Human beings are endowed with the amazing ability of creativity. Creativity can take a variety of forms; of these, this book is concerned with what can be called figurative creativity. This primarily includes three basic cognitive operations: metaphor, metonymy, and blending (or conceptual integration). In this chapter, I am concerned with metaphor and blending as creative mental processes that can account for a great deal of variation in the use of figurative conceptualization. In other words, I take the creativity of the metaphoric process, as well as that of blending, to be additional causes of the innumerable divergences that we find in figurative thought in the world's languages and cultures as well as within particular languages and cultures. My major goal, then, is to characterize some of the ways in which metaphoric thought and conceptual integration are creative processes of the mind that can produce a wide range of divergences across and inside languages and cultures, together with the constraints that may also apply to them.

METAPHORICAL CREATIVITY

If metaphors are based on embodiment, that is, correlations between abstract and physical (or subjective and sensorimotor) domains of experience and we share much of this embodiment, why are our metaphors (across cultures, groups, and individuals) not at least roughly the same? I have tried to provide an answer to this question in the previous chapter, and I continue to do so in the present one.

The question was raised in Lakoff and Turner's (1989) book More Than Cool Reason in relation to literary works.