Verbal art in surrealism is founded on isomorphism, but it is a very different
conception from that posed within cognitive linguistics through the Invariance
Hypothesis. Here is a perception of language that is transcendental and uses metaphor
to go beyond everyday meaning, in order to reframe fundamentally our view of the
world and ourselves. In other terms, here is a perception of language that is dialec-
tical and uses metaphor to go beyond the familiar understandings of ICMs, in order
to recast all our ICMs and retroactively alter our perceptions of base
and
target in
our conceptual experience. This is metaphor as interanimation, in which the process
of ‘metaphoring’ encourages us to see the familiar world in a new light as a synthesis
of base and target mapping.
Let me demonstrate this by returning to the opening of Breton’s poem quoted
above. Each line contains a single metaphorical mapping, except the fifth which maps
the wife’s lips with two bases (a ‘cockade’ and ‘stars’). Her ‘waist’ is mapped with
two ICMs, and lines 7–10 map her ‘tongue’ with four different things. Applying the
Invariance Hypothesis to a reading of this would predict only incoherence, as Turner
points out (Turner 1990: 248) [. . .]. On first inspection the Breton passage is not
exactly like this: in the line, ‘My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of
stars of the last magnitude’, two distinct sources are mapped onto one target; and in
the last four lines of the quoted passage, four distinct sources (‘rubbed amber and
glass’, ‘a stabbed host’, ‘a doll’ and ‘an unbelievable stone’) are mapped onto one
target (‘tongue’). However, if the whole poem is read as a general conceptual mapping
in which the poet’s wife is the target ICM, then there are possibly 75 distinct compo-
nents of very diverse ICMs, and there are 11 source ICMs even just in the passage
from the beginning of the poem I quoted above. All of these map, sometimes sever-
ally, onto particular components of the ‘wife’. If the passage is to be read as surrealism,
then simple incoherence does not seem an adequate account of this poem.
This paper began by noting that ICMs are radial structures that display prototype
effects. They are built up by accumulated experience and are constantly being revised
and altered to a greater or lesser degree. Those ICMs that are revised the least consti-
tute the individual’s relatively stable view of the world and the things in it. Those
that are revised the most encompass new experiences, unfamiliar things, items of
debate or uncertainty, or perhaps areas of which the person does not have a strong
opinion and has been swayed by the arguments in various incoming bits of language.
The aspect of cognitive linguistics that is essential here is the notion of prototype
effects: categories are not absolutes but are fluid continua of knowledge. Together
with the notion of radiality, this means that ICMs have central, secondary and periph-
eral elements in their structures. The central problem which the Invariance
Hypothesis was invented to solve is a consequence of the question of how to decide
which elements are mapped and which are left behind. This question can be answered
directly, without any need for Invariance.
The key idea here is
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