178 Chapter 4 we cannot grasp abstract concepts directly through our embodied perception of the world, so we need to understand them in other more concrete terms.590 In other words, certain abstract concepts cannot be thought of without metaphor. Metaphor is therefore essential for being able to think about what these (target) concepts mean. For example, the more abstract concept of time is conventionally understood through the domain of space (e.g., ‘the day before yesterday’). Time may be difficult to think of without recourse to this metaphorical way of thinking.591 Also the abstract notion of God, understood as an opposite to humanity and the physical world, is difficult to think about without recourse to metaphor. When understanding who/what God is, people often take recourse to more concrete concepts, such as thinking about God as a father or a judge.592 This also means that usually the metaphorical process is unidirectional: metaphors work from the more concrete to the more abstract, not the other way around.593 This aligns with the idea that human cognition (and hence language and thought) is dependent on bodily interaction with the world. Another premise of a cognitive approach to metaphor is therefore that the source domain of conceptual metaphors is often grounded in ‘bodily actions and experiences’, and that understandings of abstract target domains work through embodied experiences of the source domain.594 ‘Cognitive’ is often used interchangeably with ‘embodied’ or ‘conceptual’ when referring to this approach in current metaphor research.595 Experimental and neuroimaging research in social psychology and neurosciences have provided supporting evidence for the theoretical claims of the embodied understanding of metaphors.596 CMT does not only hold that metaphors reflect how language users conceive of abstract concepts, metaphors are also understood to partially shape the way language users think about target domains. Some more reflection on the mapping process of metaphors will illustrate this point. Metaphors do not necessarily equate all aspects of the source domain to the target domain, but only some aspects are perceived to correlate to the target domain. Only these aspects are mapped unto the target domain. For example, the material of a roller coaster (e.g., steel, wood, etc.) is not an aspect that is relevant in our understanding of doing a PhD. This aspect of the source domain (roller coaster) is therefore 590 Recent developments in the understanding of human cognition nuances the view that cognition is shaped by bodily perception. Although bodily perception is still considered a dominant mode of cognition, and the source for metaphors, also other aspects have been identified to play a part. Kövecses for example identifies that metaphorical cognition is not only situated in the body, but also in situations, discourses and accumulated conceptual knowledge. Kövecses’ findings are a refinement of the embodied understanding of conceptual metaphors, but the basic premises of the original theory are still reinforced. Kövecses (2015). 591 For research on the understanding of time through metaphor, see the relevant discussion in Han et al. (2022). 592 An understanding of God/divine as one end of a spectrum and humans as non-divine as the other (and in describing desires and attempts to bridge this gap, by becoming more divine and less-human, e.g., by Christian saints), is for example expressed in a study discussing mostly, but not exclusively, a Jewish-Christian understanding of spirituality, see Waaijman (2000). 593 Kovecses (2002), p. 7. 594 Gibbs (2017b), p. 23. 595 E.g., in Hampe (2017). 596 See e.g., Gibbs (2011), pp. 541–542; Matlock (2022), p. 114; Müller and Marienfeld (2022).
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