What empirical work can tell us about primary metaphors

words (e.g., grief and justice) and asked his subjects to rate how similar/different they were. Both words appeared horizontally alligned, side by side, but in three different positions; close to each other, separated from each other, or far from each other. His results showed that people would judge the same word-pair as more similar when they had seen it close to each other, and as more different when it had been presented in the more distant condition. However, these results were reversed in a second experiment in which the stimuli involved pictures of unfamiliar faces. This time, when the pairs of faces were presented far from each other, they were judged as more similar than when they were presented close to each other. He included a final experiment in which concrete words were presented and subjects were asked to evaluate their similarity either in appearance or in function/use. The results showed that subjects who were asked to judge the similarity of the words using a conceptual judgement criterion (i.e., function or use) tended to evaluate closer words as more similar and farapart word pairs as less similar, while subjects which had to decide on perceptual similarity performed in the inverse direction (i.e., close as less similar and far as more similar). Casasanto’s study shows how, though linguistically, no difference is found between both types of similarity (we would use the same metaphor in the same way in both cases), there seems to be a difference in the mapping of similarity to distance depending on which dimension is to be evaluated. This can be taken as a very clear case in which empirical testing can not only enrich and refine the predictions by CMT but go beyond them, uncovering mechanisms which cannot be accessed using a purely linguistic methodology. 3.3. Other concrete-to-abstract metaphors IMPORTANT IS BIG. There is another group of metaphors which relate the physical domain of SIZE with different abstract domains. This is what can be seen in the IMPORTANT IS BIG metaphor investigated by Schubert (in press) and Valenzuela & Soriano (2008). Valenzuela & Soriano (2008) reported on a series of experiments in which subjects had to decide which of two factors they judged as more important in their lifes. These “life factors” were abstract concepts and the answer to the task was a matter of personal choice (i.e., there was no “correct” answer). Thus, they would see “friendship” and “money” side by side, and they would have to choose one of these factors as more important for their lives. Size was manipulated by varying the font in which the words were presented; one of them was bigger (20 pt. font) and the other one smaller (12 pt. font). Their results showed that people were faster in their choice of the more important factor when the size was metaphor-coherent (i.e., big in size) than in the inverse case. Additionally, in another block, subjects were asked to choose the less important factor for them. This time, if the IMPORTANT IS BIG metaphor was present, they should be quicker when choosing the smaller stimulus: roughly, an attempt to categorize a stimulus appearing in big font as “less important” should produce a inconsistency due to the automatic activation of “more important” associated to big stimuli, and accordingly subjects should take a longer time. Indeed such was the result, which can be taken a an indication that the metaphor IMPORTANT IS BIG is automatically activated in on-line tasks. In another experiment, Valenzuela and Soriano (2008) used the experimental paradigm known as Implicit Association Test (IAT) in which subjects have to create a novel-compound category made up of compatible or incompatible notions. In the case of the IMPORTANT IS BIG metaphor, subjects were much quicker and accurate when they had to group together “important” words along with “big” words (and “small” and “unimportant” words) than in the non-congruent cases (i.e., associating “important” and “small” words and “unimportant” and “big” words). Similar results, though still preliminary, have been reported by these authors applying this experimental paradigm to the AFFECTION IS WARMTH metaphor. Schubert et alli (in press) has also investigated the relation between size and power (POWERFUL IS BIG), again showing the existence of flexibility in metaphorical mappings. In his experiments, subjects had to assign a social group to the category “powerful” or “powerless”. The words corresponding to the categories were presented either in big or small font. Their results showed that people’s responses were both quicker and more accurate when the stimulus font size matched the metaphor than in the inverse cases. However, when subjects were explained the possible effect of size and encouraged to try to avoid its influence, their error rate decreased; in a further experiment, not only were subjects informed of these possible effects, but they were also presented a high number of incongruent mappings (e.g., powerful group with small font), thus increasing their practice with these cases. In this last study, subjects reaction times also improved, showing again that the default application of metaphoric mappings can be subject to conscious control by part of conceptualizers, given a task that so requires it. 4. Conclusions The goal of CMT is one of the most relevant for cognitive science: it is concerned with how we structure thought. As such, any advancement in the theory is vitally relevant for anyone interested in the study of cognition. Primary Metaphor Theory has contributed to place CMT nearer to other current approaches to the study of embodied cognition, such as Embodiment theory (e.g., Glenberg, 1997), Simulation Theories (e.g., Zwaan, 2004) or Perceptual Symbol Theory (e.g., Barsalou 1999), to the extent that some of the results of these compatible theories could be taken as providing partial support for some of the views of CMT. At the very least, the basic idea that there are complex and abstract domains which are structured by the projection of information from more concrete domains (e.g., good and up/white/big) does seem to receive support from many different studies from different areas. This is not to say that the CMT or even Primary Metaphor Theory are without problems. For example, the origin and development course of primary metaphors (i.e., the Conflation hypothesis) has been insufficiently spelled out; the interplay between universality and culture-specificity (e.g., Kovecses, 2007) is in clear need of further clarification; even the psycholinguistic status of metaphors is not completely clear yet. Lakoff’s view of metaphors as stable, neurophysiologically implemented structures in the mind/brain has not received clear support from neuroscience, and proponents of cognition as a dynamical system would suggest alternative explanations for many of the phenomena observed. Finally, how do we choose between different versions of a metaphor (that is, the issue of flexibility) is again a point that will have to be clarified in the future. At the very least, the interplay between linguistically-based theoretical proposals on the one hand, and empirical work coming from other cognitive sciences, such as cognitive psychology, social psychology or neuroscience, on the other, seems to be 8 For more information on these specific metaphors, see Meier & Robinson (2004), Meier, Robinson, Clore (2004) and Meier, Robinson & Caven (in press), respectively. 9 For a view explicitly challenging the Conflation hypothesis, see Seitz (2005). 10 For a review of these approaches, see Calvo-Garzón, Laakso & Gomila (2008); from the more “cognitivelinguistic” camp, Gibbs seems to be seduced by this dynamic-emergent approach (e.g., Gibbs & Cameron, 2008; Gibbs, 2008). working in this case. Thus, we have seen how empirical studies can suggest refinements in the theory (as was the case of the different time-lines existing in the TIME IS SPACE metaphor), point at non-linguistic realizations of metaphor (cf. left-right metaphors for time), or suggest restrictions or additions to proposed metaphors (cf Casasanto’s work on similarity as closeness). And if we take a look as the way in which other scientific disciplines work, it seems that, to use another spatial metaphor, this is the way to go.