Stone lion needs no feedings
21
“ARGUMENT IS WAR”. This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions
36
: “ARGUMENT IS WAR”
Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point my argument. I demolished
his argument. Many of the things in arguing are partially structured by the concept of
war. In fact, as it can be seen, people do not just talk about arguments in term of war but it influences from they thought because that conceptual structures.
Someone can actually win or lose arguments, plan and use strategies. If a position is indefensible, it can abandon and take a new line of attack.
However, in this sense Argument is War structures the action performs in arguing and of course the term it is influenced by culture. Therefore, there is
similarity between conceptual system and experience. The way people talk about argument that way because they conceive that way and they act
according to the way they conceive things. From the example above there is similarity between the concept of Argument and the concept of War.
Lakoff and Johnson believe that mappings are not based on similarities but on the correlating elements in source and target domain. To make it clearer,
the writer takes the example from metaphorical concept “Argument is War”
and the explanation of source, target and mappings will be put on the table below:
36
George Lakoff , Op. Cit.,p.4
22
Table 1: Argument is War Source: War
Target: Argument
Position Combatant
Same Position Different Position
Opinion Conflict
Agreement Disagreement
From the table above, it can be explained that the correspondences or mappings characterized the Argument is War conceptual metaphor. The
elements of source domains are in systematic correspondence with the elements of target domains. The aspects in source war is a combatant. In
target arguments this corresponds to or map onto conflicts. Finally, it can be concluded that the aspects in concepts of War are map into the concepts of
Argument.