of people’s folk understanding of particular source domains that are part of the
metaphorical mappings motivating these idioms’ interpretations. That is, by
looking at the inferences that arise from the mapping of heated fluid in a con-
tainer onto the idea of anger, one can make specific predictions about what
various idioms motivated by ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER
actually mean.
The results from several experiments explicitly showed that people’s under-
standing of idiomatic meaning reflects the particular entailments of underlying
conceptualmetaphors(Gibbs1992).Participantsinafirststudywereques-
tioned about their understanding of events corresponding to particular source
domains in various conceptual metaphors (e.g., the source domain of heated
fluid in a container for ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER). For
example, when presented with the scenario of a sealed container filled with
fluid, the participants were asked about causation (e.g., What would cause the
container to explode?), the intentionality (e.g., Does the container explode on
purpose or does it explode through no volition of its own?), and manner (e.g.,
Does the explosion of the container occur in a gentle or violent manner?).
Overall, the participants in this study were remarkably consistent in their
responses to the various questions. To give one example, people responded that
the cause of a sealed container exploding out its contents is the internal pres-
sure caused by the increase in the heat of the fluid inside the container, that this
explosion is unintentional because containers and fluid have no intentional
agency, and that the explosion occurs in a violent manner. More interesting,
though, is that people’s intuitions about various source domains maps onto
their conceptualizations of different target domains in very predictable ways.
Thus, other studies in this series showed that when people understand anger
idioms such asblow your stack, flip your lid,orhit the ceiling, they infer that the
cause of the anger is internal pressure, that the expression of anger is uninten-
tional, and that the expression occurs in an abrupt and violent manner. How-
ever, people do not draw inferences about causation, intentionality, and
manner when comprehending literal paraphrases of idioms, such asget very
angry. Literal phrases, such asget very angry,arenotmotivatedbythesameset
of conceptual metaphors as are specific idioms such asblow your stack.Forthis
reason, people do not view the meanings ofblow your stackandget very angryas
equivalent, despite their apparent similarity.
A final series of reading-time experiments showed that people find idioms
more appropriate and easier to understand when they are seen in discourse
contexts that are consistent with the various entailments of these phrases.
Control studies showed that these differences in the interpretation of idioms
and their literal paraphrases cannot be attributed to differences in the entail-
ments of their respective verbs and nouns. Thus, the meanings of the individual
words in idioms are not by themselves sufficient to account for the complex
inferences people make about the meanings of idioms.
This set of studies on the conceptual basis of idiomatic meaning provides
experimental evidence in support of cognitive linguistic analyses of idioma-
ticity. Such data specifically support the idea that the mappings of source-to-
target domain information in conceptual metaphors preserve the structural
characteristics or cognitive typology of the source domains (Lakoff 1990). The
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