The Role of Conceptual Metaphors in our Thinking

This book proposes a view of the integration of conceptual metaphors in our thinking, the brainchild of Lakoff and Johnson, which is a groundbreaking cognitive theory of idiom. This study also provides the reader with access to real language, through example sentences and gives explanation about some English idiomatic expressions containing body parts, with the help of the three cognitive mechanisms, general conventional knowledge, conceptual metonymies and conceptual metaphors, which seem to be the key elements motivating many idioms. The focus of this book is to analyze abstract target domains, which are often understood via human body parts in English, in order to support the hypothesis that the metaphorical concept is thus embodied and experiential associations motivate the identity of the conceptual metaphors across languages, including perceptual, cultural, and category based associations.