Ecological affordances and fire metaphors: the salience of injury

Abstract Fire could be mapped into many target domains to construct metaphors. However, it is not yet known to what extent people’s experience of real-world fire affects the diversity of fire metaphors. The present study aims to explore the derivation of fire metaphors through the ecological perspective of affordances by analysing the collocational patterns associated with both metaphorical and literal uses of ‘fire’ in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Results show that (1) metaphorical and non-metaphorical fire expressions are related to the ecological affordances of real-world fire, including ‘ injury to the skin ’, ‘ warmth ’ and ‘ illumination ’; (2) metaphorical fire expressions are more likely to evoke the ecological affordances and (3) ‘ injury to the skin ’ is more prominent than ‘ warmth ’ and ‘ illumination ’. The findings reveal that the interaction between humans and the environment is fundamental in the process of metaphorical understanding. Metaphorical uses of fire are strongly influenced by embodied interactions with the physical fire and are constrained by cognitive salience.