Metaphors We Live By

Copyright 1980 by the University of Chicago, published 1980; ISBN 0-226-46800-3; LC 80-10783. Dedicated “For Andy and The Gherkin”. Much of the material first appeared as “Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language” in the Journal of Philosophy 77:8, August 1980. The argument — that metaphor is not ornament but the structure of ordinary thought, ARGUMENT IS WAR and so on — became one of the most widely read claims in the humanities. Lakoff appears twice on this shelf: here, and as a contributor to Seuren’s Semantic Syntax, where he is still arguing generative semantics against Chomsky.