One rich and wide-reaching element in language has become the focal point of much study in the past three decades: metaphor. If this element of language has aroused such interest, it is because there has been increasing recognition that all of our concepts are framed within metaphorical terms. Rather than a model of language based upon the linguistic sign (a model which implies that words designate things in the world outside of language), linguists today are more inclined to accept that there exists a figurative substructure to concepts. This in turn helps us to understand that concepts are not extra-lingual entities existing in the world and awaiting discovery by the mind and awaiting definition by philosophers. Thanks to progress in metaphor theory, it has become clear that concepts are the inventions of the mind as it works with and within language to construct meaningful configurations of thought.

Our model for the very concept of thought in English can serve as an example to demonstrate the figurative basis of abstract concepts. Sweetser (1990) investigated and catalogued an extensive subsystem of metaphors which enable us to define our concept of the human mind in terms of a body system. This model allows us to understand such expressions as ‘His mind is going’ and ‘That's a weight off my mind’. Our concept for ‘mind’ may present some difficulties for translation.