In this last seminar for the year, our former visiting PhD student Di (Dee) Wu will address some aspects of the so-called "metaphor war" between Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Deliberate Metaphor Theory, and propose possible reconciliation, in the spirit of the season. Since many of us will already be traveling on this date, the seminar will be held only on zoom, starting from 15:15, and ending in 16:00.

The debate between Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT) that has been characterized as a “metaphor war” by Raymond Gibbs has drawn attention to the issue of consciousness in metaphor use. In defending CMT, Gibbs argues for “automaticity in behavior, such as when using verbal metaphors, actually involves many complex embodied and conceptual processes, even if these may operate quickly and without conscious attention” (Gibbs & Chen 2017: 1). On the contrary, with evidence from metaphors in real communication situations, DMT makes a distinction between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphors, contending that at least the former involve conscious awareness of the mapping between source and target concepts in both producers and interpreters of metaphor (Steen 2011, 2017). 

I argue that much of this debate is due to misunderstandings about different levels of meaning and consciousness. With the help of the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) (Zlatev 2023; Zlatev et al. 2021), which distinguishes between the pan-human Embodied, the culturally specific Sedimented and the situation-specific Situated levels of meaning, I propose that while DMT focuses on the latter, wishing to maintain that metaphors are above all “cross-domain mappings”, CMT is concerned above all with the other two levels. As for the debate on the role of consciousness in metaphor, we can distinguish between three levels of consciousness: (a) pre-reflective, (b) reflective but not non-theoretical, and (c) reflective-theoretical (Zlatev & Blomberg 2019). On this basis, I show that CMT in fact assumes consciousness on the pre-reflective level, while DMT argues for at least some degree of reflective consciousness. When Gibbs criticizes DMT, he in fact assumes the third, reflective-theoretical level. 

Gibbs, R. & Chen, E. (2017). Taking metaphor studies back to the Stone Age: A reply to Xu, Zhang, and Wu (2016). Intercultural Pragmatics, 14(1), 117-124.

Steen, G. (2011). The contemporary theory of metaphor—now new and improved! Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 9(1), 26-64. 

Steen, G. (2017). Deliberate Metaphor Theory: Basic assumptions, main tenets, urgent issues. Intercultural Pragmatics, 14(1), 1-24. 

Zlatev, J. (2023). The intertwining of bodily experience and language: The continued relevance of Merleau-Ponty. Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 45(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.4000/hel.3373

Zlatev, J., Jacobsson, G. & Paju, L. (2021). Desiderata for metaphor theory, the Motivation & Sedimentation Model and motion-emotion metaphoremes In A. S. d. Silva (ed.), Figurative language: Intersubjectivity and usage, 41-74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Zlatev, J., & Blomberg, J. (2019). Norms of language: What kinds and where from? Insights from phenomenology. In A. Mäkilähde, V. Leppänen, & E. Itkonen (Eds.), Normativity in language and linguistics (pp. 69-101). Amsterdam: Benjamins.