Meaning and Metaphor

Language and Communication ANTH 2301 Meaning and Metaphor What kind of day are you having? Do you feel happy or depressed right now? If you're having a bad day, consider doing something enjoyable to cheer yourself up. Taking care of yourself will help you avoid going into depression. According to a long-held notion, languages are essentially referential, meaning that every language has a lexicon of terms that translate to objects found in the natural world. This idea holds that language serves as a reflection of reality. However, as we have seen in the last section, various languages have varied systems for classifying the natural world, ranging from the human realms of life and death to the natural domains of colour and flora. In addition, language is used by people to discuss abstract topics like emotion, interpersonal relationships, and communication itself. Using our vocabulary of spatial organisation to discuss the placement of tangible items, like as arugula, on a person's face, is not too difficult. However, what about more ethereal matters? How do we discuss making someone our friend? How should we talk about a point we're making in our term paper? How do we discuss our feelings for the day? Similar to colour, mood is structured by human physiology and includes a range of almost universal fundamental categories, such as happy, sorrow, rage, fear, disgust, and surprise. However, as mood is a spectrum phenomenon, many cultures have varied classifications for it. Take the German term "schadenfreude," which combines the meanings of "damage" with "joy." Schadenfreude is the term for enjoying someone else's bad luck. In English, there isn't an analogous term. We utilise more than just words to express the feelings we are experiencing. We also discuss how emotions evolve, how one mood affects another, and how to stop oneself from experiencing a certain emotion. These are abstract, enigmatic processes. How can we go about doing this? Metaphor is what we do. A metaphor is a language device that allows us to conceive and speak about abstract ideas by drawing on our knowledge of physical objects. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two cognitive linguists, contend that metaphor is the main means by which humans convey complex meaning through language (1980). We discuss our abstract experiences of mood using our tangible language of direction. Positive emotions are referred regarded as up, and negative emotions as down. You may claim you're on top of the world if you're truly pleased. Saying you're down in the dumps is a common expression for extreme sadness. Actually, the word depression, which describes a protracted state of despair, actually means "a sunken place" or "the act of lowering something." One of those things you don't notice until you start observing it is metaphor. Then you start to notice that it's present in everything you think about, including the passage of time, numbers, life, love, physical health, work, leisure, sleep, and even thought itself, to just a few extremely metaphorical subjects. Metaphorical thinking structures almost every abstract region of experience. Here are three instances of typical English metaphors. A JOURNEY IS LIFE. He chose the incorrect course in life. You should pursue your dreams as you proceed. Life put me at a crossroads when I moved out of home. You will eventually have a feeling of accomplishment in life if you put in a lot of work. Love is sweet. She is my beloved. The couple took a honeymoon. Would you please pass the salt, sugar? After a while, our sweet love became sour. ARGUMENT IS COMBAT The contender attacked her opponent on a personal level. Regarding taxes, his stance is insupportable. She won the debate because she had the facts. His criticism was quite insightful. English has tens of thousands of metaphors. A multitude of metaphors are used in abstract domains to explain distinct facets of the experience. Love may be viewed as a journey (as in "Will the couple go forward together, or will they go their separate ways?"), as well as as conflict (as in "He slew me with his come-hither glance"). Love can also be thought of as sweet (as above). Every language spoken by humans contains metaphors. Certain specialised metaphors are utilised in a wide variety of cultures, such as the directional metaphors used to depict emotion. The Asante king of Ghana often employs metaphorical language in his public addresses, including well-known expressions like "life is a journey," "life is a battle," "ideas are food," "knowing is seeing," and "death is sleep," according to a research by Esther Afreh (2018). Despite the fact that the speeches were given in English, Afreh points out that same analogies are also present in Akan, the Asante people's native tongue. She observes several Akan proverbs and phrases that make use of the same metaphors in addition to her study of the speeches in English. Metaphor is both universal and relative, as was the case with our examination of classification in the previous section. Lakoff and Johnson contend that our shared human biology shapes the way we perceive life and emotions. When you're truly joyful, you might bounce with excitement, and when you're really sad, you might actually feel like lying down. We move ahead in space to seek items and activities in our daily lives, so we may use the idea of a journey to organise our knowledge of life, social interactions, and time in general. Cross-cultural commonalities might have causes that are not always closely related to human biology. Chinese and English use comparable metaphorical discourse structures for discussing moral matters. According to Yu (2016), the word "low" is used to characterise things that are cruel, deplorable, or bad, whereas the adjective "high" is used to describe things that are lofty, noble, or excellent in both languages. As an alternative, moral behaviour can also be referred to as "straight" in both languages, whereas immoral behaviour is called "crooked." However, in order to discuss specific experience domains, various cultures do utilise distinct metaphors—metaphors that highlight particular facets of those abstract topics—to use a helpful metaphor. Think about the English proverb "time is money." Simply said, this is a metaphor, yet a lot of people who understand English think it's true. Time is something you can invest, save, squander, and spend. So, in capitalist societies, time truly does appear like money. However, time is not the same as money. Despite the fact that these are popular conceptions of time in the English language, time is neither a trip nor a horizontal line in space. Time is an abstract concept, simply said. Whorf most definitely did not discover the Hopi discussing time as money. Because they live in a culture that values time highly and tends to monetize almost everything, including labour and land as well as advice, attention, and even bodily parts like human sperm, English speakers prefer to conceive of time in terms of money.