Embodied cognition in 'black metaphors': the BAD IS DARK metaphor in biblical texts

Abstract

Recent trends in metaphor studies have focussed on the cultural and ideological dimensions of the conceptualization of experience and its linguistic realization in discourse. Within this perspective, racism has been approached as the driving ideological force underlying the conceptual metaphor BAD IS DARKNESS, and more specific ones, such as DIFFICULT IS DARKNESS and IGNORANCE IS DARKNESS. These metaphors would, in turn, licence what has been referred to, in the literature, as ‘black metaphors’, i.e., metaphorical linguistic expressions which would evoke and, at the same time, perpetuate racism. The aim of this paper is to investigate an alternative hypothesis - without rejecting the ideologically-based one - to approach black metaphors, from the perspective of the sensorimotor experience with the physical phenomenon of darkness. This hypothesis is explored through an investigation of ‘black metaphors’ found in biblical texts. The choice of such corpus is justified, mostly, by the fact that racial discrimination, though clearly present in biblical times, did not seem to be so directly associated with skin colour as it has been more recently. The analysis looks firstly into the passages where the literal linguistic markers of the source domain are found, in order to investigate how the physical experiences with darkness are evaluated in the narratives. Secondly, the metaphorical uses of the same expressions are identified, and the target domains specified. The results of the analysis have confirmed the possibility of the conceptual projection from the sensorimotor experience with darkness onto negatively evaluated abstract notions. This seems to evidence the role of embodied cognition in metaphor, not just in its epistemic, but also in its evaluative function.