Being Critical About Metaphor

Metaphor has long been a focus of linguistic study as it entertains us with descriptive and imaginative associations between dissimilar entities of thought and practice. However, the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 2003) showed that there was much more to metaphor as they proposed a fundamental linkage between metaphor and how human beings actually think. It is for this reason that studying metaphor within discourse can yield fundamental, underlying, truths that may not be apparent to the discourse participants and analysts who are focused only on the language and linguistic details. From the perspective of critical discourse analysis, being critical about metaphor and how it is used can yield interesting results about the thought process and ideologies behind a discourse event. For example, this has been shown, to great effect, by many authors when analysing the discourse surrounding the events of the first and second gulf wars. In this chapter we will consider some of the theories developed to better understand metaphor and how it relates to human thinking. We will then consider critical discourse analysis and how the critical analysis of metaphor has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool within this context.