HTML Preview Conduit Metaphor page number 1.
ISSN 1392-0588
DARBAI ir DIENOS
2000.24
Jûratë VAIÈENONIENË
1. INTRODUCTION
Communication is one of the central
human activities, as it helps to keep so-
cial contacts among people. The frequency
of the Lithuanian nouns þodis (word)
and kalba (language) reflects the sig-
nificance of this unique phenomenon of
communication. Þodis is the seventy-
fourth and kalba is the seventy-fifth
word in the frequency list of all the
Lithuanian words (Grumadienë and
Þilinskienë 1998, p. 1). Thus, naturally,
such an important human intercourse
gives impetus to different disciplines to
analyse the perception of communica-
tion and to define the concept itself. The
means to accomplish these tasks in the
present article is the analysis of concep-
tual metaphors that are retrieved from
the Lithuanian and English computer
corpora. Hence the attempt of this ar-
ticle is to combine computer linguistics
and cognitive linguistics that emphasises
the interrelation between language and
mental processes. The statistical data
derived from huge corpora allow us to
make a well-substantiated analysis. The
study of metaphors obtained from collo-
cations and supported by statistical evi-
dence becomes more reliable and less
intuition based. If the examples for analy-
sis are chosen accidentally, they can be
just occasionalisms that are not frequently
used in language. Numerous computer
data allow a linguist to select the most
typical cases and to observe the least
frequent ones. On the other hand, data
from corpora become not merely statis-
tics because cognitive linguistics allows
us to make broader generalisations about
our thinking or our conceptual system.
Furthermore, the data from the corpora
of two different languages make it pos-
sible to compare and contrast the two
languages.
1.1. THE DEFINITION
OF METAPHOR
AND THE CONDUIT METAPHOR
Before the analysis of the computer data,
we should specify how metaphor is un-
derstood in the present article. George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book
Metaphors We Live By present metaphors
as concepts structuring our thinking and
the way we act. Metaphors allow us to
understand less concrete or abstract ideas
in terms of more concrete concepts. When
we use terms of one domain to speak
about another domain, we employ a
metaphor that highlights certain features
while suppressing others (Lakoff and
Johnson 1980, p. 141) and is based on
similarities as well as contrasts between
the two domains.
One more aspect of metaphor that
Lakoff observes in his article Contempo-
The Conduit Metaphor
in English and Lithuanian
A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH