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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts Primary Metaphor as a Linguistic and Conceptual Phenomenon Joseph Grady "Primary metaphors" are a category of fundamental and schematic conceptual associations, which give rise to metaphoric language in relatively predictable ways and across a broad variety of languages. Evidence for metaphoric conceptualizations like DIFFICULTY IS HEAVINESS, SIMILARITY IS PROXIMITY, PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS, IMPORTANCE IS SIZE and PASSION IS HEAT is found in languages around the world, reflecting the universality of the experience types which motivate the conceptual bindings. In this talk I will discuss features of primary metaphors - as well as evidence that they are a special class - and will describe the distinct classes of concepts which serve as "source" and "target" for the metaphors. (Spatial Proximity, for example, is a source concept for the target concept of Similarity, as in, These two colors are quite "close.") Primary source concepts are characterized by image content - referring more directly to perception and sensation - while primary target concepts are associated with "response content." They refer to basic cognitive responses such as the judgement of similarity.
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