complex gestalts (metaphorically structured concepts)

"The concept LOVE, for example, is structured mostly in metaphorical terms: LOVE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS A PATIENT, LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE, LOVE IS MADNESS, LOVE IS WAR, etc." (#60 1530)

"The concept of love has a core that is minimally structured by the subcategorization love is an emotion and by links to other emotions, e.g., liking. This is typical of emotional concepts, which are not clearly delineated in our experience in any direct fashion and therefore must be comprehended primarily indirectly, via metaphor." (#60 1531)

"Some of these entailments are metaphorical (e.g., "Love is an aesthetic experience"); others are not (e.g., "Love involves shared responsibility"). Each of these entailments may itself have further entailments. The result is a large and coherent network of entailments, which may, on the whole, either fit or not fit our experiences of love. When the network does fit, the experiences form a coherent whole as instances of the metaphor. What we experience with such a metaphor is a kind of reverberation down through the network of entailments that awakens and connects our memories of our past love experiences and serves as a possible guide for future ones." (#60 2457)

"there is more to coherence than structuring in terms of multidimensional gestalts. When a concept is structured by more than one metaphor, the different metaphorical structurings usually fit together in a coherent fashion." (#60 1534)

"The difference between coherence and consistency is crucial. Each metaphor focuses on one aspect of the concept ARGUMENT: in this, each serves a single purpose. Moreover, each metaphor allows us to understand one aspect of the concept in terms of a more clearly delineated concept, e.g., JOURNEY OR CONTAINER. The reason we need two metaphors is because there is no one metaphor that will do the job—there is no one metaphor that will allow us to get a handle simultaneously on both the direction of the argument and the content of the argument. These two purposes cannot both be served at once by a single metaphor. And where the purposes won't mix, the metaphors won't mix. Thus we get instances of impermissible mixed metaphors resulting from the impossibility of a single clearly delineated metaphor that satisfies both purposes at once. For example, we can speak of the direction of the argument and of the content of the argument but not of the direction of the content of the argument nor of the content of the direction of the argument." (#60 1687)

"A shared metaphorical entailment can establish a cross-metaphorical correspondence. For example, the shared entailment AS WE MAKE AN ARGUMENT, MORE OF A SURFACE IS CREATED establishes a correspondence between the amount of ground covered in the argument (which is in the JOURNEY metaphor) and the amount of content in the argument (which is in the CONTAINER metaphor)." (#60 1711)

"Where there is an overlapping of purposes, there is an overlapping of metaphors and hence a coherence between them. Permissible mixed metaphors fall into this overlap." (#60 1717)

"experiential gestalts are multidimensional structured wholes. Their dimensions, in turn, are defined in terms of directly emergent concepts. That is, the various dimensions (participants, parts, stages, etc.) are categories that emerge naturally from our experience." (#60 1465)

"We have already seen that causation is a directly emergent concept, and the other dimensions in terms of which we categorize our experience have a fairly obvious experiential basis: Participants, Parts, Stages, Linear sequence, Purpose" (#60 1467)

"We have so far characterized coherence in terms of experiential gestalts, which have various dimensions that emerge naturally from experience. Some gestalts are relatively simple (CONVERSATION) and some are extremely elaborate (WAR)." (#60 1527)

"Experiential gestalts: Our object and substance categories are gestalts that have at least the following dimensions: perceptual, motor activity, part/whole, functional, purposive. Our categories of direct actions, activities, events, and experiences are gestalts that have at least the following dimensions: participants, parts, motor activities, perceptions, stages, linear sequences (of parts), causal relations, purpose (goals/plans for actions and end states for events). These constitute the natural dimensions of our direct experience. Not all of them will play a role in every kind of direct experience, but, in general, most of them will play some role or other." (#60 2997)

"The metaphorical concepts TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A RESOURCE, and TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY form a single system based on subcategorization, since in our society money is a limited resource and limited resources are valuable commodities. These subcategorization relationships characterize entailment relationships between the metaphors. TIME IS MONEY entails that TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE, which entails that TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY." (#60 209)