The 'Love is Fire' Metaphor in Selected Popular Music. Lakoff and Johnson's Understanding of a Conceptual Metaphor in 'Metaphors We Live By' (1980)

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, LMU Munich, language: English, abstract: The paper at hand is meant to contribute to Lakoff and Johnson's stance on how mundane, yet abstract domains are understood in terms of another more concretely realized concept. With the analysis of a distinct corpus of popular love songs from the 1960ies until today, the manifold interpretations and utilizations of the 'Love is Fire' metaphor will be investigated. To outline the extent of the scientific contribution and of the present paper itself, the following bullet points give a description of the major aims of my research: Explaining the 'Love is Fire' metaphor and proving its cognitive comprehensibility in Lakoff and Johnson's understanding of a conceptual metaphor. Providing evidence of the significance of the metaphor by naming and analyzing love metaphors in a selected corpus of popular love songs from the 1960ies up until now, proving its conventionality and its wide spectrum of meaning. Its presence makes us feel warm, its absence makes us freeze from within: The rather abstract notion of what love is can be conceptualized in many different, yet oftentimes sensorily tangible ways. Lakoff and Johnson already proposed in their groundbreaking work 'Metaphors We Live By' (1980) how highly abstract concepts such as LOVE can become graspable through conceptual metaphors and their mapping between target and source domains. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) quite vividly illustrate how extensive and oftentimes subconsciously established the use of conceptual metaphors appear in everyday language, especially when it comes to everyday mundane topics like the omnipresent concept of LOVE. In the tradition of the post-Lakoff-and-Johnsonian wave of linguistic studies on mundane conceptual metaphors (like ARGUMENT and TIME) this paper reworks the metaphorical concept of LOVE as a sensorily tangible sensation, best pronounced by the formula 'Love is Fire' via analyzing popular love song lyrics which draw comparisons between the inexplicable sensation of love and the actual bodily sensation of heat, which both seem interconnected within the Anglophone music culture of at least the past 50 years.