Understanding in Seeing : a discourse perspective on image metaphor

The present paper focuses on the type of metaphor known as image metaphor as it is used by architects to describe and evaluate built space in building reviews. Drawing insights from earlier research dealing with the presence and role of metaphor in a 95-text corpus, here it is suggested that image metaphor (a) motivates a large amount of architectural jargon and lexico-grammatical patterns and, therefore, can become conventionalised, (b) may involve the mapping of both images and concepts and, therefore, allows for inferencing processes, and (c) has a role at different stages of the rhetorical structure of building reviews. Together with drawing attention to the impact that the visual concerns of architects have on the metaphors articulating their thought and language, in this paper it is suggested that the differences between conceptual and image metaphors may be less dramatic than often thought, and that their characterisation cannot be effected unless the different discourse contexts where they may play a role are also taken into account.