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otherwise be very difficult to think about. A question, however, arises
about whether this function can also be attributed to metaphorical
mappings between two tangible domains of experience. As we pointed out
in Section 1, tangible target domains – and their composite parts – are
clearly delineated in themselves simply because they involve physical
objects or processes existing or happening in space. It is a little
problematic to claim that one would not be able to think, speak and reason
about SEAHORSES without any reference to horses as a land animal, as
there exists the physical reality of the Hippocampus genus, which we may
touch and see and further rely on for reasoning. Another related problem is
connected to the issue of pre-existing similarities. According to the CMT,
there are no inherent similarities between the source and the target
domains that would motivate metaphorical language, and it is only in the
light of the metaphor that we start to perceive the two domains in question
as similar to each other. However, some inherent similarities undoubtedly
do exist between SEAHORSES and HORSES as land animals or SEA COWS and
COWS as land animals, and it would be difficult to maintain that the
instances of figurative language exist independently of these or are not
motivated by them. One might then see an obvious choice to “write these
off” as instances of one-shot image metaphors – but that would leave the
multiplicity of mappings between the two domains unaccounted for.^2
This discrepancy is, to a significant extent, resolved by Evans (2013),
who argues that although conceptual metaphor certainly is a powerful
cognitive mechanism, it is unable to account for all instances of figurative
language. Evans (2013: 74) suggests that “there are classes of linguistic
metaphors that appear to be motivated in ways that are, at least in part,
independent of conceptual metaphor”. Working with a case of poetic
metaphor woman’s waist is an hourglass, the author seems to encounter
similar problems that have been pointed out in relation to the SEA ANIMALS
metaphor described above. He points out that a female waist is indeed no
less abstract than an hourglass, and in that, this metaphorical expression
lacks the crucial distinction between abstractness and concreteness that is
inherent in (or implied by) the CMT. Furthermore, Evans (2013) perceives
another problem of the theory in its claim that there should be a clear
experiential basis – a correlation in experience that motivates conceptual
metaphor. He argues that “poetic metaphor [...] is not plausibly motivated
by recurring and ubiquitous correlations in experience” (Evans 2013: 80),
(^2) As we demonstrate in the following section, there are cases of tangible target
domains with extremely productive relationships with their source domains,
producing numerous metaphorical expressions motivated by different types of pre-
existing similarities.