Combining Metaphors: From Metaphoric Amalgams to Binary Systems

Metaphoric amalgams consist in the integration of two or more metaphors resulting in a unified conceptual package. They have been distinguished from the sequencing or chaining of metaphors without incorporation of the structure of one into another. Such amalgams have been categorized into single-source and double-source. In the former, one of the metaphors becomes part of the source–target structure of another metaphor; in the latter, two metaphors map their source domains onto the same target domain. On the basis of a multisource corpus, the present article revises previous work on these categories, thus solving some analytical problems. This has also resulted in the addition of new analytical categories. This is the case of what I propose to term binary metaphoric amalgams. For example, the sentence ‘The sign warned us against skating on the pond’ combines two metaphors by integrating them into a force-dynamic schematic configuration: A PERSON’S WILL IS A FORCE and REGULATIONS ARE COUNTERFORCES, which are based on the AGONIST/ANTAGONIST force schema. Here, the integration is based on co-dependency: two metaphors complement each other and act at the same level within an image-schematic complex.