Subjects Are Areas

Transfers

An academic subject, intellectual discipline, or topic of study is a bounded region of space — a territory you can enter, explore, survey, and eventually master. This metaphor structures how we talk about knowledge acquisition as spatial navigation: you move into a field, cover ground within it, and discover what lies at its center or its periphery.

Key structural parallels:

• Subject as bounded region — “She works in the field of linguistics.” “He entered the area of machine learning.” Every discipline has borders that distinguish it from neighboring fields. To study something is to be inside its boundaries; to be ignorant of it is to be outside. The metaphor creates a territorial logic for knowledge: you can claim an area, defend it, or trespass on someone else’s.
• Depth as expertise — “She has a deep knowledge of the subject.” “He has only a surface understanding.” The spatial metaphor gives subjects vertical structure: the surface is introductory knowledge, accessible to anyone who enters the area, while the depths contain specialized, difficult material that requires sustained exploration.
• Breadth as scope — “The course covers a wide area.” “Her research is narrow but thorough.” A subject can be wide or narrow, and a scholar can range broadly across many areas or focus intensely on a small patch of intellectual territory.
• Exploration as research — “This is uncharted territory in physics.” “We need to map out the field.” Research is the act of moving through the space of a subject, discovering what is there. Pioneer researchers open new areas; survey courses give overviews of the whole terrain.
• Boundaries as disciplinary limits — “That question falls outside the scope of biology.” “Interdisciplinary work crosses traditional boundaries.” The borders between areas are not natural features but conventional lines, and one of the recurring tensions in academic life is whether to respect or transgress them.

Limits

• Subjects do not have fixed borders — the spatial metaphor implies that disciplines have clear edges, but in practice the boundary between, say, psychology and neuroscience is contested and constantly shifting. The metaphor makes interdisciplinary work look like border-crossing when it is often more like discovering that two supposedly separate territories were always the same land.
• Knowledge is not evenly distributed in space — a real area can be surveyed exhaustively, but a subject cannot. You can “cover the ground” of an introductory course, but the metaphor breaks down for research, where new questions multiply faster than old ones are resolved. The space of a subject grows as you explore it, unlike any physical territory.
• The metaphor hides power relations — “entering a field” sounds like a free choice, but access to academic subjects is gatekept by institutions, credentials, and social capital. The spatial metaphor makes knowledge look like open land anyone can explore, obscuring the barriers to entry that are social rather than cognitive.
• Depth is not always the valuable direction — the metaphor privileges vertical descent (depth equals expertise) and treats breadth as superficiality. But some of the most important intellectual work happens at the surface, in synthesis, connection, and translation between fields. The spatial metaphor has no way to value the person who stands at the intersection of three areas without being deep in any of them.
• Subjects are not static landscapes — a field in 1950 is not the same field in 2025. The spatial metaphor tends to freeze disciplines in place, making it hard to express how the very terrain of a subject changes as new paradigms emerge. You cannot really “return to” the physics you left twenty years ago, because the ground has moved.

Expressions

• “She works in the field of biology” — a discipline as a spatial region (Lakoff, Espenson & Schwartz, Master Metaphor List, 1991)
• “He’s an expert in the area of contract law” — specialization as location within a region (common academic usage)
• “The course covers a lot of ground” — breadth of study as spatial extent (Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980)
• “This is unexplored territory” — unstudied topics as unmapped space (Master Metaphor List, 1991)
• “She has a deep understanding of the subject” — expertise as spatial depth (common academic usage)
• “He’s only scratching the surface” — superficial study as touching only the top of a region (common academic usage)
• “The boundaries between disciplines are blurring” — interdisciplinarity as border erosion (common academic usage)
• “We need to map out the field” — research planning as cartography (common academic usage)

Origin Story

SUBJECTS ARE AREAS appears in the Master Metaphor List (Lakoff, Espenson & Schwartz, 1991) as part of the broader mapping of abstract concepts onto spatial locations. It is closely related to the IDEAS ARE LOCATIONS metaphor and to the general EVENT STRUCTURE system’s mapping of states onto locations. The metaphor draws on a more basic image schema: the CONTAINER schema (Johnson, 1987), where bounded regions have interiors, exteriors, and boundaries. When applied to intellectual life, this schema produces the familiar language of academic “fields,” “areas,” and “domains” — spatial terms so thoroughly conventionalized that they rarely register as metaphorical.

References

• Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Subjects Are Areas”
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980)
• Johnson, M. The Body in the Mind (1987) — the CONTAINER image schema
• Kovecses, Z. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (2nd ed. 2010)