Synopses of Donald Freeman's articles

"'Catch[ing] the nearest way': Macbeth and Cognitive Metaphor", Journal of Pragmatics, 1995

Synopsis: A new approach to figurative language, cognitive metaphor, is the basis of an analysis of the dramatic and critical language of and about Macbeth. The analysis shows that the CONTAINER and PATH schemata dominate the salient metaphors of the play, as well as those of the critics who have written for the last two hundred years about Macbeth. The analysis traces Macbeth's anguinary career as taking the form of a contained path, an analysis available only through a cognitive-metaphoric approach. Because cognitive metaphor offers independently motivated analyses – these schemata and their projections are well documented in other poetic and non-poetic langauge – this approach refutes the claim that the findings of stylistic studies are predetermined and wholly "interpretive" in the strictest sense.

"'According to my bond': King Lear and Re-cognition", Language and Literature, 1993

Synopsis: The theory of cognitive metaphor, applied in an analysis of King Lear's opening scene, shows that the scene's figurative language depends upon metaphoric projection from the schemata of BALANCE and LINKS onto the abstractions of filial love and family relationships. The metaphors arising from the BALANCE schema, in particular, are organized into a scenario, an interpretive framework, of financial accounting. Lear understands his relationships with his daughters in terms of the debits and credits of fiscal accounts; the Fool identifies him as 'an 0 without a figure'; Regan and Goneril destroy their father by the very numbers he so relishes. Cordelia tries and fails to get Lear to "recognize' parental love and filial duty in terms of the LINKS schema, beginning with language interpretable within both. Lear must learn to understand the world in terms of LINKS through action, most strikingly portrayed when he strips off his clothes and joins Tom o'Bedlam in nakedness. We understand this and other dramatic action, the plot structure, and the play's other abstract elements through the same cognitive apparatus that we use to understand its textual metaphors: projection into those abstract entities from schematized bodily experience. In the theory of cognitive metaphor, 'interpretive communities' are constrained by the embodied imagination.