Prototypicality among metaphors: on the relative frequency of personification and spatial metaphors in literature written for children versus adults. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity

This paper argues that personification is the prototypical metaphor and that it occurs more frequently than other metaphors, especially during the early stages of child development. The paper also argues that personification comes dis guised in many other figurative devices (metonymy, spatial metaphors, and container metaphors) and syntactic expressions (frozen word orders and the nominal gender marking that is obligatory in languages such as French and Ger man) and that it pervades many other aspects of human cognition (including fundamental philosophical frameworks such as objectivism and subjectivism). The main source of data is a frequency analysis of personification and spatial metaphors in two samples of poetry: one written for adults, the other for chil dren. I categorized the topic and vehicle of each metaphor as either human or nonhuman and spatial or nonspatial and found that spatial topics and vehicles were relatively infrequent. Personifications (nonhuman topic-human vehicle) were much more common in both samples and were relatively more frequent in the sample written for children. Explanations of this developmental difference are proposed, based on the cognitive and social functions of personification in literature written for children versus adults. The importance of studying the comprehension and use of metaphor is by now widely recognized. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) pointed out, meta phor is so pervasive in everyday language, thought, and action that the con ceptual system by which we perceive, think, and act must be fundamentall