Studies which approach the question of metaphor with a comparative approach include The Ubiquity of Metaphor: Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science (1985) edited by Wolf Paprotté and René Dirven, the multilingual studies to be found on the metaphorik.de online journal, based in Hamburg, Germany, and work carried out by Czech and Polish scholars and published by Irena Vaňková in The Picture of the World in Language (Obraz světa v jazyce, 2001). Eve Sweetser, like Andrew Goatly, is somewhat of an exception in that she is one of the few prominent cognitive linguists to propose comparative work which steers clear of the universalistic approach.

AN EARLY CONTRIBUTION

Dirven's work drew on the Lakoff and Johnson hypothesis, though Dirven found antecedents to cognitive linguists' claims in the work of the German post-Kantian philosopher, Ernst Cassirer, and the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Indeed, Lakoff and Johnson would analyse such phrases as ‘beyond our ken’, and ‘higher spheres’ in the same way that Cassirer did: that is, as spatial metaphors. Back in 1923, Cassirer expressed himself in words that might have been found in Philosophy in the Flesh: