Writing studies has been all but silent on the subject of metaphor because no theory has sufficiently forged a connection between the way metaphor works and what we actually say and write. Even the best accounts of metaphor put forward by proponents of conceptual metaphor do not consider important patterns of variation that concrete data reveal. Presenting findings from a study of the conceptual metaphor trade is war, the author offers a reconsideration of metaphor that refutes the standard Aristotelian view of metaphor and substantially expands upon current understandings of conceptual metaphor. Like all language, metaphors are fundamentally responsive. They are therefore implicated in a rhetorically constituted give and take among related groupings of metaphors and literal concepts. Moreover, metaphors are inflected by speakers' and writers' social commitments and are constrained by a concomitant rhetorical etiquette.
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