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A generally agreed-upon basis for some metaphorical meaning is embodiment.  A difficult endeavour, for instance, might be labeled a “reach”, due to many people’s common primarily sensory and motor experiences of striving to grasp some object if it involves a significant distance or difficulty.  Other agreed upon sources of metaphorical meaning are cultural, as in saying a person’s accomplishment is a “slam dunk”.  But relatively little attention has been given to still other sources of metaphorical meaning not based purely in sensory and/or motor functioning, or in general knowledge or culture, including some metaphors for morality.  Some such metaphors may arise from other experiential bases argued to stem from moral intuitions (e.g., the purity of something)—a robust, cognitive-embodied construct from Psychology (see Haight 2013).  The study investigated people’s reactions to metaphors which align with such moral intuitions, like saying someone engaging in a questionable moral act is “sick”, versus alternative metaphors also viable for discussing morality but not tapping as directly into moral intuitions, as in saying the same person’s behavior is “twisted”.  Results revealed that the more people care about the purity moral intuition, as measured by the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Haight, 2013) the more apt they found purity metaphors (“he’s contaminated”) relative to distortion ones (“he’s bent”) to describe a person’s morally questionable act.  Additionally, participants reported greater social affiliation with speakers of the purity over the distortion metaphors.  Norming work addressed possible obviating factors like generic, metaphorical, and disapproval severity aptness.

Biography:  Herbert Colston is a Professor of Linguistics at the ¶®É«µÛ, Canada. His research investigates figurative language, multimodality, poetics, and embodiment in language use and comprehension. He has authored three books, How Language Makes Meaning: Embodiment and Conjoined Antonymy (2019), Using Figurative Language (2015), and Interpreting Figurative Meaning (2012, with Raymond Gibbs), all with Cambridge University Press. He is Editor of the journal Metaphor and Symbol (Taylor & Francis) and co-edits the John Benjamins book series Figurative Thought and Language with Angeliki Athanasiadou