Metaphors We Love By: On the Cognitive Metaphors of Love from the 15th Century to the Present

1. Introduction In their pioneering book Metaphors We Live By Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 22) claimed that "the most fundamental values in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in the culture". Almost twenty years later, Gyori (1998: 99) followed in their footsteps by stating that "cultural category formation inevitably involves linguistic coding, because there is no other way for a conceptual category to spread in a culture, i.e. to become explicitly part of the individual members of that culture. " One of the issues which has been studied in detail in the twenty-year history of cognitive metaphors is romantic love. The pioneer in this respect is Kovecses, who started with a discussion of the concepts romantic love, anger and pride (Kovecses 1986) and later wrote another book completely dedicated to romantic love (Kovecses 1988). These undertakings led Kovecses (1990) to consider the structure of emotion concepts in general and to compare their individual and shared characteristics within the framework of the cognitive metaphor theory. Kovecses (1986, 1988, 1990, 2000) always treats specifically romantic love, not love as a more general concept. My previous studies of the meaning of the word LOVE suggest that if one compares romantic and sexual love (eros) with family love (storge), friendship love (philia), religious love (agape) and love of things (khreia), eros indeed tends to be the most frequent category in comparisons across different text categories (Tissari 1999, 2000, 2001). Consequently, eros may be the most prototypical of the different loves that human beings experience (Geeraerts 1988: 208). Nevertheless, I will also include the other kinds of love in the present study in order to approach an overall view of the meaning of the word LOVE. To cover the different approaches to cognitive metaphors that have evolved since Metaphors We Live By, Gibbs and Steen (1999b) suggest that cognitive linguists adhere to two major commitments. These are (a) the commitment to seek general principles that govern all aspects of human language, and (b) the commitment to make accounts of human language consistent with what is generally known about human cognition. In fact, these commitments were introduced by Lakoff (1990: 90-91), who prioritised the cognitive commitment (b). (1) The main question of this article was formulated with respect to the cognitive commitment (b). Langacker (1987: 147-150) suggests that there are such basic cognitive entities as space, time, the visual system and the hearing system. He calls these basic domains. A dozen years later, he presents the same idea in a chrystallised form (Langacker 1999: 171): ". certain cognitive domains (such as space, time and the sensory domains) are basic by virtue of constituting irreducible realms of conceptual potential. " This article employs corpus methodology in order to see what kind of cognitive metaphors appear together with the word LOVE itself in Early Modern and Present-Day English. Instead of presenting a long array of all kinds of metaphors, it focuses on the basic cognitive domains of space, time and sensory perception. This seems to be in accordance with the generalisation commitment (a) as well: if space, time and sensory domains really constitute irreducible realms of human conceptual potential, then they should also govern all aspects of human language. 2. More on love and cognitive metaphors 2.1. Suggested central metaphors Kovecses (1986: 62) says: "[a]mongst the various ways of conceptualizing love the model according to which love is a UNITY OF TWO COMPLEMENTARY PARTS is perhaps central. " His examples of this metaphor include: "We were made for each other. She is my better half Theirs is a perfect match. There is something between them. " He claims that the metaphor LOVE IS A UNITY OF TWO COMPLEMENTARY PARTS is natural and obvious for at least two reasons. …