Language, culture, and metaphor

Language, culture, and metaphor are connected in a million ways. Since our focus in the chapter is on metaphor, the best way to go about discussing their relationships is to start out from metaphor. The key notion of Cultural Linguistics is “cultural conceptualization” ( Sharifian 2015 , 2017a, 2017b). Conceptualizing the world is to a great extent metaphorical ( Lakoff and Johnson 1980 ). However, conceptualization rests on cognitive processes, and thus cultural conceptualization is both cultural and cognitive in nature. There is no cultural conceptualization without our cognitive apparatus participating in it. Since metaphor/metaphorization is a fundamental cognitive process, the theories of metaphor that are most relevant to the study of cultural conceptualization are cognitive theories. We assume that with the help of such theories of metaphor we can begin to understand the role of metaphor in cultural phenomena.