Metaphors part 3: Metaphors and Thought

As promised, this is the last of my three part series on metaphors (sorry for the delay, Amy). I’m going to discuss why metaphors are becoming one of the most provocative new topics in the field of cognitive science—the study of thought and intelligence. You’ll recall in this series’ initial post that I discussed dead metaphors like fishing for a compliment or planting seeds of doubt. After all, there is nothing inherently seed-like about doubt, nor does seeking a compliment resemble the sport of fishing. Yet these terms became parts of our daily language because at some point in the past some group of speakers related seeds and fishing to doubt and seeking compliments. But, as the saying goes, this is just semantics. Or is it?

Metaphors operate at much deeper level in human language than just leaving behind dead metaphors. In fact, research on metaphors is changing the way language scholars envision how our minds process language. Take, for example, the concept of cognitive metaphors, originally developed by George Lakoff and Mark Turner. The theory behind cognitive metaphors proposes that instead of thinking of language as a massive dictionary of words and meanings contained in our brains, human language actually relates quite closely to the way our minds situate our bodies in time and space.

For example, think about what you’re doing right now. Likely sitting in a chair, reading this post from a computer screen. Your mind has a 3-D model of the room you are situated in; you know approximately how far you are from the walls and ceiling; you know where the room is in relation to the rest of the building; you know that if you pick up a pen from the desk, lift it over your head, and drop it, that the pen will fall; you also likely know about the weather outside and how that will affect your plans later in the day. You’re not aware that your brain is doing this, but as you read this paragraph it probably conjured a few mental images—called image schemas.

Whether or not you’re aware of it, your mind is constantly creating image schemas that orient you as you do something seemingly simple, like looking across the room, or something seemingly complex, like skating backwards. Cognitive linguists like Lakoff and Turner argue that this process of image schemas is also fundamental to human language. They argue that perception of space and time has built a model of time and space into language as well, and not just English, every language.

But we’ll stick to English. Take the following example from Metaphors We Live By: “Things are looking up. We hit a peak last year, but it’s been downhill ever since. Things are at an all-time low. He does high-quality work.” According to cognitive linguists, these metaphors all contain an inherent cognitive metaphor: GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN. Similarly, this cognitive metaphor explains phrases like on top of the world, down and out, top notch, and under the weather. These phrases all use words of spatial orientation, called prepositions, to connect concepts and emotions to space and time.

Metaphors have always been considered frilly language, just decoration to bring extra attention to a message—as I mentioned in my previous post on metaphors in marketing. But as it turns out, there is something much deeper and fundamental about metaphors:rather than decorating the meaning of a message, metaphors are required for language to exist in the first place. As a developing language scholar, I find this possibility quite exciting.

 

Metaphors part 1: What are metaphors?

Metaphors pervade nearly every aspect of the English language and are fundamental to art, business, and human language. Therefore, I’ve decided to begin a three part series of posts about metaphors. The first part of this series will introduce the concept of metaphors; the second part will discuss metaphors in relation to marketing communications, and the third part will discuss metaphors in relation to cognitive science. Below you’ll find illustrative metaphors from poetry by Robert Burns and William Shakespeare, along with some quotes from Barack Obama’s inaugural address.

What are metaphors?

Metaphor is an ancient Greek term combining the prefix meta (meaning “beyond or over”) and the verb pherein (meaning “to carry”). Today we take metaphor, at its simplest, to mean “a comparison made by referring one thing to another” (silva rhetoricae). The word’s ancient Greek definition is a metaphor itself (it’s self-referential): a metaphor ‘carries’ the meaning of a word ‘beyond or over’ its referent; so the idea that a word can physically carry or move meaning is metaphorical in and of itself.

A more complex definition of metaphors is that they’re figures of speech in which a name, descriptive word, or phrase is grafted onto an object or action different from, but analogous to, the original name, descriptive word, or phrase.

What aren’t metaphors?

I think it’s important to distinguish metaphors from three similar figures of speech: metonymy, synecdoche, simile. (Note: I’ll be quoting some poetry below and you’ll notice slashes [/] within the lines. These indicate line breaks.)

Simile

A simile is a straightforward, explicit metaphor that often uses “like” or “as.” Any Duran Duran fans will recall their hit single “Hungry Like the Wolf.” This is a simile. Because they’re so obvious, similes are the weakest form of metaphors. In literary criticism, a bad writer would be considered one who relies heavily on similes to deliver metaphors. A good metaphor shouldn’t need the words “like” or “as” to draw a comparison. Of course this doesn’t mean that smiles have no poetic power. Take Robert Burns’ famous line “O, my love is like a red, red rose, / That is newly sprung in June” (from A Red, Red Rose). Although Burns relies on a simile to deliver the poem’s first line, he continues with eloquent, thoughtful rhymes like:

“Till all the seas go dry, my Dear

And the rocks melt with the sun!

O I will love you still, my Dear

While the sands of life shall run.”

Metonymy

Metonymy is a metaphor where you refer to sometime by naming one of its parts or attributes—there is a relation between the two things; they are contiguous. In a discussion of politics we hear “Parliament passed the bill,” when watching CNN we hear “they’re tracking it in the blogosphere,” or when discussing war we hear “the pen is mightier than the sword.” These statements are all metonymic—Parliament is a reference to the Members of Parliament, the blogosphere is a reference to groups of online political writers, the pen represents the persuasive power of words, and the sword represents military power.

Synecdoche

Synecdoche is a specific type of metonymy where a referent’s part stands in for the whole referent itself. A classic example of synecdoche is found in the balcony scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “It is my lady, O, it is my love!” says Romeo. “O, that she knew she were! / She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that? / Her eye discourses; I will answer it.” Romeo states that Juliet’s eye speaks to him, but the eye metonymically represents a part of Juliet’s beauty as a whole.

Okay, what are metaphors again?

As opposed to simile, metonymy, and synecdoche (and numerous other figures of speech), metaphors allow  readers or listeners to draw meaning themselves. So, let’s look at a recent example from Barack Obama’s inaugural address:

“Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.”

Obama doesn’t use a simile (ex. “Every so often the oath is taken amidst a political situation as brutal as a gathering storm”), metonymy (ex. “Every so often the oath is taken when the money has run out”), or synecdoche (ex. “Every so often the oath is taken while John Smith and Jane Doe are being laid off”). Obama uses a clear, eloquent metaphor that allows the audience to implicitly realize that “gathering clouds and raging storms” refers to the current US recession.

Dead metaphors

Dead metaphors are the most commonly used metaphors in the English language, so much so that they’ve become part of the language. What I mean here is that dead metaphors once were metaphors, but have become everyday words due to popular usage. Some dead metaphors are verbs like running for office, catching the game last night, fishing for complements, breaking the ice, or grasping a concept. Other dead metaphors are nouns like branches of government, seeds of doubt, or apple of my eye. Dead metaphors are similar to, but less complex than clichés—which are metaphorical truisms in the form of a complete sentence (like “kill two birds with one stone”). We use dead metaphors all the time without even realizing it; they’ve lost their original meanings and become entrenched in our language.

Conceits

An extended metaphor, or conceit, sets up a primary metaphor with multiple metaphorical levels built into it. Shakespeare was the master of conceits; here’s one of his finest examples:

JAQUES

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,

(As You Like It, 2.7)

The primary metaphor is the world as a “stage,” yet this metaphors has many implications: men and women are “players” (actors or actresses) who play “many parts” (social roles, careers) with entrances (“births”) and exits (“deaths”).

Thanks for your time and I’ll continue my discussion of metaphors in my next post when I talk about how they operate in marketing communications.

 

Discourse Analysis

I’ve mentioned in two previous posts that I am a researcher using discourse analysis to study end-of-life interviews with palliative care patients. These posts gave a high-level introduction to the methodology I use, but I should have started with a post explaining about more about the theoretical background I work from. At the onset I’ll answer the question my post poses: discourse analysis is a method of analysing the structure of texts that takes into account both their content and their context. Let me explain what that means:

Discourse analysis is a method of analysing the structure of texts . . .

The first important fundamental of discourse analysis is that the word text is unsuitably defined. A text is more than just, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) would have it, “the wording of anything written or printed; the structure formed by the words in their order; the very words, phrases, and sentences as written.” Although it is true that most texts are words printed on a page (i.e., books, newspapers, websites, recipes, lists), this definition excludes the idea that texts are socially produced. For example, a book is the conventional design for delivering a text, yet books are socially produced objects. Like toys or vehicles, an economy of supply and demand determines the production of texts; like songs or works of art, various genres divide, categorize, and organize texts; and, like a conversation or political speech, the reader interprets and responds to the authors’ words—in the form of a text.

Texts share the properties of a conversation: they are the interchange of thoughts and words. Although readers don’t explicitly exchange their thoughts and words with the content of a text (or, by extension, the thoughts of the author), readers are implicitly a part of the society that necessitates, demands, and generates a texts’ social production. Therefore, a discourse analysis approach takes all organized groupings of language, both written and spoken, to comprise the definition of the word text. Discourse analysis studies texts, but defines a text as “the wording of anything written, printed, or spoken; the structure formed by the words in their order; the very words, phrases, and sentences as written or spoken.”

. . . that takes into account their content and context.

A text’s context is either the “whole structure of a connected passage regarded in its bearing upon any of the parts which constitute it” or, more broadly and more appropriately for our purposes here, “the parts of a text which immediately precede or follow any particular passage or ‘text’ and determine its meaning.” Yet both of these standard definitions from the OED of context disregard the social aspects of textual production that determine meaning. What I mean is that a text’s popularity, controversialness (yes, it’s a word; I wasn’t sure at first looked it up), and generic categorization, aren’t “parts of a text,” and yet they do impact the way texts are interpreted by readers.

One example I like to use to illustrate how context influences meaning is the controversy around James Frey’s “Million Little Pieces.” Frey’s book was categorized as an autobiographical memoir, and thus hyped by Oprah’s Book Club as a harrowing journey through the trials of drug and alcohol addiction. Yet when The Smoking Gun published an article disproving several impactful claims Frey makes in the novel—specifically regarding his criminal record and a section detailing dental work without anesthetics. A media frenzy erupted surrounding these allegations of dishonest and suddenly a debate about integrity and generic classification of books was being discussed by media celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Steven Levitt.

Oprah had James Frey back on the show and told him that she felt “duped” and that he “betrayed millions of readers.” So here we have a book’s context brought into popular culture and now when readers buy Frey’s book—and millions have since this controversy—this controversy will in many cases act as a context for reading the book.

What is Discourse Analysis?

So, discourse analysis is a method of analysing the structure of texts that takes into account both their content and their context. Discourse analysis finds patterns of text features that point to relations between texts and context—they have linguistic integrity and contextual value; they can be any feature in a text or a set of texts that points to the way that meaning is embedded into that text in connection to its context. And so, in my research, I use verb tense and aspect to argue that the context of dying impacts the way texts (stories) are created (told) in end-of-life interviews by patients. I hope this clears up some questions about the theoretical background behind my research. But if you have anymore questions, please post them as a comment attached to this post.

 

End-of-life interviews . . . and verbs Part II

A quick review

In my last post, I discussed modals and how they’re used to make predictions about the future. More importantly, I consider modals as grammatical markers that indicate that a palliative care patient is discussing the legacy they’ll leave behind after they die. As promised, this post is about grammatical aspect: which is a grammatical marker that relates information about whether an event described by a verb is ongoing, has been completed, or is being repeated. Again, I’ll include the caveat that modality and aspect are my focus for my discourse analyses of end of life psychotherapeutic interventions between doctors and palliative care patients. By better understanding how patients use grammar at the end of life, I believe that we can better understand how they situate their stories in relation to themselves as dying patients, and the individuals they were before they were diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Primary auxiliaries

You’ll recall that auxiliary (‘helper’) verbs encode information about plausibility, and temporality into sentences. Modal auxiliaries are one kind of auxiliary verb, but the primary auxiliaries relate perfect aspect, progressive aspect, and passive voice (the last, as mentioned in my last post, I won’t be focusing on).

The perfect aspect or the perfect “have”

Unlike the verb “to have,” which means to possess, the perfect “have” introduces the perfect aspect into a sentence and is always followed by the past participle form of the next verb (Remember the mouse“might have been being eaten” by the owl.)

My research argues that, along with using modals to discuss legacy, dying patients’ narratives contain other grammatical markers that indicate a relation between the patients’ narratives of the past and their present situation—in other words, patients use aspect to relate the character they are now to the characters they were before terminal diagnosis. That being said, the perfect “have” has three different contracted forms: in the present tense ‘s (for has) and ‘ve (for have), and in the past tense ‘d (for had.)

So it’s important to note how patients use the perfect aspect. Below are amended examples taken from narratives where patients connect their pasts with their present using the present perfect aspect and the past perfect aspect:

Present perfect aspect

1) “Like I say, you’re busy and when you’ve got your health, you don’t stop and think. I’ve had many years with cancer, but when it became malignant, I was angry.”

2) “I hope I haven’t cried too much for you.”

3) “I’ve made lots of mistakes. Don’t we all?”

4) “I’ve lived a good life and I’ve had a wonderful life. Life is hard, but like everybody else, you just go through it.”

5) “I’ve always said that man upstairs, he’s got your number and when that number comes up, there’s nothing you can do.”

6) “I was sick when I was eight, and that’s continued all my life.”

Past perfect aspect [for this aspect, the auxiliary perfect “have” is in the past tense and distinguished by italics]

7) “You know my husband and I went to Malaysia and we’ve been to a number of other places. We’d planned when we were in Malaysia to go back and just drive around the islands. We’d planned to have many, many more trips . . . unfortunately we’re not able to now.”

8 ) “Last year I wrote good bye letters to all of my family members. If I’d have left it even until now I think I wouldn’t have been able to write as clearly as I did. I can’t remember what I said in them, but I know that I was quite satisfied with what I’d written at the time.”

9) “We went to Spain once with another couple, though I certainly wouldn’t have done that if my wife hadn’t been alive.”

Language as timeline

How can I prove that the perfect tense indicates a relation between the present and the past? Using Reichenbach’s system of temporality in language (from Experience and prediction [1938]), we use language to relay three points of time that are relevant to a normal statement:

· Speech Time (S): the time the statement was spoken or written

· Reference Time (R): the time on which we focus

· Event Time (E):the time at which the event took place

If we imagine these points on a timeline, which tense and aspect are used depends on the relation between S,R, and E.

So let’s consider the following statement:

6) “I was sick when I was eight, and that’s continued all my life.”

In every case, we understand S to be the moment of the interview; R, the time on which we focus, is the patient’s lifespan since age six; and E, the time the event took place, began when the patient was six, but has continued to S (the time of the interview.) On a timeline, we can represent this relation as follows (where the dotted line represents that the time the event took place is the patient’s lifespan since age six.)

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - S

E_____________________________R–>

Age six                                Time of interview

As you can see, the present perfect aspect creates a relation between the past and the present.

 

To contrast this, though, here’s an example of the less common past perfect aspect:

7) “We’d planned to have many, many more trips . . . unfortunately we’re not able to now.”

We don’t have any set dates here, but we do know that at some point in the past plans were made to travel but were interrupted by a terminal illness. Again, S is the moment of the interview; yet this time R, the time on which we focus, is the implied interruption of “many, many, more [trips];” and E, is the past instance of planning those trips—pre-diagnosis.

E______________R_______________S–>

Planning        Interruption        Time of interview

Perfect aspect is a way of indicating the relation between the focus point (R) and the time at which an event took place (E). Tense, on the other hand, is a way of indicating the relation between the focus point (R) and speech time (S): in the first sentence, R and S coincide and we get the present tense; in the second sentence, R precedes S and we get the past tense.

For an event that happened in the past, if we use the perfect aspect, we are focusing not on the time of the event, but on some later time, for instance “now” or “the moment of terminal diagnosis.” Hence, the perfect aspect is used when we want to indicate the importance of an event for what is going on now. And therefore, patients use the perfect aspect to connect moments from their past on a timeline between the moment of their terminal diagnosis (past perfect) or the present moment of the dignity interview (present perfect.)

Obviously we don’t need to draw timelines to situate every example; the contexts of patients’ narratives provide all of the information we need. Yet, I think this is a useful exercise for proving the relation between the past and present in dying patients’ narratives

The progressive aspect or the progressive “be”

In a similar vein, another primary auxiliary is the progressive “be” that follows modals and the perfect “have”—if they occur—and indicates that something is in progress. The progressive “be” is followed by a lexical verb in its –ing form—so, if “been” appears in a verb string but isn’t followed by a verb in its –ing form, then it isn’t the progressive “be.” In many cases, the progressive occurs in a verb string with the perfect “have” to further ensure that the listener is aware there is a direct relation between the narrative event and the patients’ current life:

1) “Well, you won’t believe this. I’ve been writing a biography of myself.”

But the progressive “be” doesn’t have to be used in a verb string with the perfect “have:”

2) “Palliative care wasn’t just offering me hope it was like ‘we’re gonna find that you have no pain anymore.’”

3) “One of the things when I became ill, was that I decided that I was not going to be angry anymore with anyone because it was a waste of time. It’s better to be nice to people than to be angry.”

I haven’t fully synthesized my argument about the progressive “be.” But I believe, pending a bit more research, that the progressive is a way of relating past events more directly to the present moment by implying that they are ongoing. This is powerfully important for differentiating statements made by palliative care patients–especially for psychotherapy–because this verb tense indicates that the sentiment is incomplete and therefore may require closure. If a therapist can use grammatical markers to determine statements that suggest a lack of closure, they can use these markers as focal points for discussion and therapeutic intervention.

Conclusion

I don’t have any major findings to report as of yet but I will publishing this research in a forthcoming academic article along with my research supervisor and a psychiatrist. As I’m sure you can imagine, this research causes me to think about some of the most profound existential issues that we must all face: death, dying, and legacy. I find myself brought nearly to tears when I read these documents and this series of blog posts serves to functions: first, to share with you just what the hell I do when I tell you my second job is discourse analyses of end of life psychotherapeutic interventions between doctors and palliative care patients; but second, to invite you to understand the remarkable nature of palliative care as I see it. On this second point, have you ever thought of volunteering at a hospice or palliative care ward? Dying patients have stories to tell and they have a lot to teach us about life. After this research project, I think about it a lot–I’m just in grad school right now and can’t find the time. But I will someday . . . if I ever finish school.