inglese monografico

Our relationship has hit a dead end street

Love is being conceptualized as a journey, with the implication that the relationship is stalled, that the lovers cannot keep going the way they've been going, that they must turn back, or abandon the relationship altogether. This is not an isolated case. English has many everyday expressions that are based on a conceptualization of love as a journey, and they are used not just for talking about love, but for reasoning about it as well.

Some are necessarily about love; others can be understood that way:

• Look how far we've come
• It's been a long, bumpy road
• We can't turn back now
• We're at a crossroads
• We may have to go our separate ways
• The relationship isn't going anywhere
• We're spinning our wheels
• Our relationship is off the track
• The marriage is on the rocks
• We may have to bail out of this relationship

These are ordinary, everyday English expressions. They are not poetic, nor

are they necessarily used for special rhetorical effect. See also

• Look how far we've come

Lakoff asks two commonplace questions:

1. Is there a general principle governing how these linguistic expressions about journeys are used to characterize love?
2. Is there a general principle governing how our patterns of inference about journeys are used to reason about love when expressions such as these are used?

There is a "principle that answers both": "it is a principle for understanding the domain of love in terms of the domain of journeys.

• The principle can be stated informally as a metaphorical scenario: the lovers are travelers on a journey together, with their common life goals seen as destinations to be reached. The relationship is their vehicle, and it allows them to pursue those common goals together. The relationship is seen as fulfilling its purpose as long as it allows them to make progress toward their common goals. The journey isn't easy.

Mnemonic vs. Mnemonic: the mnemonic is not the mnemonic. The mnemonic is just a short way to make reference to the mnemonic. The mnemonic is the mapping!!!

Conceptual mnemonic vs. Linguistic mnemonic / mnemonic expression. The conceptual mnemonic itself is the mapping, the source-target domain relation, to which many mnemonic expressions may correspond or make reference to.

THE LOVE-AS-JOURNEY MAPPING

• The lovers correspond to travelers.
• The love relationship corresponds to the vehicle.
• The lovers' common goals correspond to their common destinations on the journey.
• Difficulties in the relationship correspond to impediments to travel.

"It is a common mistake to confuse the name of the mapping, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, for the mapping itself. The mapping is the set of correspondences. Thus, whenever Lakoff"

refers to a metaphor by a mnemonic like LOVE IS A JOURNEY, he will be referring to such a set of correspondences”. “[metaphors are not propositional] They are anything but that: metaphors are mappings, that is, sets of conceptual correspondences. The LOVE-AS-JOURNEY mapping is a set of ontological correspondences that characterize epistemic correspondences by mapping knowledge about journeys onto knowledge about love. Such correspondences permit us to reason about love using the knowledge we use to reason about journeys”.

“Two LOVERS are in a LOVE RELATIONSHIP, PURSUING COMMON LIFE GOALS. The RELATIONSHIP encounters some DIFFICULTY, which makes it nonfunctional. If they do nothing, they will not be able to ACHIEVE THEIR LIFE GOALS. There are a limited number of alternatives for action:

• They can try to get it moving again, either by fixing it or getting it past the DIFFICULTY.
• They can remain in the nonfunctional RELATIONSHIP, and give up on ACHIEVING

THEIR LIFE GOALS.

• They can abandon the RELATIONSHIP.

The alternative of remaining in the nonfunctional RELATIONSHIP takes the least effort, but does not satisfy the desire to ACHIEVE LIFE GOALS. This is an example of an inference pattern that is mapped from one domain to another. It is via such mappings that we apply knowledge about travel to love relationships”. (Lakoff)

Some characteristics:

• “metaphors are not mere words” - “generalizations”
• metaphor as a productive device (“novel extensions of conventional metaphors”)
• “motivation” (idioms)
• hierarchy

Metaphors are not mere words: Lakoff says: “The metaphor is not just a matter of language, but of thought and reason. The language is secondary. The mapping is primary, in that it sanctions the use of source domain language and inference patterns for target domain concepts. The mapping is conventional, that is, it is a fixed part of our conceptual

system, one of our conventional ways of conceptualizing love relationships. This view of metaphor is thoroughly at odds with the view that metaphors are just linguistic expressions. If metaphors were merely linguistic expressions, we would expect different linguistic expressions to be different metaphors. Thus, "We've hit a dead-end street" would constitute one metaphor. "We can't turn back now" would constitute another, entirely different metaphor. "Their marriage is on the rocks" would involve still a different metaphor. And so on for dozens of examples. Yet we don't seem to have dozens of different metaphors here. We have one metaphor, in which love is conceptualized as a journey. The mapping tells us precisely how love is being conceptualized as a journey. And this unified way of conceptualizing love metaphorically is realized in many different linguistic expressions.

Generalizations:

• Polysemy generalization: a generalization

1) The study of linguistic correspondences.

2) The use of metaphor to govern reasoning and behavior based on that reasoning.

3) The possibility for understanding novel extensions in terms of the conventional correspondences.

"Each conventional metaphor, that is, each mapping, is a fixed pattern of conceptual correspondences across conceptual domains. As such, each mapping defines an open-ended class of potential correspondences across inference patterns."

Mappings do not arise by chance but tend to be motivated, which is particularly evident for idioms: "Many of the metaphorical expressions discussed as conventional metaphors are idioms".

Motivation and Idioms

"On classical views, idioms have arbitrary meanings. But within cognitive linguistics, the possibility exists that they are not arbitrary, but rather motivated. That is, they do arise automatically by productive rules, but they fit one or more patterns present in the conceptual system".

- e.g. "spinning"

one's wheels• comes with a conventional mental image, that of the wheels of a car stuck in somesubstance - mud, sand, snow, or on ice, so that the car cannot move when the motor isengaged and the wheels turn. Part of our knowledge about that image is that a lot of energyis being used up (in spinning the wheels) without any progress being made, that the situationwill not readily change of its own accord, that it will take a lot of effort on the part of theoccupants to get the vehicle moving again --and that may not even be possible.

The LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor applies to this knowledge about the image. It mapsthis knowledge onto knowledge about love relationships: a lot of energy is being spentwithout any progress toward fulfilling common goals, the situation will not change of its ownaccord, it will take a lot of effort on the part of the lovers to make more progress, and so on.

In short, when idioms that have associated conventional images, it is common for

"an independently-motivated conceptual metaphor to map that knowledge from the source to the target domain"

Motivation & Creativity

• Arbitrariness vs. motivation: a matter of language, and/or metaphorical creativity. E.g. "it's raining cats and dogs" vs. "piove a dirotto"
• Cf. multicultural variation & multicultural metaphors: "contrastive idiomaticity" (Ferrari, work-in-progress)
• Other e.g.: "To burst a blood vessel" vs. "gli si gonfia la vena" (ANGER), "like water off the back of a duck" vs. "scivolare addosso" / "mi fa un baffo" (INDIFFERENCE), "I heard it through the grapevine" vs. "me lo ha detto un uccellino"; "I am a little bit under the weather" vs. "mi sento sottotono" (FEELING UNWELL); "Every cloud has a silver lining" vs. "non tutto il male viene per nuocere" (HOPE); seeing/reaching

the light at the end of the