Dichotomy Between Source Domain and Target Domain in The Concept of Cognitive Metaphor: A Review

This article is published by the Zamfara International Journal of Humanities.

Salisu Muhammed Raj, PhD.
Department of English,
 Nasarawa State University, Keffi
Nasarawa- Nigeria.
salisumr@nsuk,edu.ng
 +2348033494886

Abstract

This research looks at cognitive linguistics in general and specifically reviews the concept of source domain and target domain as the basic aspects cognitive metaphor. Defining these domains of cognitive metaphor, the paper argues that, contrary to the notion that source domain in metaphorical expression is a concrete phenomenon, it is actually an abstract phenomenon. This is because, in the definition of cognitive metaphor, scholars are in agreement that source domain is derived from the brain, resulting from the perceptual experience of the speaker. This becomes the idea which is limited to him as he is yet to share such idea with the addressee. The argument, therefore, is that, if the source domain is from the brain and the perception of the speaker, then it could not be said to be concrete, rather, abstract. What is concrete is the target domain because that is what is already laid out and shared between the speaker and the addressee. The paper, thus, views metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon, deriving from the precept that physical events are naturally conceived through abstract notions, not the other way around. The research, in this regard, is of the view that source domain, which is an idea generated from the speaker’s experience of the world, is an abstract phenomenon while the target domain is the manifestation of shared assumptions between interlocutors. This is the principle underlying the relationship between human thought and language use.

Key words: Cognitive Linguistics, cognitive metaphor, source domain, target domain

 

Introduction

Language is the most formidable means of communication. It is used to make or mar relationships. Sometimes, utterances, as the most viable means of communication, is being employed in a way that mostly results to different perceptions amongst interlocutors. Geoffrey Leech is of the view that language basically functions to; one, convey individual’s experience of the world and how he expresses such experience through his attitude or behavior and, of course, the influence of his behavior to the hearers. Two, language also functions to convey the interpretation of the speaker’s expression by the audience through logical deductions, (Leech 56-57). These are key factors that make or mar the success of every speech situation. The essence of language, therefore, is basically to relate human utterances/statements with the context in which human perception is cardinal.

The research reviewed related studies on cognitive metaphor and its structural, ontological and orientational components. Especially, the research reviewed the metaphorical domains and discovered that all arguments on the relationship between the source domain and the target domain were anchored on the notion that the source domain, which is where the speaker conceptualizes his idea, is concrete. The study is, thus, interested in analyzing this relationship between source domain and target domain as integral factors of cognitive metaphor to determine how these domains interplay in the perception of an idea by a speaker and how such is shared with the addressee. In essence, the study looks at these aspects of cognitive metaphor as developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980).

Conceptual Review

There are two inter-dependent factors that are cardinal in understanding language in use. These are the speaker’s intention and the addressee’s interpretation. While the speaker expresses his views with an intention to pass a message to the addressee, the latter’s task is to either accept the message as intended by the speaker or reject it after interpreting it, using his cognition. Both factors are the embodiment of cognitive linguistics which presupposes that language is realized through our conceptualization of issues arising from the interaction between our thoughts (minds) which are the function of the brain, our bodies and our environment which shape our thoughts. All these, according to Steven Levenson (36), must connect with the assumptions we share as interlocutors. What brings about the success or understanding of the speaker’s utterance, however, is not necessarily depended on the intention of the speaker but how the hearer interprets the utterance. This is so because the hearer subsumes the speaker’s utterance into their shared assumptions or the assumptions he, the hearer, holds on the speaker.

Cognitive Linguistics 

The theory of Cognitive Linguistics can be traced to linguists like George Lakoff (1981 and 1987) who was known for his works on Metaphor and Metonymies; Gilles Fauconnier (1985) who espoused the Mental Spaces Theory, Space Grammar and later developed it to Cognitive Grammar, among other cognitive linguists. Like Systemic Functional Linguistics, Pragmatics and other linguistic theories that deal with the function of language, Cognitive Linguistics emerged as a reaction to the assumptions held by the proponents of Generative Grammar, that the primary relevance of language is its forms, claiming that Syntax is the most autonomous aspect of language theorizing. Cognitive Linguistics, thus, was developed to neutralize this (Chomskian-generativists) assumption that “linguistic knowledge is isolated from the rest of cognitive faculties (Barcelona and Valenzuela 1-2).  

In countering this notion, therefore, it is argued that our utterances are not just mere abstract linguistic expressions or “a combination of a set of universal abstract features of uninterpreted symbols… but are motivated by experience, in many cases, by bodily experience” (Barcelona and Valenzuela 3). What this suggests is that cognitive linguistics is an embodiment of linguistic concepts encapsulated in physical, social and cultural experience as factored by the human mind or perception.  It also implies that language is a product of general cognitive abilities coordinated by the human brain and neurological evidence, as contended by the duo. 

Cognitive linguistics, as an off-shoot of Pragmatics or what Halliday calls language in function, is premised on how language relates with human cognition. This suggests that, as human beings, the most essential part of our communication is cognition, without which there will hardly be intelligibility in communication and language understanding. Whether the language use conforms to syntactic rules or not is hardly the case. This is why Mey (68) says that “people talk with the intention to communicate something to somebody… whether or not they observe a particular syntactic rule is not too important (as) this is the foundation of all linguistic behaviors”.

As defined by Vyvyan Evans, cognitive linguistics is concerned with investigating the relationship between language and the mind, and the socio-physical experience, or what he refers to as “glimpses into hitherto hidden aspects of human mind, human experience and, by consequence, what it is to be human (IX).Craft and Cruse relate cognitive linguistics with cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence which, according to them, accounts for expressions and “continuities between language and experience through organization of concepts based on experience” (8-28). Cognitive linguistics, therefore, as implied by Laura Janda, evolved as a continuity in language development as it adds to the meaning of language, which linguistic models, as generated from phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, stylistics, semiotics, discourse analysis, pragmatics among others “operate in unison with greater phenomena of general consciousness and cognition” (6). To him, Janda, however, cognitive linguistics moves from context-based linguistic theories to models that examine the psychological and neurological aspects of language use as

It strives in an informed way to create analyses that are at least psychologically (biologically, neurologically, etc) plausible. . . It reflects the interaction of cultural, psychological, communicative, and functional considerations, and which can only be understood in the context of realistic view of conceptualization and mental processing (4-5).

This, by extension, implies that cognitive linguistics strives to make sense of what we experience in our daily lives and, the best way to do so, according to Janda, “entails not just understanding, but ability to express that understanding. . .”(6). According to Richard Nordquist, “Cognitive Linguistics refers to the crucial role of intermediate informational structures with our encounters with the world where our interaction with the world is mediated through informational structure in the mind” (3).  “Our encounters with the world” here simply means our day-to-day experience as we interact with people. And, since the mind is what we think with and interact meaningfully in conversation, the mind, thus, becomes an ‘intermediate’ between language and our interpersonal interactions as interlocutors. This is why Geerart and Cuykens believe that “linguistic knowledge involves not just knowledge of the language, but knowledge of our experience of the world as mediated by language” (3).

The most cardinal about cognitive linguistics, therefore, is the relationship between language and our experience of the world, and how that shapes our thoughts and perception of things.  This is because language, according to Evans and Green (43), offers a window into cognitive function, providing insights into the nature, structure and organization of thoughts and ideas”.  Lakoff and Langacker, in Barcelona and Valenzuela, believe that linguistic forms or expressions “are just clues, blueprints that activate the conceptual structures that we formed in our minds, but have no inherent meanings in themselves. . . Meaning ‘resides’ in our minds and brains” (208-209).  This, according to the postulate above, presupposes that “meanings do not ‘exist’ independently from the people that create them” (Barcelona and Valenzuela 5).

Cognitive Metaphor

Before the exploration in Cognitive Linguistics, metaphor has originally been confined to literature, used as a figure of speech liken to simile in meaning – only differentiated by the use of ‘like’ and ‘as’ (in simile). Instead of saying A is like or as B, it is said that A is B.  In Cognitive Linguistics, however, the difference between simile and metaphor goes beyond the presence of ‘like’ or ‘as’ in the former and the absence of such in the latter. According to Janda, “Metaphor is present in all kinds of syntactic situations…” and metaphorical expressions have less to do with syntactic variation than the substance (16). Metaphor has been conceived as a term used in “understanding and expressing one kind of thing is terms of another. . . (as) we act in the way we conceive of things” (Lakoff and Johnson 5). What the duo imply here is that our metaphorical expressions always reflect our conception or conceptualization of things garnered through our experience of the world; what they referred to as “cultural and personal previous experience” (154). Metaphor, therefore, is a naturally-occurring language phenomenon realized in our everyday physical experience and is explored in language use of cultural stereotype (Imre Attila 73). Cultural stereotype, as explained earlier, denotes recurring linguistic behaviour of certain group (ethnic, religious or racial) in relation to the context of utterance.

Lakoff and Johnson argue that contrary to the notion, especially purveyed by literary critics, that metaphor is a poetic device that only depicts the aesthetics of language or for rhetorical purposes, metaphor is actually “pervasive in thought and action”, contending that “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical” (4). This postulate gives credence to the fact that metaphors are expressions we use in our daily lives as we interact and communicate. And, because our communication is always hinged on our ability to express our perception of things around us, metaphor, thus, denotes how we use our conceptual system in thinking and acting through language. That is why the linguists claim that, “the metaphor is not merely in the words we use - it is in our very concept of an argument. The language of argument is not poetic, fanciful, or rhetorical, it is literal... (because) we act according to the way we conceive of things” (6).

Theoretical Framework: the Concept of Metaphorical Domains

Metaphor, in cognitive linguistics, is referred to coherent organization of human thought and experience which corresponds with the neural mapping in the brain, according to Lakoff and Johnson (7). It refers to conceptualization of an idea in one domain to infer or implement the concept in another domain. The domain in which such a concept or human knowledge is formed is called the Source Domain, which is the brain, while the referent which could be ideas, emotions, state of being, et cetera, is called the Target Domain (Janda 16). In other words, the source domain is the idea conceived in the mind, from which we draw our metaphorical expressions. The target domain, on the other hand, is what is inferred to as a representation of the conceived idea (Kovecses, Z. and Gunter R 6). For example, in “peace is priceless”. “Priceless” is the source domain – a conceived idea generated from the speaker’s perceptual experience. The target domain here is the word “peace”, which is the emotional representation of the conceived idea and which is a phenomenon shared between the speaker and the addressee.

Conceptual or cognitive metaphor, according to Lakoff and Johnson, more often than not, employs more concrete or physical concepts as source domain and more abstract concepts as target domain. The reason advanced by them is that metaphorical processes normally ascend from more concrete phenomena, denoting experience to abstract phenomena, which are the inferences derived from the conceptualization of such an idea. To them, this transition is typical of the neural/cognitive processes that imply moving from known to unknown information, (Lakoff and Johnson 123). This view was shared with Ronald Langacker who claims that metaphor is when we are able to conceive one situation against the background of another where, in expressing the metaphor, the previous (known) information or knowledge serves as the background information, which becomes the source domain used for structuring and understanding the current information - the target domain (Langacker 208). This postulate can be represented as follows:

 

 

 

 

 

Source domain = perceptual experience = concrete/physical = known/background information

Target domain = conceptualized information = abstract = unknown/new information.

 

Dichotomy between Source Domain and Target Domain

It could be argued that the relationship between the source domain and the target domain in metaphorical expression as described in the above specification is not consistent with the notion of cognitive process and the concept of conceptual metaphor. This is so because, if the source domain implies perceptual experience and conceived by the speaker as an idea, then it is unlikely to be a concrete phenomenon. Concrete, in the sense of metaphorical concept, implies what is already laid out, or a knowledge or assumption shared by both the speaker and the addressee(s). In the definition of source domain, as noted by Janda (16), however, it indicates an idea that is formed from the brain of the speaker, meaning that the concept is still only known to the speaker which may or may not be shared with the addressee. The source domain, therefore, is more of an abstract rather than a concrete phenomenon, as claimed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980).

The concept of the source domain, therefore, indicates that the idea which is conceived by the speaker is only known to and perceived by him. Further illustration on the expression “peace is priceless” could elaborate on this argument. For instance, all opinions of the scholars, as reviewed in this study, are in agreement that the source domain is the organization of the speaker’s thought which corresponds with his perceptual experience and which he expresses as an idea in spoken or written words. This implies that in “peace is priceless”, “priceless” is the source domain as it is only the thought of the speaker; whether or not the addressee shares this thought is yet to be known. “Priceless” is, thus, the speaker’s abstraction from his neural or cognitive processing – it is, therefore, an abstract phenomenon.

On the other hand, “peace” in the expression above, is the target domain because it is the emotion shared by both the speaker and the addressee. What will persist in the addressee’s brain, however, is whether or not to agree that “peace” is actually “priceless”. To an addressee that shares the same experience with the speaker, such as witnessing crises, battles and all other civil unrests that negatively affect human co-existence, his brain will also conjure imagination that will be in tandem with the speaker’s perception. If, however, the addressee’s perceptual experience is different from that of the speaker, because he has never witnessed the opposite of “peace”, his response may likely be just a tacit agreement, adducing to the fact that peace is a positive phenomenon, not necessarily because he is critical about the opposite of peace. In this case, the word “priceless” in the expression will hardly be seen as sacrosanct as the speaker portrays it.

Conclusion

Metaphors, therefore, express the speaker’s intention as they rely on his assumptions and personal experience of things as it relates to the subject matter. This is what he conceives as his source domain. Explaining this, R. Moran (264) contends that metaphor expresses the speaker’s intention while “the interpretation of the metaphor will be the matter of the recovery of the intentions of the speaker”. This postulate clearly denotes that source domain in cognitive metaphor is associated with the speaker, suggesting his perceptual experience. Whether or not he shares this with the addressee is dependent on the target domain which could be termed as a concrete phenomenon, assumptions or beliefs shared by the interlocutors.  

 

Works Cited

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George,Lakoff, And Mark, Johnson Metaphors We Live By, The University of           Chicago Press, 1980.

Janda, A. Laura “Cognitive Linguistics in the Year 2010” “International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics”, Nova Science Publishers, Inc. 2010.

Kovecses, Z. and Gunter R. Metonymy:  Developing a Cognitive Linguistics View,       Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Moran, R. “Metaphor” (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language.Blackwell, 1997.

Nordquist, Richard: Cognitive Linguistics: A Glosary of Grammatical and Rhetorical    Terms,             https//www.thoughtco.com/what-is-cognitive-linguistics, 2020 

Ronald, Langacker. Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin New York Mainton de Gruyter, 1999.

Stephen, Levenson C. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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