Metaphor and culture: an interface between Linguistics and anthropology

This paper reviews the influence of sociocultural aspects in primary metaphor production. Besides, it analyzes the comprehension of seven conceptual metaphors by 71 5th graders from three different communities: rural, urban and from landless people's movement. Results, already presented in Siqueira e Parente (2005), obtained from the tasks (verbal and non-verbal) revealed several common patterns as good candidates to universals, as well as a few unusual community-specific patterns in primary metaphor comprehension. These results corroborate Grady's (1997) assumptions regarding primary metaphors cultural independence and also point to the necessity of considering socio-cultural aspects when interpreting metaphorical mappings, what is suggested by Kvecses (2005).