Conceptual Metaphor
Why do prices skyrocket and spirits sink?
A conceptual metaphor is a systematic way of understanding one area of experience in terms of another, such as time as money, which surfaces in whole families of everyday expressions.
A learner in Đà Nẵng reads that petrol prices soared, peaked and then plunged, and asks why English describes prices like a bird in flight. The answer is that English speakers routinely talk about quantity as height, so amounts rise, climb and fall.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in 1980 that metaphor is mainly a matter of thought, not decoration. A conceptual metaphor lets us understand a target domain, often abstract, in terms of a source domain, usually more concrete. Under ARGUMENT IS WAR, we defend positions, attack claims and shoot down arguments; under TIME IS MONEY, we spend, save and waste time. The individual expressions are surface traces of one underlying pattern, which is why they arrive in families. Many sources are bodily, such as the image schemas of UP–DOWN and CONTAINER.
For teachers, the theory turns idioms that look arbitrary into motivated groups. Boers (2000) reported that EFL learners who met figurative expressions organised by their source domains retained more of them, and later reviews judge the overall evidence promising, though built mostly on small studies, some with small effects. The theory itself is debated. Psychologists such as Murphy (1996) question whether such metaphors really structure our concepts. Others ask whether people even call up the metaphor when they understand a phrase like a heated debate. Metaphors also overlap only partly across languages. The safest classroom claim is therefore modest: metaphor awareness gives learners a memorable reason for fixed expressions that would otherwise be pure rote.
In actionMood as height
- S1
- Teacher, why does I’m feeling down mean sad? Down is just a direction.
- T
- Show me how someone stands when they’re sad.
- S1
- Like this. Shoulders low, head down.
- T
- And when they’re happy?
- S2
- Up! So cheer up and my spirits rose are happy too?
- T
- Exactly. English often talks about mood as height.
An invented illustration of Lakoff and Johnson’s HAPPY IS UP, which they ground in posture. Once learners see the family, they can extend it to new idioms themselves.
In the classroom
- 1
Group new figurative expressions by source domain, not alphabetically: put boiling with rage, simmer down and blow your top together as anger pictured as a hot liquid in a container.
- 2
Before explaining an idiom such as throw in the towel or on the ropes, ask learners to picture or mime the literal boxing scene, then guess the figurative meaning.
- 3
Ask learners whether their first language also treats time as money or argument as war, and flag mismatches where a word-for-word translation, or an English collocation, will mislead.
Myth and reality
Metaphor is a literary device, so it can wait until learners are advanced enough to read poetry.
Conceptual metaphor runs through ordinary words such as rise, grasp and spend time, so learners meet it in their first coursebooks, long before they meet poems.
Reflect
Which seemingly random idioms in your current coursebook might become memorable if learners could see the metaphor family they belong to?
Worth a minute before your next lesson, or a conversation in the staffroom.
SourcesChecked against Crossref and library records
Lakoff and Johnson set out the theory in 1980, acknowledging Michael Reddy’s 1979 analysis of the ‘conduit metaphor’ for communication. Lakoff later restated it in terms of mappings between source and target domains.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Boers, F. (2000). Metaphor awareness and vocabulary retention. Applied Linguistics, 21(4), 553–571.
Three small classroom experiments suggesting that grouping figurative expressions by their underlying metaphor helps EFL learners remember them.
Kövecses, Z., & Szabó, P. (1996). Idioms: A view from cognitive semantics. Applied Linguistics, 17(3), 326–355.
Argues that many idioms are motivated by conceptual metaphor and metonymy, and reports a small experiment teaching phrasal verbs with *up* and *down* through their metaphors.
Boers, F., & Lindstromberg, S. (Eds.) (2008). Cognitive linguistic approaches to teaching vocabulary and phraseology. Mouton de Gruyter.
The standard edited collection on putting cognitive linguistics to work in teaching vocabulary, idioms and phrases.
Boers, F. (2013). Cognitive linguistic approaches to teaching vocabulary: Assessment and integration. Language Teaching, 46(2), 208–224.
A candid review: the evidence is promising but mostly small-scale, and would gain from closer alignment with mainstream vocabulary research.
Murphy, G. L. (1996). On metaphoric representation. Cognition, 60(2), 173–204.
A psychologist’s critique of the strong claim that metaphors actually structure our concepts, worth reading before overselling the theory.
ConnectionsSee it in the graph
- Image Schemasnot yet writtenBodily patterns like UP–DOWN and CONTAINER supply many metaphors’ source domains.
- The Lexical Approachnot yet writtenMetaphor grouping is one way to organise the chunks a lexical syllabus teaches.
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