Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell view our world of meanings as a fabric of concepts and relations. Metaphor bends this fabric, superimposing one concept on another. While Gerhart and Russell are right to view metaphor as a cognitive rather than a purely linguistic phenomenon, their model misses the danger inherent in a cognitive restructuring that leaves some features of a concept highlighted and others backgrounded. When the bending of the conceptual fabric becomes permanent, the essential metaphorical insight is lost, leaving (...) a skewed understanding of reality. We have a tendency to retain the metaphorically altered cognitive topography while forgetting its nonliteral genesis. Thus, the metaphoric process is one from which proceeds not only insight but also, necessarily, misconception. (shrink)

Meaning addresses the fundamental question of human language interaction: what it is to mean, and how we communicate our meanings to others. Experienced textbook writer and eminent researcher Betty J. Birner gives balanced coverage to semantics and pragmatics, emphasizing interactions between the two, and discusses other fields of language study such as syntax, neurology, philosophy of language, and artificial intelligence in terms of their interfaces with linguistic meaning.