Where Metaphors Come from

In <em>Where Metaphors Come From</em> Zolt�n K�vecses proposes a metaphorical grounding that augments and refines conceptual metaphor theory according to which conceptual metaphors are based on our bodily experience. While this is certainly true in many cases of metaphor the role of the body in metaphor creation can and should be reinterpreted and consequently the body can be seen as just one of the several contexts from which metaphors can emerge (including the situational discourse and conceptual-cognitive contexts) - although perhaps the dominant or crucial one. <p/>K�vecses is a leader in CMT and his argument in this book is more in line with what has been discovered about the nature of human cognition in recent years; namely that human cognition is grounded in experience in multiple ways - embodiment in a strict sense being just one of them (see Barsalou 2008; Gibbs 2006; Pecher and Zwaan 2005). In light of the present work this is because cognition including metaphorical cognition is grounded in not only the body but also in the situations in which people act and lead their lives the discourses in which they are engaged at any time in communicating and interacting with each other and the conceptual knowledge they have accumulated about the world in the course of their experience of it.<br>