The main theory dealing with the relationship between thought/cognition and metaphor is George Lakoff’s The Neural Theory of Metaphor (2009). Before this, however, he wrote a book in 1979 with Mark Johnson detailing metaphors and their types titled Metaphors We Live By. In it, they explore conceptual metaphors and the processes that underlie them. They describe conceptual metaphors as one conceptual domain being described in terms of another.
This is slightly different, but may overlap, with literal metaphors — the kind one usually thinks of when thinking about…
