A Plea for Living Metaphors: Conflictual Metaphors and Metaphorical Swarms

Abstract

Now that the cognitive turn has highlighted the role of consistent and shared metaphorical concepts in human cognition and language, a comprehensive vision demands that living metaphors are paid due attention. The most typical and revealing instances of living metaphor are not poetic rewordings of shared and consistent metaphorical concepts but textual interpretations of conflictual meanings of complex expressions. Conflictual metaphors document the creative potential of linguistic expressions and shed light on the structure of metaphorical transfer and projection. Moreover, the complex network of inferences triggered by a living metaphor may generate a set of conflictual expressions consistent with it—a “metaphorical swarm”—which is open to empirical investigation. The final section of this article is an illustration of the metaphorical swarm of liquid light in English Romanticism and French Symbolism.

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