Cognitive Semantics: Lakoff, Langacker, Johnson, Chafe, Talmy

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 425):

On the West Coast, a number of linguists have developed a "cognitive" alternative to generative linguistics. Some of them (e.g., Lakoff, Langacker) come from a generative background (Lakoff s starting point was generative semantics), but have made a radical departure from this tradition. They have widened the scope of study relative to the generativist research agenda so as to include metaphor as a prominent feature (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, and other subsequent writings, such as Lakoff, 1987, 1988) and a detailed theoretical model of the relationship of language to cognition and perception (Langacker, 1987). A few have also oriented their work towards discourse (notably Chafe, e.g. 1979; 1987; cf. also Tomlin's, 1987a, discussion of the linguistic reflection of cognitive events). 

This version of cognitive semantics is arguably more closely associated with the rhetorical and ethnographic tradition (perhaps not so much in terms of its roots, but in terms of where it is headed); cognitive anthropology, with its interest in folk taxonomy and more recently in cultural models, provides a meeting point between the two.

Various aspects of the West Coast work in cognitive semantics are relevant to the organisation of the ideation base; for example, the work on metaphorical systems already mentioned, Talmy's (e.g. 1985) work on lexicalisation, and Chafe's (1970) early work on the organisation of meaning.

Lakoff & Johnson's 'Metaphors We Live By'

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 273):

Lakoff & Johnson (1980), in Metaphors We Live By, showed just how many of our basic conceptual schemata and reasoning strategies are shaped by their metaphorical make-up in the everyday language. To continue with this same domain: using examples such as you're going around in circles, their argument has holes in it, if we keep going the way we're going we'll fit all our facts in, they demonstrate that the motif of 'argument' is construed by a combination of two metaphors, the 'journey' and the 'container'. Such patterns of coherence (or "frames of consistency", in Whorf s term) across metaphoric regions are typical of the "structuring of concepts" (p. 96) which determine (to quote their own use of this same metaphor) "how human beings get a handle on the concept" (p. 116) and function with it in daily life.

Although they make some reference to particular grammatical categories (e.g. "with few exceptions,... in all the languages of the world the word or grammatical device that indicates ACCOMPANIMENT also indicates INSTRUMENTALITY" (p. 135) — with in English), Lakoff & Johnson's "metaphors we live by" are largely presented as lexical metaphors: that is, in terms of individual words, and sets of words that are semantical!y related. Sometimes however the metaphors of daily life arise rather from metaphoric movement in the grammar: for example, many of our everyday expressions for behavioural processes, like have a bath, take a look, give a smile, do a turn, involve construing the process (congruently a verb) in the form of a noun. Such metaphors are even less accessible to conscious reflection than the lexical ones, and so readily diffuse throughout the system and become the norm.

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Unacknowledged by Lakoff & Johnson, the wording Metaphors We Live By was coined by the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell; cf. his Myths We Live By.

The Domains Of Lexical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 233n):

Because of the vastness of lexis, we do not yet have a general description of lexical metaphorical syndromes or of the location of metaphorical domains within the overall ideation base. But it is possible to discern that a central resource for metaphor is human bodily experience; and that the human body itself, concrete phenomena located in space-time, and features of daily social life are the most favoured metaphorical motifs. 

Renton (1990: 513-514) lists 37 such motifs, which account for 87 %of the 4215 metaphorical items in his dictionary of metaphor. The most common are human body (23%), animals (9%), sport (4%), food & drink (4%), war A military (4%), buildings (4%), geography (4%), clothes (3%), nautical (3%), religion & biblical (3%), transport (2%), plants (2%), meteorology (2%), science & medicine (2%), colours (2%), commerce (2%), manufacture (1%), and the remaining types 1% or less. 

The descriptive challenge is to systematise the domains of lexical metaphor, as Lakoff & Johnson (1980) and researchers building on their framework have started to do.