Cognitive metaphor

Concrete Understanding

The cognitive metaphor of a website is the association of the site concept to an experience outside of a site's environment. It is used to enhance the level of comfort the user experiences using the website since this association relates the navigational schemes, processes, and informational areas of a site to something familiar. For example, a tabbed metaphor can be used in a site for organization of information because users can relate the site's organization to that of using a file drawer of tabbed file folders. This relationship between the file drawer containing folders allows a user who is unfamiliar with a website to navigate it comfortably and with less aggrivation.

Literature and Cognitive Metaphor

"The most recent linguistic approach to literature is that of cognitive metaphor, which claims that metaphor is not a mode of language, but a mode of thought. Metaphors project structures from source domains of schematized bodily or enculturated experience into abstract target domains. We conceive the abstract idea of life in terms of our experiences of a journey, a year, or a day. We do not understand Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to be about a horse-and-wagon journey but about life. We understand Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" as a poem about the end of the human life span, not a trip in a carriage. This work is redefining the critical notion of imagery. Perhaps for this reason, cognitive metaphor has significant promise for some kind of rapprochement between linguistics and literary study."

Additional Reading

Organizational structure in multiagent systems: metaphorical contributions to a discussion See Page 2 Section II