PCSY-D-24-00136

Diachronic data analysis supports and refines conceptual metaphor theory

PLOS Complex Systems

Dear Dr. Teich,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Complex Systems. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Complex Systems's publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript within 60 days Jun 23 2025 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at complexsystems@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pcsy/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

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* A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.

* An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, competing interests statement, or data availability statement, please make these updates within the submission form at the time of resubmission. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Hocine Cherifi

Editor-In-Chief

PLOS Complex Systems

Hocine Cherifi

Editor-In-Chief

PLOS Complex Systems

Hocine Cherifi

Editor-in-Chief

PLOS Complex Systems

Journal Requirements:

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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Reviewers' Comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Complex Systems’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Complex Systems does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The manuscript is well-written, the statistical analysis is appropriately performed, and the data are carefully presented. The concept is clear, and the conclusions are well-supported by the analyses conducted. The manuscript meets PLOS Complex Systems' publication criteria and fulfills the requirements for data availability. Overall, the research is of high quality, and the conclusions are valid and well-supported by the data. I recommend acceptance of this manuscript for publication in PLOS Complex Systems.

Reviewer #2: Introduction

This paper presents itself as a sophisticated empirical study, but beneath its polished formulas, it lacks theoretical depth. It follows an all-too-common pattern in cognitive linguistics: a selective engagement with literature that justifies a predetermined framework while neglecting crucial debates on language, embodiment, and conceptualization. The reliance on outdated or uncritical interpretations of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) raises fundamental concerns about the study’s conceptual soundness.

In this sense, the authors adopt a problematic approach to cognitive linguistics by relying on an insular selection of sources, many of which do not explicitly define foundational concepts such as thought, language, or mind. Instead, they seem to assume these constructs within the broader framework of cognitive science, positioning themselves in opposition to generative grammar without fully addressing the underlying philosophical tensions.

At the heart of their argument lies an uncritical acceptance of CMT’s core premise: that abstract concepts are structured through metaphorical mappings derived from embodied experience. However, this premise is not universally accepted, and its neural plausibility remains questionable. While CMT asserts that metaphor is a function of thought rather than language (Gibbs, 2017, p. 3), it paradoxically relies on an amodal (disembodied) model of cognition, where meaning is computationally derived rather than experientially enacted.

This contradiction becomes particularly evident in the discussion of embodiment. The authors superficially align metaphor with sensory-motor experiences (e.g., Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Lakoff, 2008, 2014), and hence fail to address a crucial question: What kind of embodiment is at play? Is it a deeply modal, sensorimotor experience, or merely a neural activation pattern abstracted from physical interaction? The omission of this discussion leaves the paper’s theoretical foundations ambiguous at best.

Moreover, the methodology follows a narrow empirical paradigm that prioritizes experimental control over ecological validity. While Dynamical Systems Theory (Gibbs, 2016) suggests that metaphor emerges as a context-sensitive phenomenon shaped by multiple interacting forces, this study treats metaphor as a static computational process rather than a dynamic, lived experience. As a result, its findings may reflect experimental artifacts rather than genuine cognitive mechanisms.

That said, it is evident that more robust approach is required that recognizes metaphor not as an abstract mapping mechanism but as an intrinsic aspect of human embodied cognition. Relevant research (Casasanto & Gijssels, 2015) suggests that metaphor is deeply rooted in experiential knowledge, where spatial and motion concepts (e.g., verticality, horizontality, path) are not linguistic constructs but fundamental aspects of human perception and interaction (Torres-Martínez, 2022). For instance, Old English expressions like ic up a hof (“I went up”) do not merely reflect a conceptual mapping (they are not “passive metaphors”) but embody an actual perceptual and motor experience of movement. This challenges the assumption that metaphor is a secondary cognitive function arising from abstract representation. Instead, it supports the view that metaphor is an emergent property of direct bodily engagement with the world.

From this perspective, the paper’s insistence on treating metaphor as a computational phenomenon is not only outdated but also misaligned with contemporary debates on linguistic embodiment. If metaphor is truly grounded in experience, then an adequate theoretical framework must account for the sensorimotor, phenomenological, and socio-cultural dimensions of metaphor use.

If this paper aims to contribute meaningfully to metaphor research, it must move beyond computational models and adopt a more integrative perspective—one that acknowledges the richness of embodied experience.

As it stands, this paper offers a partial and somewhat outdated view of metaphor, failing to engage with the broader theoretical implications of embodied cognition. A more nuanced approach would not only strengthen its conceptual foundation but also provide a clearer, more comprehensive account of how metaphors emerge from the lived experience of language users.

References

Black, M. (1954). Metaphor. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 55, 273–294.

Casasanto, D., & Gijssels, T. (2015). What makes a metaphor an embodied metaphor? Linguistics Vanguard, 1(1), 327–337.

Gallese, V., & Lakoff, G. (2005). The brain’s concepts: The role of the sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22(3–4), 455–479.

Gibbs, R. W. (2008). The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge University Press.

Gibbs, R. W. (2016). Metaphor, imagination, and dynamical systems: The cognitive science of metaphor revisited. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, 192.

Gibbs, R. W. (2017). Metaphor wars: Conceptual metaphors in human life. Cambridge University Press.

Gibbs, R. W., & Colston, H. L. (2012). Interpreting figurative meaning. Cambridge University Press.

Isenberg, I. (1963). Metaphor and the logic of language. Inquiry, 6(1–4), 7–18.

Jamrozik, A., McQuire, M., Cardillo, E. R., & Chatterjee, A. (2016). Metaphor: Bridging embodiment to abstraction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(4), 1080–1089.

Katz, A. N. (1998). Figurative language and thought: The poetics of everyday life. Oxford University Press.

Kirby, J. R. (1997). The development of metaphor understanding. Educational Psychology Review, 9, 273–322.

Kövecses, Z. (2002). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford University Press.

Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge University Press.

Kövecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A practical introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, G. (2008). The neural theory of metaphor. In R. W. Gibbs (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought (pp. 17–38). Cambridge University Press.

Lakoff, G. (2014). Mapping the brain’s metaphor circuitry: Metaphorical thought in everyday reason. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 958.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Basic Books.

Ortony, A. (Ed.). (1993). Metaphor and thought (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Ricœur, P. (1975). La métaphore vive. Seuil.

Torres-Martínez, S. (2022). Metaphors are embodied otherwise they would not be metaphors. Linguistics Vanguard, 8(1), 185-196. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0083

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: No

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PCSY-D-24-00136R1

Diachronic data analysis supports and refines conceptual metaphor theory

PLOS Complex Systems

Dear Dr. Teich,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Complex Systems. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Complex Systems's publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript within 30 days Jul 03 2025 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at complexsystems@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pcsy/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

* A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. This file does not need to include responses to any formatting updates and technical items listed in the 'Journal Requirements' section below.

* A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.

* An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, competing interests statement, or data availability statement, please make these updates within the submission form at the time of resubmission. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Hocine Cherifi

Editor-In-Chief

PLOS Complex Systems

Hocine Cherifi

Editor-In-Chief

PLOS Complex Systems

Hocine Cherifi

Editor-in-Chief

PLOS Complex Systems

Journal Requirements:

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' Comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Complex Systems's publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Complex Systems does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: The revised manuscript responds in a detailed and rigorous manner to the concerns raised by the reviewer. Their revisions directly address the key critiques and significantly strengthen the theoretical and methodological clarity of the paper.

One of the primary concerns raised by the reviewer was the limited engagement with developments in CMT, particularly those addressing embodiment and the cognitive foundations of metaphor. The authors acknowledge this concern but justify their minimal reliance on theoretical assumptions by emphasizing their empirical and data-driven approach. They explain that their methodology is designed to test the foundational claims of CMT without presupposing its theoretical elaborations, thereby ensuring that the findings stand independently of any specific version of metaphor theory. This methodological minimalism is defended not as a rejection of embodiment theory but as a strategic decision to isolate and test the most basic metaphoric processes observable in large-scale linguistic change.

A key addition in the revised manuscript is a new subchapter that clarifies the authors’ position on embodiment. They state explicitly that their methods are not equipped to study the sensorimotor grounding of metaphor directly, and they avoid making speculative claims about the nature of embodiment. Instead, they focus on how metaphor-related changes manifest in language use over time. This indirect approach does not contradict embodied cognition; rather, it complements it by tracking the linguistic residues of embodied processes. They also stress that the study does not model metaphor as a static or purely computational phenomenon. On the contrary, their network analysis reveals that metaphor is emergent, dynamic, and context-sensitive—consistent with theories that describe metaphor as a lived, phenomenological process.

The revised paper offers a rich and methodologically innovative analysis of metaphorical mappings using data from the Mapping Metaphor project. Through complex systems tools such as network analysis, motif detection, curvature measures, and hierarchical clustering, the authors reveal that metaphorical structure in English exhibits a clear and non-random pattern. Notably, they find that metaphors are organized around two anti-communities: a concrete domain dominated by spatial, mechanical, and bodily concepts, and an abstract domain encompassing social, emotional, and temporal themes. The former tends to serve as the source for metaphors, while the latter functions predominantly as a target. These results strongly support the view that metaphor is not a rhetorical flourish but a persistent and structured cognitive process.

In contrast to some assumptions within traditional CMT, the authors find that spatial domains do not hold a privileged or central position in the metaphor network. While they do play a role, they are not disproportionately influential in generating metaphorical mappings. This challenges claims that orientational metaphors—those structured around spatial direction—are cognitively primary. The results instead suggest a more distributed and flexible structure, where multiple domains can serve as productive sources for metaphor depending on context and linguistic evolution.

The paper’s findings also point to a metaphorical process grounded in tension and difference between domains rather than in analogy alone. That is, metaphors often arise not because of preexisting similarity between domains, but because the conceptual tension itself generates new structures of similarity. This emergent quality of metaphor is further supported by the presence of symmetric connections within the network: metaphors not only map from source to target but may also invite reverse mappings that restructure the source domain.

Importantly, the authors demonstrate that once a metaphorical mapping becomes established, it tends to attract additional word transfers, indicating persistence and entrenchment—key claims of CMT. By comparing their results to random graph models, they show that these patterns are not artifacts of the dataset but reflect genuine structural regularities in metaphor formation and evolution. Furthermore, the metaphor-based semantic structure revealed by hierarchical clustering exhibits low correlation with FastText word embeddings, suggesting that metaphor introduces conceptual and figurative dimensions of meaning not captured by distributional semantics alone.

Despite its strengths, the manuscript still exhibits a few limitations. The theoretical discussion, while greatly improved, remains somewhat cautious in its engagement with recent developments in embodied and 4E cognition. A brief incorporation of perspectives from authors like Gibbs, Johnson, or Barsalou would further anchor the findings in contemporary debates. Additionally, although the authors clearly acknowledge the limitations of the Mapping Metaphor dataset—such as the use of broad categories and manual coding—the dependence on this single dataset constrains the generalizability of their conclusions. The paper would benefit from a more explicit discussion of these constraints, perhaps emphasizing the need for complementary datasets in future research.

Overall, the revised manuscript is a thoughtful, empirically rich, and theoretically informed contribution to metaphor research. The authors have effectively addressed the reviewer’s concerns, clarified their methodological stance, and enriched the discussion of metaphor’s cognitive and linguistic dimensions. Given these improvements, I recommend minor revision. The only outstanding issues are relatively minor: (1) a brief extension of the theoretical discussion to include recent embodied and dynamic models of metaphor, and (2) a clearer articulation of the methodological limitations imposed by the Mapping Metaphor dataset. These revisions can be addressed without altering the core structure or findings of the paper. With these small enhancements, the manuscript will be ready for publication.

However, I leave the final decision of publishing the revised manuscript as is to the editor, since, as I have suggested in this review, no single paper can provide a definitive answer to the intriguing and by far elusive nature of metaphors and their coupling with cognition.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

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Reviewer #2: Yes: Sergio Torres-Martínez

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While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. If there are other versions of figure files still present in your submission file inventory at resubmission, please replace them with the PACE-processed versions.

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To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that authors of applicable studies deposit laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option to publish peer-reviewed clinical study protocols. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols

Diachronic data analysis supports and refines conceptual metaphor theory

PCSY-D-24-00136R2

Dear M.Sc. Teich,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Diachronic data analysis supports and refines conceptual metaphor theory' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Complex Systems.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Complex Systems.

Best regards,

Hocine Cherifi

Editor-In-Chief

PLOS Complex Systems

Hocine Cherifi

Editor-in-Chief

PLOS Complex Systems

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Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):