Metaphors as an Intracultural Bridge for Educational Enterprise

Abstract

Based on John Henry Newman’s (1801–1890) conception of university as laid down in his treatise The Idea of a University (1858), the paper discusses the role of conceptual metaphors in structuring contemporary Polish educational discourse as compared and contrasted with Newman’s ideas of a university. The data examined appear to indicate that some of Newman’s metaphors, such as university as a battle field, knowledge is truth, knowledge is beauty, are valid in the Polish cultural context; they form highly structured metaphorical networks in the sense of Kövecses (Where metaphors come from? Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2015). In accordance with recent metaphor studies, the paper points to the importance of linguistic metaphors, which “add vividness to speech” (Gibbs in The poetics of mind: figurative thought, language and understanding. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK; New York, USA, p. 125f, 1994; Sopory and Dillard in Hum Commun Res 28(3):408, 2002), viewing the “conventional versus novel metaphors” opposition as forming “a cline of metaphoricity” (Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA, 1980; Urquidi in Catalan J Linguist 14:221–222, 2015). Finally, following the insights in Kövecses (Metaphor and discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK, p. 24, 2009), we demonstrate that the examined conceptual metaphors vary along two major dimensions: intercultural (cross-cultural) and intracultural (within-culture).