The neural theory of metaphor

Report: January, 2009. An earlier version appeared in: R. Gibbs. 2008 The Metaphor Handbook, Cambridge University Press. The Neural Theory of Metaphor George Lakoff University of California at Berkeley The neural revolution is changing our understanding of the brain and the mind in radical ways, and that is no less true in the theory of metaphor. It is 30 years since Mark Johnson and I wrote Metaphors We Live By in 1979. Though the fundamental outlines of what we discovered remain as valid today as they were then, developments in brain science and neural computation have vastly enriched our understanding of how conceptual metaphor works. This is an intermediate report, as of January 2009. You may well ask why…