In this thesis, I employ Critical Discourse Analysis (Van Dijk 1997) and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Charteris-Black 2004) in order to examine data I collected in forty interviewees with the goal of documenting the metaphoric process used by 40 Parisians when they imagined and spoke about the unknown beyond the Earth. My research extends the traditional boundaries of CMT in order to analyse the metaphoric process at work when interviewees imagine and describe the unknown. What role does language, especially metaphor, play in the process of understanding the unknown and how does it influence how we conceive of and ‘build’ new worlds?
Past research indicates that analogy and metaphor are fundamental to human language and cognition (Kövecses 2002, Hofstadter and Sander 2010). A metaphor is composed of a source domain and a target domain, both ‘known’ to a speaker through her previous experience or generalized cultural knowledge. However, the function of metaphor in discourse concerning the imaginary or unknown is less studied than the function of metaphors in traditional metaphorical schemas. Understanding how metaphor makes the unknown known is key to our understanding of how language functions in ‘wor(l)d-building’ (or the mutual construction of worlds and words) (Black 2018) by facilitating cognitive processes that bridge human imagination and emergent reality.
Based on the analysis of 40 interviews conducted in Paris, and a year of participant observation, my thesis will be developed in 11 chapters. By focusing on language and the construction of worlds through words, I participate in a classic debate in linguistic anthropology concerning the creation of meaning. If our metaphors are motivated by our previous knowledge
and experience, how do we come to know something truly new, to innovate, or to incite profound social change?