University of California Santa Cruz Diving into the Wreck, Study notes of Poetry

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University of California Santa Cruz Diving into the Wreck: Embodied Experience in the Interpretation of Allegory A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY in PSYCHOLOGY by Lacey Okonski June 2015 The dissertation of Lacey Okonski is approved: Raymond Gibbs Jr., chair Alan Kawamoto Nick Davidenko

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Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies

iii Table of Contents

1. Abstract: pages iv-v
2. Acknowledgements: pages vi-viii
3. Text: pages 1- 89
4. Appendix: pages 90 - 109
5. Bibliography: pages 110- 113

iv Abstract Diving into the Wreck: Embodied Experience in the Interpretation of Allegory Lacey Okonski Allegory refers to a narrative that can be interpreted to reveal an additional layer of symbolic meaning beyond what appears on the surface. More specifically, an embodied allegory is created when the target domain is never explicitly mentioned and the source domain draws upon embodied concepts. For example, the poem, “Diving Into the Wreck,” by Adrienne Rich, describes a scuba diver going down to explore a wrecked ship. Although the poem describes the diverse, specific actions, it also invites an allegorical interpretation in which the investigation of a wrecked ship symbolically represents one person’s look back at a past failed romantic relationship. The present studies investigate whether ordinary readers are capable of inferring allegorical messages when reading Rich’s poem and how they might do so. Two studies prompted participants to think of the poem in a literal way (as though the poem is about scuba diving), in a particular metaphoric way (as though the poem is about a failed relationship), in a general metaphoric way (as though the poem has multiple valid meanings), or with no prompt (in a control condition participants saw no prompt). In general, the data suggests that participants could interpret the allegorical messages in the Rich poem, not through abstract, disembodied processes, but rather through embodied simulations. These results are considered in relationship to current theories in cognitive science on conceptual metaphor and allegory. I argue that allegorical interpretation is not limited to formal analyses done by literary scholars. Instead, the embodied simulations that are a fundamental trait of human

v cognition drive allegorical interpretation. The same resources used to reason about action and perception are used to comprehend both everyday language as well as poetic instances of allegory. Keywords : allegory, conceptual metaphor theory, embodied simulation, literary response

vi Acknowledgements My grandmother was a pioneer of sorts. She grew up on a farm and was one of the first ladies to serve in the United States Women’s Army Corps (WAC). My mother continued this brave legacy earning a Master’s degree from Stanford in electrical engineering and going on to become a rocket scientist at NASA. These two women passed down to me some of their bravery, intelligence, and kindness. This work is dedicated to them and also to Amelie who has yet to be born. I know she will be equally as great. It takes a village to write a dissertation and my support system has been wonderful: Rodger Hayes, Aunt Cookie, Grandpa Sam, Sandra Bingham, Rachael Behrens, Noelle Nehmer, Sabine and Thomas Blaesi, and Gabriel Molina. Thank you to Sejin Hahn who has been a very understanding partner and is always ready with a smile and a glass of wine. Also, thanks to my goddaughter Aubrie who read some of my dissertation and assured me that it’s not as boring as a lot of things she has read. I hope it inspires her to continue to find her own unique voice as she goes about her studies. Thank you to the following artists: Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickenson, and Robert Frost. To Kate Vrijmoet for her intersemiotic translation of Diving into the Wreck. My whole committee took pause to appreciate this work of art on my introductory slide. Thank you to Gabriel Romero and Victoria Ruskovoloshina, the entire Mambo Romero family, and Bay Area dance community. I am beyond grateful to these artists, poets and dancers for adding so much beauty to my world.

vii I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Nick Davidenko, Alan Kawamoto, and Ben Carson, who were truly a pleasure to work with and who always provided me with intellectual stimulation through their careful consideration of my work. There were some scholars out there who, in spite of their celebrity and busy schedules, took time out to have conversations which greatly inspired me: Rolf Zwaan, Mike Kaschak, Roel Willems, Cornelia Mueller, Jean-Remi Lapaire, Szilvi Csabi, Thomas Schack, Bettina Blaesing, Wlad Godzich, Michael Spivey, Durand Begault, Gerard Steen, Meg Wilson, and Bruce Bridgeman. A special thank you to Litze Hu for sharing her deep knowledge of statistics with me. Ron Rogers and Annabel Prinz from San Jose State University helped me to kick off my career as a statistics lecturer, financing the end of my dissertation work. The Gibbs lab is always a haven of intellectual stimulation. Thank you to my labmates: Julie Lonergan, Marcus Perlman, Laura Morett, Nate Clark, Pat Samermit, and Chris Karzmark. My research assistants, many of whom are making me very proud as they have gone on to very respectable PhD programs of their own: Julie Carranza, Miles Hatfield, Cameron Smith, Kaitlin Beatrix, Giselle Stayerman, Daniel Shubat, Emory Strickland, Grant Glander, Adam Zimmerman, Arun Croll, Claire Williams, Matisse Mozer, Julian Rifkin, Emily Huscher, and Laura Kincaid. Thank you to Nicole Wilson who introduced me to applied linguistics through our collaborations at Open English. I am also lucky to have met some brilliant international scholars from around the world while they were working in the lab as post docs: Marlene Johansson Falck, Luciane Correa Ferreira, and Aneider “Ani”

viii Iza. Thank you to all the participants who selected my studies over the years even though it has always had the same boring name, “Language & Pragmatics.” These willing participants have made all of this possible. Finally, this work is also dedicated to Ray Gibbs. He was my first choice for grad school and I’m incredibly honored that he has given me this opportunity. Hopefully I have inherited some small part of his genius.

An Introduction to Embodied Allegory Life is filled with many journeys. There are the physical kinds that we encounter when we travel and also more abstract journeys where we monitor our progress in a variety of other domains. When Robert Frost was at the beginning of his career as a poet he spent much time walking through the forest with his dear friend, Edward Thomas. On these long walks they would sometimes discuss where their lives were heading, their hopes and aspirations as unknown writers, and which way they should walk next. It is rumored that Frost wrote one of the most famous poems of our time, “The Road Not Taken,” to gently poke fun at his friend’s moments of indecision during these walks that Frost himself called “talks-walking” (Hollis, 2011). Sadly, Thomas took this poem and its allegorical message very seriously. In a moment of decisiveness, Thomas enlisted for the war and was subsequently killed in a battle in France. Read the poem below and take special note of how a mundane activity like going for a walk can have strong psychological effects when it is used as a symbolic tool in an allegorical context: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. In this poem, the metaphorical journey theme comes alive because of the specificity, elaboration, and attention to detail, which invites readers to consider a symbolic message beyond a simple story about taking a walk through the woods. This metaphorical message could be about a job, about a relationship, about buying a house, about going on a diet, or about making decisions in life more generally. How do ordinary readers understand that the poem is allegorical when there is no mention of the larger symbolic theme? Allegory Interpretation “ Allegoresis is our imaginative projection into other minds and worlds, and is ‘cognitive’ precisely because much abstract cognition is inherently embodied and imaginative.” (Gibbs, 2011) There is a popular folk notion that many people simply aren’t gifted at poetic interpretation because they cannot understand linguistic symbolism. Frost once commented on having access to these literary gifts when he said: “It's only if you're good at it that I'm talking to you. If you haven't been, I don't want you to be let in on any figures I ever made, don't want any teacher to let you in on me.” (Frost, 1953). Frost might be quite right that some scholars are able to do a more nuanced analysis

of the poem, yet his embodied allegory remains one of America’s most loved poems (Kettle, 2001). Robert Pinsky’s “Favorite Poem Project 1 ” caught the attention of over 18,000 Americans (with an impressive age range of 5-97 years old). These ordinary people submitted video readings and explanations about their favorite poems and Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” came in first place. This overwhelming popular response to the Frost poem suggests that many people enjoy reading this poetic allegory and find its symbols accessible. In spite of Frost’s idealization of his audience, and contrary to the popular notion that average people can’t understand poetry, this allegory has proven accessible to ordinary readers. Yet the actual interpretation of allegory still remains a mysterious process. Some empirical work has shown that people can use their embodied knowledge to understand allegory. Participants in one study read one of two allegorical poems: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and Maxine Kumin’s “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem” (Gibbs & Boers, 2005). Each participant wrote out their interpretations for each three-line segment of the poem, and afterward wrote out their understanding of the complete poem. An analysis of these written protocols showed that participants frequently understood the metaphorical and allegorical meaning of the poems. For instance, one participant interpreted the Frost poem first in terms of the literal surface meaning and then metaphorically: “The traveler, in making this tough decision, contemplates for a long time which path to follow. This could be interpreted as a struggle or challenge in one’s life, where one must decide which is the better path or way to go” (ibid). Participants rarely included personal, 1 http://www.favoritepoem.org/project.html

idiosyncratic information in their interpretations. These data suggest that participants were quite good at tapping into the allegorical themes implied by the embodied imagery contained in the poems. In another study that focused on embodied allegory (Gibbs & Blackwell, 2012), participants were asked to read the following allegorical story, taken from a contemporary novel, where a poet/author likens his writer’s block to climbing an insecure ladder: “I wish I could spill forth the wisdom of twenty years of reading and writing poetry. But I am not sure I can... Now it’s like I’m on some infinitely tall ladder. You know the way that old aluminum ladders have the texture, that kind of not too appealing roughness of texture, and that kind of cold gray color? I’m clinging to this telescoping ladder that leads up into the blinding blue. The world is somewhere very far below. I don’t know how I got here. It’s a mystery. When I look up I see people climbing rung by rung. I see Jorie Graham. I see Billy Collins. I see Ted Kooser. They’re all clinging to the ladder too. And above them, I see Auden, Kunitz. Whoa, way up there. Samuel Daniel, Sara Teasdale, Herrick. Tiny figures clambering, climbing. “The wind comes over, whsssew, and its cold, and the ladder vibrates, and I feel very exposed and high up. Off to one side there’s Helen Vendler, in her trusty dirigible, filming our ascent. And I look down and there are many people behind me. They’re hurrying up to where I am. They’re twenty-three-old energetic climbing creatures in their anoraks and goggles, and I’m trying to keep climbing. But my hands are cold and going numb. My arms are tired to tremblement. It’s freezing, and it’s lonely, and there’s nobody to talk to. And what if I just let go? What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just — ffffshhhooooww. Let go. “Would that be such a bad thing?” (Baker, 2009) Participants were then asked to answer a series of 10 questions, nine of which were about specific phrases from the poem describing climbing the ladder and one question asking people to describe their own bodily sensations when they were reading the poem. For example, when asked to “Please describe what an ‘infinitely tall ladder’ refers to or represents” 62% of participants described the poet’s path to

success, the poet’s job as a never ending journey, or where the end is never in sight. When participants were asked to reason about why the poet/editor was trying to climb the ladder, 45% of the replies indicated that he was trying to become a great poet or to reach the status of a great poet in heaven. The poet was clinging to the ladder because, according to the participants in this study, he realized that it never ends, that he was not really going anywhere, and that it is hard to achieve success as a poet (25%) or because he had not yet reached his full potential as a poet and was fearful of losing his career, knowledge and creativity (23%). Participants also answered 3 questions about metaphorically interpreting the importance of poets based upon their vertical positions on the ladder. They answered two forced choice questions about which poet was more famous: 1. Graham or Auden 2. Kooser or Kunitz? Participants showed a high proportion of agreement that Auden (91%) and Kunitz (95%) were the more famous poets. A third question asked participants a how they knew which poet was more famous and many participants (79%) noted that the poet’s respective positions on the ladder was indicative of how famous they are so that the poets who were higher on the ladder were also further up. The data also showed that participants interpreted Helen Vendler to be filming the ascent because she is a filmmaker, documentarian of some sort (36%), or a critic (32%) and that the other people on the ladder were other poets, the next generation of poets, or poets who had not yet been defeated (89%). Finally, participants interpreted “loosening his grip” and possible “falling to one side” as references to writing the introductory essay (32%) or giving up writing the introductory essay (16%).

These data show that participants were able to construct allegorical interpretations with some consistency. Climbing upwards and pondering what might happen if the author would fall off of the ladder were mapped, respectively, onto the allegorical acts of becoming a famous poet and possibly giving up on that endeavor while encountering writer’s block. Participants in this experiment could easily decide who the more famous poets were, not because they had prior knowledge, but because they all have the fundamental ability to reason about abstract concepts in a metaphorical way. They embraced embodied source domains like verticality to infer underlying metaphorical themes like UP IS GOOD and UP IS MORE which were consistent with their interpretations that the more famous poets are further up on the ladder and also with the idea that if the poet can climb higher he can achieve more success. At the end of the questionnaire, participants were asked to explicitly reflect on any bodily sensations they experienced when reading the passage. Participants indicated a high agreement of physiological reports (45% mentioned a physical property of the ladder, 41% mentioned the fear of the height or the potential of falling) and a moderate agreement of emotional feelings associated with the passage (feeling lonely, anxious, stressed out). These data reflect the overall ability to understand the surface meaning about the physical experience of what it is like to climb a scary ladder, and recognize the abstract meaning in which climbing the ladder is a parallel to success in one’s writing career. Participants showed coherence in the way they interpreted the embodied features of the ladder (e.g. verticality), consistency in the types of embodied

simulations they were having (e.g. being scared of falling on a shaky ladder) and consistency in the associated feelings these embodied situations were likely to evoke (a sense of fear, stress, or anxiety). Even if some of the participants were not always able to verbalize the particular embodied elements they were using in order to create their abstract allegorical interpretations, they still showed implicit knowledge of the metaphorical mappings between the difficulties of ladder climbing and success/failure in one’s career. Language Comprehension and Embodied Simulation The fact that participants in the previously mentioned studies were able to tap into some of the embodied elements and abstract meanings when reading literature supports the idea that they are using embodied simulations to infer allegorical meanings. Embodied simulation refers to the idea that “we understand language by simulating in our minds what it would be like to experience the things that language describes” (Bergen, 2012, p. 13). Even when people are not engaging in overt action, they automatically and imaginatively employ their bodily resources to create an interpretation of a given text or speech sample (Gibbs, 2006). Psycholinguistic and cognitive neuroscience research provides evidence in support of this idea. For example, one study presented people with sentences such as “The carpenter hammered the nail into the wall.” After reading the sentence, participants were shown a picture of an object, such as a nail or elephant, and asked to quickly judge whether that object was mentioned in the sentence. Of course, people quickly say, “yes” to the picture of a nail and “no” to the elephant. The primary interest, however, was with speeded responses to the nail picture, depending on

whether it was shown in a horizontal or vertical orientation. Research indicates that people, on average, were faster to make their “yes” decisions when the picture was in the same spatial orientation as implied by the sentence they just read (Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001). Thus, people are faster to say “yes” when the picture showed the nail in the horizontal orientation than when it was shown upright, or in the vertical position. However, when people first read the sentence “The carpenter hammered the nail into the floor,” they were faster, on average, to say “yes” to the nail picture that presented it in a vertical position than when seen in the horizontal orientation. This pattern of results suggests that participants are simulating the implied orientation of objects when they are interpreting sentences. In a similar study, Zwaan and colleagues found that when participants read sentences about an eagle in a nest they were quicker to verify an eagle with its wings tucked. Likewise when they read a sentence about an eagle in the sky participants were quicker to verify an eagle with its wings spread (Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). Once again, people are simulating the shapes of objects when they process language. These results suggest that simulations are dynamic because participants do not prefer any depictions of a nail or eagle equally, they prefer the depictions of the nail and the eagle that match the linguistic context that they just read. In this way, simulations are dynamic and context sensitive. The context provides nuanced information and these contextual details are incorporated in simulations. People do not access static representations of “eagle” or “nail” concepts in their mental lexicon, they create specific simulations based on the details of their current linguistic contexts.

In a similar line of inquiry, cognitive neuroscience researchers tested to see whether action verbs create body specific neural simulations (Hauk, Johnsrude & Pulvermueller, 2004). Participants were asked to engage in a passive reading task. Hemodynamic response was collected using event related fMRI. Participants showed increased activation in the motor and premotor cortex in body specific areas when they read body specific action verbs so that when they read words like “lick” the areas showing increased hemodynamic response overlapped with the areas of the motor and premotor area which were previously determined to control mouth related action. This experiment illustrates that simply reading a word can activate embodied simulations even when the body itself is not in action. Previous, entrenched knowledge of the body in action contributes to people’s embodied understandings of action verbs. This brief sample of studies is representative of a new trend in cognitive psychology to view language comprehension as a multi-modal, constructive process that relies on embodied simulations as a means of semantic grounding (Bergen, 2012; Gibbs, 2006). Traditional theories of language comprehension posit that language is an amodal, modular process (Fodor, 1983). Still, the question remains: How do people create embodied simulations for abstract, metaphorical language? Some scholars have rejected the embodied simulation view of language understanding because they doubt that people can ever create embodied simulations of language referring to abstract events (Mahon & Caramazza, 2008; McGlone, 2007; Rakova, 2006).

In contrast, cognitive linguistics research has demonstrated that metaphoric language, rather than being a deviant, indirect way to communicate, reflects an embodied way to ground abstract concepts (Gibbs, 2006; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). The embodied, experiential domain, also known as a source domain , helps structure the usually more abstract, and difficult to define target domain. Imagining what it is like to walk through the woods serves as an embodied source domain to better understand the more abstract target domain of life and our life decisions. This systematic process, where the facts about a physical source domain (e.g. a physical journey through the forest) are applied to an abstract target domain (e.g. decisions about how to proceed in life) to create a complex set of metaphorical entailments is known as source-to-target domain mapping. For example, having two paths on a physical journey can create a moment of indecision if you do not know which path leads to the desired destination. This can be mapped onto difficult life decisions because having two options can be like choosing between paths and having difficulty knowing which choice will lead to a better outcome can be a lot like not being able to see where each path leads. The physical limitations of not being able to explore both paths at once and not being able to visually see where each path leads are mapped onto other more abstract mental struggles that one might have in life. People often note that their love relationships “aren’t going anywhere,” that they “are having a rough time,” or that “they might go their separate ways.” These concrete elements of a journey allow speakers to talk about abstract topics in a structured way. Several lines of experimental research support the claim that people can readily draw embodied source-to-target domain mappings when interpreting

metaphorical language. For example, in one set of studies, participants heard one of the two following stories about either successful or difficult romantic relationships (Gibbs, 2013): Story A: Successful Relationship Imagine that you are a single person. A friend sets you up on a blind date. You really like this person and start dating a lot. Your relationship was moving along in a good direction. But then it got even better. The relationship felt like it was the best you ever had. This continues to this day. No matter what happens, the two of you are quite happy together. Story B: Difficult Relationship Imagine that you are a single person. A friend sets you up on a blind date. You really like this person and start dating a lot. Your relationship was moving along in a good direction. But then you encounter some difficulties. The relationship did not feel the same as before. This lasted for some time. No matter how hard you two tried, the two of you were not getting along. Both stories referred to the embodied metaphor “Your relationship was moving along in a good direction ,” which was motivated by the embodied conceptual metaphor RELATIONSHIPS ARE JOURNEYS. This conceptual metaphor utilizes the embodied activity of taking a journey through time and space to describe the source domain of love relationships. After reading one of these stories, participants were blindfolded and asked to walk, or imagine walking, to a tennis ball, 40 feet away, while thinking about the story they just heard. Results showed that those who heard the successful relationship story walked (15.7 sec) and imagined walking (11.4 sec), longer than did people who heard the unsuccessful story (12.8 sec and 9.5 seconds respectively).

When participants heard metaphorical stories about successful relationships they implicitly imagined that the people involved in the relationship moved in similar trajectories, travelled further, and travelled in a straighter line causing them to walk faster as if they too were on a smooth, successful trajectory. These differences were not found when people heard non-metaphorical stories in which the statement “Your relationship was moving along in a good direction,” was replaced with “Your relationship was becoming very important to you,” an expression that does not imply the same kind of embodied movement. It appears, then, that people are simulating the physical, embodied information associated with the source domain when understanding the linguistic instantiations of conceptual metaphors in a discourse context. The activation of the source domain JOURNEY changed the way participants walked or imagined walking while they were still thinking about the story. Those who were simulating a more challenging journey did not walk or imagine walking as far as those who were simulating a smoother trajectory. Another test of the embodied simulation hypothesis examined people’s speeded understanding of metaphorical phrases such as “grasp the concept” (Wilson & Gibbs, 2007). Participants first learned to associate particular symbols with particular bodily actions. For example, when they saw the symbol (“) they learned to produce a grasping movement. After this training phase, participants then sat in front of a computer, saw an icon, enacted the action, and then were presented with a metaphoric statement to understand as quickly as possible. The results showed that making, or imagining making, a relevant body action (e.g., a grasping motion)

facilitated the time it took people to read and understand the metaphorical statements. Even if people are unable to physically grasp a concept, engaging in relevant body actions primes the construction of an embodied simulation to infer the metaphorical meaning of “grasp the concept.” Neuroscience work also showed activation in the motor system of participants’ brains when they read both literal (e.g., “grasped the stick”) or metaphorical (e.g., “grasped the idea”) statements (Desai et al., 2012), which offers additional evidence that embodied simulations may be the foundation of our understanding of metaphorical meanings. These results further suggest that metaphor comprehension is embodied and dynamic. Not only are embodied neural resources activated when metaphorical phrases are accessed as the neuroscience results suggest (ibid.), but this also indicates that there is a dynamic relationship between bodily experiences, mental simulation, and metaphorical comprehension. Real and imagined bodily movements prime metaphor comprehension. It is not the case that the participant discretely activates the conceptual metaphor only once they read the metaphor with no influence from previous context. Their enactment or their imagined enactment of related bodily action primes them to understand the metaphor and increases the fluidity with which they can engage in metaphoric language processing. Again this work suggests that simulations associated with metaphoric thought are not static, discrete representations that we access the same way every time. Rather, context plays a crucial role in the embodied simulation process. These experimental results suggest that embodied conceptual metaphors play an important role in people’s interpretation of metaphorical language. Still, how do

people infer metaphorical meanings for language that does not explicitly mention a target concept? Once again, there is no reference to life or life decisions more generally in the Frost poem. Can people still construct embodied metaphorical simulations to interpret allegorical texts? My thesis explored this question through four main experimental studies. These studies specifically examined three different empirical hypotheses. Hypothesis 1: The Traditional View Just as Frost hypothesized that average people aren’t good at interpreting symbols (1953) psychologists have traditionally suggested that people are generally poor at constructing simple logical analogies (Gick & Holyoak, 1983). Only when people are given blatant clues can they construct the analogical relationships that are necessary to map the surface meaning of allegorical text to the deeper symbolic relationships. Based on their experimental studies, Gick and Holyoak conclude, “It is thus no easy matter to spontaneously notice an analogy between two superficially dissimilar situations, even in our highly simplified experimental paradigm.” If constructing logical analogies is the basis for metaphor comprehension (Miller, 1979), then ordinary people should not be good at interpreting allegory. This position is also consistent with many theories of literary interpretation, which maintain that only skilled readers should be capable of understanding complex texts with diverse symbolic and aesthetic messages. Hypothesis 2: The Conceptual Metaphor View This hypothesis suggests that people should be capable of understanding allegorical messages given their tacit knowledge of conceptual metaphors.

Conceptual metaphors are cognitive devices responsible for networks of metaphor used frequently in everyday language and this idea has been supported by linguistic evidence (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). For example, people often talk about love as a journey (where is this relationship going? We are going through a rough time.), anger as heated fluid in a container (I’m pissed off. She looks like she is going to explode.), and sadness as being oriented down (I’m feeling so depressed. What is bringing you down?). The presence and ubiquity of these mundane metaphors organized around embodied themes is widely recognized by metaphor scholars, even opponents of conceptual metaphor theory (McGlone, 2007). In contrast to the traditional assumptions of metaphor as a disembodied, rhetorical device, there have been a variety of empirical findings that suggest that embodied conceptual metaphors are activated during metaphoric thought processes. The results described earlier from Gibbs (2012) and Wilson & Gibbs (2007) provide such empirical support that people are influenced by conceptual metaphors when they process metaphorical language. Participant’s bodily actions were primed by linguistic instantiations reflecting the underlying conceptual metaphor LOVE IS A JOURNEY (Gibbs, 2012). Conversely, participant’s bodily actions, when they matched the action implied by a metaphoric phrase, facilitated comprehension (Wilson & Gibbs, 2007). This evidence suggests that conceptual metaphors are not merely linguistic. Conceptual metaphors are not isolated or idiosyncratic but rather they are systematic expressions that reflect underlying, systematic, embodied, metaphorical concepts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Instead of being dead, these are the metaphors that we

“live by” (ibid.) reflecting a mode of thought “used constantly and automatically, with neither effort nor awareness” (Lakoff, 1993). According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (henceforth CMT), participants should be able to understand the metaphoric interpretation of the allegorical poem by automatically accessing a single conceptual metaphor in a very coarse manner: complete activation or no activation at all. Secondly, metaphorical themes should be clearly organized around one single conceptual metaphor at a time. Participants should easily access embodied concepts in their reasoning about the allegorical poem by activating one conceptual metaphor at a time, activating the mapping pattern that is characteristic of CMT: a one-to-one correspondence from target to source domain. Hypothesis 3: The Embodied Simulation View CMT has been criticized by many metaphor scholars as being too singular and prescriptive. One critic referred to this theory as “the barren pigeonholing of metaphor” (Tsur, 1999). In other words, it encourages stock responses to metaphorical discourse and ignores the nuances of context. Two other potentially problematic issues have also been noted: The first is the singularity assumption or the assumption that “single conceptual metaphors underlie the meaning of individual statements” (Gibbs & Santa Cruz, 2012, p. 301). The second is the discreteness assumption that “complete conceptual metaphors are accessed and then ‘turned off’ when applied to understanding verbal metaphoric utterances” (ibid). The embodied simulations view takes a dynamic perspective to metaphorical comprehension so that conceptual metaphors are not discretely stored, pre-assembled source-to-target mappings that are accessed the same way every time. Instead,

allegorical interpretation arises from ongoing simulations that are freshly constructed each time a person engages in metaphoric thought. This view can be summarized as follows: “We do not first understand the poem through abstract, purely symbolic means and then react to this (i.e., emotionally and aesthetically). Rather, allegory emerges from simulation processes, and is “soft assembled” in the moment of experience depending on state of person, environment and task” (Gibbs, 2011). In contrast to the traditional perspective, this view asserts that humans naturally have an allegorical impulse whereby they relate abstract concepts to enduring embodied experiences. Furthermore, in contrast to CMT, these metaphorical mappings are assembled in the moment of experience (i.e. soft assembly) instead of accessing the exact same conceptual knowledge, as if it were a static chunk of information. Here I argue that the embodied simulations, custom-made during the interpretation of an allegorical poem, are creative, nuanced, and soft assembled in the moment. Although there may be enduring metaphoric themes, such as LOVE IS A JOURNEY, as suggested by previous empirical work (Gibbs, 2012), more work is needed to look at the way that metaphorical thought emerges in nuanced ways. If this metaphorical thought does rely on embodied simulations, participants should engage in allegorical interpretations of the whole poem, but they may not necessarily organize their interpretations around pre-fabricated conceptual metaphors, one at a time. Participants should show evidence of multiple partially activated, source domains that work dynamically instead of displaying a one-to-one source-to-target mapping pattern. Second, participants should construct a coherent narrative of the entire poem so that, instead of a single conceptual metaphor being activated one at a