Doubleness in Experience: Toward a Distributed Enactive Approach to Metaphoricity

Abstract

A new concept of cognition also implies a novel approach to the study of metaphor. This insight is the starting point of this article presenting two innovations to comprehending and analyzing metaphor, one theoretical and one in terms of methodology. On a theoretical level we argue for a new orientation to metaphor and metaphoricity based on enactive cognition and distributed language and cognition. In recent years enactive and distributed cognition have been developing a new concept of cognition as an inter-bodily and ecologically afforded achievement, and in light of this theoretical development we propose an approach to metaphor as a multi-body, multi-party, and multi-timescale phenomenon. On a methodological level we demonstrate a new way of analyzing metaphoricity in multimodal social interaction based on in-depth video analyses of two real life examples in which we introduce metaphorical identification criteria focusing on doubleness in meaning, affordances for co-action, co-ordination, and co-experience. Here metaphoricity is explored as a distinct and emergent aspect of the coordination processes that constitute social interaction. In the final section we point to the general findings of the analyses and discuss the challenges that conceptual metaphor theory faces in the light of the new tendencies within cognitive science as well as a possible way forward.

Notes

¹ It is crucial to note that Gibbs’ recent development of a dynamic systems approach to metaphor also features experience; for example, Gibbs and Santa Cruz (2012b) suggest that “conceptual metaphors are not static representational entities existing only at the cognitive level, but are stabilities in experience that are emergent products of the human self-organized system” (p. 304).

² See also Rączaszek-Leonardi (2012).

³ Such a claim will of course need much more empirical support in order to be carried through. There is however a large amount of studies within applied linguistics that in great detail examines how difficult and rare it can to detect clear, source—target driven, metaphors in naturalistic spoken data while at the same time pointing to the widespread use of other forms of words or lexical items with a metaphorical potential (i.e., close to what we call metaphoricity; see Cameron, 2011; Zanotto, Cameron, & Cavalcanti, 2008).

⁴ Whether the girls are consciously aware that they are using images of sadness as pain is hard to say. Chris Johnson (1997) has argued that young children in some cases start with conflations of experience which later become “deconflated,” allowing for mappings between what come to be understood as separate domains. Again, our point of focus is not specifically on the “deep structure” of mappings in a conceptual system, but rather on how metaphoricity enacts experience and co-experience with a potentially double nature in the here-and-now of social interaction.

⁵ According to ASL linguist and metaphor scholar Sarah Taub (2001), the chest location is a common source domain in conceptual metaphors for emotion in ASL. She lists “THE LOCUS OF EMOTION IS THE CHEST” and “FEELING IS TOUCHING” as metaphors, not metonymies, as the manipulation of the morphophonemic parameter of location in ASL (making a sign at or touching the chest rather than in a more neutral sign-space) means (metaphorically targets) emotion. It is relevant to our attempt to avoid the written language bias (Linell, 2005) to note that Taub’s focus on the manual modality of ASL generates the conceptual metaphor “HEART IS THE LOCUS OF EMOTION,” whereas Kövecses, looking at written language data, deems this a metonymy. Different modalities afford different kinds of sense-making.

⁶ Furthermore, the change in gesture from line 1 to 2 reveal a switch in how the man perceives himself from an observer view-point to a character view-point (McNeill, 1992; see also Parrill, 2009, 2010). In the former the man enacts the nightmare scene as a confined space he can describe as an observer standing outside of it. By contrast, in the latter his gesturing positions him as an active agent or character who, so to speak, enters the nightmare space in trying to get his wife out while a passive agency for the woman caught in the nightmare is implied.

⁷ Of course this gesture might also work as an act of self-protection creating a confined personal space for the woman.