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Description
Among the structures and devices involved in human linguistic expression, the metaphor stands out as a concept of illustration and meaning-making that has been found in every human language studied so far. Despite their apparently universal use, metaphors are distinct in that they represent a preference of figurative language over literal and in many cases readily available terms. This is a peculiar behavior. The question begs to be asked why we use metaphors instead of literal expressions. What is the advantage of using metaphorical expressions and risk the failure of the utterance, instead of simply adhering to literal meaning of words? The cognitive processes and sequences of creating figurative language in the form of metaphors, as well as the environments that prompt the use of them, the choice of locutionary partners in whose presence one might use a metaphor in speech - and what happens if we choose poorly - are all areas that must be examined deeper, and this thesis will attempt to answer some of these questions. I will focus in particular on the metaphor A COLLEGE DEGREE IS A DOORWAY and examine it from the perspectives of different fields of language study. I will be asking (and answering) the following questions: 1. How old is this metaphor?, 2. Who uses this metaphor?, 3. What is the purpose of this metaphor?, 4. What is the structure of the metaphor, and 5. What are its implications? Using data from five corpora as well as contributions from prominent sources in linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, all of which are intensely curious about and fascinated by metaphors, this metaphor will be scrutinized and examined. I will show that this metaphor was carefully crafted for marketing purposes rather than organically developed like most other metaphors.
