Conceptual metaphor

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In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, is the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the price of peace is rising") or the understanding of time in terms of money (e.g. "I spent time at work today"). A conceptual domain can be any mental organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, often perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain. This theory gained wide attention in the 1990s and early 2000s, although some researchers question its empirical accuracy. The conceptual metaphor theory proposed by George Lakoff and his colleagues arose from linguistics but became of interest to cognitive scientists due to its claims about the mind, the brain and their connections to the body. There is empirical...

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