The problem of psychological reality of conceptual metaphors
Aleksander Kiklewicz
Uniwersytet Warmińsko-Mazurski w OlsztynieAbstract
The article discusses a debatable issue of contemporary cognitive semantics, i.e. the
issue of the psychological reality of explication procedures used in the framework of the
conceptual metaphors theory proposed by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson. It quotes arguments
that show the speculative and non-representative nature of such procedures in relation to
many language metaphors. This is evidenced by a psycholinguistic experiment that was
carried out for the purpose of the study. Its results indicate that the conceptual projections
following Lakoff and Johnson are relatively rarely taken into account by respondents.
An alternative conception of the cognitive interpretation of metaphor is proposed, based
on the affordance phenomenon, i.e. the use of secondary nominations to fill in naming
deficits, and also to facilitate mental processing of semantic information through concepts
from the basic level of categorization.
Keywords:
semantics, cognitive semantics, polysemy, conceptual metaphor, experiment, levels of categorization, psycholinguisticsReferences
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