6.2 Metaphor and Cognition

Metaphor is not merely a figure of speech that we can use to write nicer poems or prose. It is so fundamental to our perception of our environment that it is in fact our main way to construct non-perceptual information.

6.2.1 Time is space

One of the most pervasive metaphorical patterns in language is that of time as space. You might easily overlook this mapping because understanding temporal relations in the sense of spatial relations is so basic to our cognition that it is easily overlooked. We do not have a physical sense of time. Our eyes provide us with information about space; depth perception allows us to sense differences in distance. We can also directly perceive ourselves relative to the space we move in with a combination of our senses of balance and proprioception. All the information of time is inferred from those more basic senses and the changes we experience. Language use reflects this asymmetry.

Historically, many, if not most, of our temporal function words are etymologically derived from spatial function words or lexemes with a spatial meaning.

  • Prepositions: at, after, before, between …
  • Temporal auxiliaries: going to, be about to, venire de (fr.), voll am Chillen, Digga (ger.) …
  • Temporal adverbs: always, next …
  • Nouns: presence, past …
  • …

6.2.2 Exploring color metaphors

I asked you to brainstorm color metaphors and you split up in groups. You found a lot of interesting mappings and linguistic structures representing them. Here are some highlights:

  • Red as danger: red light, red flag, redlining
  • Red associated to communism: red army, red menace

You also found that red is associated to beauty, love and sensuality. This association is mostly related to things that are literally red so we couldn’t find many clear metaphorical structures. There is the red light district, though.

  • Blue is calm: feeling blue, out of the blue,

  • Black is bad: black night, black death, black times

  • Black is obscure, unnormal: black market, black money, black sheep

  • Green is young or unexperienced: green boy, green behind the ears

  • Green as environmentally conscious: green politician, green(er) cars

  • Green is jealous: green with envy

The Yellow group came to the conclusion that yellow seems to be used mostly literally. You hypothesized that the color is more important in Eastern cultures so we could expect to find more collocations and idioms with yellow used metaphorically.