Reviewed by Fan Zhen-qiang, Zhejiang Gongshang University

Based on case studies on Czech, German, and French languages, this book demonstrates how to use metaphor, which is one of the major approaches to conceptual organization in language, as an effective tool to analyze the worldviews of different cultures. The book is intended to ‘invite readers into the kind of intellectual adventure that translators set off upon when they enter into foreign worldviews; because translators must inhabit more than one “world”, if they are to be able to build bridges between worlds with their translations’ (12).

Besides the introduction and conclusion chapters, a glossary, bibliography, and index, the book contains nine chapters, which are divided into two parts. The first part (Chs. 1–6) critically evaluates the studies of metaphor by cognitive researchers. Ch. 1 introduces the notions of ‘worldview’, ‘patterning’, and the dialectical relationship between them. It also previews what will be covered in the following chapters. Ch. 2 stresses the crucial role of metaphor for the study of language and thought by explicating the ideas of the German thinker Ernst Cassirer, the French scholar Georges Matoré, and American researchers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (L & J). The author argues that the ideas proposed by L &J are ‘not revolutionary’ (23) since similar ideas have already explored by Cassirer, Matoré, and others. Ch. 3 summarizes the main claims of L & J’s cognitive metaphor work into seven points.

In addition to these cognitive-oriented studies, Ch. 4 overviews approaches and perspectives to metaphor from a wide range of disciplines, such as philosophy, linguistics, poetics, and rhetoric. The purpose of the overview is to ‘prevent the contribution made to metaphor by cognitive linguists in recent decades from eclipsing the wide variety of other approaches’ (43). Ch. 5 discusses additional cognitive-oriented contributions to metaphor theory, pointing out that many cognitive linguists employ universalist approaches and more research is needed to be based on different languages. Ch. 6 provides representative comparative studies of metaphor with data from a variety of languages.

Part 2 begins with an introduction offering a bird’s-eye view of the case studies, which are presented in the three chapters of this part. Ch. 7 examines how the concepts of ‘history’, ‘people’, ‘Party’, and ‘State’ are metaphorically constructed and expressed in Czechoslovak communist discourse, attempting to ‘enter into its world in order to unveil its logic and its strategies in order to understand how people thought with and within the conceptual world of the communist mindset’ (110). It is discovered that communism concepts and arguments are logical and coherent. In contrast, in Ch. 8, an analysis of metaphors in Nazi discourse reveals that Nazi rhetoric is obscure, incoherent, and perverse. A third case study in Ch. 9 discusses the metaphorical construction of ‘language’, comparing and contrasting how French and English are conceptualized metaphorically. The final chapter summarizes the conclusions presented throughout the book.

Overall, this book is highly recommended for researchers in the fields of critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, and linguistic typologies.