Introduction: “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors” by Daniel Casasanto
“The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors” by Daniel Casasanto first appeared in The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language Sciences (2015), published by Cambridge University Press. This influential chapter presents the Hierarchical Mental Metaphors Theory (HMMT), a compelling extension of conceptual metaphor theory, offering a dynamic and layered explanation for how humans use spatial structures to conceptualize abstract domains like time, pitch, and emotional valence. Casasanto challenges the previously dominant view that mental metaphors are universal and fixed, arguing instead that they emerge from both universal patterns of embodied experience and language-, culture-, and body-specific influences. By proposing that mental metaphors are organized hierarchically—beginning with broad, often innate or early-learned “superordinate” metaphor families, which are later shaped by individual experiences—Casasanto demonstrates how metaphors can be simultaneously deeply ingrained and remarkably flexible. This nuanced framework significantly impacts literature and literary theory by providing cognitive underpinnings for metaphorical thinking, influencing how we understand meaning-making, interpretation, and the variability of metaphor across cultures, languages, and individuals. HMMT also opens new pathways for analyzing literary texts, offering a scientific grounding for reader-response variability and the embodied basis of metaphorical language.
Summary of “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors” by Daniel Casasanto
🔍 Mental Metaphors Are Core to Abstract Thinking
“People think about abstract domains like time and goodness metaphorically. This tendency may be universal.” (Casasanto, p. 46)
🧠 Casasanto distinguishes mental metaphors (non-linguistic mappings) from linguistic metaphors, showing that humans often think metaphorically even without language (Casasanto & Bottini, 2014a) 🌐.
📚 Challenges to Universality and Fixity
“Yet the claims that basic mental metaphors are learned, universal, and fixed are all challenged by experimental data” (p. 47)
🧪 Studies show variability across languages, cultures, and individuals. For instance, newborns already show sensitivity to spatial-numerical mappings, suggesting innateness rather than learning (De Hevia et al., 2014) 👶.
🧭 Hierarchical Mental Metaphors Theory (HMMT)
“Even our most basic mental metaphors are constructed over multiple timescales, on the basis of multiple kinds of experience.” (p. 48)
🌱 HMMT proposes that metaphors exist in superordinate families—universal but flexible—shaped by ongoing cultural, linguistic, and bodily experiences. Different mappings from the same family can become dominant over time 🏗️.
🎵 Pitch as an Example of Language-Specific Variation
“Speakers of height languages…incorporate height information into pitch, whereas thickness-language speakers do the same with thickness.” (p. 51)
🎼 Dutch and Farsi speakers conceptualize pitch differently based on the metaphors common in their native language, and brief training in an unfamiliar metaphor can retrain mental mappings (Dolscheid et al., 2013) 🎧.
👶 Infants Show Both Height–Pitch and Thickness–Pitch Mappings
“Four-month-olds…are sensitive to two of the space–pitch metaphors that are found in languages like Dutch and Farsi.” (p. 53)
👶 Infants possess multiple potential mappings early in life. Language strengthens one metaphor over another, not by creating new ones, but by enhancing the activation frequency of existing ones 🔄.
🕓 Temporal Sequences Are Culturally Structured
“The direction in which events flow…varies systematically across cultures.” (p. 55)
📆 While sagittal time metaphors (past behind, future ahead) may be embodied, lateral metaphors (left–right) depend on orthographic experience. Mirror-reading even reverses mental timelines (Casasanto & Bottini, 2014b) 🔄🕰️.
👐 Emotional Valence Tied to Body Dominance
“Right-handers associate positive ideas with right space…left-handers show the opposite.” (p. 57)
💖 The spatial mapping of good vs. bad follows motor fluency. Right-handed people associate “good” with the right, while left-handed people do the opposite. This holds even against cultural conventions (Casasanto, 2009a) ↔️.
🧤 Motor Experience Can Reverse Valence Mappings
“Participants who had worn the right glove showed the opposite left-is-good bias.” (p. 58)
🧠 Temporary shifts in motor fluency, like wearing a glove on the dominant hand, can alter emotional metaphors in less than 15 minutes—proving their plasticity and dependence on physical experience 🕹️.
🔁 Mental Metaphors Are Flexible Yet Stable
“Dispreferred mappings are weakened but not lost and can be adopted quickly with new experience.” (p. 60)
🧬 Even “unused” metaphors persist in memory, enabling people to switch mappings when context shifts (e.g., new languages, scripts, tools). This dual stability and flexibility is a core insight of HMMT 🌍🧠.
🌐 Cognitive Diversity and Conceptual Plasticity
“By understanding how mental metaphors are shaped…we can better understand the origins of our thoughts.” (p. 60)
🌟 Casasanto concludes that mental metaphors are fundamental cognitive tools shaped by diverse experiences. Recognizing their variability enhances our understanding of thought, culture, and language as dynamic systems 🔄🌏.
Theoretical Terms/Concepts in “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors” by Daniel Casasanto
| 🔣 Term | Definition | Explanation / Role in Article | Reference & Usage |
| 🧠 Mental Metaphor | A mapping between non-linguistic mental representations (e.g., from space to time). | Central concept. Distinct from linguistic metaphors; mental metaphors shape how people think about abstract concepts like time, pitch, and emotion. | “People often think in ‘mental metaphors’… even when they are not using any metaphorical language.” (p. 46) |
| 🗣️ Linguistic Metaphor | A metaphor expressed through language, such as “a long vacation.” | Contrasted with mental metaphors. Linguistic metaphors can reinforce mental metaphors over time. | “The term ‘mental metaphor’ is used contrastively with ‘linguistic metaphor’…” (p. 46) |
| 🏛️ Hierarchical Mental Metaphors Theory (HMMT) | A theory that conceptual metaphors exist in superordinate families, with individual mappings strengthened over time via experience. | Casasanto’s main theoretical contribution. Explains both universal origins and individual flexibility in mental metaphor use. | “Even our most basic mental metaphors are constructed over multiple timescales…” (p. 48) |
| 🧩 Superordinate Family of Mappings | A category of related source–target mappings that share a common structure. | Under HMMT, all metaphorical mappings belong to a broader conceptual family (e.g., space–time or space–pitch). | “Cross-domain mappings…are members of a superordinate family of mappings.” (p. 48) |
| ⚖️ Competitive Associative Learning | A cognitive process where activating one association strengthens it while weakening competitors. | Describes how one metaphorical mapping (e.g., “pitch is height”) becomes dominant over others. | “Activating a mapping strengthens…and weakens the competing source–target mappings.” (p. 48) |
| 🔄 Overhypothesis | A general conceptual rule above specific hypotheses within a metaphor family. | Used to describe higher-level abstraction that governs mental metaphor patterns, such as “space maps to time.” | “The overhypothesis could be: ‘Progress through time corresponds to change in position along a spatial path.’” (p. 56) |
| 🧬 Core Knowledge | Innate, possibly evolutionarily developed understanding (e.g., of spatial and numerical relations). | Explains how infants exhibit metaphorical thinking (space–pitch, space–number) prior to language exposure. | “These relationships…could be part of infants’ innate ‘core knowledge’.” (p. 48) |
| 📉 Dispreferred Mapping | A metaphorical mapping that exists but is not dominant due to lack of reinforcement. | Important in explaining flexibility: such mappings can be reactivated later (e.g., via training or new contexts). | “Dispreferred mappings…are weakened but not lost.” (p. 60) |
| 🦾 Motor Fluency Hypothesis | Suggests that ease of action on a body side leads to associating that side with positive valence. | Forms the basis for body-specific mental metaphors, e.g., right is good for right-handers. | “Greater motor fluency leads to more positive feelings…” (p. 58) |
Contribution of “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors” by Daniel Casasanto to Literary Theory/Theories
📘 1. Expands Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT)
🧩 “People think about abstract domains like time and goodness metaphorically. This tendency may be universal.” (p. 46)
- 🌐 Casasanto builds on Lakoff & Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which underpins much cognitive literary theory.
- He advances the theory by showing that metaphorical thinking is not static, but dynamically shaped by cultural, bodily, and linguistic experience.
- Contribution: Helps literary theorists analyze how metaphor use in texts reflects both universal and idiosyncratic cognitive patterns across cultures and individuals.
🧠 2. Introduces HMMT: A Dynamic Model of Meaning-Making
🪜 “Mental metaphors are constructed over multiple timescales… members of a superordinate family of mappings.” (p. 48)
- 🔄 The Hierarchical Mental Metaphors Theory (HMMT) introduces plasticity into metaphor use, challenging rigid linguistic determinism.
- Literary theorists can apply this to interpret reader-response variation and narrative structures influenced by readers’ embodied or cultural metaphor biases.
- Contribution: Supports reader-centered theories like Reception Theory by explaining why readers interpret metaphors differently.
✍️ 3. Reframes Embodied Literary Cognition
💡 “Mental metaphors can be fundamental to our understanding of abstract domains, yet at the same time remarkably flexible.” (p. 46)
- Casasanto’s findings back embodied cognition theories in literature (e.g., Scarry, Gibbs).
- They suggest that reading metaphors activates sensorimotor systems, explaining why metaphors feel viscerally meaningful in literary texts.
- Contribution: Strengthens Embodied Poetics and Neuroaesthetics, by grounding metaphor in bodily and cultural experience.
🌏 4. Offers Tools for Cross-Cultural Literary Analysis
🧭 “Mental metaphors can be language-specific, culture-specific, or body-specific…” (p. 48)
- Casasanto’s research on how language shapes metaphors (e.g., pitch as “high” vs. “thick”) aids Comparative Literature by providing a framework to study how metaphors operate differently in Farsi, Dutch, English, etc.
- Contribution: Supports Postcolonial Literary Theory and Transcultural Criticism by explaining metaphorical variability across linguistic boundaries.
📚 5. Revitalizes Structuralist & Post-Structuralist Concerns
🧬 “How can they be fundamental…if they can change in a matter of minutes?” (p. 48)
- HMMT challenges the idea of metaphors as fixed semiotic structures, offering a fluid, memory-network-based view.
- This bridges Structuralist attention to patterns with Post-Structuralist focus on instability and play of meaning.
- Contribution: Provides a cognitive underpinning for Derridean différance—mappings are in flux, not fully stable.
🗣️ 6. Provides Insight into Literary Language Evolution
💬 “Each time people use a linguistic metaphor, the corresponding mental metaphor is activated…” (p. 48)
- This explains how metaphorical language in literature evolves and reshapes cognition itself over time.
- Contribution: Offers Historical Poetics and Stylistics a model to track how metaphorical patterns in texts shape cultural cognition.
🧤 7. Validates Body-Specific Interpretive Frameworks
✋ “Right-handers associate ‘good’ with the right…left-handers show the opposite.” (p. 57)
- Literary scholars exploring disability studies, gendered embodiment, or queer theory gain from this perspective that bodily difference affects meaning construction.
- Contribution: Adds nuance to embodied literary approaches by introducing body-specific metaphor biases.
Examples of Critiques Through “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors” by Daniel Casasanto
| 📘 Work | 🔍 Metaphorical Mapping | 🧠 HMMT-Based Critique | 💡 Theoretical Insight |
| 🕰️ Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf | Time as Space (e.g., “waves of time,” “moving forward”) | Woolf’s stream of consciousness maps time as a fluid, spatial experience, resonating with Casasanto’s idea that spatial metaphors scaffold temporal thought. | Reflects culture-specific time metaphors (English, left-to-right) and supports reader-response variability through dynamic timelines (p. 55–56). |
| 🦋 The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka | Self as Form (body as metaphor for identity) | Gregor’s transformation illustrates how bodily changes reshape cognition and emotion, aligning with Casasanto’s body-specific metaphors (p. 57). | Embodied experience drives conceptual change—bodily distortion = metaphorical shift in social and existential identity. |
| 🎭 Hamlet by William Shakespeare | Emotion as Space (e.g., “downcast,” “deep sorrow”) | Hamlet’s vacillations between “high hopes” and “low moods” show how valence is spatialized, consistent with Casasanto’s motor fluency hypothesis (p. 58). | Highlights embodied cognition in classic literature—right-hand/left-hand imagery becomes metaphorically charged. |
| 🗺️ Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe | Cultural Time as Spatial Progression | Achebe contrasts linear (colonial) vs. cyclical (Igbo) metaphors of history. Casasanto’s theory explains how readers from different cultures may activate different mappings (p. 56). | Validates HMMT’s use in postcolonial analysis—mental metaphors shaped by linguistic and cultural practices. |
| 🎶 Song of Myself by Walt Whitman | Self as Expansive Space (“I contain multitudes”) | Whitman’s language relies on spatial metaphors of self as infinite, layered—matching Casasanto’s idea of flexible metaphor families. | Supports embodied poetics: metaphorical “sprawl” represents internal diversity and changing self-concept (p. 48–49). |
| 📖 Beloved by Toni Morrison | Memory as Space (“rememory,” “steps back”) | Characters move physically and emotionally through past trauma. The spatialization of time and emotion fits Casasanto’s flexible timeline mappings (p. 53–54). | Aligns with trauma theory and HMMT: metaphorical remapping reflects disrupted but reconfigurable timelines. |
| 🌀 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf | Time as Flowing Path (“The waves fell; withdrew”) | Woolf’s narrative structure aligns with Casasanto’s idea that metaphors of time are nested hypotheses, varying across individuals (p. 56). | Offers insight into reader-driven narrative processing, grounded in flexible mental timelines. |
| 🌄 The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot | Disorientation in Space-Time | The fragmentation and directionlessness of the poem echo HMMT’s idea of weakened or competing metaphor mappings due to conflicting cultural schemas (p. 59–60). | Literary fragmentation = metaphorical instability—supports HMMT’s memory-network competition model. |
Criticism Against “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors” by Daniel Casasanto
❗ 1. Ambiguity Between “Universal” and “Flexible”
Critics argue that the theory struggles to reconcile its claim of universal metaphor families with the radical variability observed across individuals and cultures.
- 🌍 If metaphors are universal (as claimed), why are they so easily reversible in minutes (e.g., with mirrored orthography)?
- ❓ The line between innate mappings and learned cultural variants is sometimes blurred in HMMT, leading to theoretical ambiguity.
🧪 2. Overreliance on Laboratory Evidence
Many of the cited experiments use artificial settings and brief interventions that may not reflect natural cognitive behavior in real-world contexts.
- 🧫 For example, spatial interference tasks with tones and shapes may oversimplify how people process metaphor in language, art, or literature.
- Critics suggest HMMT may not fully explain deep metaphorical reasoning in complex, real-life scenarios like literature or politics.
🧠 3. Neglects Social and Power Structures
While HMMT accounts for body, language, and culture, it underplays the role of ideology, power, and discourse in shaping metaphors.
- ⚖️ Critics from poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives argue that metaphors are not just cognitive, but also political and rhetorical tools.
- HMMT lacks engagement with theories from Foucault, Butler, or Bourdieu regarding language, identity, and control.
📏 4. Limited Scope of Metaphor Domains
The theory focuses mostly on space-based metaphors (e.g., time, pitch, valence), ignoring rich metaphorical domains like morality, love, or nationhood.
- 💘 Metaphors like “love is war” or “the nation is a body” involve emotionally and socially charged concepts that go beyond space–domain mappings.
- HMMT’s hierarchy model might not apply cleanly to multi-domain metaphors or culturally embedded conceptual blends.
🔁 5. Circularity in Evidence and Explanation
Some scholars argue that HMMT explains metaphor flexibility by invoking metaphor flexibility, creating a tautology.
- 🔄 If all metaphor changes can be explained by metaphor competition, the theory may be unfalsifiable without more predictive power.
- The model risks retrospective explanation rather than offering testable forecasts of metaphor use across populations.
🔤 6. Language Bias in “Universal” Claims
Critics point out that most empirical studies cited (Dutch, English, Farsi) reflect Indo-European language systems, leaving global linguistic diversity underexplored.
- 🌐 No substantial data from tonal languages (e.g., Chinese), sign languages, or indigenous oral traditions.
- Claims of universality may be premature or Western-centric.
Representative Quotations from “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors” by Daniel Casasanto with Explanation
🔵 1.
Quotation:
“People think about abstract domains like time and goodness metaphorically. This tendency may be universal.”
Explanation:
This sets the foundation of the chapter, asserting that metaphor is not merely a linguistic device, but a cognitive universal shaping how humans understand complex, abstract domains through more tangible ones like space.
🟢 2.
Quotation:
“Mental metaphors are mappings between non-linguistic representations in a source domain and a target domain that is typically more abstract.”
Explanation:
Here, Casasanto distinguishes mental metaphors from linguistic metaphors, stressing that such mappings occur without language, in our internal thought processes.
🟣 3.
Quotation:
“The specific mappings that get used most frequently or automatically can vary across individuals and groups.”
Explanation:
This illustrates how individual experience, culture, and language can shape which mental metaphors dominate, despite their shared foundational structure.
🔴 4.
Quotation:
“Even our most basic mental metaphors are constructed over multiple timescales, on the basis of multiple kinds of experience.”
Explanation:
Casasanto argues against static universality, proposing that metaphor development is hierarchical and dynamic, adapting over time through layered experiential inputs.
🟡 5.
Quotation:
“Activating a mapping strengthens this source–target association and… weakens the competing source–target mappings in the same family.”
Explanation:
This reveals how competitive associative learning guides which metaphors become dominant, explaining both their entrenchment and malleability.
🟤 6.
Quotation:
“It may be a human universal to conceptualize these domains in terms of space… but the particulars… vary across groups.”
Explanation:
A critical point for cognitive diversity: while spatial metaphors may be universal scaffolds, their expression is culturally and bodily specific.
🔶 7.
Quotation:
“Speakers of thickness languages like Farsi come to rely on multidimensional spatial schemas more strongly than vertical spatial schemas.”
Explanation:
An empirical insight showing how language experience determines spatial representation in mental metaphors—an example of linguistic relativity at work.
🔷 8.
Quotation:
“Participants did not abandon a spatial mapping of time; rather they rapidly adopted a different mental timeline.”
Explanation:
Illustrates the flexibility of metaphorical thinking. Even entrenched metaphors can be reversed or replaced with new experience, often within minutes.
⚫ 9.
Quotation:
“The fluent region of space is good.”
Explanation:
From the theory of bodily relativity, this quote links motor fluency to valence, showing that bodily asymmetries shape ethical and emotional judgments.
⚪ 10.
Quotation:
“By seeking to understand common mechanisms… we can better understand the origins of our thoughts, the extent of cognitive diversity, and the dynamism of our mental lives.”
Explanation:
This concluding statement encapsulates the purpose of HMMT: to account for shared cognitive architecture while explaining its adaptive diversity.
Suggested Readings: “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors” by Daniel Casasanto
- Casasanto, Daniel. “The hierarchical structure of mental metaphors.” Metaphor: Embodied cognition and discourse (2017): 46-61.
- Gärdenfors, Peter. “Mental Representation, Conceptual Spaces and Metaphors.” Synthese, vol. 106, no. 1, 1996, pp. 21–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20117475. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.
- Tilford, Nicole L. “Complex Metaphors.” Sensing World, Sensing Wisdom: The Cognitive Foundation of Biblical Metaphors, Society of Biblical Literature, 2017, pp. 173–98. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1p0vjz8.13. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.
- Fienup-Riordan, Ann. “Metaphors of Conversion, Metaphors of Change.” Arctic Anthropology, vol. 34, no. 1, 1997, pp. 102–16. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40316427. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.