The DOI matches its Crossref record; 3 of the 3 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Meanings of Literal
Abstract
In a simpler world, "Who's your mother?" has a simple answer. It is your female parent, the person who supplied the egg from which you were conceived, who carried and gave birth to you, who raised you, and who was married to your father. The word mother is defined relative to an idealized and oversimplified model of the world in which all those criteria converge to pick out a single person. But in a world in which there is in vitro fertilization in surrogate mothers, adoption by lesbian couples, as well as other vagaries of modern life, the criteria that are commonly assumed to come together to define "mother" may diverge radically. In such cases, there is no completely satisfactory way to choose: Both the woman who gives birth and the woman who supplies the egg have some claim to the title, as, of course, does the woman who raises the child. Any decision the courts make in defining motherhood in nonstandard cases is bound to conflict with our idealized model in which all the classical criteria for motherhood converge.
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“Nevertheless, we often find that the known means of one domain, which is often more concrete, provide the terms for explaining aspects of the other domain, which is usually more abstract.”
From “Nothing to Be Practiced” (bsgom du med): What Conceptual Blendings and Metaphors Reveal About an Ancient Kagyu Concept (2025) · cites this paper as Lakoff (1986)
Citations
Cites
Flowing Waters or Teeming Crowds: Mental Models of Electricity
Dedre Gentner, C., & Gentner, D. R. (2014) · Psychology Press eBooks · doi:10.4324/9781315802725-10 · Cited by 699
A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor.
Lakoff, G. P., & MacCormac, E. R. (1987) · The Philosophical Review · doi:10.2307/2185396 · Cited by 192
Self-citationA cognitive theory of metaphor
Cormac, E. R. M. (1985) · Cited by 97
Cited by
Bowdle, B. F., & Dedre Gentner, C. (2005) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.112.1.193 · Cited by 1,387
More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor
Nuessel, F. (1990) · Metaphor and Symbolic Activity · doi:10.1207/s15327868ms0504_5 · Cited by 341
Convention, Form, and Figurative Language Processing
Dedre Gentner, C., & Bowdle, B. F. (2001) · Metaphor and Symbol · doi:10.1080/10926488.2001.9678896 · Cited by 291
Blending and coded meaning: Literal and figurative meaning in cognitive semantics
Seana Coulson, A., & OAKLEY, T. V. (2005) · Journal of Pragmatics · doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2004.09.010 · Cited by 236
Why metaphor matters in education
Botha, E. (2009) · South African Journal of Education · doi:10.15700/saje.v29n4a287 · Cited by 183
Metadata
- Authors
- Lakoff, G.
- Corresponding author
- Lakoff, George
- ORCID
- Lakoff, George
- Venue
- Metaphor and Symbolic Activity
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 1986-12
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 291-296
- ISSN
- 0885-7253 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1974784418
- Cited by
- 92
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 5 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 1 · 2013: 2 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 2.31
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Metaphor and Symbolic Activity (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender and Feminist Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Social Sciences › Demography › Family Dynamics and Relationships
- Keywords
- motherhood, mothers, biological mother, surrogate mothers, in vitro fertilization, adoption, lesbian couples, idealized models, social construction of kinship
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
