Metaphor and Symbol, 24: 105–120, 2009

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1092-6488 print / 1532-7868 online
DOI: 10.1080/10926480902830862

Preferential Metaphorical Conceptualizations

1532-7868and Symbol,
1092-6488
HMET
Metaphor Symbol Vol. 24, No. 2, March 2009: pp. 1–34

in Everyday Discourse About Love in the Brazilian

and German Speech Communities

Ulrike Agathe Schröder

BRAZILIAN and GERMAN love METAPHORS
schrÖder

University of Minas Gerais

This article deals with cultural variation in the metaphorical construction of love in the Brazilian and
German speech communities, based on 30 interviews held in each culture with subjects 20–30 years
of age. Besides similarities, the study revealed significant differences in the conventional use of
some complex metaphors, which indicate emphasis given to chosen parts of the target when talking
about it, rather than proving the existence or nonexistence of the respective metaphor. Thus, by talking
about the target, there is significant evidence for the “CONQUEST,” “EATING/APPETIZING
FOOD,” and the “GROWTH/ORGANISM/PLANT” metaphors in the Brazilian corpus. By contrast,
in the German interviews, the “ECONOMICAL EXCHANGE,” “FUNCTIONING MACHINE,” and
“JOURNEY” metaphors are frequently employed. These findings will be related to the cultural
backgrounds of each speech community, arguing for a stronger presence of the passionate ideal of
love in the Brazilian one, whereas in the German one, the ideal of romantic love seems to be more
accentuated.

INTRODUCTION

When people talk about love, they usually do so against the background of the idea that love
represents a universal and substantial feeling shared all over the world. Such a view accounts for
the assumption of a preexisting emotional reality constituted by brain states and bodily
responses. Many scholars from psychological and linguistic research in cognitive metaphor have
been and still are exclusively concerned with going beyond this simple, everyday view, by
assessing how conceptual metaphors help to construe our emotions on the basis of entrenched
embodied experience. However, little attention has been turned to the question of how cultural
and social factors influence and shape emotional experience. Attempting to overcome these
shortcomings, Kövecses (2003) suggests a synthesis of the embodied and experientialist approach
with a constructionist one that conceives emotions as constructions motivated by a particular social
and cultural environment. He calls this unified approach “body-based constructionism” (BBC).
In connection with these displays, the aim of this study was to reveal differences in talking
about love in the Brazilian and German speech communities by focusing on the cultural varia-
tion in the metaphorical construction of the domain in question. Since there have been so many

Address correspondence to Ulrike Agathe Schröder, Department of Language and Literature, University of Minas
Gerais, Av. Antônio Carlos, 6627 31270-901, Belo Horizonte MG, Brasil. E-mail: schroederulrike@gmx.com
106 SCHRÖDER

sustained criticisms regarding the made-up examples given by cognitive linguists that many
times only reflect the idealized speaker-hearer situation, this study proposed an analysis based
on ordinary talk about love by people engaging in everyday discourse. Therefore, 30 interviews
were held in each culture with people between 20 and 30 years of age.

The Social-Cultural Extension of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT)

By claiming the philosophical position of experientialism and embodied realism (Johnson,

1987; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), the basic idea of conceptual metaphor is rooted in
the conviction that “any adequate account of meaning and rationality must give a central place
to embodied and imaginative structures of understanding by which we grasp our world”
(Johnson, 1987). Correspondingly, metaphor is no longer conceived as an isolated linguistic
phenomenon, but as an expression of embodied conceptual structures. Hence, a considerable
part of our everyday experience is made coherent to us only by means of establishing correspon-
dences between a just known source domain and a still shapeless target domain due to a cross-
domain mapping of a set of counterparts in the conceptual system. By doing so, linguistic
expressions turn out to be a merely superficial indicator of the cognitive deep structure behind it.
“In short, the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the ways we conceptualize one
mental domain in terms of another” (Lakoff, 1995). Consider the “LOVE IS A JOURNEY” met-
aphor that represents a conceptual metaphor underlying different linguistic expressions such as
“Look how far we’ve come.” “We can’t turn back now.” “This relationship is a dead-end street,”
or “This relationship is foundering.” What happens here is a cognitive mapping favoring an
understanding of the domain “LOVE” in terms of the domains of “JOURNEYS” by displaying a
metaphorical scenario constituted by a set of correspondences whereby the “LOVERS” correspond
to “TRAVELLERS,” the “LOVE RELATIONSHIP” to the “VEHICLE,” and the “LOVERS’
COMMON GOALS” to their “COMMON DESTINATION ON THE JOURNEY” (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1995).1
Besides its successful proliferation in the course of the following three decades, the CMT is
also an object of criticism, which says that the analysis would be limited to the individual-corporal
level following the unidirectional way from conceptual metaphor to linguistic expression, that
is, from concrete sensory-motor experience to image schemas and then to abstract concepts. In
fact, the CMT seems to be interested exclusively in embodied cognitive structures such as the
image schemas “WAY” or “CONTAINER”; the social-cultural aspect, and therefore the location
dependency of certain metaphorical concepts, are left untouched. According to the objections, in
praxis, we need to consider more than the social-cultural context rupturing with this monocausal
chain; the posteriorization of language itself is also arguable. In the end, cognition and language
cannot be conceived as a sequence, but have to be understood as interacting bidirectionally, so
that, ultimately, it cannot be decided clearly which is a linguistic aspect and which a cognitive
one (Leezenberg, 2001).
As a social-cultural extension of this account, but without breaking with its basic assumptions,
Kövecses relies on the CMT; but now, the question of cultural variation comes to the fore. For
him, metaphor has to be simultaneously thought of as a linguistic, conceptual, neurological,
embodied, social, and cultural phenomenon (Kövecses, 2005). In striving for an integration of

1
Empirical evidence exists for the “RELATIONSHIPS ARE JOURNEYS” conceptual metaphor (Grady, 2005).
 BRAZILIAN AND GERMAN LOVE METAPHORS 107

universalistic and relativistic components, he modifies the thesis of the embodiment to the
“body-based constructionism synthesis” searching for the revealing of “embodied cultural
prototypes” (Kövecses, 2003). The key distinction introduced here is the one between “primary
metaphors”—a term coined by Grady (1997)—and “congruent metaphors.” Following Grady
(2005), primary metaphors can be seen as “templates, opposed to the more fleshed-out,
blended conceptualizations which constitute metaphors per se. Primary metaphors are generic
patterns, rather than concrete, vivid instantiations.” In this regard, the difference between the
two concepts implies a distinction between universality and cultural variety: whereas primary
metaphors might be imagined as products of correlations of different dimensions of basic
embodied experience, congruent or complex metaphors give a vivid structure to these
scaffold-like concrete scenes and images.2 Thus, for instance, Kövecses (2005) shows that the
metaphor “THE ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER” can be claimed to have
a near-universal status since it is present in such diverse languages such as English, Chinese,
German, Japanese, Hungarian, Polish, Wolof, and Zulu. Nevertheless, at this generic level, the
metaphor does not specify many things which de facto are specified in the respective cultures,
such as what kind of container is used, how the pressure arises, whether the container is heated
or not, what kind of substance fills the container, what consequences the explosion has, etc.
Thereby the generic-level conceptual metaphor is instantiated in culture-specific ways at a
particular level.

METHOD

The corpus of this study is composed of 60 interviews, 30 held in each culture with subjects
between 20 and 30 years old. Ten of the interviews in each culture stem from a 1998 study,
when the subjects were asked about their love concept by a range of guiding questions
(Schröder, 2004). The other 20 interviews stem from a study comparing the construction of a
variety of life concepts, such as work, family, friendship, love relationship, and others in the
German and Brazilian cultures (Schröder, 2003). Here, the analyzed section was limited to the
questions concerning the love relationship theme. The introducing question, “What do you
consider a good love relationship?”, was intended to solely give a stimulus in order to get the
subjects talking.
Based on a primarily qualitative and inductive orientated “reconstructive methodology”
(Wagner, 1999), the study was particularly concerned with a reconstruction of an objective pro-
totype in its case-specific nature. In this sense, our interest did not rely in discovering innovative
metaphors reflecting the subjective and individual construction procedures of the groups as, for
example, modeled by Fauconnier and Turner (2003; 2006), but in culture-specific conventional
procedures of metaphorical construction mechanisms. From the vantage point of reconstruction
methodology, metaphorical conceptions are not traceable back to a subjective intended meaning,
instead being viewed as a derivation of the objective meaning emerging in social interaction.

2
Similar to Grady’s (1997) differentiation between “primary” and “complex” metaphors, we can observe other
distinctions drawn in cognitive metaphor literature. For instance, Baranov & Zinken (2003) distinguish between
“ground” and “figure models,” and Christa Baldauf (1997) between “bildschematischen” (“image-schematic”) and
“Konstellationsmetaphern” (“constellation”) metaphors.
108 SCHRÖDER

That is, conceptions such as metaphorical ones as collective products, may be seen as primary,
whereas the subjective meaning is secondary.
As CMT fails to give an explicit identification procedure capable of dealing with real dis-
course or texts (Gibbs, 2006), the methodological stages established here partly go back to more
discourse and text-orientated directions within cognitive metaphor research. The procedure
implied the following five steps:
1. The first step implied the identification of the instances of metaphors by the identifi-
cation of the presence of lexical items that stand out against the background of a
literal frame, forming disparate or incongruent semantic fields. That kind of analysis
goes back to the work of Harald Weinrich (1963/1976) who anticipates the CMT by
his metaphorical field theory elaborating the terms of “bildspendendes” (“image-
producing”) and “bildempfangendes Feld” (“image-receiving field”). He advocates
the substitution of word semantics by text semantics, arguing that only word and
context together are able to generate the metaphor, calling this interdependence
“Kon-Determination” (“con-determination”), since the determination of the context
is directed against the determination expectation of the word. He concluded that
“Eine Metapher ist folglich nie ein einfaches Wort, immer ein – wenn auch
kleines—Stück Text” (“hence, a metaphor is never a simple word, but always a
piece of text—even though a little one”) (Weinrich, 1963/1976). The pivotal point in
identifying the conceptual metaphors was to find out how the linguistic metaphors
were spread across the text produced by the respective subjects and how the density
of metaphor use emerges.
2. The second step was similar to what Cameron (2007) called “identifying systematicity
through vehicle groupings,” that is, there was a grouping of linguistic expressions on the
basis of their semantic connectedness forming a middle-range theoretical framework.
Therefore, as will be shown later, in this phase, there were not yet established conceptual
metaphors such as “LOVE IS . . .” or “THE LOVE RELATIONSHP IS . . .,” but rather
bundles of metaphorical expressions used when talking about love having a key scene in
common that represents a certain source without necessarily determining the target as
associated by the “X IS Y” construction.
3. The third step implied counting the number of linguistic metaphors in each bundle, in
order to yield a quantitative description of the qualitative data.
4. To ensure that there were no findings related to individual preference, the fourth step
included an important criterion for the cultural prototype; linguistic metaphors that only
occurred in one or two interviews were not counted. The minimum number of occur-
rences to be called representative were findings in three different interviews.
5. Finally, a fully-fledged referential baseline as a full metaphorical mapping could be
defined as a target domain coming up with a list of correspondences that were entailed
by the constructed analogy.3

3
This last step corresponds to the fifth one in the description of the five-step procedure for metaphor identification
according to Steen (2002).
 BRAZILIAN AND GERMAN LOVE METAPHORS 109

RESULTS

To begin with, I will give an overview of the conceptual metaphors singled out from the linguistic
corpus. As previously stressed, the first column only refers to the source domain because of the
fuzzy boundaries of the target (“LOVE,” “LOVE RELATIONSHIP,” “OBJECT OF LOVE,” etc.)
where it is preferred to say: “talking about love includes the following conceptual metaphors . . . .”
The second and third columns summarize the number of Brazilian and German expressions
found belonging to this group, accompanied by one illustrative example.
As these findings show, the most frequent metaphor bundles in the Brazilian corpus are the
“GROWTH”/“ORGANISM”/“PLANT” metaphor (32 occurrences), followed by the “JOURNEY”
metaphor (16 occurrences), the “EATING”/“APPETIZING FOOD” metaphor (15 occurrences),
the “CONQUEST” metaphor (14 occurrences), and the “CONSTRUCTION” metaphor (14
occurrences). Compared to the German corpus, the most significant difference seems to be that
there is not even one occurrence for the “EATING/APPETIZING FOOD” metaphor and only
one instance for the “CONQUEST” metaphor. Another interesting comparative finding is that
the “GROWTH/ORGANISM/PLANT” metaphor is highly frequent in the Brazilian corpus,
whereas in the German one there are only six expressions found. I think it is worthwhile to take
a closer look at some instantiations connected to these three metaphor bundles.
“GROWTH”/“ORGANISM”/“PLANT”
“O que é diferente é que tenta assumir uma estrutura mais madura”
(“What’s different is that you try to assume a more mature structure”)
“Quando a gente consegue atingir um compartilhamento de intenções que faz com que o relacionamento
cresça”
(“When people are able to reach a sharing of intentions that makes the relationship grow”)
“Tô apaixonada, deixo acontecer para ver como isso vai se desenvolver”
(“When I’m in love I let things happen to see how this will develop”)
“Está dançando com alguém e aquela sensualidade começa a florescer”
(“You’re dancing with somebody and that sensuality begins to flourish”)
“Pode acontecer que os sentimentos morrem quando não são cuidados”
(“It can happen that the feelings die when not cared for”)
“EATING”/“APPETIZING FOOD”
“O homem falou assim: Ah, sua gostosa, quero te comer”
(“The man said this: Ah, you delicious thing, I want to eat you”)
“Uma ligação amorosa não é só essa coisa de comer carne, o amor é também isso,
mas não é só isso”
(“A love relationship isn’t just about eating meat; it is also about this, but not exclusively”)
“Tem a paixão que é o desejo da carne”
(“There is a passion that’s the carnal desire”)
“Quando eu acho uma garota super gostosa e ficaria à vontade de devorá-la”
(“When I consider a girl superdelicious, I’m anxious to devour her”)
110 SCHRÖDER

“Assim como gostar de estar apaixonada o relacionamento sexual deve ser muito satisfatório, isso
me mantém fiel”
(“Similar as liking and being in love the sexual relationship has to be very satisfactory, that keeps
you faithful”)
“CONQUEST”
“Eu acho que na América Latina, os relacionamentos são mais sensuais, mais daquele lado da con-
quista pela sensualidade por uma pessoa”
(“I guess in Latin America the relationships are more sensual, more of the conquest type by means
of the sensuality you feel for somebody”)
“É uma tática que eu assumo em defesa das minhas emoções, um jogo de sedução e de interesse”
(“It is a tactic I assume in defence of my emotions, a game of seduction and interest”)
“Para conseguir uma mulher, o que é importante é invadir pelo olhar”
(“To get a woman, what’s important is invading by your glance”)
“Tem se muito mais medo de se entregar a um relacionamento”
(“You are much more afraid of surrendering to a relationship”)
“Às vezes, tem que vencer pela insistência mesmo”
(“Sometimes, you have just to win by insistence”)

It was already mentioned previously that these metaphors have fuzzy boundaries; for instance,
in the first complex, some metaphors might be interpreted as rather belonging to the more
image-schematic metaphor “MORE IS UP” or to the more complex “LOVE IS AN ORGANISM.”
Anyway, I grouped them together because the context given by the cotext indicates the key con-
cept of living. Similarly, the example “É uma tática que eu assumo em defesa das minhas
emoções, um jogo de sedução e de interesse” (“It is a tactic I assume in defence of my emotions, a
game of seduction and interest”) can also be understood in terms of “GAMES” or “SPORTS,” but
because of the context “seduction and interest,” which is highly tied to the idea of “CONQUEST,”
this concept is taken to be more dominant since the three concepts partly overlap. In the third
metaphor examples, the first part of the utterance “Uma ligação amorosa não é só essa coisa de
comer carne, o amor é também isso, mas não é só isso” (“A love relationship isn’t just about
eating meat; it is also about this, but not exclusively”) obviously also includes a negation of the
importance of the “EATING” part. However, the pivotal point was what people first think of
when asked to talk about love and which metaphors they use to create their discourse about it.
As mentioned earlier, therefore, singling out metaphors of the kind “LOVE IS . . .” was avoided.
The German corpus revealed the following metaphor bundles to be most frequent: “JOURNEY”
(30 occurrences), “FUNCTIONING MACHINE” (28 occurrences), “EXCHANGE”/
“ECONOMICAL EXCHANGE”/“VALUABLE OBECT” (20 occurrences), “CONSTRUCTION”
(18 occurrences), and “SAFETY NET”/“HOLD”/“SUPPORT”/“REFUGE” (14 occurrences).
Whereas the “JOURNEY” metaphors can also be found in the Brazilian corpus, even though sup-
ported by fewer expressions, there is not even one expression in the Brazilian corpus corresponding
to the “FUNCTIONING MACHINE” metaphor. In addition, the “EXCHANGE”/“ECONOMICAL
EXCHANGE”/“VALUABLE OBJECT” and the “SAFETY NET”/“HOLD”/“SUPPORT”/“REFUGE”
metaphors show little evidence in the Brazilian corpus. Some of the most common metaphoric
expressions linked to these metaphor bundles are reflected in the following examples (see Table 1).
 BRAZILIAN AND GERMAN LOVE METAPHORS 111

TABLE 1
Number of Metaphors Applied in the Two Cultures

Conceptual Metaphor Brazilian Corpus German Corpus

“JOURNEY” 16 “Se não tiver sinceridade, nenhuma 30 “Irgendwann ist die Beziehung sonst
relação vai para frente” an einem Punk angelangt, wo’s
(“When there is no sincerity, no nicht mehr weitergeht”
relationship moves forward”) (at any time the relationship has come
to a point where it can’t go ahead”)
“UNITY OF PARTS” 10 “uma união amorosa entre dois sexos” 3 “dass es passt, dass ähnliche
(“a loving union between two sexes”) Interessen da sind”
(“that they match, that there are
similar interests”)
“CLOSENESS” 10 “que você quer essa pessoa próxima de 0
você”
(“that you want this person near to you”)
“BOND” 4 “O contato seria no lação do casal” 0
(“the contact would be the bond of the
couple”)
“EXCHANGE”/ 6 “E uma coisa que de certa forma 20 “dass man bestimmte Sachen
“ECONOMICAL compensa a outra” austauschen kann, Gedanken,
EXCHANGE”/ (“and one thing in a way compensates Gefühle”
“VALUABLE another”) (“that you can exchange certain
OBJECT” things, thoughts, emotions”)
“PHYSICAL FORCE” 9 “Eu resistia em namorar” 0
(“I resisted dating”)
“NATURAL FORCE” 8 “Todos os sentimentos vão fluir
naturalmente”
(“all the feelings will flow naturally”)
“INSANITY” 6 “Tive um amor durante duas semanas e 0
foi muito louco”
(“I had a love for two weeks and it was
very crazy”)
“CONQUEST” 14 “A parte que eu mais gosto é a parte da 1 “Man ist eher wehrlos”
conquista” (“you’re rather defenceless”)
(“the stage which I most like is that of
conquest”)
“SPORTS”/“GAMES” 8 “Gosto de brincar esses jogos” 0
(“I like to play these games”)
“EATING /“APPETIZING 15 “Aquela coisa que vai progredindo com 0
FOOD” fome”
(“that thing that’s growing with
hunger”)
“ANIMAL” 8 “Estou super feliz com minha gata” 0
(“I’m super happy with my kitty”)
“FUNCTIONING 0 28 “Das Zusammenleben muss
MACHINE” funktionieren”
(“the living together has to function”)
“PRESERVATION OF 2 “Cada um deve ter seu espaço” 15 “Das bedeutet vor allem Freiräume”
TERRITORY” (“everyone has his own space”) (“that means above all free spaces”)

(Continued)
112 SCHRÖDER

TABLE 1
(Continued)

Conceptual Metaphor Brazilian Corpus German Corpus

“ART” 3 “Uma relação amorosa se constitui a 0

partir da arte sexual”
(“a love relationship is constituted by
means of sexual art”)
“CONSTRUCTION” 14 “Está construindo a relação em todos os 18 “Will man mit dem Partner irgendwas
sentidos” an Leben aufbauen”
(“you are construing a relationship in (“if you want to create some way of
every sense”) living”)
“GROWTH”/ 32 “O que você espera é um relacionamento 6 “Ich hoffe, dass sich das Ganze ein
“ORGANISM”/ mais maduro” bisschen befruchtet”
“PLANT” (“what you expect is a more mature (“I hope that the whole thing is
relationship”) getting a little bit fertilized”)
“SAFETY NET”/ 2 “O amor te protege ao mesmo tempo” 14 “dass man auch aufgefangen wird”
“HOLD”/“SUPPORT”/ (“at the same time, the love protects you”) (“that you are also caught”)
“REFUGE”
“OPEN BOOK” 4 “Você se sente cada vez mais aberto para 4 “Komplett alles offen legen im
a pessoa” Endeffekt”
(“each time you feel more open to this (“the bottom line is to lay open
person”) everything”)

“FUNCTIONING MACHINE”
“Wenn einmal was kaputt gegangen ist und man es nicht mehr reparieren kann”
(“Once there is something broken down und you can’t repair it”)
“Wenn ich mich zum Beispiel an eine Beziehung klammere und die geht auf einmal in die Brüche”
(“For instance, when I clutch a relationship and suddenly, it goes to pieces”)
“Ich kenn das [Liebe] nicht anders, weil ich ja so aufgewachsen bin, inna intakten Familie, wo alles
funktioniert und klappt und darum, ich kenn das nicht anders, und das ist für mich auch schön und
wichtig und etwas, woraus man auch immer wieder Kraft schöpfen kann.”
(“I don’t know it [love] any different, because I grew up this way, in an intact family where every-
thing functions and flaps and hence, I don’t know it differently, and that’s nice and important and
something from which I can always gather force again”)
“dass man zueinander steht, gerade dann, wenn’s nicht gut läuft”
(“that you stand together; especially when it works out”)
“Da muss etwas anspringen und dann muss das in Gang gehalten werden”
(“There has to be something being put into operation and then it has to be kept running”)
“EXCHANGE”/“ECONOMICAL EXCHANGE”/“VALUABLE OBJECT”
“Ne Beziehung muss mitbringen, dass sie weiblich ist, ne sexuelle Komponente
bietet”
(“A relationship has to bring along with it, the feminine offering, a sexual component”)
 BRAZILIAN AND GERMAN LOVE METAPHORS 113

“Man muss schon irgendwie was draus schöpfen können, so interessante

Gespräche”
(“In a certain way, you have to be able to scoop something out of it, something like interesting
conversations”)
“Was in der Partnerschaft zählt, ist Zusammenarbeit”
(“What counts in a partnership is collaboration”)
“Ob man dann eine Familie gründet, muss man im Zeitalter der Scheidungen und Unterhaltszahlungen
genau abwägen”
(“In an age of divorces and alimonies, whether you form a family later or not has to be exactly
calculated”)
“Jeder verkauft sich ja erst mal und ist dann enttäuscht”
(“First, everyone sells himself, and later he’s disappointed”)
“Und dass man sich dann ganz konkrete Eigenschaften des anderen raussuchen kann, die man dann
gut findet, dann weib man auch, dass sich das alles irgendwie gelohnt hat”
(“And then, that you can choose quite concrete characteristics of the other which you like; then you
will know, that this all was worthwhile”)
“SAFETY NET”/“HOLD”/“SUPPORT”/“REFUGE”
“dass man halt nicht alleine dasteht”
(“that you just don’t stand alone”)
“und dass man sich ne Stütze ist”
(“and that you are a backup for each other”)
“dass man auch viel Verständnis zeigt und jemandem die Stange hält”
(“that you also show a lot of comprehension and that you balance the load for someone”)
“Ja, dass ich mich einfach fallen lassen kann”
(“Yes, that I can let myself fall down”)
“weil eine Beziehung ja irgendwo auch Halt gibt”
(“because a relationship also gives a foothold”)

Again, we have to take a look at some fuzzy boundaries to point out that there are never such
clear metaphorical labels possible in real, on-line discourse, although this item only can be
exemplified here. For instance, take “Wenn ich mich zum Beispiel an eine Beziehung klammere
und die geht auf einmal in die Brüche” (“For instance, when I clutch a relationship and sud-
denly, it goes to pieces”). In effect, this proposition represents a classical case of “blending” in
the sense of Fauconnier and Turner (2003, 2006). On the one hand, we have the metaphor input
“A PERSON CLUTCHING AN OBJECT TO KEEP IT FROM BEING SNATCHED AWAY.” On
the other hand, we have the metaphor input “A BRITTLE OBJECT THAT CAN BREAK INTO
PIECES.” But now, the “LOVE RELATIONSHIP” input brings its own structure into this
integration network by contributing the aspect of duration. Out of this blended domain, the
“FUNCTIONING MACHINE” is created. The last metaphoric bundle is a good example for
exploring the different levels of specification. While the first utterance “dass man halt nicht
alleine dasteht” (“that you just don’t stand alone”) expresses the idea of “SUPPORT” on a
very generic level, “dass man auch viel Verständnis zeigt und jemandem die Stange hält” (“that
114 SCHRÖDER

you also show a lot of comprehension and that you balance the load for the other”) and “Ja,
dass ich mich einfach fallen lassen kann” (“Yes, that I can let myself fall down”) relate to the
more specific idea of “SAFETY NET.”

DISCUSSION

With respect to the dimensions by which cross-cultural variation of metaphors occur, the pivotal
point of the results studied above applies to “preferential conceptualizations” (Kövecses, 2005),
that is, generally speaking, the metaphors found in each culture are also understandable for the
participants of the other culture. It is rather a matter of preferential choice of certain conceptual
metaphors and not a matter of availability or lack of the source domains in question. Many times
the speakers of a particular language just seem to prefer to use a different set of metaphors for
their target, although there might be parts of the particular conceptual metaphor which are not
known in the other culture, for example, expressions such as “sich fallen lassen” (“to let himself
fall down”) or “jemandem die Stange halten” (“to balance the load for someone”). It seems as
if the “scope of metaphor” (Kövecses, 2005), referring to the set of target domains to which a
particular source domain can apply, may also be promoted by several key lexemes. Thus, the
“FUNCTIONING MACHINE” metaphor is not completely unknown in Brazil, but it is signifi-
cantly less common to map words like “funktionieren” (“function”) and “laufen” (“work”)
onto the target domain, at least not in everyday discourse about love and love relationships.
To which aspects of underlying cultural models might we attribute these differences? As
Kövecses (2003) posits, there are two underlying generic-level metaphors for human relationships:
“INTERACTIVE RELATIONSHIPS ARE ECONOMICAL EXCHANGES” and “COMPLEX
SYSTEMS ARE COMPLEX PHYSICAL OBJECTS.” One interesting finding of the results
presented above is that two of the metaphoric bundles that were very salient in the German
corpus seem to be rooted in these generic-level metaphors: the “ECONOMICAL EXCHANGE”/
“VALUABLE OBJECT” complex and the “FUNCTIONING MACHINE” complex. Elsewhere,
Kövecses (1988) holds that, basically, we can assume that there were two alternative conceptual
metaphors for love: the “LOVE IS A UNITY” metaphor incorporating the concept of “ideal
love” and thereby reflecting more traditional ideas about the topic, and the “LOVE IS AN
ECONOMICAL EXCHANGE” metaphor that rather represents the current model of “typical
love” influenced by the rational organization of business.
The distinction drawn here departs a little from this proposal, and, moreover, I do not believe
that it is only one basic metaphor which produces the classification preferred by the present
work, but is an interplay of several. The distinction that I prefer, instead, is that of the “ideal of
passionate love” and the “ideal of romantic love” as analyzed in its cultural formation process by
Niklas Luhmann (1996). To him, love must be understood in terms of a “Generalized Symbolic
Medium of Communication,” therefore influenced by the specific temporal and geographical
location in which the emotion is construed, since it is the communication code itself that encour-
ages people to build up the corresponding emotion subjected to particular sociogenetic processes
of evolution. He describes the process of love’s semantic differentiation in three steps: its birth
and idealization during the Middle Ages, its paradoxization during the French classical period,
and finally, the reflection of self-reference introduced by the ideal of romantic love as a result of
a modified comprehension of the subject. While the passionate ideal of love is dominated by an
 BRAZILIAN AND GERMAN LOVE METAPHORS 115

increase of the emotion in imagination, which can be characterized as a “übermäβige, exzessive,

maβlose [. . .] Leidenschaftsliebe, die zu einem lust- und leidvollen Identitätsverlust führt, zu
einem partiellen Verrückwerden” (“exceeding, excessive, overweening [. . .] passion love cul-
minating in a lust- and painful loss of identity, a partial turning mad”) (Baumgart, 1985), the
ideal of romantic love evolves from criticizing the superficiality of the “plaisir” inherent in the
passionate ideal based on coquetry and gallantry. Hence, the obscene disqualifies itself by
the absence of real interest in the other person as an individual. By individualizing the subject, it
turns versatile; that is, love becomes capable of continuance so that the concept of love and com-
panionship could be combined, bearing out the emergence of love-match which appeared first in
England and the United States in the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding, this development
from passionate love to romantic love is strongly associated with two cultures: the French one as
the cradle of the passionate ideal and the German one as the cradle of the romantic one.
Luhmann (1989) explains this connection as follows: since the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the growing differentiation of the function systems (legal system, politics, science,
economy, etc.) consigns a lack of superordinate reference to society where morality enters.
Testimonies of this development were the attempts at integration of religion and morality by the
freemasons. People now aimed for real moral qualities and authenticity, a development which
turned out to have success, especially in more Protestant-influenced cultures (Schröder, 2003).
Within this opposition, it is argued that the German corpus bears evidence for an almost strict
limitation of the metaphors to the ideal of romantic love, whereas the Brazilian one rather points
to an overlap of both. Initially, focusing on the crucial differences between the findings, we will
pay attention to metaphor bundles that might support the chosen dichotomy as a possible expli-
cation for the described differences. Notice that the following table (Table 2) also integrates
metaphor bundles neglected in the previous paragraph when concentrated only on the most out-
standing numbers. But connected to the superordinate theme, they turn out to be relevant, too.
The hypothesis that follows here is that the Brazilian subjects, stimulated to talking about
love and love relationships, tend to focus more on the first stage of the relationship, while the
German subjects are more concerned about the future, that is, the stages that follow. In other
words, the Brazilian subjects emphasize the emotion love in contrast to the German subjects

TABLE 2
A Comparison of the Ideals of Love and the Conceptual Metaphors Involved

Metaphors Indicating the Corpus Corpus Metaphors Indicating the Corpus Corpus
Passionate Ideal of Love BRA GER Romantic Ideal of Love GER BRA

“UNITY OF PARTS” 10 03 “JOURNEY” 30 16

“CLOSENESS” 10 00 “FUNCTIONING MACHINE” 28 00
“BOND” 04 00 “TERRITORY PRESERVATION” 15 02
“PHYSICAL FORCE” 09 00 “ECONOMICAL EXCHANGE” 20 06
“NATURAL FORCE” 08 00 “SAFETY NET”/“REFUGE” 14 02
“INSANITY” 06 00 “OPEN BOOK” 04 04
“CONQUEST” 14 01 “CONSTRUCTION” 18 14
“SPORTS”/“GAMES” 08 00 “GROWTH”/“ORGANISM”/“PLANT” 06 32
“EATING”/“APPETIZING FOOD” 15 00
“ANIMAL” 08 00
“ART” 03 00
116 SCHRÖDER

who underscore the friendship part. This is supported by the list Kövecses (2003) uses to
describe the source domains which apply to most “LOVE” and “LUST” concepts, including
almost all of the favored concepts of the Brazilian subjects: “LIVING ORGANISM”, “NATURAL
FORCE”, “PHYSICAL FORCE”, “INSANITY”, “NUTRIENT”/“FOOD”, “WAR”, and
“GAME.” By contrast, the metaphorical concepts preferred by the German subjects reflect more
items of the “HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS” concepts listed by him: “DISTANCE”, “ECONOMICAL
EXCHANGE”, “BUILDING”, “MACHINE”, “JOURNEY”, and “VALUABLE COMMODITY.”
“PLANT” and “BUILDING” are also named. The “BUILDING” metaphor may correspond in
many aspects to what I have labelled “CONSRUCTION.” So, we can make a decisive observa-
tion: as stated above, in the Brazilian culture, the romantic and the passionate ideals are both
salient, even though the first one seems to be less salient in comparison to the German corpus.
However, the “CONSTRUCTION” metaphor is nearly equally distributed, the “JOURNEY”
metaphor is highly frequent in the German corpus but also amply presented in the Brazilian
corpus, in which, by contrast, the “GROWTH”/“ORGANISM”/“PLANT” bundle is signifi-
cantly high. I would conclude that both cultures have the idea of a love relationship as some-
thing enduring. Nevertheless, they tend to prefer different conceptions to express this basic idea.
While the German subjects are more familiar with the image-schematic metaphor of the
“PATH” two lovers walk together, that is grounded in a more horizontal and linear orientation
system and directed to a more temporally understood future in common, the Brazilian subjects
prefer a conceptualization grounded in a more vertical orientation based on the image-schematic
metaphor of “GROWTH,” mostly being animated. Notably, this tendency corresponds to an
interesting detail observed in the earlier study (Schröder, 2003) about the different life concepts.
The answers given by the subjects of the Brazilian group,4 when asked for the most important
items that constitute a good love relationship, allude to a higher emphasis on reciprocal actions
such as “dancing together,” “going out together,” “having good sex,” etc. By contrast, in the
German group, this “principle of interactional reciprocity” might be substituted by another one
labelled as the “principle of parallel commonalities” (see Table 3). Some typical answers to this
question which sketch out these different attitudes toward love relationships are illustrated in the
following table.
It seems obvious that the “principle of interactional reciprocity” in conjunction with the idea
of a long-term relationship combines better with the “GROWTH” metaphor than with the
“JOURNEY” metaphor, which is more apt to represent the parallelization of perspectives in
order to create a future in common by self-propelled motion of the two travellers involved
toward a destination. According to Lakoff (1995), the “LOVE IS A JOURNEY” metaphor can be
seen as the dual of the “LOVE IS A PARTNERSHIP” metaphor, that is, a two-person business
because both are special cases of the event-structure metaphor. That would explain the high use
of the lexical item “partnership” found in the German corpus, unlike the Brazilian one.
Aside from the “JOURNEY” metaphor reflecting romantic love in its combination of sex and
companionship striving for duration, another pivotal point expressed by the German metaphors
is the assumption of maximalization that can be found in the “FUNCTIONING MACHINE”
metaphor, as well as in the “ECONOMICAL EXCHANGE” metaphor. As the logic of the tech-
nological production process aims for an increase of the results as much as possible—bigger,

4
The results of that study were not only based on the analyses of the twenty interviews held in each culture, but also
on the evaluation of 400 questionnaires.
 BRAZILIAN AND GERMAN LOVE METAPHORS 117

TABLE 3
Interactional Reciprocity Versus Parallel Commonalities

Brazilian Corpus German Corpus

“respeito mútuo” “gleiche Wellenlänge”

(“mutual respect”) (“the same wavelength”)
“amor recíproco” “gemeinsame Interessen”
(“reciprocal love”) (“common interests”)
“amor mútuo” “dass die Ziele übereinstimmen”
(“mutual love”) (“that the objectives correspond”)
“respeitar-se” “dass man in wichtigen Dingen an einem Strang zieht”
(“to respect each other”) (“that you pull together concerning the important things”)
“entender-se” “ähnliche Vorstellungen vom Leben”
(“to comprehend each other”) (“similar ideas about life”)
“amar e ser amado” “Gemeinsamkeiten”
(“to love and being loved”) (“commonalities”)
“respeito entre duas pessoas” “gleiche Einstellungen”
(“respect between two persons”) (“equal attitudes”)

better, cheaper, more efficient, stronger, faster—that axiom is equally transferred to other life
domains, that is, the “tinkering attitude” of the working and business domains is assigned to sec-
tors of social life as already observed by Berger and Berger (1974). As mentioned just above, it
might also be the influence of the Protestantism and the individualism (Schröder, 2003) which
promote this kind of development.
Now, if we take a further look at the “EATING”/“APPETIZING FOOD” metaphor, which
obviously reflects a specific cultural theme of the Brazilian speech community, we can indeed
state that this metaphorical concept might be omnipresent in a widespread variety of domains of
the Brazilian culture, such as the following.
Proverbs:
“Criança que nunca comeu doce, quando come se lambuza”
(“A child who never ate sweets, makes a mess eating for the first time”)5
Literature:
“Tu está tão bonita, tu nem sabe. . . Tu parece uma cebola, carnuda sumarenta, boa de morder. . .”
(“You are so beautiful, you can hardly imagine. You look like an onion, beefy and juicy and good to
bite into” (“Dona Flor e seus dois maridos” by Jorge Amado 1969, 415)6
Brazilian Popular Music:
“Vamos comer Caetano/Vamos desfrutá-lo/Vamos comer Caetano/Vamos começá-lo/Vamos comer
Caetano/Vamos devorá-lo/Degluti-lo, mastigá-lo/Vamos lamber a língua”7

5
This proverb is prominently applied to the lack of experience in love relationships.
6
Compare also Amado (1969), Espanca (1996), and many of the poems published in the journal CADERNOS
NEGROS.
7
Further evidence, among others, can be found in the following songs: “Você não entende nada” by Caetano Veloso
(1970), “Comida” by the Titãs (1987), “Eu te devoro” by Djavan (1998), “Morena Tropicana” by Alceu Valença (1982),
“Mania de você” by Rita Lee, “Tanta Saudade” by Chico Buarque & Djavan, to cite only some very famous ones, etc.
118 SCHRÖDER

(“We will eat Caetano/We will relish him/We will eat Caetano/We will start now/We will eat Caet-
ano/We will devour him/Swallow him, chew him/We will lick his tongue”) (“Vamos comer Caetano”
by Adriana Calcanhotto 1998)
Televison:
“Tu tem uma abundância de carnes fartas. Tu não é uma mulher, tu é um rodízio”
(You have abundance of meat enough and to spare. You are not a woman, you are a meat buffet)
(show “Sai de Baixo”, cf. Neves, 1998)8

Furthermore, a semasiological glance at the source domain “EATING” endorses the cultural
entrenchment of this concept: until today, the “EATING” metaphor can also be found in other
target domains of the Brazilian culture. An example might be the sociological and anthropologi-
cal literature searching for an adequate delineation of the Brazilian culture, where many times
“THE BRAZILIAN” is described in terms of a “CANNIBAL” (Andrade, 1995; Ianni, 1993) who
devours and tropicalises the European culture in order to adjust it to the hybrid conditions of the
Brazilian lifestyle.
The topos of the Brazilian sensuality and its mixture with the “EATING”/“APPETIZING
FOOD” metaphors is rooted here, as among other myths, in that of the “lost paradise,” born
with the help of the first Jesuits arriving in Brazil. In opposition to the Portuguese adventurers
and those sent by the Crown, the Jesuits aimed to prevent the Indians from being enslaved and
viewed their nudity and lack of shame as something natural, reflecting human living before the
fall of mankind. During the empire, this kind of nativism, mixed with exotism and romantism,
bore the picturesque association opulent nature—great future. This development alludes to the
roots of the stereotype of the fervent love life of the Brazilians reflected in the figure of the
mulatta bearing the stamp of the seductive and innocent natural beauty. Thus, Bastide (1971)
cites a folkloric proverb circulating since the first centuries of Brazilian history:
“Mulatinha brasileira, você é um doce maná, é um fruto açucarado, saboroso
cambucá. A mulata é feiticeira, outra como ela não há ; o amor da mulatinha, a branca não sabe dá.”
(“‘Mulatinha brasileira’, you are so sweet as a fruit, you are a sweet and sticky fruit, nutty
Cambucá. The mulatta is a sorceress, there is no one like her; a white woman is not able to give the
love of a ‘mulatinha’.”)

The “CONQUEST” metaphor also strongly matches with the ideal of passionate love by empha-
sizing the instantaneous passion. Luhmann (1996) points out that the passion arrogated by the
ideal itself, in effect implies a certain license to act masked by passivity and compulsion.9
Thereby, defencelessness and behavior planning form a cohesion of increase describable by the
paradox “erobernde Selbstunterwerfung, gewünschtes Leiden, sehende Blindheit, bevorzugte
Krankheit, bevorzugtes Gefängnis, süβes Martyrium” (“conquering self-submission, desired
suffering, seeing blindness, preferred illness, preferred prison, sweet martyrdom”) (Luhmann,
1996). What comes to light here, too, is what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) already mentioned in
their first book: metaphorical concepts do not only structure our everyday discourse, they also

8
In her article, Neves (1998) has a whole list of expressions which link “SEX” to “EATING,” which stem from this
show. Compare also Lenz Costa Lima, Gibbs Jr., & Françozo (2001).
9
Note that the metaphors PHYSICAL and NATURAL FORCE are involved in the ideal of passionate love because they are
grounded in the metaphor THE PASSIVITY OF EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE IS THE PHYSICAL EFFECT OF NATURAL/PHYSICAL
FORCES as Kövecses (2003) points it out.
 BRAZILIAN AND GERMAN LOVE METAPHORS 119

conduct our actions. Thus, a German woman might interpret the insistency of a Brazilian man
who wants to establish an intimate contact as an invasion in her territory, and she might not
understand why he always tries it again, even after she has already told him that she is not inter-
ested. He, by himself, interprets her behavior by means of the “CONQUEST” metaphor and
might think that she wants to delay the conquest game. Observe that in the Brazilian culture, the
proverb “Água mole/Em pedra dura/Tanto bate/Até que fura” (“Constant dripping wears away
the stone”) applies first of all to the establishing of a sexual contact. Whereas in German culture
it primarily refers to the hard work somebody has to do to get where he wants.

CONCLUSION

As Gibbs (2006) claims, until today, “there is still insufficient attention paid to the exact ways
that cultural beliefs shape both people’s understandings of their embodied experiences and the
conceptual metaphors which arise from these experiences.” The study presented here aims to
make a contribution to these shortcomings by illustrating how the revealing of different prefer-
ential metaphorical conceptualizations might be embedded in different cultural backgrounds.
Therefore, we blanked out parallels here explicitly to emphasize the culture-specific variety of
metaphor concepts that can be seen as reflecting particular cultural models. Thus, the metaphors
“JOURNEY,” “FUNCTIONING MACHINE,” “TERRITORY PRESERVATION,” “ECONOMI-
CAL EXCHANGE,” and “SAFETY NET”/“REFUGE,” which were considered to be more charac-
teristic for the German corpus, could be tied to the ideal of romantic love, including strong emphasis
given to the love relationship rather than the emotion itself while in the Brazilian corpus, there
appeared to be a greater tendency to talk about love not only in terms of the relationship but
to account for the emotion itself, too. As a result, the corpus-entailed metaphors such as
“CONQEUST”, “EATING”/“APPETIZING FOOD”, “CLOSENESS”, “PHYSICAL FORCE”,
“NATURAL FORCE” and “INSANITY,” which can be joined to the ideal of passionate love and
underscoring the emotion itself, and by doing so, accentuate the moment rather than the future.

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