Metaphors We Live By

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, Dec 19, 2008 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 256 pages
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.

In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
 

Contents

1 Concepts We Live By
3
2 The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts
7
Highlighting and Hiding
10
4 Orientational Metaphors
14
5 Metaphor and Cultural Coherence
22
6 Ontological Metaphors
25
7 Personification
33
8 Metonymy
35
19 Definition and Understanding
115
20 How Metaphor Can Give Meaning for Forms
126
21 New Meaning
139
22 The Creation of Similarity
147
23 Metaphor Truth and Action
156
24 Truth
159
25 The Myth of Objectivism and Subjectivism
185
26 The Myth of Objectivism in Western Philosophy and Linguistics
195

9 Challenges to Metaphorical Coherence
41
10 Some Further Examples
46
11 The Partial Nature of Metaphorical Structuring
52
Partly Emergent and Partly Metaphorical
69
15 The Coherent Structuring of Experience
77
16 Metaphorical Coherence
87
17 Complex Coherences across Metaphors
97
18 Some Consequences for Theories of Conceptual Structure
106
27 How Metaphor Reveals the Limitation of The Myth of Objectivism
210
28 Some Inadequacies of the Myth of Subjectivism
223
30 Understanding
226
Afterword
239
References
241
Afterword 2003
243
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About the author (2008)

George Lakoff is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of, among other books, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things and Moral Politics, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Mark Johnson is the Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Body in the Mind and Moral Imagination, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Johnson and Lakoff have also coauthored Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought.

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