The "Career of Metaphor" paper is interesting, though the path of the paper is an odd mixture of density and winding topics. For me, there were a few points that I thought were profound or novel.
Firstly, the dead metaphor discussion near the end of the paper struck me as a neat form of verification.
"Thus, dead metaphors represent the logical conclusion to the shift from comparison to categorization described by the career of metaphor hypothesis."
Is the career of metaphor a path from figurative to literal meaning? In the example of "Star Wars was a blockbuster", the figurative term blockbuster has come to almost exclusively refer to 'movies that make a lot of money' (or occasionally, 'movie stores with poor business models', but that refers to a proper noun). Clearly, at another point in our language's history, it meant something quite other, and blockbuster was used only figuratively in other contexts. Now, using it outside of movies (or at least sales) would be figurative... so, is the trajectory of a metaphor a way into literal-ness? Or over time, could it be cyclical, where blockbuster gets used metaphorically outside of sales and comes to exclusively mean something else? If so, then the career of metaphor would also be cyclical. I'm interested in this idea of a time course of metaphors over generations.
I think perhaps the best part of this article were the references back to concepts and categorization as we discussed them last week. Someone (can't remember who exactly, I'm terrible with names) mentioned last week that abstract concepts are best understood through grounded experiences, which helps us categorize related experiences. That in itself is a kind of metaphorical mapping, but what do we make of their more figurative examples ("[Our relationship is] spinning its wheels.")? How could metaphors help us categorize events/feelings as abstract concepts, and which is more prevalent/salient in the daily human experience, the metaphorical understanding of an abstract concept ('freedom' as being released from a relationship), or the experientially-mapped understanding of an abstract concept (‘freedom’ as being released from physical incarceration)?
I guess I will deal with the two articles one at a time.
First of all I just want to say that I couldn’t wait until the Bowdle & Getner article was over with… I am unsure whether it was a lack of background in the subject or the author’s unforgiving writing. I felt bombarded by similar sounding terminology, and found it was a painful read.
I could not help but think about the comment made by the gentleman in the back of the class regarding “natural languages” which I am quite sympathetic towards. The natural languages he was referring to seem to gel nicely with the idea that metaphorical processing is common and crucial in understanding meaning. In order to communicate we must use terms that try to convey our natural (or “private” if you like Wittgenstein [but screw him]) language which means that metaphor is actually the basis of all communication. This would have implications on the theory held by many cognitive scientists that thought is derived from language… Instead, language is a shallow and pragmatic reflection of thought. Sooooo, returning to the reading, I would agree with Lakoff and Johnson that metaphor is the center of all thought, especially abstract thoughts, and besides that point I honestly didn’t really understand the details just the gist of the article. Explanation please!
The Giora article I found much more approachable. At first I wanted to support the contemporary view because of the sentiments I expressed in the previous section. After a while I decided that the graded salience hypothesis actually deals less with private language and more with the memory process that is necessary for metaphorical understanding. According to a grounded view, memory is not stored within the head but rather in the world and body. We don’t have a memory bank like a file cabinet so much as a pattern completion mechanism that takes perceptual /visceral stimulus to reactivate a bundle of sensations and feelings that collectively constitute an idea/perception (i.e. memory). Memory is actually a set of heuristics for manipulating perceptual/visceral information which may even be unique to each individual. Sooooo, returning to the reading, salience seems like a great way to quickly and smoothly pick the meaning of a metaphor which seems significant for fast processing (especially if metaphors are indeed the primary way to publicize private language).
Long post! I actually edited out about half of the original so if it doesn’t make sense you know why. Sorry guys… when you have to read and talk about overcomplicated and pedantic metaphysics all day practical stuff like cognitive science is a breath of fresh air.
Giora proposed the graded salience hypothesis which supported that the salient meaning of figurative and literal utterances is always activated initially. This explained that the salient meaning plays more roles in comprehension of meaning than metaphor itself. However, I am wondering when people comprehend the meaning, more problems arise in understanding the figurative meaning, but not the literal meaning. Although Giora argued that the three steps of meaning interpretation: direct, parallel, and sequential processes, that unconventional metaphor itself makes comprehension more difficult. I would like to know if people agree with the graded salience hypothesis and when people come across unsalient expression, whether this recognition process help people understand more accurate.
Gentner quoated Glucksberg et al.’s (1997) example that the process how people selected the correct category of the snowflake with the illustration of its various concepts until it matched the target concept. It is reasonable, but there is doubt how many people experience this cognitive process when the target concept is constructed. In this way, the salient meaning seems more practical.
Benjamin, I think the crux of the B&G paper is in the first paragraph of the general discussion: that as we become more familiar with metaphor, we tend to deal with them as though they were literal (i.e., familiar metaphors are processed by using categorization, whereas new metaphors are processed using comparisons [thereby making them take longer]). I actually liked this article better than the other one [comment to follow], but I wish they would have addressed some views of metaphor that extend beyond English. Given that references would change from language to language, does everyone (i.e., speakers of all languages) process metaphors the same? (maybe some of the studies cited do, but I didn't notice any reference to that) That being said, it was real neat to see that there is a conceptual difference between simile and metaphor (which illustrates my summation of the article). I just always thought of a simile as a specific type of metaphor, not something that would alter how someone compares vs. categorizes a concept. Neat!
While I appreciate a continuum approach much more than the dichotomy that pervades so much psychological research (I think experimental people just like to argue!), I didn't find that Giora's new approach was an alternative to traditional, or even conventional, views. It was more like something you can add on the side, but not rely on to fully explain the richness of metaphor processing. So, I'm down with the importance of salience. But if parallel processing is what's up, then why is there the shift mentioned in the other article?
And on a somewhat related note, I've noticed several people refer to embodied or grounded cognition. I want to caution against depending on that kind of research too much. I'm just learning about new approaches to (against) it, but there's been some strong cases made (by Max Louwerse, for instance) that linguistic factors (e.g., frequency of co-occurrence) can account for a lot of what the embodiment theorists claim is due to embodied cognition. I like the IDEA of embodiment: that we've all been given these vessels (bodies) and we understandably interpret our world through the existence of such corporeal forms. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be what embodiment people go for (maybe it's too layman-y or spiritual or whatever). But my take is this: the language that we use becomes part of our consciousness (and is used physically, I reckon!), and is just as much a part of "embodiment" as thinking about pulling a drawer toward you and having a quicker RT when you push a button closer to your body (Glenberg) or walking slower if you think about elderly people (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows). So my standpoint is don't blink, we may be quickly pushing the drawer closed on embodiment in its current form. [I sure hope someone thinks that's funny.]
I thought one of Whitney's points was particularly interesting. How do we ground emotion/feeling concepts in a concrete experience. I think though, in terms of categorization and concepts, emotions and feelings play a different role. I think that they would create a richer network (or whatever setup) of concepts. If you are grounding an abstract concept in an actual, concrete experience, it is possible that you could have both a negatively and positively valenced experience with a particular concept. In this case, would it be more difficult to categorize a member of this concept? Would the conflicting concrete examples cause you to treat the whole category like a borderline case when categorizing it (or just cause longer processing in general)?
I think this becomes even more interesting with interpreting metaphors. Since metaphors reference something else (whether the interpretation of the metaphor itself has shifted from figurative to literal interpretation), you could have a metaphor that unintentionally creates multiple affective experiences for the reader or listener. Trying to interpret figurative language can in some cases be a challenging (or even confusing task) at times, so I think ignore the affective component of processing figurative text is leaving out a big part of the picture.
The whole premise of the Gentner article made a lot of sense to me. It seems reasonable that metaphors become more conventionalized (or more like literal language) the more we use them. I can imagine that this might hold true for all sorts of language that isn't so figurative…(jokes for instance)… or I guess even language that is figurative (but novel). I really liked Experiment Three in which metaphors were rapidly conventionalized. I wonder what would happen if this were done with nonsense words. As stated in the paper, categories are derived from comparing the target and the base, allowing for a shift towards a conventionalized base. What would happen if the only relationship between target and base was some statistical relationship? Would the same results emerge?
I also was curious about metaphors that can/cannot be reversed. That seemed to be one of the reasons the whole venn diagram feature comparison theory (in the intro) was insufficient. What is the reason some metaphors cannot be reversed? Does it have something to do with the physical properties of the base vs. target? Does it have something to do with the supposed size or significance of the base vs. target? Is it something to do with word order? Is there some pattern? Evidence suggesting that reversed metaphors are meaningful when under time pressure seems to indicate that 'depth of processing' should be important in this paper but they instead look at processing over a larger chunk of time. I think the fact that the reversed metaphors are initially seen as meaningfully related support the proposal of comparison then categorization. Maybe this has been further explored?
First, the term--base(imagine it as an input, or deep structure) and target(as an output, or surface structure)--used in the career of metaphor article are left undefined. Because of that, the mapping process between base and target (imagine it as a system, or transformation grammar) causes me a lot of trouble understanding the real meaning of the authors’ intention. Questions are: 1) In the career of metaphor model, why it assumed that literal meaning is the base and figurative is the target even when highly conventionalized metaphoric meaning is the default? 2) So there is a developmental trajectory for how metaphorical meaning gradually becomes the default meaning, but how career of metaphor explains this change over time? In linguistics, those intermediate linguistic products not explained by theories are fascinating to linguistists, because they are those trouble-makers! 3) In the mapping process, the authors proposed two subprocesses-projection and alignment according to Gentner’s structure-mapping theory. It is a rather confusing part given my lack of knowledge of his theory, but I have to admit I was totally drawn to this SME model because they look so similar to syntactic trees! I would love to know how it actually works in our Wed. lecture.
On the other hand, the graded salience hypothesis makes more sense to me. Giora did not leave out the factor of context, but proved that saliency actually prioritizes over contexts. Although she only vaguely defined saliency as being more conventional, popular, frequent, familiar to both speakers and listeners, and predictive in terms of higher probability. Her hypothesis seemed to have more accountabilty in explaining metaphorical usage across generations, cultures, and the gap between the speaker and listener. However, as the author suggested, her model only provided a more global way of thinking metaphor, further research on defining features of saliency are worth exploring.
Final side remark, I have been noticing that I have trouble understanding the figurative language in English even when I tried hard memorizing them (from A-Z). e.g. why someone is angry as a bear or bull but not like a thunder or lion or anything else?
I completely agree with Yuna about having trouble understanding figurative language. I, too, find myself trying to memorize and mistakenly using the common phrases. These papers were interesting for me to read because I find that I rarely use metaphors in speech, and furthermore, have to spend time deducing their meanings often when others using them. Bowdle and Getner stated, "A growing body of linguistic evidence further suggests that metaphors are important for communicating about, and perhaps even reasoning with, abstract concepts such as time and emotion," which I found interesting. So, to use Yuna's, exmaple-- angry as a bear (anger being the communicated emotion) or happy as a lark (I THINK I have heard that before....?)-- I think this is worth some discussion- What does the class think about conveying emotions using metaphors. Emotions research has had a hard (controversial) time with defining emotions, so is the the best way to try and go about it, especially in more casual situations? And what happens when the bear or a lark have some personal connotation to the percipient that conflicts the implied meaning of the metaphor?
I think it's funny that people can read the same two articles and have opposite reactions to them. I'd have to say I MUCH preferred the Bowdle + Gentner reading, but perhaps that's because I've been reading a few other things by Gentner lately which has biased me. My biggest problem with the Giora article was that it wasn't clear to me what the "current view" she kept referring to entailed exactly. At the end she seemed to indicate that the "current view" she was proposing was the salience hypothesis, but earlier she clearly referred to them as separate entities. I did appreciate the value of the salience hypothesis and quite agree with the gist of it, although I lack a complete grasp of all this view has to offer.
I also thought, "Well are these articles really conflicting viewpoints?" Doesn't Giora get to a point where she admits metaphors might be processed automatically, without first processing the literal meaning? I felt she showed both sides, but never really took a stand on her point of view. I probably just missed it though.
I couldn't agree more with Rick's comment, "I just always thought of a simile as a specific type of metaphor, not something that would alter how someone compares vs. categorizes a concept. Neat!" This was really interesting and eye-opening to read about and I really enjoyed it. I did find that in both articles, the studies that were mentioned often used interesting measurements and methodologies that I wouldn't have thought of (e.g., the simile/ metaphor studies).
There's so much I could say about both articles, both on a practical level, which is where I have stayed for this post, but also on a theoretical or philosophical (for lack of a better word) level. I think my brain is swelling from jumping around in my mind between all these theories and my own thoughts on every aspect of them on both practical and conceptual levels (plus, poor David has to make sense of my ramblings), so I shall end my post here.
I find the Bowdle paper on "dead metaphors" interesting. I wonder how it is related to word frequency, since the paper suggest that those dead metaphors may be related to the generality of the word, such as "culture," which I would expect is a word with high word frequency. I wonder if it's true that convention has this great affect on metaphors, when at what point in its frequent use would a metaphor become "dead?"
I would also want to know how word concreteness and imagability would affect the usage of words as metaphors. For example: the word "apple" is probably a word with high concreteness and imagability ratings, but it is frequently used as a metaphor, such as "apple" as in the forbidden fruit, or "she is the apple of my eye." Since these metaphors of apple also came from a conventional use, through culture, I wonder if that would further make the word apple have higher concreteness or imagability ratings.
I have to harp again on the concept of mental patterns, patterns that work like circuits, the pathways that active thought travel through. It seems to compliment the parallel processing ideas ("parallel" should be a palindrome, or at least have 4 l's), while making foundational the graded salience notion.
It all starts somewhere. We learned how to write words by first learning to write letters, then sentences from the words, paragraphs, and so on. Mental activation seems to work the same way. Once an initial pathway is formed, the data in all these studies suggests those pathways are always used, regardless of apt conclusions in understanding. Novel ideas in any regard take longer to process than the familiar. (If that's not a Law, it should be.) It stands to reason that you can't understand what you don't understand, and that will always take longer than the familiar; even the suddenness of intuition is built off or prior experiences, reactivation of the "familiar" pathways.
I could go on and on. I enjoyed the readings, and am glad to know this work is being done. Where would we be without the ability to understand metaphor? Somewhere between a rock and a hard place, maybe?
The "Career of Metaphor" paper is interesting, though the path of the paper is an odd mixture of density and winding topics. For me, there were a few points that I thought were profound or novel.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, the dead metaphor discussion near the end of the paper struck me as a neat form of verification.
"Thus, dead metaphors represent the logical conclusion to the shift from comparison to categorization described by the career of metaphor hypothesis."
Is the career of metaphor a path from figurative to literal meaning? In the example of "Star Wars was a blockbuster", the figurative term blockbuster has come to almost exclusively refer to 'movies that make a lot of money' (or occasionally, 'movie stores with poor business models', but that refers to a proper noun). Clearly, at another point in our language's history, it meant something quite other, and blockbuster was used only figuratively in other contexts. Now, using it outside of movies (or at least sales) would be figurative... so, is the trajectory of a metaphor a way into literal-ness? Or over time, could it be cyclical, where blockbuster gets used metaphorically outside of sales and comes to exclusively mean something else? If so, then the career of metaphor would also be cyclical. I'm interested in this idea of a time course of metaphors over generations.
I think perhaps the best part of this article were the references back to concepts and categorization as we discussed them last week. Someone (can't remember who exactly, I'm terrible with names) mentioned last week that abstract concepts are best understood through grounded experiences, which helps us categorize related experiences. That in itself is a kind of metaphorical mapping, but what do we make of their more figurative examples ("[Our relationship is] spinning its wheels.")? How could metaphors help us categorize events/feelings as abstract concepts, and which is more prevalent/salient in the daily human experience, the metaphorical understanding of an abstract concept ('freedom' as being released from a relationship), or the experientially-mapped understanding of an abstract concept (‘freedom’ as being released from physical incarceration)?
I guess I will deal with the two articles one at a time.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all I just want to say that I couldn’t wait until the Bowdle & Getner article was over with… I am unsure whether it was a lack of background in the subject or the author’s unforgiving writing. I felt bombarded by similar sounding terminology, and found it was a painful read.
I could not help but think about the comment made by the gentleman in the back of the class regarding “natural languages” which I am quite sympathetic towards. The natural languages he was referring to seem to gel nicely with the idea that metaphorical processing is common and crucial in understanding meaning. In order to communicate we must use terms that try to convey our natural (or “private” if you like Wittgenstein [but screw him]) language which means that metaphor is actually the basis of all communication. This would have implications on the theory held by many cognitive scientists that thought is derived from language… Instead, language is a shallow and pragmatic reflection of thought. Sooooo, returning to the reading, I would agree with Lakoff and Johnson that metaphor is the center of all thought, especially abstract thoughts, and besides that point I honestly didn’t really understand the details just the gist of the article. Explanation please!
The Giora article I found much more approachable. At first I wanted to support the contemporary view because of the sentiments I expressed in the previous section. After a while I decided that the graded salience hypothesis actually deals less with private language and more with the memory process that is necessary for metaphorical understanding. According to a grounded view, memory is not stored within the head but rather in the world and body. We don’t have a memory bank like a file cabinet so much as a pattern completion mechanism that takes perceptual /visceral stimulus to reactivate a bundle of sensations and feelings that collectively constitute an idea/perception (i.e. memory). Memory is actually a set of heuristics for manipulating perceptual/visceral information which may even be unique to each individual. Sooooo, returning to the reading, salience seems like a great way to quickly and smoothly pick the meaning of a metaphor which seems significant for fast processing (especially if metaphors are indeed the primary way to publicize private language).
Long post! I actually edited out about half of the original so if it doesn’t make sense you know why. Sorry guys… when you have to read and talk about overcomplicated and pedantic metaphysics all day practical stuff like cognitive science is a breath of fresh air.
Giora proposed the graded salience hypothesis which supported that the salient meaning of figurative and literal utterances is always activated initially. This explained that the salient meaning plays more roles in comprehension of meaning than metaphor itself. However, I am wondering when people comprehend the meaning, more problems arise in understanding the figurative meaning, but not the literal meaning. Although Giora argued that the three steps of meaning interpretation: direct, parallel, and sequential processes, that unconventional metaphor itself makes comprehension more difficult. I would like to know if people agree with the graded salience hypothesis and when people come across unsalient expression, whether this recognition process help people understand more accurate.
ReplyDeleteGentner quoated Glucksberg et al.’s (1997) example that the process how people selected the correct category of the snowflake with the illustration of its various concepts until it matched the target concept. It is reasonable, but there is doubt how many people experience this cognitive process when the target concept is constructed. In this way, the salient meaning seems more practical.
Benjamin, I think the crux of the B&G paper is in the first paragraph of the general discussion: that as we become more familiar with metaphor, we tend to deal with them as though they were literal (i.e., familiar metaphors are processed by using categorization, whereas new metaphors are processed using comparisons [thereby making them take longer]). I actually liked this article better than the other one [comment to follow], but I wish they would have addressed some views of metaphor that extend beyond English. Given that references would change from language to language, does everyone (i.e., speakers of all languages) process metaphors the same? (maybe some of the studies cited do, but I didn't notice any reference to that) That being said, it was real neat to see that there is a conceptual difference between simile and metaphor (which illustrates my summation of the article). I just always thought of a simile as a specific type of metaphor, not something that would alter how someone compares vs. categorizes a concept. Neat!
ReplyDeleteWhile I appreciate a continuum approach much more than the dichotomy that pervades so much psychological research (I think experimental people just like to argue!), I didn't find that Giora's new approach was an alternative to traditional, or even conventional, views. It was more like something you can add on the side, but not rely on to fully explain the richness of metaphor processing. So, I'm down with the importance of salience. But if parallel processing is what's up, then why is there the shift mentioned in the other article?
And on a somewhat related note, I've noticed several people refer to embodied or grounded cognition. I want to caution against depending on that kind of research too much. I'm just learning about new approaches to (against) it, but there's been some strong cases made (by Max Louwerse, for instance) that linguistic factors (e.g., frequency of co-occurrence) can account for a lot of what the embodiment theorists claim is due to embodied cognition. I like the IDEA of embodiment: that we've all been given these vessels (bodies) and we understandably interpret our world through the existence of such corporeal forms. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be what embodiment people go for (maybe it's too layman-y or spiritual or whatever). But my take is this: the language that we use becomes part of our consciousness (and is used physically, I reckon!), and is just as much a part of "embodiment" as thinking about pulling a drawer toward you and having a quicker RT when you push a button closer to your body (Glenberg) or walking slower if you think about elderly people (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows). So my standpoint is don't blink, we may be quickly pushing the drawer closed on embodiment in its current form. [I sure hope someone thinks that's funny.]
I thought one of Whitney's points was particularly interesting. How do we ground emotion/feeling concepts in a concrete experience. I think though, in terms of categorization and concepts, emotions and feelings play a different role. I think that they would create a richer network (or whatever setup) of concepts. If you are grounding an abstract concept in an actual, concrete experience, it is possible that you could have both a negatively and positively valenced experience with a particular concept. In this case, would it be more difficult to categorize a member of this concept? Would the conflicting concrete examples cause you to treat the whole category like a borderline case when categorizing it (or just cause longer processing in general)?
ReplyDeleteI think this becomes even more interesting with interpreting metaphors. Since metaphors reference something else (whether the interpretation of the metaphor itself has shifted from figurative to literal interpretation), you could have a metaphor that unintentionally creates multiple affective experiences for the reader or listener. Trying to interpret figurative language can in some cases be a challenging (or even confusing task) at times, so I think ignore the affective component of processing figurative text is leaving out a big part of the picture.
-Blair
The whole premise of the Gentner article made a lot of sense to me. It seems reasonable that metaphors become more conventionalized (or more like literal language) the more we use them. I can imagine that this might hold true for all sorts of language that isn't so figurative…(jokes for instance)… or I guess even language that is figurative (but novel). I really liked Experiment Three in which metaphors were rapidly conventionalized. I wonder what would happen if this were done with nonsense words. As stated in the paper, categories are derived from comparing the target and the base, allowing for a shift towards a conventionalized base. What would happen if the only relationship between target and base was some statistical relationship? Would the same results emerge?
ReplyDeleteI also was curious about metaphors that can/cannot be reversed. That seemed to be one of the reasons the whole venn diagram feature comparison theory (in the intro) was insufficient. What is the reason some metaphors cannot be reversed? Does it have something to do with the physical properties of the base vs. target? Does it have something to do with the supposed size or significance of the base vs. target? Is it something to do with word order? Is there some pattern? Evidence suggesting that reversed metaphors are meaningful when under time pressure seems to indicate that 'depth of processing' should be important in this paper but they instead look at processing over a larger chunk of time. I think the fact that the reversed metaphors are initially seen as meaningfully related support the proposal of comparison then categorization. Maybe this has been further explored?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the term--base(imagine it as an input, or deep structure) and target(as an output, or surface structure)--used in the career of metaphor article are left undefined. Because of that, the mapping process between base and target (imagine it as a system, or transformation grammar) causes me a lot of trouble understanding the real meaning of the authors’ intention. Questions are: 1) In the career of metaphor model, why it assumed that literal meaning is the base and figurative is the target even when highly conventionalized metaphoric meaning is the default? 2) So there is a developmental trajectory for how metaphorical meaning gradually becomes the default meaning, but how career of metaphor explains this change over time? In linguistics, those intermediate linguistic products not explained by theories are fascinating to linguistists, because they are those trouble-makers! 3) In the mapping process, the authors proposed two subprocesses-projection and alignment according to Gentner’s structure-mapping theory. It is a rather confusing part given my lack of knowledge of his theory, but I have to admit I was totally drawn to this SME model because they look so similar to syntactic trees! I would love to know how it actually works in our Wed. lecture.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the graded salience hypothesis makes more sense to me. Giora did not leave out the factor of context, but proved that saliency actually prioritizes over contexts. Although she only vaguely defined saliency as being more conventional, popular, frequent, familiar to both speakers and listeners, and predictive in terms of higher probability. Her hypothesis seemed to have more accountabilty in explaining metaphorical usage across generations, cultures, and the gap between the speaker and listener. However, as the author suggested, her model only provided a more global way of thinking metaphor, further research on defining features of saliency are worth exploring.
Final side remark, I have been noticing that I have trouble understanding the figurative language in English even when I tried hard memorizing them (from A-Z). e.g. why someone is angry as a bear or bull but not like a thunder or lion or anything else?
I completely agree with Yuna about having trouble understanding figurative language. I, too, find myself trying to memorize and mistakenly using the common phrases. These papers were interesting for me to read because I find that I rarely use metaphors in speech, and furthermore, have to spend time deducing their meanings often when others using them.
ReplyDeleteBowdle and Getner stated, "A growing body of linguistic evidence further suggests that metaphors are important for communicating about, and perhaps even reasoning with, abstract concepts such as time and emotion," which I found interesting. So, to use Yuna's, exmaple-- angry as a bear (anger being the communicated emotion) or happy as a lark (I THINK I have heard that before....?)-- I think this is worth some discussion- What does the class think about conveying emotions using metaphors. Emotions research has had a hard (controversial) time with defining emotions, so is the the best way to try and go about it, especially in more casual situations? And what happens when the bear or a lark have some personal connotation to the percipient that conflicts the implied meaning of the metaphor?
I think it's funny that people can read the same two articles and have opposite reactions to them. I'd have to say I MUCH preferred the Bowdle + Gentner reading, but perhaps that's because I've been reading a few other things by Gentner lately which has biased me.
ReplyDeleteMy biggest problem with the Giora article was that it wasn't clear to me what the "current view" she kept referring to entailed exactly. At the end she seemed to indicate that the "current view" she was proposing was the salience hypothesis, but earlier she clearly referred to them as separate entities. I did appreciate the value of the salience hypothesis and quite agree with the gist of it, although I lack a complete grasp of all this view has to offer.
I also thought, "Well are these articles really conflicting viewpoints?" Doesn't Giora get to a point where she admits metaphors might be processed automatically, without first processing the literal meaning? I felt she showed both sides, but never really took a stand on her point of view. I probably just missed it though.
I couldn't agree more with Rick's comment, "I just always thought of a simile as a specific type of metaphor, not something that would alter how someone compares vs. categorizes a concept. Neat!" This was really interesting and eye-opening to read about and I really enjoyed it. I did find that in both articles, the studies that were mentioned often used interesting measurements and methodologies that I wouldn't have thought of (e.g., the simile/ metaphor studies).
There's so much I could say about both articles, both on a practical level, which is where I have stayed for this post, but also on a theoretical or philosophical (for lack of a better word) level. I think my brain is swelling from jumping around in my mind between all these theories and my own thoughts on every aspect of them on both practical and conceptual levels (plus, poor David has to make sense of my ramblings), so I shall end my post here.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI find the Bowdle paper on "dead metaphors" interesting. I wonder how it is related to word frequency, since the paper suggest that those dead metaphors may be related to the generality of the word, such as "culture," which I would expect is a word with high word frequency. I wonder if it's true that convention has this great affect on metaphors, when at what point in its frequent use would a metaphor become "dead?"
ReplyDeleteI would also want to know how word concreteness and imagability would affect the usage of words as metaphors. For example: the word "apple" is probably a word with high concreteness and imagability ratings, but it is frequently used as a metaphor, such as "apple" as in the forbidden fruit, or "she is the apple of my eye." Since these metaphors of apple also came from a conventional use, through culture, I wonder if that would further make the word apple have higher concreteness or imagability ratings.
I have to harp again on the concept of mental patterns, patterns that work like circuits, the pathways that active thought travel through. It seems to compliment the parallel processing ideas ("parallel" should be a palindrome, or at least have 4 l's), while making foundational the graded salience notion.
ReplyDeleteIt all starts somewhere. We learned how to write words by first learning to write letters, then sentences from the words, paragraphs, and so on. Mental activation seems to work the same way. Once an initial pathway is formed, the data in all these studies suggests those pathways are always used, regardless of apt conclusions in understanding. Novel ideas in any regard take longer to process than the familiar. (If that's not a Law, it should be.) It stands to reason that you can't understand what you don't understand, and that will always take longer than the familiar; even the suddenness of intuition is built off or prior experiences, reactivation of the "familiar" pathways.
I could go on and on. I enjoyed the readings, and am glad to know this work is being done. Where would we be without the ability to understand metaphor? Somewhere between a rock and a hard place, maybe?