Our perception of the social system, morality and human relations is an influential factor on how human´s mentally and linguistically express themselves through figurative speech. By examining human´s tendency to personify abstract entities with concrete structures, increases our understanding of how the human lexicon associates and maps multiple source domains with their targets. As each individual´s experiences and background knowledge varies, their figure of thought, or sense of reality, is illustrated in their rhetorical processing. That being said, in 1724 one of England´s first feminists, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wrote a poem describing how the injustices patriarchal …show more content…
They are clusters of words that occur together under certain circumstances. However, words and phrases can have both positive or negative connotations depending upon individual´s social and cultural experiences. While some words may have the same denotative, their connotative meaning can be allusively dissimilar. In a like manner, metaphors are figurative expressions that connote meanings beyond their literal meanings. Specifically, denotations are literal aspects of words while connotations depend on a learner´s emotional association with a word, not the words literal meaning. Using metaphors in speech means associating two different concepts that have something in common with each other to illustrate a mental thought or an idea. To understand metaphorically conveyed ideas entails having the unconscious ability to connect the two domains together and cognitively build networks with associations. In truth, articulating thoughts through language is a secondary process as the prospect of the mapping itself is a primary attribute. Nevertheless, this primary ability helps humans map conceptual metaphors ontologically from one source domain to a target