is not only a type of rhetorical device but also people’s general thinking mode and way of cognition through which the people can understand the unknown things via the known(Lakoff & Johnson, 2003).
According to Lakaff and Johnson, the conceptual metaphors can be divided in three kinds. The first type is structural metaphor, which refers to the concepts that are understood and demonstrated by another well – structured concept. A typical example of the structural metaphor is “Argument is war”, which is often realized in expressions such as “She always win the argument”, or “My argument is attacked”.
The second type is ontological metaphor, in …show more content…

Initiated firstly by Naomi Quinn, some cultural models are conceptualized metaphorically. Quinn proposes that metaphors are “ordinarily selected to fit a preexisting and culturally shared model”, i.e. metaphors are picked on the basis of speakers’ prior understanding(Quinn & Strauss, 2001). However, this argument was widely criticized for offering only one – way view of the relationship among culture, mind and metaphor. Meanwhile, the dialectical relationship between cultural models and metaphor is much more complex. On the one hand, metaphors are shaped by currently existing cultural models, but on the other hand, metaphors can reproduce or transform such models(Khajeh & Imran-Ho-Abdullah,

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