The Nature of Metaphor Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning. Much subject matter, from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can only be comprehended via metaphor. Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature. Metaphorical language is a surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor. Though much of our conceptual system is metaphorical, a significant part of it is nonmetaphorical.
Metaphorical understanding is grounded in nonmetaphorical understanding.
Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject matter in terms of a more concrete, or at least a more highly structured subject matter. The Structure of Metaphor Metaphors are mappings across conceptual domains. Such mappings are asymmetric and partial. Each mapping is a fixed set of ontological correspondences between entities in a source domain and entities in a target domain. When those fixed correspondences are activated, mappings can project source domain inference patterns onto target domain inference patterns.