Metaphors the English language lives by

Abstract

A discussion of the centrality of imagery in the promotion and use of English worldwide. Metaphor is traditionally considered a “figure of speech”, describing one thing by stating another with which it can be compared, as discussed by rhetoricians and grammarians, from Aristotle in his Poetics and Rhetoric to I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) and Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives (1945), a growing number of recent linguists have been trying to establish metaphor at a cognitive, conceptual level (such as Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1994).