Mapping the mind and the body: on W.H. Auden's personifications - Critical Essay

For Lakoff and Johnson, personification is an ontological metaphor that "allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with non-human entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities" (Metaphors 33). Since "motivations, characteristics, and activities" are central to our basic notion of a human being, when we use these traits in source domains to construct a target domain via metaphor, the product of this cognitive process is a personification. As Lakoff and Johnson claim, in personification generally "we are imputing human qualities to things that are not human-theories, diseases, inflation, etc. In such cases, there are no actual human beings referred to. When we say 'Inflation robbed me of my savings,' we are not using the term 'inflation' tQ refer to a person" (Metaphors 35). The target of this expression is inflation, while the source is not a single specific person per se but human traits that become salient for the mapping. in this case, we have personal motivations and a ctions, such as the greedy act of robbing that we map onto "inflation," and the resulting state of affairs whereby money is inevitably or unexpectedly lost. Figure 1 represents this mapping.

"Inflation robbed me of my savings" is meant to convey that money was lost unexpectedly. That is, a certain state of affairs in the target domain results from a certain source domain activity (i.e., robbing). We map a personal trait like having a motive (greed) to carry out an action (rob) onto "inflation," which helps us to personify it. So when Edgecombe states that "Incarnation involves the assumption not only of a human form, but also of a personality" (6), the "assumption" of "personality" results from active cross-domain mapping from a source to a target rather than a passive encounter with the metaphor. On this view, Knapp's idea of the reversible nature of personification does not hold since cross-domain mapping principles, as Lakoff and Johnson would argue, mean that metaphor is neither arbitrary nor reversible. To clarify conceptual domains, and clearly recognize corresponding elements within those domains, is just one advantage of the cognitive approach to metaphor.

While personification may not be arbitrary, whether or not it is "a single unified general process" (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors 33) is open to question. Depending on the context, it is possible to read INFLATION IS A PERSON in general as INFLATION IS AN ADVERSARY in particular. However, a general theory of personification metaphor that posits the existence of an infinite number of different source domains is not helpful. There may be no limit to what we can personify (e.g., fear, time, trees, weather, etc.) but we cannot confuse targets with sources or source subcategories (an adversary is a person) with targets. Mapping a personified source domain onto a target domain of an idea or an object or an emotion will yield personification, so there must be something coherent about this source domain. It is the one common denominator for personification metaphors. Indeed, so pervasive is personification that what I call its inevitability arises because of what Daniel Dennett defines as our "intentional stance" in the world. For Dennett, the intentional stance is one we take on a regular basis in life and it works as follows: