Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Metaphor in Culture
- 1 Introduction: Metaphor and the Issue of Universality
- PART I UNIVERSAL METAPHORS
- PART II DIMENSIONS OF METAPHOR VARIATION
- 4 Cross-Cultural Variation
- 5 Within-Culture Variation in Metaphor
- PART III ASPECTS OF METAPHOR INVOLVED IN VARIATION
- PART IV CAUSES OF METAPHOR VARIATION
- References
- Index
5 - Within-Culture Variation in Metaphor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Metaphor in Culture
- 1 Introduction: Metaphor and the Issue of Universality
- PART I UNIVERSAL METAPHORS
- PART II DIMENSIONS OF METAPHOR VARIATION
- 4 Cross-Cultural Variation
- 5 Within-Culture Variation in Metaphor
- PART III ASPECTS OF METAPHOR INVOLVED IN VARIATION
- PART IV CAUSES OF METAPHOR VARIATION
- References
- Index
Summary
People everywhere live in a complex society that is structured in a large number of ways. We are members of groups that have more or less social power; in many societies we belong to different ethnic groups; we live in geographical regions that leave their mark on the groups of people inhabiting them; we and many other people pursue similar jobs; we observe certain customs and conventions in particular situations in which we communicate with others; and, of course, we all have our own idiosyncrasies as individual human beings. These divisions of the complexities of social and cultural life are well known to sociologists, anthropologists, and others. They are also well known to sociolinguists who study variation in the use of language. These scholars point out that languages reveal a great deal of variation according to these and other divisions of society. They also tell us that languages vary because the experiences of the people divided by these dimensions of experience vary. So if it is true that metaphors reveal and, in some cases, constitute human experience (see chapter 9), then we should expect metaphors, both of the conceptual and of the linguistic kind, to vary according to these social divisions. Indeed, this is my hypothesis in the present chapter. I will suggest that an obvious place to look for variation in metaphor are the social, cultural, stylistic, individual, and so on, dialects and varieties that have been identified by sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and other researchers of language variation in a social and cultural context.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Metaphor in CultureUniversality and Variation, pp. 88 - 114Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005