Since the advent of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) more than thirty years ago, many researchers have been considering that the problems of this approach is its lack of historiographical contextualization, despite the fact that the major hypotheses related to conceptual metaphor, as well as many examples, were already anticipated by philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and linguists during the 17th century. The article introduces two authors from 18th and 19th centuries - the philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert (1965); and the linguist Paul Wegener (1991) - who, not only developed a cognitive theory of the metaphors 'we live by', but also included in their researches some pragmatic aspects which were rediscovered in recent works about cognitive metaphor and which also were characterized as issues disregarded by the first generation of CMT. Therefore, we believe that the works of Lambert and Wegener may help researchers to build a bridge from their work to current discussions, since the approaches of both scholars refer to ways of overcoming the cleavage between the solipsistic individual and the society; and they also address the dichotomy of universalism and cultural relativity. It is important to highlight that both authors concurrently understand metaphor as a cognitive and intersubjective phenomenon negotiated between participants in real communication.
Conceptual Metaphor; Cognitive Linguistics; Pragmatics; Lambert; Wegener
