Event Structure (Location Case)

metaphor

Source: Journeys → Event Structure

Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguisticsphilosophy

From: Master Metaphor List

Transfers

The Event Structure metaphor is not a single metaphor but a coherent system: a set of interlocking mappings that together constitute our primary way of reasoning about events, states, changes, causes, actions, and purposes. The location case — one of two major variants — maps the entire structure of events onto the structure of space and motion. States are locations. Changes are movements. Causes are forces. Actions are self-propelled motions. Purposes are destinations. Means are paths. Difficulties are impediments to motion.

This is Lakoff and Johnson’s most ambitious claim about metaphor: that an entire abstract conceptual domain — the structure of events as such — is understood through a single coherent spatial metaphor system. The location case treats the experiencer as a traveler moving through a landscape of states.

Key structural parallels:

• States as locations — “She’s in trouble.” “He’s at peace.” “They’re in a recession.” Every state is a place you occupy. You are inside bounded regions (in love, in debt, in a coma) or at points (at rest, at war, at the peak). The spatial prepositions do the work of turning abstract conditions into places on a map.
• Changes as movements — “The company went from strength to strength.” “He moved from anger to acceptance.” “The situation shifted.” If states are locations, then changing state is moving from one location to another. The path between states is the process of change; the distance between them is the magnitude of change.
• Causes as forces — “Inflation pushed prices up.” “The crisis forced a response.” “Competition drives innovation.” Causes are forces that move things from one location-state to another. The force-dynamic logic (Talmy 1988) gives causation directionality, magnitude, and the possibility of resistance.
• Actions as self-propelled motions — “She’s making progress.” “He’s going places.” “They’re moving ahead with the plan.” When you act, you move yourself through the event landscape. Agency is locomotion — you choose your direction, your speed, and your destination.
• Purposes as destinations — “We’re aiming for profitability.” “She’s working toward a degree.” “They’ve reached their goal.” Purposes are the places you want to get to. Achievement is arrival. Failure is never reaching the destination. The entire motivational vocabulary of goals, targets, and aims is spatial.
• Means as paths — “There are many routes to success.” “She took a different approach.” “He found a way around the problem.” The method by which you achieve a purpose is the path by which you reach a destination. Different means are different paths to the same place.
• Difficulties as impediments — “She hit a wall.” “He ran into an obstacle.” “They’re stuck.” Difficulties are things that block your path — walls, barriers, rough terrain, dead ends. The metaphor gives difficulty a spatial structure: it is something between you and your destination that must be overcome, circumvented, or endured.

Limits

• Events are not spatial — the system’s power is also its limitation. By mapping all of event structure onto space, it makes space the measure of all things. But events have temporal, causal, and social structure that does not reduce to spatial layout. “Progress” is not literally forward motion, and treating it as such can obscure what actually changes in a complex situation.
• The system privileges linearity — the location case implies a landscape with paths connecting locations. This makes event structure seem linear: you go from A to B to C. But many real event structures are cyclical (economic cycles), recursive (feedback loops), or multi-dimensional (a policy change affects dozens of variables simultaneously). The one-traveler-on-one-path model cannot represent these structures.
• Agency is ambiguous — in the system, self-propelled motion is action and externally caused motion is passivity. But real causation is rarely so clean. “The market moved” — is the market an agent (self-propelled) or a patient (pushed by forces)? The spatial metaphor forces a choice between agent and patient that may not fit.
• The destination metaphor for purpose is teleological — it assumes that purposes exist in advance, like places on a map, waiting to be reached. But many purposes emerge in the course of action. You do not always know your destination before you start walking. The metaphor makes purpose look like navigation rather than improvisation.
• Impediment metaphors hide systemic causes — “hitting a wall” localizes difficulty in a single obstacle. But many difficulties are systemic: they are not walls on a path but features of the entire landscape. Poverty is not an obstacle on the road to prosperity; it is a condition of the terrain itself. The impediment metaphor encourages a problem-by-problem approach to issues that may require systemic change.
• The dual-case problem — the event structure system has two versions, location case and object case, which are not always compatible. In the location case, states are locations you are in. In the object case, states are possessions you have. English freely mixes both: “She’s in trouble” (location) and “She has a problem” (object). The system does not explain when speakers choose one over the other.

Expressions

• “We’re at a crossroads” — decision point as spatial fork in the path
• “The project is moving forward” — progress as forward motion
• “She hit a wall with her research” — difficulty as physical impediment
• “He’s going in circles” — lack of progress as circular motion
• “They’ve reached their goal” — achievement as arrival at destination
• “She took a different approach” — method as path to destination
• “The economy is in a downturn” — economic state as location on a vertical landscape
• “He’s making headway” — progress as forward spatial displacement
• “We need to find a way around this problem” — solution-seeking as pathfinding around an obstacle
• “She’s come a long way” — significant change as large spatial distance traveled

Origin Story

The Event Structure metaphor system is Lakoff and Johnson’s most systematic theoretical contribution. First sketched in Metaphors We Live By (1980) through individual examples (PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS, STATES ARE LOCATIONS), it was developed into a full system in More Than Cool Reason (Lakoff and Turner, 1989) and received its definitive treatment in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Chapter 11. The Master Metaphor List (1991) documents the location case and object case as two parallel systems, noting that both coexist in English with different entailments.

The location case is the more spatial of the two variants. It inherits the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL image schema (Johnson 1987) as its structural backbone: events have a starting point (initial state), a path (process of change), and an endpoint (final state or purpose). The system’s claim to be a system rather than a collection of individual metaphors rests on its internal coherence: all the component mappings (states/locations, changes/movements, causes/forces, etc.) work together and generate consistent entailments.

The Event Structure system is arguably the strongest evidence for Conceptual Metaphor Theory’s central claim that abstract thought is structured by embodied spatial experience. If Lakoff and Johnson are right that we understand events as such through space and motion, then metaphor is not decoration on literal thought — it is the foundation of abstract reasoning itself.

References

• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980)
• Lakoff, G. & Turner, M. More Than Cool Reason (1989)
• Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Event Structure (location Case)”
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Chapter 11 — the Event Structure metaphor system
• Johnson, M. The Body in the Mind (1987) — image schemas
• Talmy, L. “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition” (1988) — force dynamics framework

Related Entries

• States Are Locations
• Action Is Motion
• Change Is Motion
• Existence Is A Location
• Difficulties Are Impediments to Motion
• Purposes Are Destinations

Structural Neighbors

Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.

• Harm Is Preventing Forward Motion Toward a Goal (embodied-experience/metaphor) path, force, blockage, cause, prevent
• Obligations Are Forces (embodied-experience/metaphor) path, force, blockage, cause, prevent
• Strong Emotion Is Blinding (vision/metaphor) container, force, blockage, cause, prevent
• Action Is Motion (embodied-experience/metaphor) path, force, blockage, cause, prevent
• Actions Are Self-Propelled Motions (embodied-experience/metaphor) path, force, blockage, cause, prevent
• Causes Are Forces (embodied-experience/metaphor) path, force, blockage, cause, prevent
• Dead in the Water (seafaring/metaphor) path, force, blockage, cause, prevent
• Difficulties Are Impediments to Motion (embodied-experience/metaphor) path, force, blockage, cause, prevent

Structural Tags

Patterns: pathcontainerforceblockage

Relations: causetransformprevent

Structure: networkpipeline Level: primitive

Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner