# Methods of Annotating and Identifying Metaphors in the Field of Natural Language Processing
## 2 Theories of the Metaphor
### Conceptual Metaphor  
In \"Metaphors we live by\", [PERSON] and [PERSON] present their theory stating that metaphors influence our thinking and actions, and that our conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. They support the theory with concepts such as ARGUMENT IS WAR (e.g., \"Your claims are _indefensible.\"_, \"He _attacked every weak_ point in my argument.\")-stating that it is \"important to see that we don't just talk about arguments in the terms of _war_\", but that we actually can \"win or lose arguments\". Furthermore, the authors conclude that \"the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another\". In the specific example of ARGUMENT IS WAR, we comprehend ARGUMENT and talk about it by means of WAR. The authors support their theory by citing a series of concepts and examples from everyday life and communication (for example, TIME IS MONEY, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, MIND IS A MACHINE, THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS). At the core of the conceptual metaphor is the mapping of one domain (source) to another (target), as shown in the example ARGUMENT IS WAR, where WAR is the source and ARGUMENT the target domain. This mapping takes place not only at the linguistic level but also at the cognitive level, which affects our understanding of the world and the phenomena that surround us. [PERSON] and [PERSON] focus precisely on the discovery of such concepts (in the mind) and primarily deal with conventional metaphors (cf. [3]), which are so common in everyday speech (and life) that we do not even notice them. It is important to distinguish among common, conventional metaphors and novel metaphors. (It could be argued whether the conventional--novel metaphor distinction is a binary one or a scale, but this discussion is out of the scope of this paper.) What is interesting about novel metaphors is how some of them become conventional. Those that do are often accepted in many languages [3; 4]--which means that these languages, apart from sharing the same metaphors on the linguistic level, share the same concepts, i.e., understanding of the world. Some of the concepts cited by [PERSON] [4] that are applicable in several languages are, for example, describing a person's intelligence through brightness, which we find, for example, in English \"_bright_ student\" and Spanish \"una persona _brilliant_\". Describing anger as a hot liquid (e.g., \"let off _steam_\", \"_steaming_ at the ears\") is also a concept that we find in a number of languages--English, Japanese, Chinese and Hungarian. The existence of the same or similar concepts in different languages is further evidence for the conceptual metaphor theory. Another characteristic of the conceptual metaphor is its asymmetry, i.e., its unidirectionality--if we use the same example of ARGUMENT IS WAR, we can see that we can express argument using the experience of war, but we will not explain war through the experience of the argument. The same applies, for instance, to LOVE IS A JOURNEY--we do not talk about a journey using the experience of love. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [1] explain this phenomenon by noting that concepts that are less clear and less concrete are explained through concepts that are more clear, concrete and grounded in our experience. Relying on the theory of the conceptual metaphor, [PERSON] [5] in his doctoral thesis develops the theory of primary metaphor, which shows us how metaphors can be divided into primary and complex metaphors, which we create from primary metaphors. Primary metaphors represent simple patterns such as MORE IS UP (e.g., \"My income _rose_ last year\") (Example for MORE IS UP concept taken from [1]), and these are the atoms that make up molecules, i.e., complex metaphors [5; 6]. [PERSON] gives the example of the concept THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS and decomposes this concept into simpler and more primary concepts (atoms) making up a more complex concept (molecule)--ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE and VIABILITY IS EEECTNESS.