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Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393

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Metaphors of possession in the conceptualisation of language

Philip Seargeant *
The Open University, Centre for Language and Communication, Faculty of Education and Language Studies,
The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AL, United Kingdom

Abstract

This article analyses the use of metaphors of possession in the conceptualisation of language. The article takes as an
example for analysis the theoretical terminology used to describe linguistic borrowing within the context of language con-
tact. It focuses in particular on Einar Haugens [Haugen, E., 1950. The analysis of linguistic borrowing. Language 26 (2),
210231] seminal essay on this topic in which much of the terminology used in the analysis of borrowing is rst system-
atically propounded. Drawing upon this example, the article explores the structure of the conceptual metaphor Language
Is A Possession, and examines its theoretical implications and its consequences for social practice.
2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Language conceptualisation; Conceptual metaphor theory; Metonymy; Linguistic borrowing; Loanwords; Einar Haugen

1. Linguistics and its object of study

Writing on the entity that linguistics takes as its object of study, Harpham (2002, p. ixx) argues that:
Nothing meaningful. . . can be said about language as such, both because language as such is not avail-
able for direct observation and because the features, aspects, characteristics, and qualities that can be
attributed to language approach the innite. Language is inadequate as an object of knowledge both
because there is too little information available, and because there is too much. . . This is why all char-
acterisations of the essence or true nature of language are tendentious.
This is a view that has been expressed by various scholars interrogating the ontological and epistemological
assumptions upon which the study of language is and has been based. Kristeva (1989, p. 325), for example,
in her survey of the history of linguistics, comes to the conclusion that representations and theories of lan-
guages. . . approach through the name language an object that is noticeably dierent each time. . . Through-
out the history of linguistic knowledge, what appears is not so much the upward evolution of a knowledge of
language: it is the story of thought tackling this unknown that constitutes it. In other words, the history of
linguistics is as much a history of epistemological investigation, and the object that linguistics takes as its

*
Tel.: +44 (0) 1908 658677; fax: +44 (0) 1908 654111.
E-mail address: p.seargeant@open.ac.uk

0271-5309/$ - see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2009.02.001
384 P. Seargeant / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393

axiomatic centre remains, in absolute terms, an unknown quantity. Harris (1990, p. 45) likewise questions
whether the concept of a language, as dened by orthodox modern linguistics, corresponds to any deter-
minate or indeterminate object of analysis at all, whether social or individual, whether institutional or psycho-
logical. His conclusion, based on an analysis of the historical processes that have formed the notion of the
scientic study of language in the West (1980, 1981, 1987), is that the idea of language (and particularly of
dierent named languages) with which orthodox modern linguistics operates is a myth.
Viewed from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the contention that language qua language will remain
elusive as an object of understanding is not an unexpected conclusion to draw. It is the contention of cognitive
linguistics that abstract and complex concepts are predominantly metaphorical, and that the conceptual met-
aphors which provide the structures by which we are able to reason about phenomena are a product of our
embodied experience and the way that we, as human beings, exist and interact with the world around us. That
is to say, we necessarily conceptualise abstract or complex entities in terms of something other than what they
are. As Lako and Johnson (1999, p. 128) write: Metaphorical thought is what makes abstract scientic theo-
rising possible and
[m]any, if not all, of our abstract concepts are dened in signicant part by conceptual metaphor.
Abstract concepts have two parts: (1) an inherent, literal, nonmetaphoric skeleton, which is simply
not rich enough to serve as a full-edged concept; and (2) a collection of stable, conventional metaphor-
ical extensions that esh out the conceptual skeleton in a variety of ways.

In other words, the cognitive apparatus that mediates our rational engagement with the world relies to a great
extent upon metaphorical thought for the structuring of abstract conceptual theorising. To argue, as some do
(e.g. Jacquette 2002, p. 2), that metaphor is an impediment to objective scientic explanation, is to fail to
appreciate the fundamental role played by metaphoric conceptualisation in the rational processing of
experience.
Based upon this theory it can be supposed that linguistics, in its need to nd a way of making the
innite nite and the abstract concrete (i.e., of managing the amorphous and extensive set of behaviours
and beliefs that constitute human language), has rened a metaphorical vocabulary that esh[es] out the
conceptual skeleton that constitutes the idea of language. As such, although the contentions of Harpham,
Kristeva and Harris may, in strict terms, be an accurate review of the project of linguistics (language qua
language is beyond the scope of objective scientic understanding), in practical terms a signicant and sci-
entically useful body of knowledge has been constructed despite (or maybe because of) the conceptual
metaphors that are used to give actual shape to the multiple and diverse practices which constitute human
linguistic behaviour.
In this article I wish to examine the ways in which this contention of cognitive linguistics might apply to the
conceptualisation of language as practiced within linguistics and its various sub-disciplines.1 To this end I will
examine the metaphorical structure of certain approaches to language as an object of study, focusing in par-
ticular on the metaphor of Language Is A Possession which, I will suggest, is one of the fundamental meta-
phors for contemporary understandings of language.

2. Metaphors of language

There are several important metaphors that are conventionally used to conceptualise language. There is, for
instance, the concept of language families, around which much of the theoretical explanation that comprises
historical linguistics is structured. For example, Newmeyer (1986, pp. 1819) summarises the project of com-
parative philology in the 19th century in the following terms:

1
Although I am concentrating upon the conceptualisation of language in academic discourse, there is not always a clear boundary
between this and everyday usage. As Harris (1980, p. 31) notes: it would be illusory to suppose that in any culture there is ever a break of
contiguity between popular and technical concepts of what language is. The concept of a language may nd expression in various ways
and at various levels. It may take the form of myth, legend, or folklore. It may also in certain circumstances become the focal point of an
explicit body of knowledge, doctrines, practices and methods of inquiry, tending towards the establishment of what is nowadays usually
called a study, or discipline, or science, overly concerned with linguistic matters.
 P. Seargeant / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393 385

[T]he comparative method (as it is called) resulted in the hypothesis that the four-thousand-odd lan-
guages of the world belong to several dozen families at most. In broadest outline, two languages are con-
sidered to be in the same family if they are descended from the same ancestor, or protolanguage.
Comparativists look for systematic correspondences in sound and meaning among the languages under
investigation. If enough are found that are not attributable to borrowing from one language to another,
it is hypothesised that the languages are genetically related, i.e., that they belong to the same family.
Since most of the time no written records of the protolanguage exist, a major task of comparative lin-
guistics has been to reconstruct a protolanguage for each language family and to formulate the sound
changes by which it descended into its various daughter tongues (Emboldening added).

The highlighted words in this passage are all linguistic instantiations of a metaphor which explains the rela-
tionships between dierent languages in terms of the relationships that constitute a biological family. There
are, in fact, several dierent linguistically-realised metaphors here an historically earlier language is an
ancestor; an historically later language is a daughter; etc. yet they all utilise the same conceptual frame
of the biological family to structure their specic meanings. It is the contention of cognitive linguistics that
it is this primary cross-domain mapping that likens language relationships (the target domain) to biological
families (the source domain) that constitutes the conceptual metaphor that underpins the various linguistic
manifestations found in this passage. The contention is that without the meaning provided by this cross-do-
main mapping, this particular conceptualisation about language development, along with the body of theoris-
ing that results directly from it, would be impossible.
There are other metaphors in the above passage that are also used for the conceptualisation of language.
For example, there are references to borrowing and to protolanguage, and there is also the metonymy of
tongues. All of these are used as a means of conceptualising theoretical tenets about human linguistic behav-
iour, and providing a means both to talk about and, according to cognitive linguistics, to think about lan-
guage. It is one of these other commonly-used and, as we shall see, theoretically inuential conceptual
metaphors, manifested in the passage above in the term borrowing, which I wish to examine in further detail
for the remainder of this article.

2.1. Language is a possession

In much contemporary linguistic theory language is viewed as an object. As Love (2009, p. 5) writes, it is a
familiar conceptual process in our linguistic culture for languages and their component parts [to be] reied as
a xed set of decontextualised abstractions from speech events (italics in original). Blommaert (2008, p. 291
2) similarly draws attention to the way in which central to much of modern professional linguistics [is] the idea
that language needs to be seen primarily as a limited collection of ordered forms grammar and of words
lexis, and he suggests that this results in what he terms an artefactual ideology of language, an ideology in
which particular textual practices can reduce language to an artefact that can be manipulated like most other
objects. This ideology, he contends, is a key ingredient of modernity. . . [and] has become the most wide-
spread view of language both in popular and in scientic circles (2006, p. 512). It is the axiomatic starting
point upon which much linguistic research builds.
In discussing this conceptualisation, neither Love nor Blommaert explicitly explore its metaphorical struc-
ture, yet much of their analysis involves identifying instances of a dominant metaphor and working through
the entailments that result from its use. When, for example, they critique the theoretical terminology that is
used in constructing this particular approach, they are, in eect, highlighting linguistic manifestations of
the core conceptual metaphor. The primary mapping that their critiques allude to is one between the domain
of language and the domain of objects, and thus we could suggest that the fundamental conceptual metaphor
that underpins this approach is Language Is An Object.
The motivation to conceptualise abstract or intangible phenomena in terms of objects is one of the most
fundamental in our engagement with lived experience, and Lako and Johnson (1980, p. 25) speculate that
it is a result of our embodied nature: our experiences with physical objects (especially our own bodies) provide
the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is, ways of viewing events, activ-
ities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances. A notable example of the use of this source domain can
386 P. Seargeant / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393

be seen in Reddys (1979) exposition of the conduit metaphor that is used for conceptualising the process of
communication. One of the elemental components of this metaphor, Reddy suggests, is that Ideas (or Mean-
ings) Are Objects. In the act of communication, according to the conduit metaphor, these ideas-as-objects are
passed from one individual to another, and successful communication occurs when the interlocutor safely
receives the ideas that the speaker wishes to transfer. Understood as objects, ideas or meanings can then be
scrutinised, pulled apart, categorised, quantied, and so on.
Reication is, then, a common metaphorical strategy in acts of conceptualisation, and one of its eects is to
enable us to reason about abstract or intangible phenomena in ways similar to those we employ for physical
entities. And it is this cross-domain mapping that Love and Blommaert implicitly allude to in their critiques of
contemporary trends in the conceptualisation of language. Blommaert does in fact suggest his own metaphor
of the artefact when proposing terminology for the ideology he identies, and in doing so he extends the met-
aphor beyond simple reication and introduces the notion of human intervention. In choosing this metaphor
he takes a particular theoretical stance, highlighting not only beliefs which see language in terms of an object,
but also those which suggest that it has or can be modied as if by human workmanship. As evidence for this
he cites common expressions such as I need to polish my German a bit or My French needs a bit of practice
(2008, p. 292). So while for Love the dominant metaphorical process in the conceptualisation is reication, for
Blommaert it is this plus the privileging of textual artefacts (the dictionary, the grammar book) which results
in an ideology that practically equates language with these artefacts, and which sees any given language as
something that can be contained within such artefacts.
As noted above, although both these critiques are sensitive to the metaphoric nature of this conceptualisa-
tion, they do not engage in any systematic analysis of the linguistic metaphors which are to be found in con-
temporary linguistic discourse. If we do consider some of the most common expressions and terms used to
refer to language, we can, perhaps, suggest an alternate modication both to Blommaerts artefactual met-
aphor and the more basic Language Is An Object mapping. This is the metaphor Language Is A Possession,
which, as I shall aim to demonstrate, provides the specic conceptual structure for signicant portions of
the discourse of linguistics.
The linguistic manifestations of this conceptual metaphor in everyday discourse2 include the following:

 While you have been perfecting your French, I have been bettering my English [use of the possessive pro-
noun when referring to linguistic ability] (BNC, FU4 1094).
 My Portuguese, of course, was as excellent as my English (BNC, H9N 2654).
 since man has language and other creatures do not, man is, after all, for all practical purposes, a separate
creation (BNC, H10 583).
 The Swiss have four languages three of which they share with their neighbours (BBC World Service, The
New Europe, January 24, 2002).
 The fact that England virtually possessed a common language is also reected in the increasing extent to
which it was used both by individuals and by corporate bodies (BNC, HWG 1121).
 Somalia is the only country in Africa possessing a single language, culture, religion and ethnic group (BNC,
CJP 669).
 they returned home a nucleus of mainly young men with experience of foreign countries and a grasp of for-
eign languages (BNC, HY5 681).
 Lose the language and you lose Shakespeare (The Guardian, April 29, 2008).
 The exiles who also lost their language (The Independent, December 26, 2000).
 older people too will be spurred into passing their language on to the next generation (BBC Online, May 26,
2005).
 Italians exhorted to retain language (New York Times, April 3, 1921).
 Treating people with brain injuries to regain language (Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health).
 Giving the gift of a language (The Guardian, April 15, 2006).

2
Examples are taken from the British National Corpus (BNC) and from mainstream media sources.
 P. Seargeant / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393 387

It is also apparent in technical linguistic terminology, such as:

 Second language acquisition, child language acquisition.

 Loanwords and borrowings.
 Language loss (e.g. Block, 2008).
 Language as a commodity (e.g. Rubdy and Tan, 2008).
 Linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991).
 Language appropriation (e.g. Pennycook, 1994, Chapter 3).
 Language exchange.
 The ownership of English (e.g. Widdowson, 1994).

Each of these expressions or terms maps a specic concept from the domain of possessions onto a particular
aspect of language or linguistic behaviour. In each case language, or some form of linguistic behaviour, is not
merely reied, but likened to an object that can belong to an individual or group.
Conceptual metaphor theory contends that aspects of the source domain that are not stated explicitly in the
mappings can be inferred, and that it is the much of the structure of the source domain can inferred as holding
in the target domain. Thus, based on this central cross-domain mapping of Language Is A Possession, more
specic mappings also occur, motivated by the logic and structure of the central source domain. This logic and
structure includes the following key elements:

 A possession must have a possessor or owner.

 A possession can be transferred from one person/group to another.
 A possession will be accorded a particular value.
 There will be a cultural system which regulates this value.
 This cultural system will consist of practices that enact that value.
 This cultural system will prescribe rights that protect the value.

These various elements are inferences or entailments of the source domain, which all transfer across to the
target domain in some form or other, resulting in the several specic conceptualisations listed above.

3. Objects as possessions

There is a further issue to be appended to this initial outline of the core cross-domain mapping and its var-
ious entailments. This concerns the choice of source domain. In itemising the various analytic components
which are transferred in the mapping we could say that Language Is A Possession entails that Language Is
An Object. In other words, a possession is, in all non-gurative senses, an object. It is also, however, possible
to suggest the reverse. From the above outline of secondary mappings it is apparent that entailments are the
consequences of cultural habitual knowledge about the source domain. Encyclopaedic cultural knowledge
about the nature and status of possessions within the culture in which Im situated provides the structure
for this conceptual eld which is then transferred across to the target domain. So, for example, the value
accorded to possessions in this culture results in the meaningful nature of phrases such as linguistic capital.
And it is due to the inuence of culture in determining such meanings that I am suggesting that the core met-
aphor is Language Is A Possession rather than Language Is An Object, despite the fact that it would appear to
be the case that object is the superordinate term and possession its hyponym. The reasoning for this choice
is that, in the era of late capitalism, there is an almost synonymous relationship between objects and posses-
sions. That is to say, all objects within a late capitalist culture have the potential to be valued as possessions,
and a complex institutional belief system exists which species the ways in which this occurs. For this reason
the hierarchical semantic relationship which would position object as the superordinate term, and thus pro-
mote its candidacy as primary source domain, is not as intuitive as it may seem. Instead, possession suggests
both the reied aspect of the concept, but also the cultural practices which accompany such reication. Fur-
thermore, the key relationship between language and language user is clearly conceptualised through this
source domain, as a possession necessarily has a possessor. And though one of the consequences of seeing
388 P. Seargeant / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393

language as an object is to conceptualise it as having an existence which is outside or independent of people

(i.e. the conceptualisation severs any symbiotic link between language and language producers), Language Is A
Possession reinstates the language user into the equation, albeit in a very particular way.

4. Borrowings and loanwords

The consequences of the structure and inferences that proceed from the Language Is A Possession mapping
are extensive, and I will discuss them in greater detail below. To facilitate this, and to explore the issues out-
lined so far, I will look now at one particular example of linguistic terminology which derives its meaning from
this fundamental cross-domain mapping: the loanword. I will analyse the way this metaphorical terminology
is commonly understood and used in linguistics, and to do this I will focus particularly on the discussion of the
term that occurs in a seminal text from twentieth-century linguistic theory, namely Einar Haugens essay, The
analysis of linguistic borrowing (1950).
The most general denition of a loanword is a word or language feature that has been adopted from one
language to another. The English word is itself a loan-translation from the German Lehnwort, and is now an
established part of the technical vocabulary of linguistics. The phenomenon it describes can also be technically
referred to as a borrowing, and this latter term, when used to describe the process rather than the product, is
dened by Haugen (1950, p. 230) as the process that takes place when bilinguals reproduce a pattern from one
language in another. As suggested above, both the terms loanword and borrowing would appear to be
examples of a more fundamental conceptual metaphor that views language as a possession. A linguistic feature
(be it lexical, phonological, syntactic or morphological), which is understood as belonging to one particular
language and its speakers, is transferred across to another language. The nature of this transference is then
characterised in terms of an act of borrowing or loaning. By the use of this metaphor not only is the trans-
ference emphasised, but the provenance of the linguistic feature and specically the fact that its origin is
associated with a dierent named language is also highlighted. As was discussed above, if language is a pos-
session, it must needs have a possessor, and this relationship between linguistic forms and those who are
understood, by right of birth or upbringing, to have a natural anity with these forms, is seemingly accentu-
ated in this metaphoric terminology. Haugen himself uses the terms loanword and borrowing almost syn-
onymously, at least in the way they are collocated in his discussion.3 This blurring of a semantic distinction
between the two also indicates, perhaps, that the motivation for their use as signs to refer to this particular
linguistic phenomenon is not structured around the exact details of the individual words so much as a general
metaphoric association between two domains.
Haugens study has been very inuential for the development of work in this eld, especially in the way that
it sets out a coherent terminology for the complex of linguistic features and processes that constitute this par-
ticular aspect of language contact (Myers-Scotton, 2002, p. 234). Indeed, Haugen (1950, p. 210) species that
his aim is to dene more precisely the terminology used in the analysis of this linguistic process, and to this
end the rst part of his essay concerns itself with a discussion of the basic metaphor underpinning the termi-
nology. This discussion centres mainly on the aptness of this metaphor as opposed to other possibilities. Ini-
tially he considers the term mixing, also prevalent in linguistic discourse at that time, but dismisses it as
overly problematic. His reasoning here involves considering the entailments which would rationally ensue
from the use of mixing as a metaphor, and then analysing their theoretical consequences for the conceptu-
alisation of the linguistic process. So, for example, he argues that the introduction of elements from one lan-
guage into the other means merely an alteration of the second language, not a mixture of the two (p. 211). In
other words, the metaphor is only partly apt, and it mischaracterises the outcome of the language contact.
Furthermore, he argues, the metaphor of mixing languages suggests that such a process would result in
the production of a mixed language which, postulated as an actual entity, would imply the existence also
of unmixed that is pure languages. This then raises problematic issues of essentialism akin to those of
racial purity: In some circles the term mixed or hybrid has actually acquired a pejorative sense, so that

3
The terms are collocated as synonyms in sentences such as: While it is true that we shall rarely if ever be able to catch a speaker in the
actual process of making an original borrowing, it is clear that every loan now current must at some time have appeared as an innovation
(p. 212), and If the loan contains patterns that are not innovations in the borrowing language. . . (p. 213).
 P. Seargeant / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393 389

reformers have set to work purifying the language without seeking clearly what they were about (p. 211). In
cases such as these the logical entailments of a dominant metaphoric vocabulary result in aspects of the struc-
ture of the source domain being transferred across to the target domain in terms of social practice, so that this
structure is reied in the actions of the reformers to which Haugen refers. This type of social practice then
becomes one of the consequences of the belief in the metaphor. The metaphor of borrowing avoids this par-
ticular consequence, or so Haugen argues, and, although still possessed of logical anomalies, no apter term
has yet been invented (p. 212). It is for this reason he chooses it as an adequate term to refer to the
phenomenon.
Despite its relative suitability however it is not a precise t with the phenomenon it is used to refer to (it is,
after all, still a metaphor). That is to say, not all the elements of the literal use of borrowing are transferred,
since the borrowing takes place without the lenders consent or even awareness, and the borrower is under no
obligation to repay the loan (p. 211). The issue of which elements of the source domain transfer as entail-
ments to the target domain and which do not is one that conceptual metaphor theory has a number of spec-
ulative explanations for. One of these is the invariance principle, which posits that [m]etaphorical mappings
preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the image schema structure) of the source domain, in a way consistent
with the inherent structure of the target domain (Lako, 1993, p. 215). In other words, the structure of the
source domain is preserved by the mapping in a way that is consistent with the structure of the target domain,
and metaphoric entailments that are incompatible with the target domain fail to map. When one is dealing
with abstract or unfamiliar phenomena the logic of the source domain is more likely to impose itself on
the target domain, and a fuller set of inferences will be made based upon the structure of the source domain.
When dealing with familiar phenomena, however, blends are created between source and target which have
their own logic. Thus Haugen can begin with the metaphor of borrowing and use an understanding of literal
borrowing to hypothesise about the properties of the process of linguistic borrowing. But when the aspects of
the structure of the concept of literal borrowing conict with the results of a close scrutiny of linguistic bor-
rowing, the term linguistic borrowing becomes a distinct semantic reference, the meaning of which is rened
by acts of denition within the discourse of linguistics. As such there is a dialectic at work between non-met-
aphoric understanding and the usefulness that metaphoric understanding provides. A rich knowledge of the
source domain provides the opportunity for rich inferences about the target domain, yet the aptness or inapt-
ness of these inferences (that is to say, the theoretical insights they provide or the false avenues of hypothesis
the promote) then becomes the subject of scientic debate. And while the metaphor (that is the structure of the
source domain) can draw attention to certain elements of the phenomenon it is used to refer to, once it
becomes a conventional sign, practical experiential knowledge of the phenomenon will override some of the
structure of the entailments.
Despite the current conventionalised nature of the term borrowing, however, the metaphor and its pos-
sible entailments is still considered to have theoretical inuence, and thus one way of redening the eld is to
deconstruct the metaphoric nature of the terminology and propose alternative (metaphoric) denitions. In his
discussion of the case of English borrowings in the Japanese context, for example, Stanlaw (2004, p. 1920)
has argued that the implications associated with the metaphor are misleading. He writes that English loan-
words are not really loanwords at all, as there is no actual borrowing that occurs. Borrowing is thus an
inappropriate metaphor, as, in many cases, nothing is ever received and nothing is ever returned. He contends
that the majority of the words referred to in this way in the Japanese context are original to the Japanese lan-
guage, and are simply inspired by English vocabulary. Within this eld of scholarship, dissatisfaction with the
conceptualisation that this particular metaphoric vocabulary results in has led to the term English-derived or
English-inspired vocabulary being preferred (e.g. Miller, 1997; Hogan, 2003). In this case, therefore, the pur-
ported inuence of unapt entailments from the core conceptual metaphor provide a touchstone (albeit in a
negative way) for rationalising about the structure of the actual concept.
This newly-adopted terminology of English-derived or English-inspired vocabulary still indicates the
provenance of the particular lexical items, and is suited to a language like Japanese where this provenance
is marked in the orthography by the use of a dierent script (katakana) from that traditionally used for the
native word-stock. However, in some respects it highlights a more limited range of the target domains salient
elements. One aspect of the metaphor of loans which is apt for this particular phenomenon (or which, at least
at the root conceptual metaphor level, is inuential) is the idea of ownership which comes with the
390 P. Seargeant / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393

possession source domain. While this aspect may not be important for the language contact process which
results in these coinages, it is important in terms of the cultural belief systems through which the language
contact is viewed. That is to say, a Romantic ideology of the national language, which sees a discrete language
as one of the essential characteristics of a people (as the genius of the people, as Herder characterised it,4 is
well represented by a metaphor which considers language as a possession, and the concomitant entailment
which considers the (native) speaker as the owner of that language (Seargent, 2009).

5. Language as metonymy

The logic of linguistic borrowing is that words are loaned/borrowed from one language to another, and this
can conventionally be expressed in English by saying that one language (e.g. Japanese) has borrowed terms
from another language (e.g. English). In this formula, language operates as a metonym for the language com-
munity who use the language. The substitution of the abstract idea of a discrete code for the combined behav-
iours of a speech community is a commonplace conceptual strategy for talking and reasoning about language.
It often results in a form of personication where the abstract entity is accorded agency. In a phrase such as
the English language changed after the Norman conquest, for example, the language itself is not an agent of
change; rather the word language is used within the phrase as a metonym for the linguistic practices of the
speech community.
Similar examples of this type construction are frequent. For instance, in this passage from David Nunans
introduction to linguistics (2007, p. 182), language is personied in a variety of ways:
If we have learned anything at all about language and the way it spreads and mutates its this: language,
like wayward teenagers will not be controlled. It pays little heed to purveyors of purity, and when used as
an instrument of communication in foreign and second language situations it will intermingle and coha-
bit with local languages. In Singapore, the languages rubbing shoulders with English are Chinese, Tamil
and Malay, and it is out of these languages that Singlish has been born.

The underlying conceptual metaphor here is Language Is A Person, and it is this that provides the meaning
structure for the vivid imagery of wayward teenagers, cohabitation, and dierent languages rubbing shoul-
ders with each other. It could be argued that Nunan is here using an ornate register which, while it might be
appropriate for the sort of engaging introductory text he is writing, would be too imprecise for a more mea-
sured scientic analysis of the subject. Even when the personication is not so overt though, agency can be
ascribed to the entity in a way which it does not, in strict rational terms, possess. So, for example, when Crys-
tal (1997, p. 2) suggests that [a] language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that
is recognised in every country, or when Pennycook (1994, p. 14) discusses the extent to which English func-
tions as a gatekeeper to positions of prestige in a society, language is in both cases made the subject of verbs
of agency and abstracted away from the complex practices and behaviours which are the actual substance of
the phenomena being commented upon.
Not only is this type of metonymic expression frequent, it is also extremely useful for discussing and think-
ing about language. In a footnote to the introduction of the Course in general linguistics, Saussure (or the col-
lective represented metonymically by that name) records how previous generations of linguists had criticised
this sort of personication of language as being an example of an illogical metaphor. Following such crit-
icisms, he writes, it became unacceptable to say the language does this or that, to speak of the life of the
language, and so on, because a language is not an entity, and exists only in its users (1983 [1916], p. 5). He
goes on to argue, however, that:
such an attitude must not be carried too far. What matters is that people should not be misled. There are
certain gurative ways of speaking which are indispensable. To require that one should restrict oneself to

4
In Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity [1791]) Herder writes: Not
only do the organs of speech vary with regions, not only are there certain sounds and letters peculiar to almost every nation, but the giving
of names, even in denoting audible things, nay in the immediate expression of the passions, in interjections, varies over all the earth. . . The
genius of a people is nowhere more displayed than in the physiognomy of its speech (translation in Hayes, 1927).
 P. Seargeant / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393 391

a linguistic terminology corresponding to linguistic realities is to presuppose that we have already solved
the mysteries surrounding these realities. But this is far from being the case.
Although he does not elaborate upon the point, Saussure here identies a pragmatic truth about the linguistic
and cognitive tools we have to talk about linguistics. To be unable to generalise about language by means of
the metonym which substitutes an agent language for the collective linguistic behaviours of a speech commu-
nity would severely compromise our ability to investigate the nature of language by means of rational dis-
course. The metonym which substitutes the abstract concept of language or a language for the combined
linguistic behaviours of a speech community enables generalisations to be made about this behaviour, which
in turn allows for acts of theorisation. Without these illogical metaphors, therefore, both discussion and ra-
tional manipulation of ideas concerning linguistic behaviour would be far more distended and awkward, if not
impossible.
To return to the structure of the metaphor of the loanword, and the way that one language is said to bor-
row a linguistic form from another language, what we have here is what Goossens (1990, p. 333) calls a
metonymy within a metaphor. He describes this type of gurative structure as being one in which a metony-
mically used entity is embedded in a (complex) metaphorical expression (p. 336). In this instance, the meta-
phor is Language Is A Possession, and the metonymy is language is the combined habitual linguistic
behaviour of a speech community. In the case of the loanword therefore, certain forms from one language
(i.e. aspects of the linguistic behaviour of one speech community) are incorporated into another language
(again that is the combined habitual behaviour of a speech community). To say that Japanese has borrowed
many words from English is a condensed and conventionalised way of articulating this meaning which relies
on the conceptual metaphor of Language Is A Possession and the metonymy Language Is The Combined Lin-
guistic Practices Of A Speech Community. To criticise such a statement as being illogical or scientically mis-
leading would be to underestimate the integral importance of metaphor and metonymy in all acts of
conceptualisation, and to mistake a theoretical shorthand for theoretical naivety.

6. The multiple metaphors of language and the consequences of conceptualisation

In one respect there appears to be a systematicity to the metaphoric structuring of the concept of linguistic
borrowing, so that not only does the core terminology derive from Language Is A Possession, but so also does
associated vocabulary such as terms like importation and donor language.5 At the same time, however, dis-
cussion of the phenomenon involves several other cross-domain mappings which are manifest in other meta-
phoric terms such as the calque, the hybrid, and the compound. Haugen also introduces terms such as
loanblends and loanshifts where Language Is A Possession is mixed with a dierent metaphor within the
same lexical item.
Shen and Balaban (1999, p. 151), commenting upon the seeming incoherence in metaphoric patterning
within discourse, write that the use of metaphors in unplanned discourse appears more like free, uncontrolled
navigation between a large number of root metaphors than a consistent elaboration of any unifying root
metaphors. Even within planned discourse such as Haugens essay, the systematicity of the dominant met-
aphor is neither absolute nor exclusive. As Lako and Johnson note (1999, p. 71) for a rich and important
domain. . . a single conceptual mapping does not do the job of allowing us to reason and talk about the expe-
rience. . . as a whole. As such, multiple metaphors are used for a single concept, each of which has a certain
aptness for certain experiential aspects of the phenomenon. For the target domain of language, which includes
faculties, behaviours, and practices, and which has cognitive, social, and cultural proles, a single conceptual
mapping will never be adequate, and thus a multiplicity of conceptual metaphors exist. Language Is A Posses-
sion, however, plays a particularly prominent role in contemporary Western conceptions of language, as can
be seen in the example of linguistic borrowing.

5
Haugen (1950, p. 212), for example, writes that If the loan is similar enough to the model so that a native speaker would accept it as his
own, the borrowing speaker may be said to have imported the model into his language, while Myers-Scotton (2002, p. 236), writes that
borrowing starts out as largely lexical, but, then, it also can involve phonology, syntax, and morphology when the cultural contact with
the donor language is long and intense (italics added).
392 P. Seargeant / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 383393

The consequences of this metaphoric conceptualisation are twofold. As was noted earlier, cross-domain
mappings of this sort provide a means of theorising about complex or abstract concepts. Processes of categor-
isation, explanation and analysis are facilitated and enriched as a result of the fundamental role played by
metaphoric thought in the way we conceptualise experiential phenomena. The possibilities for analysing
and explaining linguistic borrowing, for example, would be greatly restricted without recourse to terminology
provided by a conceptual metaphor such as Language Is A Possession.
A further consequence, however, is that the entailments of such a metaphor will likely highlight particular
elements of the target domain at the expense of others, and will provide a conceptualisation for those elements
which can, if used as the basis for further abstract theorising, produce a very specic cultural interpretation of
the target domain. In the case of Language Is A Possession, for example, the entailment that possessions have
possessors, when mapped onto the relationship between language and users, results in the production and
reproduction of beliefs about the proprietorial nature of this relationship. When one speaks of language loss,
when one speaks of appropriating anothers language, or the ownership of a particular language, the basic
anity between speakers and the patterns of speech they produce is transformed by virtue of the cultural
knowledge about the nature of possessions in this society into a specic narrative about ownership. This idea
of ownership is an entailment of the metaphor, not an essential element of human linguistic behaviour, yet it
exists within our culture as a lens through which language is often viewed, and this perspective is produced in
part by the core metaphor used to conceptualise language. It is by atomising and examining the structure of
the metaphor, therefore, that its aordances and limitations as a theoretical tool for engaging in the study of
language can best be recognised and that the inuence it has in cultural conceptualisations of language can
best be discerned.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Lynne Cameron and Charles Denroche for providing very helpful
feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

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