American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The study of cognitive metaphors is a recent one in linguistics, and has opened up new doors in our understanding of language, as well as of the cognition that underlies language. Until recently, metaphor was considered to be a phenomenon that occurred only in literary language. However, George Lakoff and others have shown that metaphors are in fact deeply embedded in everyday language and provide a window into both the minds and cultures of speakers. Metaphor does not only exist in language, however. It is a cognitive process that structures the way in which human beings reason about the world. Psychological studies such as those performed by Gentner and Gentner have shown the large extent to which metaphor is used in understanding and structuring the world around us. This paper discusses preliminary findings on the cognitive metaphors of Hupa, an Athapaskan language spoken in Northern California. The study of metaphor has, to date, focused primarily on metaphors in English and other Indo-European languages, with a few studies done on metaphors in non-Indo-European langua es, such as Thai and Japanese. Only one metaphor study that I know of has been done on a Native American language. That paper studied metaphors as they appeared in the prepositional system in Mixtec. One of the goals of this paper is to expand the cross-linguistic study of cognitive metaphors, a study that is essential to typological and universal issues as it will add to the general corpus of knowledge of cross-linguistic metaphors. This paper also has applications in other areas of linguistics such as second language acquisition, which I will address at the end of this paper.