DMT is a new theory of metaphor that is one off-shoot of the explosion in metaphor research that occurred from the late 1970s in cognitive science (including parts of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and communication science). Metaphor was reconceptualized as a fundamental and ubiquitous part of thought instead of seeing it as a quirky and rare form of meaning in poetry, rhetoric, and other ‘deviant’ types of language use. During the eighties and nineties, metaphor became a hot topic across the cognitive and social sciences. Researchers showed that metaphor was intimately related to general aspects of language use, analogizing, categorization, and other fundamental aspects of cognition.<\/p>\n
DMT itself arose as a result of a specific combination of new metaphor theories and findings in cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics. This led to the discovery of the paradox of metaphor<\/strong><\/a>: contrary to at least one dominant theory in modern metaphor studies (Conceptual Metaphor Theory), many metaphors are not likely to be comprehended metaphorically (Full article: The Paradox of Metaphor: Why We Need a Three-Dimensional Model of Metaphor<\/a>). In order to resolve the paradox, a new three-dimensional model<\/strong><\/a> for metaphor was postulated, which became the basis for DMT as an alternative theory of metaphor.<\/p>\n DMT then gradually developed over fifteen years of research across the world in what are now several hundreds of studies (<\/strong>see bibliography<\/a>).<\/strong> On the basis of this work, DMT was recently updated and elaborated into a four-dimensional model<\/strong><\/a>. The latest overview can be found in Slowing Metaphor Down: Elaborating Deliberate Metaphor Theory | Gerard J. Steen<\/a>, and is summarized in Frontiers | Thinking by metaphor, fast and slow: Deliberate Metaphor Theory offers a new model for metaphor and its comprehension<\/a>. This marks a new stage in DMT that offers new views of how the original model and the research it inspired should now be understood (see key issues in DMT<\/strong><\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DMT is a new theory of metaphor that is one off-shoot of the explosion in metaphor research that occurred from the late 1970s in cognitive science (including parts of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and communication science). Metaphor was reconceptualized as a … Continue reading