Conceptual metaphors and figurative language interpretation: Food for thought?

How do people interpret metaphors such as The lecture was a three-course meal? Lakoff (1993) has proposed that figurative expressions are interpreted as instantiations of deep conceptual metaphors, such as IDEAS ARE FOOD. In contrast, Glucksberg (1991) has proposed that metaphors are interpreted as assertions of the topic's (e.g., lecture) membership in an attributive category exemplified by the vehicle (e.g., three-course meal). Four experiments that test the predictions of the two views are reported. The results suggest that reference to a conceptual metaphor is not the modal strategy that people use when paraphrasing metaphors (Experiments 1 and 2), rating the similarity between metaphors (Experiment 3), or retrieving metaphors from memory (Experiment 4). In each of these situations, participants relied primarily on the stereotypical properties of the vehicle concept. The results from these experiments are consistent with Glucksberg's (1991) attributive categorization proposal. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.