Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Metaphors change through time in different cultures, languages and across generations.This research aimed to test the change and social distribution of some metaphors inUruguayan Spanish. This study tested figurative expressions for the metaphors BEING INTHE OVEN IS DIFFICULTIES / HAZARDNESS, BANKING SOMETHING OR SOMEBODYIS BEARING IT and TO BE FLYING IS DOING SOMETHING WELL. On a multiple choiceonline questionnaire 267 Uruguayan female chose the meaning and the frequency that theybelieve they use previous metaphors. By using Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) asa visual exploratory statistical tool, the study suggested Cultural Immersion and MetaphoricalProficiency as dimensions for explaining the social distribution of the aforementionedmetaphors. But even though MCA seems to be a useful tool for understanding themetaphors’ vitality, the short percentage of the variance explained by the dimensionssuggests introducing additional categories for obtaining an adequate proportion of thisvariance.