Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Languages exhibit striking semantic diversity, but differentlanguages often share core metaphors. Conceptual MetaphorTheory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) claims that universalhuman experiences give rise to conceptual representationsthat are then expressed in language. But languages changeslowly, making it difficult to observe implicitconceptualization affecting linguistic convention in realtime. Here, we describe a shared conceptualizationpreviously absent from speech that has now becomeconventionalized in linguistic metaphors. In two studies, wedocument how members of the US military talk about timeusing conventionalized lateral metaphors (e.g., ‘push themeeting right’ to mean ‘move the meeting later’). We showthat military members, unlike civilians, consider suchsentences to be acceptable—sometimes even moreacceptable than more standard phrases. Moreover, militarypersonnel seem unaware that these lateral metaphors arespecific to their linguistic sub-community. Our findingssuggest that implicit mental representations can becomeconventionalized metaphors in language.