Human beings rely on metaphor as a primary cognitive device for interpreting the world around them. Metaphors figure especially strongly in discourse around health, illness, and medicine. It is not just that patients use metaphors to describe their personal experience of being unwell, or that medical professionals employ metaphor to convey a diagnosis, describe a treatment, or explain the funct...

This paper investigates perspectives of applying the notion of “evolution” to the development of conceptual metaphors. It presents evidence for historical changes in mappings from the source domain of LIFE-BODYHEALTH to the target domain of STATE-SOCIETY. The data show that the body politic metaphor has retained a strong influence on popular conceptualisations of the political domain. However, ...

Metonymy, as often treated as a subtype of metaphor by cognitive linguistics, has a different working mechanism; metaphor is based on perceived similarity between things while metonymy on the relationship within things themselves. Cognition and the use of language involve the access and manipulation of mental spaces, which are constructed from human perceptual experience and are extended throug...