Metaphors in Language: Rhetorical and Cognitive Perspectives on Terrorism

Metaphors: Rhetorical and Cognitive Understanding

We may understand metaphors in two different ways:

Rhetorical understanding

In its merely rhetorical dimension, there is no attempt to use metaphor beyond the aesthetic dimension. Metaphors in this case are convenient labels that serve the purpose of making speech sound better. As Alexander Spencer himself highlights, they are just a decoration for the discourse, which does not change the meaning.

Cognitive understanding

Cognitive linguistics goes beyond the strictly rhetorical understanding and posits that, in fact, metaphors may have a much bigger effect: metaphorisation is the transference of one concept onto another. Thus, metaphorisation can become an instrument for understanding certain domains by way of understand(ing) one domain of experience in terms of another by projecting knowledge about the first (familiar) domain onto the second (more abstract) domain.

If we are to remain within the cognitive approach, we may distinguish two kinds of metaphors: metaphoric expression and conceptual metaphor.

Metaphorical expressions

These are directly visible and represent the specific statements found in the text from which the conceptual metaphor draws. In our case, the expression in question would be that of "terrorism is war", from which we derive the conceptual metaphor above. However, it must be highlighted that the conceptual transference is not as absolute as a strict reading of the metaphoric expression would let us think. Transference is only partial through the process of selective distinctions.

Conceptual metaphor

If we should take an example to show the mechanism of this kind of metaphor, we could choose "terrorism is war". In this example, two conceptual domains are abstractly connected: on the one side we have a source domain, the one which is familiar to us, namely "war", and a target domain, "terrorism", which is to us less familiar and for which, therefore, we need explanatory tools. We can define it as a set of systematic correspondences between the source and the target in the sense that the constituent conceptual elements of B correspond to constituent elements of A.