Image Schema,

Cultural Models,
The Background to Conceptual
Metaphor Theory, and
Other Tropes

Andri Setiadi
180920170012
Image Schema
-> mental snapshot of our sensory experiences of
locations, movements, shapes, etc.
-> “mental icon” of an experience (Johnson 1987)
-> can also be iconic of any sensory modality
-> so automatic that we are hardly ever aware of
their control over conceptualization
Qualities of image schemas:
1. Auditory -> the sound of thunder
2. Tactile -> the feel of wet grass
3. Olfactory -> the smell of fish
4. Gustatory -> the taste of toothpaste
5. Kinesic -> the sensation of being
uncomfortably cold
6. Emotional -> the sensation of extreem
happiness
Orientational Image schema

“I’m feeling down today.”

This image schema involves mental orientation

< physical experiences of orientation

up – down, back – front, near – far, etc.

Impediment (obstacle)

Impediment
Line of sight Object

“We got through that difficult time.”

“The train stopped us from enjoying our picnic.”
“You cannot go any further with that idea.”
Ontological Image Schema
Involves ontological thinking
 produces conceptual metaphors
 activities, emotions, ideas, etc. are associated
with entities and substances

“I’m full of memories.”

 The mind is a container
Structural metaphors
 Extends orientational and ontological concepts.

Time is a resource and time is a quantity

 “My time is money.”

Other samples:
Happiness is up / sadness is down
“I’m feeling up today.”
Health and life are up / sickness and death are down
“She fell ill.”
Knowledge is life / ignorance is darkness
“I was illuminated by that professor.”
Ideas are buildings
“That is a well-constructed theory.”
Ideas are plants
“That is a branch of mathematics.”
Ideas are commodities
“That’s a worthless idea.”
Cultural Models

Cultural groupthink is built on conceptual

metaphors, since these coalese into a system of
abstract thinking that holds together the entire
network associated with many kinds of source
domain (orientational, ontological, structural).

Three conceptual metaphors on doimain of ideas:

Ideas are food
“It’s hard to digest all those ideas at once.”
Ideas are persons
“She breathed new life into that idea.”
Ideas are fashions
“That idea is old hat.”
The Background to Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Lakoff and Johnson did not devise conceptual

metaphor theory. They developped it from the work
in several disciplines and from the deliberations of
several key scholars in the twentieth century.
I. A. Richards’ work (1955) showed that
metaphors derived from the vocabularies of
sensation of several phylogenetically unrelated
languages (warm, cold, heavy, etc.) used the same
sensory modality for different referential domains.
Hot stood for rage (Hebrew), enthusiasm (Chinese),
sexual aousal (Thai), and energy (Hausa).
Other Tropes

Metaphor can now be defined as the ability of

human brain to convert experience into abstraction via
the mapping of some source domain onto a target
domain to produce an abstract concept.

Mapping = Metaphor

Source domain Target domain

(vehicles) (topics)
Metonymy and irony do not entail the same mapping
process (with metaphor) in the concept-formation.

Metonymic concept-formation
Domain
Part of the domain

“She’s in dance.” (= the dancing profession)

“My mom frowns on blue jeans.” (= the wearing of blue
jeans)
“New windshield wipers will satisfy him.” (= the state of
having new wipers)
Synecdoche is a subtype of metonymy that is particularly
productive in concept-formating. This is defined as the
process by which the part is used to represent the
whole, and vice versa.

“I’ve got a new set of wheels.” (car)

“Indonesia won the gold medal in badminton again.”
(athlete)
Conceptual metonyms are abstractions, they are
interconnected to other domains of meaning-making in a
culture.

Some examples of conceptual metonyms:

The part for the whole
“Get your butt over here!”
The producer (brand) for the product
“I’ll have a Heineken.”
The object used for the user
“The buses are on strike. ”
Irony does not entail a mapping process. Rather, it
constitues a highlighting strategy based on the use of
words to convey a meaning contrary to their literal
sense.

“I love being tortured.”