George Lakoff
George Lakoff is a cognitive linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns conceptual systems, metaphor, categorisation and the relationship between language and thought. Berkeley faculty directory.
Conceptual metaphor
Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980) argues that metaphor participates in ordinary thought as well as in conspicuous figures of speech. In their account, one area of experience can structure how another is understood. For example, expressions such as "spending time" and "saving time" treat time through the vocabulary of a resource. Publisher's description and editions.
This is a claim about patterns across expressions, rather than simply an instruction to substitute one word for another. A conceptual pattern and a particular person's description also operate at different levels. Recognising a familiar pattern does not settle the meaning of every expression in which it appears.
The distinction is useful alongside Idiomatic, Literal and Figurative Communication. A phrase may be conventional and still participate in a metaphorical pattern. Its familiarity does not make its meaning independent of context.
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (1987) examines categorisation. Lakoff challenges the view that categories must always have sharp boundaries and be defined by a list of features shared equally by every member. He considers prototypes and categories organised around central examples, and connects these questions with embodied cognition. University of Chicago Press.
This is relevant when using a classification of metaphors: a category can help compare examples without requiring every example to fit one exclusive box. The usefulness and limits of a classification depend on what it is being used to describe.
Framing and politics
Don't Think of an Elephant! (2004), expanded as The All New Don't Think of an Elephant! (2014), applies Lakoff's ideas to political communication. It is written as advice for a progressive political audience. Its framing examples should therefore be read in that advocacy context, rather than presented as a politically neutral manual. Publisher's description of the 2014 edition.
Metaphor circuitry and the interpretation of idioms
Lakoff's open-access 2014 article, Mapping the brain's metaphor circuitry, develops his account of metaphorical thought in relation to proposed neural mechanisms. It is published as a Hypothesis and Theory article. Readers can use it as a primary statement of his position without treating every proposed mechanism as a separately demonstrated finding. Lakoff (2014), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8:958.
The section on idioms makes a useful distinction between a general mapping and the knowledge associated with a particular image. Lakoff discusses relationship descriptions involving vehicles and impeded travel, while also noting that speakers may associate different images with the same expression. An analyst's preferred image should therefore not simply be assigned to every speaker. See “Metaphor and the meaning of idioms”, PDF p. 3.
This provides a reading route from the account of conceptual mappings to Embodied Cognition, and from the analysis of expressions to the experiments discussed in Metaphor and Reasoning. The Metaphor Research Library links the original paper and related free reading.
Reading Lakoff alongside other approaches
Lakoff's account of recurring conceptual patterns can be compared with Ricoeur's attention to the creation of meaning in metaphorical discourse and Bateson's attention to communication and context. These are distinct bodies of work. Their relevance to metaphor does not make them evidence for every claim made by a later therapeutic model.