Conceptual metaphor

A conceptual metaphor or cognitive metaphor is a metaphor which refers to one domain (group of ideas) in terms of another. For example, treating quantity in terms of direction:

1. Prices are rising.
2. I attacked every weak point in his argument. (Argument as war rather than enquiry or search for truth).
3. Life is a journey.
4. Love talked about as if it were war or competition.
5. Time talked about as if it were a path through space, or a quantity that can be saved or spent or wasted.

The idea of a conceptual metaphor came from a book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980: Metaphors we live by.

"The most recent linguistic approach to literature is that of cognitive metaphor, which claims that metaphor is not a mode of language, but a mode of thought". Donald Freeman.

A convention is to write conceptual metaphors in small capital letters, e.g. time is money, with the target domain (idea being referred to) first, here "money," and the source domain (terms used to refer to it) second.^[1]

1. ↑ "Time Is Money". www.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp.