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Reaction paper
What does ‘really deliberate’ really mean? More thoughts on metaphor and consciousness Gerard J. Steen
Department of Language and Communication, VU University, Amsterdam
The essay by Gibbs raises the question whether deliberate metaphors really are deliberate. It is an interesting attempt to advance the discussion of the nature, or even existence, of deliberate metaphor. At least three claims are proposed: 1. Deliberate metaphor is no different from other types of metaphor and basically constitutes a vacuous idea. 2. Deliberate metaphor is difficult to identify by linguistic analysis alone. 3. Deliberate metaphorizing does not lead to felicitous products in the form of apt metaphors. The last two claims do not deny the existence of deliberate metaphor but assume that it does exist (claim 3) or may exist but is not always easy to identify (claim 2). I concur wholeheartedly with the methodological issue flagged in claim 2, since linguistic analysis will need to be complemented by behavioral analysis, as has been one of my long-standing qualms with much linguistic research on metaphor (Steen, 2007). Claim 3 may be a matter of genuine disagreement, since the deliberate exploitation of a particular metaphor in public debates can lead to surprising but effective exploitations of metaphorical ideas (Musolff, 2004; Steen, submitted). At any rate, I have no great problems with claims 2 and 3 since they do not undermine the proposition that metaphors may be deliberate; therefore I will concentrate on claim 1, which is Gibbs’s main answer to the question whether deliberate metaphors really are deliberate (cf. Steen, 2010). One difficulty with the critique Gibbs offers of ‘deliberate metaphor’ is his conflation of ‘non-deliberate metaphor’ with ‘conventional metaphor’. This confusion needs to be dispelled before we can achieve a clearer view of what deliberate metaphor really is and can do. The point is that deliberate metaphor goes equally well with conventional metaphor as with novel metaphor: deliberate metaphor involves the express thinking about one thing in terms of something else, whether that connection has been conventionalized in thought or not. When a teacher asks Metaphor and the Social World 1:1 (2011), 53–56. doi 10.1075/msw.1.1.04ste issn 2210–4070 / e-issn 2210–4097 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
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their students to think of the political system as if it were a family with a strict or nurturing father, the mapping is conventional but the metaphor is deliberate. When a therapist asks a client to think about the negative implications of seeing cancer as war, the mapping is conventional but the metaphor deliberate. Deliberate metaphor does not contrast with conventional metaphor, but belongs to a different dimension of metaphor: conventional and novel conceptual structures have to do with metaphor in thought, whereas their deliberate or non-deliberate use has to do with metaphor in communication (Steen, 2008). This view may also be employed to contradict Gibbs’s assertion that deliberate metaphors are “often seen as the most interesting theoretically”, which tacitly plays on the conflation of the conventionalnovel distinction with the non-deliberate/deliberate distinction: in principle, deliberateness has nothing to do with metaphor conventionality or novelty/interestingness (in practice, there may turn out to be associations, but that is another matter). The deliberate use of conventional or novel metaphor has a specific purpose, as is also discussed by Gibbs. I have proposed that this has to do with changing the perspective of the addressee: when a speaker or writer uses a metaphor deliberately, that is, as a metaphor in order to make the addressee deliberately understand one thing in terms of something else, the sender forces the addressee to attend to the source domain as a domain that lies outside the current domain of discourse and to view the target domain from that perspective. An example is Shakespeare’s opening line of Sonnet 18, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Steen, submitted) It follows that all deliberate metaphor is necessarily processed by some form of comparison. This set of claims about the functions and processes of metaphor cannot be made, I argue, for non-deliberate metaphor. The function of perspective changing is clearly incorrect for many metaphors in natural discourse — consider all temporal and abstract uses of spatial prepositions as one example where people are not asked to reconsider a referent or topic from a spatial perspective in order to derive a temporal or abstract meaning. And although it is true that there is much evidence which shows that metaphorical mapping plays, or can play, a role in metaphor processing, the overall picture for language is far from clear. I have shown (Steen, 2008) that important psycholinguists now agree that the main issue is when a verbal metaphor is processed by comparison or categorization, or even mere lexical disambiguation. This makes deliberate metaphor distinct from non-deliberate metaphor, and potentially the most typical case of metaphor that is around. True, we need to establish its nature more precisely by further theoretical and empirical work, but this is not just “a theoretical and methodological idea without much substance”, as Gibbs concludes. To clear up some theoretical difficulties raised by Gibbs in this context, I have not denied that some non-deliberate metaphor may be processed by comparison, © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved
What does ‘really deliberate’ really mean?
too; what I have emphasized is that it is an empirical question how much non-deliberate metaphor can be explained by this view. The distinction between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor throws into relief a question about metaphor processing which has long been ignored — the possibility that much if not most metaphor may not be processed metaphorically, that is, by comparison; if this were shown to be the case, (non)deliberateness is an important candidate for explaining many of the patterns. This is what I have called the paradox of metaphor (Steen, 2008). Another issue has to do with the relation between conscious and unconscious processing. The fact that deliberate metaphor may involve conscious processing by means of comparison does not mean that unconscious processes do not play a role in deliberate metaphor, too. They clearly do. All conscious processing emerges from unconscious processing and feeds back into it, a fact which holds for all language processing. In particular, the present response is an opportunity to further clarify two theoretically crucial aspects: 1. non-deliberate metaphor does not involve conscious metaphor processing (and perhaps not a lot of unconscious cross-domain mapping either); 2. deliberate metaphor is not necessarily conscious but can lead to conscious processing, and this would be based in cross-domain mapping, even though those processes and effects are also supported by unconscious processes, as is only natural. Deliberate metaphor is not identical with conscious metaphorical cognition, as has been aptly clarified by the contribution by Gibbs, but I believe that it does have the crucial function of affording conscious metaphorical cognition, which does not hold for non-deliberate metaphor. That is a distinction which I think has become sharper than before because of the present exchange. Gibbs sets up as his target what I would argue is a simple view of how intentions, goals and consciousness are supposed to play a role in the deliberate use of metaphor. This is what the title of his essay is meant to hint at: language user, do not have any illusions, metaphors are not under your full and conscious control. I agree. But a more sophisticated theoretical view of ‘deliberate metaphor’ is quite possible and is not undermined by the arguments advanced by Gibbs in his thought-provoking essay. Such a view focuses on the crucial role of processing by cross-domain comparison in metaphor reception and production when people use metaphors deliberately, in contrast to what happens when they use metaphors non-deliberately. The nature of that type of processing is quite complex and includes much unconscious processing, but it is not the same as the cognitive processes involved in non-deliberate language use. Gibbs’s critique on this front, therefore, does not undermine the thesis that deliberate metaphor exists and may be characterized by processing by means of comparison. © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved
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Gibbs’s critique of ‘deliberate metaphor’ is helpful but does not constitute a major threat; instead, some of his own arguments allow for the very existence of deliberate metaphor and focus on the quality of its effects or the difficulties of its identification. Moreover, some of the assumptions Gibbs attributes to theorists of deliberate metaphor are mistaken, for instance when it comes to the alleged opposition between deliberate metaphor versus conventional metaphor, or the supposition that the notion of deliberate metaphor can be conceptualized without taking seriously the state of play in the neurocognition of language and consciousness. When a more precise model is inspected, it is possible to develop the notion of deliberate metaphor in more sophisticated ways, even incorporating the picture Gibbs paints of the complexities of unconscious and conscious processing without insuperable difficulties. Deliberate metaphors really are deliberate, but we have to be quite careful about what that means.
References Musolff, A. (2004). Metaphor and political discourse: Analogical reasoning in debates about Europe. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Steen, G.J. (2007). Finding metaphor in grammar and usage: A methodological analysis of theory and research. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Steen, G. J. (2008). The paradox of metaphor: Why we need a three-dimensional model of metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol, 23(4), 213–241. Steen, G. J. (2010). When is metaphor deliberate? In N.-L. Johannesson, C. Alm-Arvius & D. C. Minugh (Eds.), Selected papers from the Stockholm 2008 Metaphor Festival (pp. 43–63). Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Steen, G.J. submitted. Conscious metaphorical thought is for facilitating social and cultural interactions: From conceptual to deliberate metaphor.
Author’s address Gerard J. Steen Department of Language and Communication VU University Amsterdam
[email protected]
© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved
