"Heaps of meanings": A multidimensional approach to metaphorical expressions

Abstract

In the public discourse, if a manager is described as being above their employees or a queen is referred to as “her royal highness”, we tend to understand both expressions as cues of powerful positions, disregarding the explicit verticality of their meaning. Similarly, if a friend or family member calls to confess to a lie and goes on to say they feel lighter, we do not genuinely assume they have lost weight since the beginning of the conversation. Instead, we understand that holding a lie or a secret can often feel heavy. Both the usage and comprehension of these expressions reveal what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson termed Conceptual Metaphors (CMs; Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). According to the authors, CMs are mechanisms used to convey abstract concepts through concrete notions, such as power through a vertical scale and guilt as weight. These expressions, although so implicitly used and understood, are present in everyday speech and have been proven to shape our understanding of several concepts, as well as our actions (Kouchaki & Smith, 2014; Schubert, 2005; Winter et al., 2020). Nevertheless, the existing research lacks consensus in categorising the different types of CMs. With the publication of the CM Theory, the authors enumerated a plausible CM organisation but went on to publish a different classification years later (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Similarly, research has attempted to divide CMs into primary and non-primary categories, arguing that the former would be largely grounded on bodily experience and, therefore, universal (Grady, 1997). However, as has been detailed, this distinction is based on the assumption of a "prototypical human body" that can be deemed non-inclusive and is primarily concerned with the English language (Littlemore, 2019). Such discord presents a research gap that can hinder the credibility of existing studies since CMs from different types may elicit differences in processing, thus explaining possible disparities in studies resorting to several CMs. Furthermore, theories of CM classification have, to the best of our knowledge, included only one language when determining CM types. Nevertheless, experimental research using CMs as stimuli is often conducted in several languages, and it frequently fails to consider that equivalent CMs in different languages may belong to distinct categories. Hence, in this normative study, we have focused on collecting multiple CMs conveyed through metaphorical expressions in both English and Portuguese. Additionally, we have asked participants to evaluate these expressions through a Likert-scale in terms of concreteness, embodiment, familiarity, valence, arousal, and transparency, variables that have been previously identified as affecting metaphoric processing (Jankowiak, 2020). Thus, we have strived to bridge the existing research gap by proposing a new avenue in which CMs are assessed in pertinent dimensions - and thus able to comprise controlled stimuli in future research - rather than being fitted into previously existing, and often arbitrary, categories.