An Inquest into Metaphor Death: Exploring the Loss of Literal Senses of Conceptual Metaphors

Abstract

Abstract In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson famously recast the notion of ‘dead’ metaphor. Rather than accepting conventionality as a criterion for ‘deadness’, they argued that only metaphors which ‘play no particularly interesting role in our conceptual system, and hence are not metaphors we live by... deserve to be called “dead”’ (1980: 55). In later work, Lakoff revisited this definition, suggesting that ‘dead’ was most accurately reserved for cases such as pedigree, a ‘one-shot’ metaphor that is not transparent for English speakers because no ‘literal’ sense exists. This paper examines a number of ‘dead’ or ‘historical’ linguistic metaphors for which no ‘literal’ sense exists in present day English, and considers how and why these ‘died’. Some, like pedigree, do not appear to reflect any system-wide mapping, and it is perhaps unsurprising that their metaphoric nature has become opaque. Others, like ardent and comprehend, demonstrate conceptual mappings that must have been active when their metaphorical senses first emerged, and which are still live in other lexemes. To date, there has been little interrogation of the reasons for the loss of literal senses of metaphorically motivated lexemes. I hope to demonstrate that an examination of the historical evidence for the different stages in the ‘life’ of particular linguistic metaphors can shed light on the nature of metaphor death.