Pressure of Cultural Cognition on Discourse Metaphors

Kövecses investigates the impact of subject matter, communicative situation, physical environment as well as the conventionalized pattern of conceptualization on metaphor usage in natural discourses in terms of “pressure of coherence”.This perspective has a defect in that it idealizes the discourse maker as the interface between the contextual factors and the discourse.In contrast, this article approaches metaphor use with enlightenment from hermeneutics, which requires a recognition of the socio-cultural situatedness of body, language and cognition, and, from a Cognitive Sociolinguistic perspective, observes the specific pattern and variation of metaphor usage as the result of the “pressure of coherence” up from shared cultural cognition.