Metaphors of weather in Canadian short prose

In his recent book entitled Metaphor, Hungarian Lakoff-scholar Zoltán Kövecses translates the tenor-vehicle relationship into a linguistic Great Chain of Being (2002). The primary purpose of the paper is to examine how Canadian metaphors of weather fit into this framework. The first part of the paper presents some theoretical grounding, proceeding from the overt-covert and direct-indirect relationship of tenor and vehicle to Lakoff's cognitive concept of metaphor (1980, 1993). Based on this concept, the linguistic Great Chain of Weather Metaphors is created. The second part of the paper makes an attempt at examining the most typical source and target domains of weather, and, based on a pilot sample, it also looks into conceptual weather metaphors built by mapping at each level of the Great Chain of Weather Metaphors. Furthermore, the analysis tackles the question of conventionality as well as the establishment of a certain hierarchy among the different Great Chain levels through the employment of Ricoeur's Platonic ladder theory (1987) and Lakoff's principle of unidirectionality (1990). This section of the paper is followed by an in-depth analysis focusing on object-to-weather and weather-to-object correspondences.