Modeling Indexicality

Modeling Indexicality 6. Cognitive linguistics (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Ungerer & Schmid 1996) argues that all human languages are organized in terms of intricate, complex, intersecting, and overlapping systems of metaphors (and related figurative devices). These metaphors shape, in different ways in different cultures, how we interpret our experience and how we think about ourselves and the material, social, and cultural world. For example, in English we often think and talk about argument in ways shaped by how we talk about warfare (“I defended my argument and destroyed his case at the same time”) or talk about minds as if they were enclosed spaces (“He just couldn’t get it into his head”).

 (From Gee, “The new literacy studies and the ‘social turn’”)