The Theory of the Conceptual Metaphor (CMT) is one of the first and most important developments in Cognitive Linguistics (CL). Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) was the first whole book devoted to CL and several important domains of human conceptualisation and language have been studied with the constantly enriched tools of CMT: poetic metaphor and language (Lakoff & Turner 1989; Gibbs 1994), political thinking (Lakoff 1996), mathematics (Lakoff & Núñez 1997), emotions and especially love (Kövecses 1987, 1988, 1990; Barcelona 1992; Martín Morillas & Pérez Rull 1998), linguistic change (Sweetser 1990), gestural language (McNeill 1992) to mention just some especially important works.
It is nowadays included in linguistic and cognitive research of many types (see e.g. Edelman 1992, esp. the Epilogue: “Mind without Biology: A Critical Postscript”, pp. 211-252, ‘pro’-Lakoff and Langacker and against Chomsky; Damasio 1994; Palmer 1996, chapter 8, on its applications to the cultural study of language; Werth 1999 as an instance of its integration in a cognitive theory of discourse and the text).
