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Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality

Metaphors, a ubiquitous feature of human language, reflect mappings from one conceptual domain onto another. Although founded on bidirectional relations of similarity, their linguistic expression is typically unidirectional, governed by conceptual hierarchies pertaining to abstractness, animacy and...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Gil, David, Shen, Yeshayahu
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8059515/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33745312
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0193
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author Gil, David
Shen, Yeshayahu
author_facet Gil, David
Shen, Yeshayahu
author_sort Gil, David
collection PubMed
description Metaphors, a ubiquitous feature of human language, reflect mappings from one conceptual domain onto another. Although founded on bidirectional relations of similarity, their linguistic expression is typically unidirectional, governed by conceptual hierarchies pertaining to abstractness, animacy and prototypicality. The unidirectional nature of metaphors is a product of various asymmetries characteristic of grammatical structure, in particular, those related to thematic role assignment. This paper argues that contemporary metaphor unidirectionality is the outcome of an evolutionary journey whose origin lies in an earlier bidirectionality. Invoking the Complexity Covariance Hypothesis governing the correlation of linguistic and socio-political complexity, the Evolutionary Inference Principle suggests that simpler linguistic structures are evolutionarily prior to more complex ones, and accordingly that bidirectional metaphors evolved at an earlier stage than unidirectional ones. This paper presents the results of an experiment comparing the degree of metaphor unidirectionality in two languages: Hebrew and Abui (spoken by some 16 000 people on the island of Alor in Indonesia). The results of the experiment show that metaphor unidirectionality is significantly higher in Hebrew than in Abui. Whereas Hebrew is a national language, Abui is a regional language of relatively low socio-political complexity. In accordance with the Evolutionary Inference Principle, the lower degree of metaphor unidirectionality of Abui may accordingly be reconstructed to an earlier stage in the evolution of language. The evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality in metaphors argued for here may be viewed as part of a larger package, whereby the development of grammatical complexity in various domains is driven by the incremental increases in socio-political complexity that characterize the course of human prehistory. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.
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spelling pubmed-80595152021-05-14 Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality Gil, David Shen, Yeshayahu Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci Part III: Prehistoric Behaviour, Cognition, and the Brain Metaphors, a ubiquitous feature of human language, reflect mappings from one conceptual domain onto another. Although founded on bidirectional relations of similarity, their linguistic expression is typically unidirectional, governed by conceptual hierarchies pertaining to abstractness, animacy and prototypicality. The unidirectional nature of metaphors is a product of various asymmetries characteristic of grammatical structure, in particular, those related to thematic role assignment. This paper argues that contemporary metaphor unidirectionality is the outcome of an evolutionary journey whose origin lies in an earlier bidirectionality. Invoking the Complexity Covariance Hypothesis governing the correlation of linguistic and socio-political complexity, the Evolutionary Inference Principle suggests that simpler linguistic structures are evolutionarily prior to more complex ones, and accordingly that bidirectional metaphors evolved at an earlier stage than unidirectional ones. This paper presents the results of an experiment comparing the degree of metaphor unidirectionality in two languages: Hebrew and Abui (spoken by some 16 000 people on the island of Alor in Indonesia). The results of the experiment show that metaphor unidirectionality is significantly higher in Hebrew than in Abui. Whereas Hebrew is a national language, Abui is a regional language of relatively low socio-political complexity. In accordance with the Evolutionary Inference Principle, the lower degree of metaphor unidirectionality of Abui may accordingly be reconstructed to an earlier stage in the evolution of language. The evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality in metaphors argued for here may be viewed as part of a larger package, whereby the development of grammatical complexity in various domains is driven by the incremental increases in socio-political complexity that characterize the course of human prehistory. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’. The Royal Society 2021-05-10 2021-03-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8059515/ /pubmed/33745312 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0193 Text en © 2021 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Part III: Prehistoric Behaviour, Cognition, and the Brain
Gil, David
Shen, Yeshayahu
Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality
title Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality
title_full Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality
title_fullStr Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality
title_full_unstemmed Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality
title_short Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality
title_sort metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality
topic Part III: Prehistoric Behaviour, Cognition, and the Brain
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8059515/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33745312
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0193
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