Metaphors We Live By

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1980

Link

https://obnb.uk/p7366086-metaphors-we-live-by

Cited from

art_aesthetics, cognitive_science, communication_media_studies, futurism_foresight, linguistics_semiotics, literature_literary_theory

Cited by

17 citations across 17 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Analogy
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Arbitrariness of Symbolic Conventions
  • Modern solution: symbols are arbitrary at the formal level (any form can be assigned), but grounding in embodied experience and community practice provides the semantic content that arbitrariness permits

    This sourceArgues metaphor is conceptual, pervasive in thought and action, and grounded in embodied experience — central to cognitive semantics and to how abstract concepts are structured.

• Causal Layered Analysis (CLA)
  • The deepest layer consists of cultural narratives, archetypal stories, and metaphorical patterns that shape human meaning-making across generations, drawing on Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) demonstration that conceptual metaphors structure reasoning at a pre-reflective level.

    This sourceArgues that conceptual metaphor structures thought and reasoning at a largely subconscious, pre-reflective level, not merely language; supports CLA's myth/metaphor layer.

• Conceptual Blending

  • This sourceFounds conceptual-metaphor theory; metaphor as a mechanism of mind grounded in embodied experience. Link is the archive.org copy.

• Iconicity
  • Lakoff & Johnson (1980)
• Linguistic Universals
  • Cognitive linguistics and embodiment: Lakoff & Johnson 1980 and subsequent work propose that universals emerge from embodied experience: spatial orientations (UP-DOWN, FRONT-BACK) are universal because human bodies are spatially oriented; containment metaphors are universal because humans interact with containers.

    This sourceLakoff-Johnson Metaphors We Live By embodied cognition spatial metaphors universals.

• Metaphor
  • Lakoff-Johnson's framework
• Metaphor (Visual/Artistic)
  • The cross-domain principle is that visual perception can enact the same conceptual mapping and meaning-production that linguistic metaphor enacts
• Metonymy
  • Rhetoric and literature. "Lend me your ears" (ears for attention); journalistic conventions in which a building or capital stands for an institution or government.

    This sourceChapter 8 ("Metonymy") treats metonymy as substitution by contiguity/association (e.g., "the White House," the part-for-whole "ham sandwich" cases) distinct from metaphorical mapping.

• Translation and Conceptual Bridging
  • Metaphors are intentionally asymmetric and often approximate, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue in their treatment of conceptual metaphor; they highlight selected similarities while backgrounding differences.

Domain-specific

• Semantic Narrowing and Widening
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Semantic Shift
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Simile
  • Lakoff & Johnson Metaphors We Live By 1980 foundational; also relevant to metaphor and conceptual mapping (CROSS-DP-21/22/23).

Mechanisms

• Metaphorical Blend Prompt
  • It works in the tradition of conceptual metaphor, where a source domain's structure systematically shapes reasoning about a target through its entailments.

    This sourceTreats conceptual metaphor as a systematic mapping in which structure and entailments from a source domain organize reasoning about a target domain.

• Myth / Metaphor Mapping Canvas
  • It draws on the well-established idea that abstract reasoning runs on conceptual metaphors we rarely notice.

    This sourceA well-established conceptual-metaphor account holds that metaphor structures abstract understanding and can shape thought without conscious notice.

• Simile Scaffold Prompt
  • The scaffold surfaces that battlefield would prime a war footing, while marketplace transfers the crowding-and-differentiation feature with the least misleading entailment.

    This sourceThe scaffold's whole reason to weigh alternatives is that the choice of source is never neutral; it shapes what the audience will infer next.

• Visual Metaphor Mapping Grid
  • Its analytic backbone is conceptual-metaphor theory, which models a metaphor as a systematic mapping of entailments from a source domain onto a target — and which shows that a metaphor always highlights some entailments while hiding others.

    This sourceModels metaphor through systematic correspondences and entailments across conceptual domains, while showing how metaphor highlights some aspects of experience and hides others.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 4 other ways.

• https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992.html ×2
• https://archive.org/details/metaphorsweliveb0000lako ×1
• https://books.google.com/books/about/Metaphors_We_Live_By.html?id=y4EGxAEACAAJ ×1
• https://www.google.com/books/edition/Metaphors_We_Live_By/r6nOYYtxzUoC ×1

Registry ID ref:e69700894739 · see in the full table