A very pedestrian attempt at a definition would be ‘an understanding of con- cept A in terms of concept B’. This understanding, however, is not realized at the level of the utterance, sentence or word, but at a cognitive level. It is more accurate to define conceptual metaphors as the understanding of some con- ceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain. (60)

Kövecses (2002, p. 4) provides a concise way of defining conceptual domains: ‘A conceptual domain is any coherent organization of experience’. Some of these rich mental frames are ‘journeys’, ‘war’, ‘games’, ‘money’, on the one hand, and ‘love’, ‘argument’, ‘thought’ or ‘morality’, on the other. (61)

The conceptual domain we use to draw elements from in order to establish the analogy (FIRE in our case) is known as ‘source domain’; the domain we trans- fer the analogy onto is called ‘target domain’ (that is, LOVE). The transference always happens from the source to the target domain and tends to be non- reversible, that is, conventional conceptual metaphors do not appear to work in the opposite direction, as in *FIRE IS LOVE. This non-reversibility can be easily understood if we consider the contrast existing between those domains generally used as source and those commonly found as target. 61

Whereas humans conceptualize ‘journeys’, ‘war’, ‘games’ or ‘money’ as fairly concrete organizational patterns of experience, ‘love’, ‘argument’, ‘thought’ or ‘moral- ity’ convey, instead, fairly abstract meanings less easily related to the basic experiential aspects of humans’ lives. 61

Richards (1936) introduced the terms ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ to refer to respectively the subject and the metaphorical term, while cognitive linguists like Lakoff and Johnson (1980) employ the terms ‘target’ and ‘source’. For a word or expression to be metaphorical, the vehicle (or source) must be set out explicitly, whereas the tenor (or target) may merely be implied. 107

In cognitive linguistics and related approaches such as conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory, a metaphor is regarded as more than a mere trope. Seen from a cognitive perspective, our understanding of a metaphor is not realized at the level of the utterance, sentence or word, but at a much more fundamental cognitive level. Metaphors are seen as linguistic manifestations of underlying conceptual metaphors which are central to the way humans make sense of the world. One such conceptual metaphor is that of AN ARGUMENT IS WAR (conceptual metaphors in small capitals) which may be realized by means of a number of different linguistic metaphors such as ‘Your claims are indefen- sible’, ‘He attacked every weak point in my argument’, ‘His criticisms were right on target’, ‘He shot down all of my arguments’ (Kövecses, 2002, p. 5).