Meaning, language, and mind: an interview with Mark Turner - Interview

Style, Winter, 2002 by James W. Underhill

JU: One very interesting point you make is that our ideas of kinship bonds exclude certain metaphors. You give some amusing examples to prove your point. However free we might like to feel imagination and metaphoric fantasy is, most people would probably agree with you that "Love is the father of purity" is not a likely association. Why is that?

MT: We need to distinguish two sorts of constraints. One kind of constraint has to do with constraints on the basic mental operations of conceptual connection. Another kind of constraint has to do with cultural frames of knowledge. Here, we are dealing with the second kind. Why can Love not be the Father of Purity? Maybe it can now, but until recently such an expression was extremely unlikely in the language. I found thousands and thousands of kinship metaphors in the language (in the days before one could use a computer to search for them -- I had boxes and boxes of little index cards), and I never found one like this. Nurturant love and admirable purity seemed to be associated with mothers rather than fathers, so I never found anything like "love is the father of purity."

JU: Can you offer any more such unlikely examples?

MT: Absolutely. On the one hand, there are many expressions that are unlikely because they contravene topology constraints. So Betsy Ross may be the mother of the American flag, but I am not the father of my beard, I am not the father of the home run I just hit, I am not the father of a hiccup. On the other hand, there are all those expressions that are unlikely because they run counter to cultural stereotypes.

For at least a long period of time in English, it would have been remarkable to say "Meekness is the father of contentment," although it is perfectly clear what it would mean if we could say it.

JU: You show that the metaphors we use, accept, and invent reflect the way we understand our kinship bonds and the roles that each member is "supposed" to play. Interpreting metaphors involving daughters you claim, "'Daughter' has the strongest connotation of submissiveness and dependency, of passivity and inaction; she is not an individuated socially active agent. A daughter is an object of wooing. She is stereotypically graceful and beautiful" (Death is the Mother of Beauty 57). Could you give an example?

MT: I give a long analysis of the passage in book two of Milton's Paradise Lost in which Satan encounters Sin and Death. Sin is Satan's daughter. She is attractive and he has incestuous sex with her. She begins life graceful and beautiful. She stays submissive to Satan throughout.

JU: "Son," you say, can have strong connotations of activity and inheritance. Can you give an example?

MT: Again, Milton gives us just that picture in Paradise Lost. Death is the son, and he is one of the strongest and most active characters you could meet. He also inherits this strength, resolve, and activity from his father, Satan. This passage actually gives us a very full introduction to the kinds of complexities we can see in conceptual connections involving kinship relations.