17 GA. Language can carve out a new space, (an expanded context), where new thoughts can develop
I don’t say that all thinking is verbal. But whatever the mystery of thought is, words are superimposed on top of it, because we always like to explain our perceived images.
Therefore, it is very difficult to see pure thought for what it might be. Belief is the arbitrary choice to close the space of unknowing. It has a practical aspect to move forward with what we have now. Perhaps you can move forward even without a full “knowing”, and keep investigation alive. If altering my language can alter my living space and yield more choices, then more of my life is in my hands, and I am less of a victim. (4,000 words, 1,500 more with the footnotes at the end.)
That is my impetus to say that the choice of words can alter thought, and thus alter life’s trajectory.
It is what I am writing about here. (After Steven Mithen).
By choosing to read this article, I suspect you know at least 50,000 words and say around 16,000 words a day. Thousands more will pass through your mind, either heard from others, as you are reading, thinking what to say next, or musing to yourself.1 You are good at words, speaking between 120 and 200 words a minute and reading them at twice that speed.2 When speaking, writing or using sign language, you effortlessly create unique sequences of words. These convey meanings beyond those of the individual words themselves, meanings that others can understand with equivalent ease despite never having heard or seen that string of words before. You might even be able to do this in another language, perhaps several. How so? How can you remember and manipulate so many words? That is a puzzle.
Words and language provide a means of communication. They also influence the way we perceive and think about the world. The extent of that influence is heavily contested: to some academics it is self-evident that speakers of English, Mandarin and Hindi experience the world in different ways, even before they start thinking about it. That is what bilingual speakers express, tending to say they feel like different people when using their different languages.1
To others, language is merely a veneer over universal processes of perception and thought.
A third group – to which I am aligned – (Mithen), is sympathetic to a cognitive role for words but requires empirical evidence.
Experimental tests undertaken throughout the twentieth century to find such evidence had inconclusive and sometimes contradictory results. During the last two decades, however, a new level of experimental sophistication has provided convincing evidence for the impact of words on perception, while the case for words as a tool for thought is compelling. As such, the nexus between language, perception and thought provides a critical fragment of the language puzzle.
[My NOTE: This dichotomy above is flawed, because while I cannot Prove cognitive functions, I can Demonstrate them 100’s of times, even daily.]
Franz Boas (1858–1942), proposed that ‘the categories of language compel us to see the world in certain definite conceptual groups which, on account of our lack of knowledge of linguistic processes, are taken as objective categories, and which, therefore, impose themselves upon the form of our thoughts’.3 As such, language provides the foundation for cultural and cognitive diversity.
By ‘conceptual groups’ - Boas was referring to bounded units of knowledge stored in long-term memory that provide the building blocks for thought. Concepts include the following: physical entities in the world, such as dogs, tables and chairs; feelings, such as sadness and anger; relationships, such as friends and enemies; and abstract ideas, such as freedom and betrayal.
Our words are labels for concepts held within our minds, while concepts are the mental representations of categories, the members of which share several essential features. Without such categories, our minds would be overwhelmed and incapacitated by having to recall facts and figures about every single item in the world. Categories are hierarchically organized: the base category will contain several subordinate categories and may be an element of a more general superordinate category. The category of ‘dogs’, for instance, contains terriers, working dogs and toy dogs, while being part of mammals and, at a higher level, all living things.
Some concepts are universal, possessed by all humans, while others are culturally specific. The former relates to aspects of the world that are of such long-standing importance that they have become embedded into our DNA (?), saving us the bother of learning about them, although we may need to give them names. Knowing that things fall when dropped, for instance, appears instinctive – we are a born with the concept of gravity, although without a word for it.5 Others will relate to recurrent features of the world. Most people in the world today will have a concept of a telephone, although there is nothing in our DNA to automatically place that concept into our minds.
Regarding the biologically based concepts, we are born with an intuitive understanding of the physical world, with our minds already possessing concepts of gravity, inertia and solidity, although we are born with no words for such phenomena.6 Similarly, we have an intuitive understanding of the difference between living things and inanimate objects.7
These are the categories of domain-specific knowledge for which the brain has functionally specific regions connected by long-distance neural networks. The innate concepts they provide enable us to function in the world and begin the process of learning by which further concepts are acquired. Franz Boas suggested this occurs via the words we learn.
Linguistic relativism
Boas’ ideas were further developed by his student Edward Sapir (1884–1939). Writing in 1929, Sapir stated that ‘we see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation’.11
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope-flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to a cultural agreement to organize it in this way – an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data that the agreement decrees . . . We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.12
And so began one of the longest-running debates between linguists, anthropologists and philosophers – the idea that the language we speak influences the way we perceive and think about the world.
Feeling emotion and talking about locomotion
We experience emotions as different bodily sensations, such as a beating heart, sweaty palms, a knot in the stomach, euphoria and so forth; we recognize emotions in others by their facial expressions, posture and behavior. A prominent idea, championed by the psychologist Paul Ekman, is that we are born with a fixed set of basic emotions that are universal within our species, notably happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and anger.22 Just as we attach the word gravity to our intuitive understanding about how objects move through space, we simply attach words to each of these innate and universal emotions once those words become available – there is no role for learning, individual experience or cultural variation.
An alternative view is that we make sense of the sensations we feel and the facial expressions we see only when we attach words to them – we develop rather than inherit our emotional concepts.23 Key evidence is that children are unable to categorize facial expressions as representing different emotions until they have acquired a lexicon of words for emotions. Before having such words, faces that we might view as angry, sad or fearful are all categorized together as ‘unpleasant’ – a concept that is likely to be more innate. By acquiring the words for different types of emotions while experiencing sensations or observing their expression in others, we develop a set of concepts into which those feelings can be placed.
The significance of words for shaping our emotion concepts becomes further apparent when we appreciate how languages differ in their words for emotions.24 Polish, for instance, does not have a word that perfectly corresponds to the English word disgust, and English lacks a word that fits to tęsknić in Polish, which can roughly be translated as being homesick – but not in the way that an English speaker would think of it. Russian separates anger into two types: serdit’sia, anger at a person, and zlit’sia, anger for more abstract reasons, such as about climate change; English speakers use the same word for both. The Australian language Gidjingali has a single word that refers to both fear and shame, emotions that are kept quite distinct in the English language.
While children who grow up speaking English, Polish, Russian and Gidjingali might be likely to experience the same range of sensations, these will be dissected and understood in different ways because their languages have different words that shape different – although overlapping – concepts in their minds. As Franz Boas explained, without knowledge of other languages these concepts would be taken as objective, universal categories. That seems to be what Paul Ekman had assumed, taken as objective and not questioning why his “universal emotions” should fit so perfectly onto the words used in the English language.
Words for complex emotions such as shame, embarrassment, remorse and jealously tend to be language specific; such emotions also lack distinctive sensations. Consider shame.25 Can I feel shame without having a word for shame? Yes, but it would be ill defined – an unpleasant feeling that I would struggle to place within any of my existing emotion categories and hence reflect on and communicate to others. Could I distinguish between my feelings of shame and those of embarrassment, humiliation and guilt without having separate words for them? Could I identify these in others? Probably not. While shame has been described as a universal emotion, there is considerable cultural variation in its meaning, expression, prevalence and salience. Mandarin, for instance, has more than 100 words for different types of shame – those words providing a fine-grained partition of this otherwise ill-defined concept.26
Each language dissects human locomotion in different ways. English has the largest number of terms (fourteen, including walk, run, jump, stomp and shuffle) and Spanish the least (five: caminar, correr, marchar, saltar and trotar), with no precise correspondence of words between the languages.
Words are tools for thought
Consider why we talk to ourselves, either out loud or inside our heads with what is known as inner speech. Rather than using words to communicate our thoughts to someone else we are using private speech to formulate those thoughts in our minds, thoughts we might never wish to tell someone else about. We also use private speech to shape our actions by talking ourselves through a complex task.33
It is a matter of philosophical debate as to whether our streams of inner speech constitute thinking itself. Our silently spoken words might bring our concepts to consciousness, such that inner speech itself can be considered as a type of thought.34 That would be a supplement to most of our thinking that is undertaken without any awareness and without the use of words, referred to by psychologists as mentalese.
Whether or not we think in words, they certainly augment our thought.35 While I might feel uncomfortable sensations after I have done something wrong, by attaching the word shame to those feelings, I can reflect on them, recalling what they were like, which may deter me from repeating such behavior. Moreover, I can talk about those feelings to others, which is itself a form of thinking because it helps me to understand the cause and nature of those feelings.
More generally, simply the act of labelling items in the world, whether they are sensations, material objects, actions or abstract ideas, makes them salient and concrete.36 By attaching words, we enhance our ability to remember them and target our thoughts on them; we can compare one item with another, by which we begin to establish relationships, and learn about the world.37 As such, the language we speak influences how we remember the past.38 Unlike English, Spanish has words for inside corners and outside corners, and consequently speakers of Spanish have a better memory for where items are present in a display. When speaking about accidental events, those using Spanish are less likely than English speakers to mention who caused the accident. A phrase such as Se rompió el florero, literally the vase broke, is an entirely neutral construction – the person responsible does not need to be mentioned. A consequence is that when remembering past accidents, they are less likely to recall the person(s) involved than an English speaker. Not surprisingly, languages label those items which are most significant for their speech community’s ways of life, those which their members need to remember and think about.39
Most importantly, we can chunk labels together, into a single new label/concept which enables us to use our powers of thought to their greatest effect. The linguist Stephen Levinson nicely summarized this: ‘We don’t have to think about a hundred as “ten tens” when doing mental arithmetic, or aunt as “mother’s sister, or father’s sister, or father’s brother’s wife, or mother’s brother’s wife” when greeting Aunt Mathilda.’40 The chunking of labels, and then the chunking of those chunked labels, is a key means for complex concepts to develop. A long chain of chunking has taken us from thinking about stones and bones to thinking about black holes and human evolution.
We can also use words to invent concepts that have no physical manifestation in the world – concepts that can only be defined by using other words. These are the words/concepts that we describe as abstract in contrast to those that are concrete words/concepts, referring to objects and actions that can be experienced via our senses, by sight, touch or smell. How can ideas about morality and infinity ever arise unless we have words to build, define and describe them?41
We cannot, of course, develop such ideas by ourselves. Words augment thought by making thought a collaborative process. While I might have an idea, such as how to redesign my garden, by sharing those ideas with someone who knows about flowers, someone who has expertise on drainage and another who recently purchased garden furniture, I can develop my own thoughts by drawing on those of others. Words connect minds together just as the internet connects computers to create systems with immense memory capacity and computational power. Talking with others helps us to interrogate and develop our own thoughts. This is especially important for abstract concepts when we may struggle to understand what they mean. What is ‘justice’? Nobody has a complete understanding and hence we share our ideas by talking to develop our own understanding.42
Critical to this process of thinking through words is the invention of words. New words can help establish a new concept within our minds, the word acting as a cognitive anchor and helping to spread the existence of this new knowledge into other minds by talking about it. The invention of the word ‘dinosaur’ by Richard Owen in 1842 enabled a set of heterogenous fossils discovered since the early 1800s to be placed together into a single new category. We now invent words with such frequency that we miss their significance for not just labelling new items and ideas in the world, but for also changing what we can think about.
Metaphor
This use of body-words introduces the most powerful way in which words augment thought – the use of metaphor.47 It is easy to think that metaphor provides no more than an embellishment of our phrases, one used by poets and politicians. In fact, metaphor pervades virtually every phrase we use in everyday life and is how we manage to entertain abstract ideas and think about complex issues. This was made evident in a ground-breaking book of 1980 by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson called Metaphors We Live By.48
Metaphor is the use of knowledge about one conceptual domain, the source, to inform that of another, the target. Some examples: ideas can either be ‘lightbulbs’ that come on in a flash, or ‘seeds’ that grow slowly and need nurturing before they flourish; love is a ‘journey’ that will have hills to climb and rocky patches to pass through; arguing is a form of warfare because views can be ‘attacked’ and claims can be ‘indefensible’ while criticisms can be ‘right on target’; presidents can be ‘lame-ducks’.
The key insight of Lakoff and Johnson is that we use our knowledge about the physical word around us, such as our bodies and how they move, plants and animals, food and eating, warfare and so forth, to reason about unfamiliar, abstract or complex concepts: when used as metaphors, words enable us to move from the concrete to the abstract. The extent to which metaphors pervade our thinking is illustrated by how we use space to think about time. English and many other languages use the words that describe spatial relationships to also describe time. By using such words, we think of time as a line in space with the past behind us and the future stretching out in front. Could we possibly think about time without such spatial metaphors?
As the linguist Guy Deutscher has noted, the link between space and time has become so entrenched in our thinking that we struggle to understand that time cannot literally be long or short, that it cannot pass, nor that we can look forwards or backwards in time.49 Moreover, we often fail to appreciate that we are using metaphor at all when talking and thinking about time. That is quite common – we can take almost any passage of speech or written text and find it laden with metaphors that pass by unnoticed. Deutscher gives a passage that begins:
“At the cabinet meeting, ground-breaking plans were put forward by the minister for tough new legislation to curb the power of the unions. It was clear that the unions would never go along with these suggestions, and the conflict erupted as soon as news of the plan was leaked to the press.”
This short passage contains at least seven metaphors all deriving from the concrete world of physical actions (ground-breaking, put forward, go along), materials (tough, curb [a piece of metal placed in a horse’s mouth]) and processes (erupted, leaked) to express the nature of human intentions and social interaction.
When metaphors become so frequently used and familiar, they lose their evocative power, becoming ‘dead metaphors’ – no more than content words for the target concept itself. Phrases such as ‘pushing the meeting back in time’ may have become an idiom, its meaning now understood without recourse to concepts of space. Because metaphors fade away and die, new ones are required to create an impact. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump demanded that corruption is rooted out (to use another metaphor) by ‘draining the swamp’ – imposing the idea of a murky, insect-infested, disease-ridden location with slimy creatures onto Washington.50 Although he was not the first to use this phrase, it was new to many Americans and evidently struck a chord (to use another metaphor). Draining the swamp influenced how many of the electorate reasoned about the state of US politics – not only that it is corrupt but that it can be cleansed – and helped Trump win the election. Such is the power of metaphor.
Metaphors play a critical role in science. They enable us to think about difficult ideas, to develop new concepts and progress our understanding of the world by drawing on what is familiar – to use the concrete to think about the abstract.51 Many of the key breakthroughs in scientific understanding have been reliant on metaphors. In 1605 Johannes Kepler developed his concept of planetary motion by comparison with a clock, followed by Robert Hooke in 1665 who adopted the word cell to describe what he saw when he placed a piece of cork under his microscope, having been reminded of the small rooms, or cells, occupied by monks. We are familiar with the atom as a miniature solar system, and with “waves” of light: how could we possibly think about these entities without such metaphors? They provide us with words to anchor, communicate and, for some, develop more advanced concepts. How could anyone, scientist or otherwise, think about a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that neither particles nor electromagnetic radiation such as light can escape from it without using the term ‘black hole’? Equally, how can we think about and debate the working of the brain without comparing the activation of neurons with either ripples across a pond or a telecommunications network?
For me personally, I struggled for years to think and write about the evolution of language because there were so many different strands of evidence. Only when I imagined the challenge as a jigsaw puzzle, needing to find the pieces and assemble the frame and fragments, could I make progress.
A persistent presence or a turning point?
We have considered language, and whatever preceded it, to have been a system of communication. We now find that language, and notably words, can influence how the world is perceived and what we can know and think about. Abstract concepts require abstract words, as labels and as cognitive anchors. The use of metaphor is essential for us to grasp the meaning of such concepts, even before we attempt to explain them to someone else. Not only for abstract concepts, but also for resolving any complex problem we are facing: metaphor pervades language and is the source of human creativity and scientific progress.
Has language always influenced how its users perceive and think about the world? Or is this an innovation, perhaps a turning point in the evolution of language after millions of years when its sole use had been for communication? The ‘unbelievable monotony’ of the Acheulean, (lower Paleolithic period), made by Homo erectus and the stochastic, (random) variation of Neanderthal technology through time provide little evidence for the type of cognitive and cultural diversity that arises from the multitude of languages in use today. And yet the evidence about the evolution of the vocal tract and the brain suggests that both H. erectus and the Neanderthals had a form of language. Might their languages have been restricted to communicating thoughts rather than doubling up as a tool for thought? Might their languages have been without metaphor? How about in the use of symbols and the creation of art?
[My impetus is to say that the choice of words can alter thought, and thus alter life’s trajectory. Therefore, to better grasp ahold of your life, pay atention to the words you are telling yourself.]
Footnotes for this section (I didn’t use all of these sections.)
1. 1 Marian (2023, p. 101) states that when 1,000 bilinguals were asked if they feel like a different person when using a different language, two-thirds said yes. My own anecdotal observations confirm this is the case, primarily based on my father-in-law, Eric Orton. He was a quiet, softly spoken, reserved Englishman, who spent his career teaching French in Leicester. Each summer he took his family for holidays in France. After marrying his daughter, I joined them on several occasions to find that Eric was transformed when speaking French, in France with his French friends: a jovial, expressive, fun-loving extrovert. This wasn’t because he was on holiday, it was because his personality changed when speaking French. Whether it had done the same in a Leicester schoolroom I never had the chance to find out.
2. 2 See Pavlenko (2014) and Leavitt (2011) for the origin and history of linguistic relativism.
3. 3 Quoted from Boas (1920, reprinted in 1966, p. 289).
4. 4 See Lakoff (1987) and Mervis and Rosch (1981) for definitions of concepts drawn on in my text.
5. 5 See Hirschfeld and Gelman (eds) (1994) for inherited domain-specific knowledge.
6. 6 See Spelke (1991) for intuitive physics. Inertia: that inanimate objects cannot move by themselves. Solidity: that solid objects cannot pass through each other.
7. 7 See Atran (1990) for intuitive biology.
8. 8 See Keil (1994) for why horses in striped pyjamas are horses and not zebras.
9. 9 See Whiten (ed.) (1991) for intuitive psychology, sometimes characterised as mind reading.
10. 10 See Ljubicic et al. (2018) for alternative categorisation of caribou herds.
11. 11 Quoted from Sapir (1929b, reprinted in 1949, p. 162).
12. 12 Quoted from Whorf (1940, reprinted in 2012, pp. 213–14).
13. 13 Pavlenko (2014) describes how the extensive, nuanced but often convoluted writings of Sapir and Whorf were transformed by later writers into what became known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism. This was a radically simplified and vulgarized version of their recognition of linguistic relativism, one that became a bête noire of the academic establishment.
14. 14 Quoted from Pinker (1994, p. 54).
15. 15 Bloom (2001, p. 1128–29) provides a critique of Whorf ’s view that the grammatical structure of language influences perception.
16. 16 See Zlatev and Blomberg (2015) for a summary of how recent interdisciplinary research has provided a substantial degree of support for linguistic relativity and a rebuttal of the arguments made against the influence of language on thought. One of their most intriguing suggestions is that the language-based conceptual framework that Steven Pinker brings to his work, using terms such as ‘modules’ and ‘information processing’, effectively predetermine his negative view of linguistic relativism – ironically providing evidence that language does indeed influence thought.
17. 17 See Deutscher (2010) for an excellent review of research up to 2010 on the impact of language on thought, placing this into a long-term historical perspective.
18. 18 Stephen Levinson (2003b) described three frames of reference for talking about space, which can be referred to as linguistic strategies. European speakers are most familiar with the ‘relative’ (or egocentric) frame of reference in which terms such as front, back, left and right are used for talking about the locations and directions. An ‘intrinsic’ (or object-centerd) frame of reference is also frequently used, specifying a relationship to a reference object, such as ‘behind the mountain’. Third is an ‘absolute’ (or geocentric) frame of reference that uses the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west. While speakers of European languages make use of this when speaking about long distances, such as the relationship between Edinburgh and London, other languages use it as their primary frame of reference. A well-described example is the Australian language of Guugu Yimithirr that would, for instance, refer to people sitting at a table as to the east or west of each other.
19. 19 Haun et al. (2011) undertook experiments to test whether the way in which one talks about space influences non-linguistic spatial cognition, providing a detailed description of their methodology and results.
20. 20 See Boroditsky (2000, 2001) for experiments to test whether the differences in which English and Mandarin speakers talk about time affect the way they think about time.
21. 21 See Boroditsky et al. (2003) for experiments to test whether the gender of an object influences the way it is conceived. See Mickan et al. (2014) for a failure to replicate some of these experiments, questioning their validity.
22. 22 Paul Ekman has many publications that can be easily accessed via the web. For a start, I recommend Ekman and Davidson (eds) (1994).
23. 23 See Lindquist et al. (2015) for how we only make sense of our sensations once they are attached to words.
24. 24 See Wierzbicka (1986) and Barrett (2017) for the relationship between language and emotion.
25. 25 See Crozier (2014) for the difficulties of defining shame.
26. 26 See Li et al. (2004) for a study of Chinese shame concepts.
27. 27 See Malt et al. (2011) for words and concepts about locomotion.
28. 28 It is neither necessary nor possible for me to review the debate about color words and the perception of color – it can be easily accessed via the internet with many academic and even more popular publications. The debate was kicked off by the seminal publication by Berlin and Kay (1969). Paul Kay maintained a relentless study of this topic. He and his co-authors defined two key questions: (1) Are color categories determined by largely arbitrary convention? and (2) Do color terms affect color perception? Whereas a universalist would answer ‘no’ to both, a relativist would answer ‘yes’. Kay’s recent work suggests that neither question should have a simple yes or no answer. Key publications in the debate include Kay and Kempton (1984), Kay and Regier (2003), Regier et al. (2005) and Roberson et al. (2000, 2005).
29. 29 See Regier and Kay (2009) for Whorf being half right about color.
30. 30 Quoted from Regier and Kay (2009, p. 442).
31. 31 See Rosch Heider (1975) for Dani color categorization.
32. 32 See Borghi et al. (2018) for a study of how abstract concepts are acquired by language and social interaction.
33. 33 See Berk (1994) and Diaz and Berk (eds) (1992) for studies on private speech in children.
34. 34 Carruthers (1996) believes that speech itself constitutes a type of thought.
35. 35 See Lupyan (2015) and Clark (1998) for overviews of ‘language-augmented thought’. As Clarke explains, ideas about language-augmented thought have a long history, with pioneering work having been undertaken by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1934).
36. 36 See Dennett (1994) and Lupyan (2012) for the significance of labelling items.
37. 37 See Boutonnet and Lupyan (2015), Lupyan and Bergen (2015), Edmiston and Lupyan (2015), Lupyan and Clark (2015) and Lupyan and Thompson-Schill (2012) for experimental studies exploring the impact of labels.
38. 38 The following draws on Marian (2023) for ‘corners’ and Boroditsky (2011) for ‘accidents’.
39. 39 Words for weather and food are frequently cited examples of those that vary between speech communities, as noted in Chapter 3 regarding snow, rice and rain.
40. 40 Quoted from Levinson (2003a, p. 36).
41. 41 See Lupyan and Winter (2018) for a discussion of how abstract ideas are defined by words alone.
42. 42 See Borghi et al. (2018) for the significance of talking about abstract ideas,
43. 43 See Lancy (1983) for number systems in languages of the island of New Guinea. See Wassmann and Dasen (1994) for a fascinating study of one such number system.
44. 44 Xu et al. (2020) argue that cross-language variation in number systems may be understood in terms of shared functional need to communicate precisely while using minimal cognitive resources.
45. 45 See Beller and Bender (2008) and Calude (2021) for reflections on the evolution of number systems.
46. 46 See Dehaene (1997) for a review and interpretation of numerical cognition.
47. 47 See Thibodeau et al. (2019) for a review of the role of metaphor in communication and thought.
48. 48 Lakoff and Johnson (1980) is a seminal work in the understanding of language and metaphor.
49. 49 Deutscher (2005) provides a chapter entitled ‘A reef of dead metaphors’, which I have drawn on in my text.
50. 50 Thibodeau et al. (2019) discuss the ‘drain the swamp’ metaphor, noting that it goes back more than a century. They use this example to demonstrate that metaphors typically only carry some aspects of the source domain into the target domain, in this case leaving the positive aspects of swamps – locations of flourishing biodiversity – behind.
51. 51 See Hoffman (2018) for a review of the role of metaphor in science. Although metaphor is essential and pervasive, Taylor and Dewsbury (2018) explain that it might also be restraining.
52. 52 See Leivada et al. (2021) for bilinguals being more able than monolinguals to detect manipulative discourse.
53. 53 The following draws on Marian (2023).
54. 54 Cited from Marian (2023, p. 62).
.