Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language

The phenomenon of “conventional metaphor,” where much of our ordinary conceptual system and the bulk of our everyday conventional language are structured and understood primarily in metaphorical terms, has gone either unnoticed or undiscussed. Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. The metaphorical concepts time is money, time is a resource, and time is avaluable commodity form a single system based on subcategorization, since in our society money is a limited resource and limited resources are valuable commodities. These subcategorization relationships characterize what we will call “entailment relationships” between the metaphors, time is money entails that timeis a limited resource, which entails that time is a valuable commodity.