According to conceptual metaphor theory, individuals are thought to understand or express abstract concepts by using referents in the physical world—right and left for moral and immoral, for example. In this research, we used a modified Stroop paradigm to explore how abstract moral concepts are metaphorically translated onto physical referents in Chinese culture using the Chinese language. We presented Chinese characters related to moral and immoral abstract concepts in either non-distorted or distorted positions or rotated to the right or to (...) the left. When we asked participants to identify the Chinese characters, they more quickly and accurately identified morally positive characters if they were oriented upright or turned to the right and more quickly and accurately identified immoral characters when the characters were distorted or rotated left. These results support the idea that physical cues are used in metaphorically encoding social abstractions and moral norms and provided cross-cultural validation for conceptual metaphor theory, which would predict our results. (shrink)

This paper investigates an unexplored indexical dimension inherent in the mapping structure of metaphor. The empirical focus is on the metaphor of stain but the scope of indexicality in relation to...

This work presents two theoretical challenges to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). The first argument shows CMT’s foundational _Conceptual Claim—_that abstract concepts are necessarily structured by concrete concepts—entails the blurring of the literal–figurative distinction, which calls into question the legitimacy of standard methods of metaphor identification used in CMT. The second argument aims at the _Linguistic Claim—_that conceptual metaphors are necessary for metaphorical language—by showing that conceptual metaphors are neither necessary nor sufficient for linguistic metaphors and that, therefore, the existence of (...) conceptual metaphors cannot be validly inferred from the presence of their linguistic counterparts. In light of the arguments put forward, the CMT theorist is forced to accept one of four options: (A) hold on to both the Conceptual Claim and Linguistic Claim, by adequately addressing problems presented here, (B) discard the Conceptual Claim and give up the theory, (C) discard both claims and give up the theory, or (D) accept the Conceptual Claim but reject the Linguistic Claim and abandon the methods of discovering conceptual metaphors through analysis of figurative language. I argue that the only tenable option is D. (shrink)