40 years of Metaphors We Live By: Remarks on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphors

In the essay “Cognitive Linguistics and Autonomous Linguistics,” published in 2007 in the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, John R. Taylor suggests the dialogue and even the integration of cognitive linguistics with other strands of language studies. Following this line of argument, I reanalyze George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphors in this paper. I aim to make explicit the empirical and rhetorical excesses of these authors since the publication of the book Metaphors We Live By, 45 years ago, as a consequence to a large extent of their attack on Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar. With this, I hope to facilitate the approximation between generativism and cognitivism in biolinguistics.