Notes on Metaphor PDF

Preview

Summary

Semantics, Notes on Metaphor Steve Nicolle Notes on Metaphor Traditionally, metaphor is a figure of speech in which one word or idea is replaced with another which it resembles in some way. For example, in Shakespeare’s line All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, the worl...

Description

Semantics, Notes on Metaphor

Steve Nicolle

Notes on Metaphor Traditionally, metaphor is a figure of speech in which one word or idea is replaced with another which it resembles in some way. For example, in Shakespeare’s line All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, the world is not only compared to a stage (in a theatre), it is said to be a stage, and the men and women are not only like players, they are players.1 Definition Metaphor has proven difficult to define. The best definition that I have found comes from Yanow (2008, cited in Ritchie 2013: 6) Metaphor: “the juxtaposition of two superficially unlike elements in a single context, where the separately understood meanings of both interact to create a new perception of each and especially of the focus of the metaphor.” Terminology • The thing being talked about (e.g. All the world and all the men and women) is known as the TARGET (other terms include TENOR, TOPIC and also, confusingly, FOCUS, as in the above definition from Yanow 2008). •

The metaphorical phrase which replaces the topic (e.g. a stage and players) is known as the IMAGE or VEHICLE.

•

The way in which the target and the vehicle resemble each other, that is, what they have in common, is known as the POINT OF COMPARISON.

•

The term “metaphor” is sometimes used to refer to the whole statement (e.g. All the world’s a stage) and sometimes just to the vehicle (a stage). In these notes, I will reserve the term METAPHOR for the whole statement, TARGET for the thing being talked about, and VEHICLE for the phrase which replaces the topic.

•

In metaphor studies, the term MAPPING refers to a process in which certain attributes or characteristics of the vehicle are associated in a systematic way with comparable attributes or characteristics of the target

Grammatical forms Different parts of speech can function as the vehicle in a metaphor: Verb: Her words carried a lot of meaning; he built a convincing argument Noun: All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players Adjective: She used incendiary language; he replied with cool reason Preposition: we are united in Christ; we are no longer under the Law In spoken discourse, verbs are more common as vehicles than nouns. Some metaphors are complicated, involving various parts of speech and “underlying” metaphors. Ritchie (2013: 10) gives the following example: The metaphor ‘put your thoughts into words’ implies ‘thoughts are objects’, ‘words are containers’, and therefore ‘speaking or writing is putting objects into containers’. The implicit target of the statement ‘put your thoughts into words’ is expressing one’s thoughts; the underlying vehicle is putting objects into containers. 1 When one word or idea is compared to another (e.g. All the world is like a stage, and all the men and women are merely like players) this is called a “simile” (pronounced SIM-MILL-LEE).

Semantics, Notes on Metaphor

Steve Nicolle

Functions of metaphor It has often been noted that metaphor makes language expressive, and allows speakers and writers to say more than is possible using literal expressions. Consider the metaphor ‘put your thoughts into words’. There are various attributes that can be mapped from objects to thoughts and containers to words. Objects are typically put in a container to stop them from getting lost or mixed up, and so that they can be retrieved easily; this suggests that thoughts might be lost or mixed up or forgotten if they are not put into words. Also, a container is usually less important than the objects it contains, which might suggest that the thought is more important than the word that it is ‘put into’. And so on. It is its open-ended nature (“And so on” in the paragraph above) which gives metaphor much of its expressive power. Ritchie (2013: 9) provides the following example: In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” [the poet Robert] Frost (1923) ends with the line, “And miles to go before I sleep,” repeated for emphasis. Closing a poem about riding home on horseback, the line is literally true, but coming after “I have promises to keep,” it is also a metaphor for Frost’s life, drawing on the commonplace metaphors LIFE IS A JOURNEY and DEATH IS SLEEP; understanding the poem requires that the closing lines be understood as simultaneously literal and metaphorical. In relevance theory terms, metaphors have the potential to give rise to a range of weak implicatures – that is, to have number of possible interpretations in addition to what is literally said. Extended metaphors A whole narrative can function as an extended metaphor, such as the garden metaphor in Song of Songs 6:2 (see also 4:12–16): My beloved has gone down to his garden to the beds of spices, to graze in the gardens and to gather lilies. A number of extended metaphors are used in the Bible, such as ‘the people of God are a vineyard’ and ‘apostasy and idolatry in religion are adultery and prostitution’. Lexicalized metaphors Based on the underlying metaphor MORE IS UP, the expression ‘rising costs’ is used to mean ‘increasing costs’. In fact, ‘rising’ is now more common than ‘increasing’ when referring to financial concepts such as costs, inflation, prices, and so on. Also, ‘increase’ is now a basic meaning of rise alongside ‘become higher’, and both ‘increase’ and ‘become higher’ are listed in most dictionaries of English as meanings of rise’ The ‘increase’ meaning of rise has become part of the lexicon; the metaphor has become lexicalized. Theories of metaphor Category-assignment theories According to category-assignment theory (Glucksberg & Keysar 1990) people interpret metaphors by assigning the vehicle in a metaphor to an ad hoc category (represented in small caps followed by an asterisk, e.g. JAIL*). An ad hoc category is a category which is created spontaneously in order to map the target to the vehicle; it is not a concept that is stored in long-term memory. For

Semantics, Notes on Metaphor

Steve Nicolle

example, in the metaphor ‘jobs are jails’ an ad hoc category JAIL* is created which is “the category of things that the metaphor vehicle jail typifies – situations that are unpleasant, confining, difficult to escape from, unrewarding, and so on” (Glucksberg, Keysar & McGlone 1992: 578, cited in Ritchie 2013: 44). The ad hoc category JAIL* contains only some of the properties of the conventional concept JAIL; it excludes properties such as barred windows and locked doors. That is, the conventional concept JAIL has been narrowed to exclude certain irrelevant properties. However, if ‘jail’ were to be used as the vehicle in a different metaphor, such as ‘A zoo is a jail’ the ad hoc concept created in this context would include barred windows and locked doors. A version of category-assignment has been proposed as part of relevance theory (which will be studied in the Pragmatics course). According to relevance theory, when a hearer processes an utterance he expects the utterance to be relevant enough to be worth processing. As a result, the concepts associated with the expressions used in the utterance will be broadened (extending the usual range of properties) or narrowed (excluding properties that are not relevant) until a relevant interpretation is obtained. Broadening and narrowing in the search for optimal relevance is part of the normal process of utterance interpretation, and is not restricted to metaphors (Wilson & Carston 2006; Sperber & Wilson 2008).2 According to this account, in the metaphor ‘jobs are jails’, “‘jail’ is broadened to form an ad hoc concept, JAIL*, that includes “frustrating, confining, and unpleasant,” and narrowed to exclude barred windows and locked doors.” (Ritchie 2013: 56) The process of broadening not only helps to make the utterance understandable, it also contributes to relevance by licensing various weak implicatures. At this point, I should mention that category-assignment theories were prefigured by the work of Max Black (Black 1954-55). Black argued that metaphor works by applying to the target a system of “associated implications” characteristic of the vehicle. According to Black, “These implications usually consist of “commonplaces” about the subsidiary subject [vehicle], but may, in suitable cases, consist of deviant implications established ad hoc by the writer. The metaphor selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and organizes features of the principle subject [target], by implying statements about it that normally apply to the subsidiary subject [vehicle]. This involves shifts in meaning of words belonging to the same family or system as the metaphorical expression; and some of these shifts, though not all, may be metaphorical transfers.” (Black 1981: 78) Black (ibid.) continues, “There is, in general, no simple “ground” for the necessary shifts of meaning – no blanket reason why some metaphors work and others fail.”3 For example, many 2

A similar point is made by Searle. According to Searle (1981) understanding how metaphors work is simply a special case of understanding a speaker’s meaning, like irony and indirect speech acts, in which the speaker communicates more than what is literally said. Searle notes that even literal sentences are context-dependent: ‘Sally is tall’ has to be understood as ‘tall for a woman’ (although he does not use the term ‘narrowing’, the application of ‘tall’ here has been narrowed to the specific set of women).

3

A similar point is made by Searle: “The question, “How do metaphors work?” is a bit like the question, “How does one thing remind us of another thing?” There is no single answer to either question, though similarity obviously plays a major role in answering both. Two important differences between them are that metaphors are both restricted and systematic; restricted in the sense that not every way that one thing can remind us of something else will provide a basis for metaphor, and systematic in the sense that metaphors must be communicable from speaker to hearer in virtue of a shred system of principles.”

Semantics, Notes on Metaphor

Steve Nicolle

things can be described as frustrating, confining, and unpleasant (for example, matatus), so why does the metaphor ‘jobs are matatus’ not succeed as well as ‘jobs are jails’? Although categoryassignment theories can explain how ‘jail’ might function as the vehicle in a metaphorical expression such as ‘jobs are jails’, they do not explain why the metaphor jobs are matatus’ fails. Conceptual metaphor theory According to Richards (1936), metaphor “is a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts. Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom.” (Richards 1981: 51) The idea that metaphor as a feature of language is a reflection of the way that people think is developed in the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. For Lakoff & Johnson (1981: 309), “Expressions like ‘wasting time’, ‘attacking positions’, ‘going our separate ways’, etc., are reflections of systematic metaphorical concepts that structure our actions and thoughts. They are “alive” in the most fundamental sense – they are metaphors we live by.” (See also Lakoff & Johnson 1980) Only a few concepts, such as HUNGER, PAIN, TEMPERATURE, PHYSICAL ORIENTATION and PHYSICAL PROXIMITY, are based directly on experience. Most abstract concepts are based on metaphors in which these basic experiences function as vehicles. For example (at least in English), AFFECTION is understood as warmth and proximity (e.g. ‘a warm welcome’, ‘to give someone the cold shoulder’, ‘a close friend’, ‘a distant relationship’). There is experimental evidence in support of the view that the abstract concept AFFECTION is based on the physical experience of temperature and proximity; for example, people who experience a lack of affection, for example by being excluded from a game, often feel physically colder than those who experience affection, for example by being included in a game. Similarly, metaphors such as ‘carrying guilt’ and ‘weighed down by guilt’ reflect the fact that people who experience guilt actually feel heavier (experimental evidence is reported here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131008132858.htm). Many of these conceptual metaphors are grounded in image schemas (see the presentation on the course website for examples). Lakoff & Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory is discussed in more detail in the summary on the course website. Methodology Ritchie (2013) makes the following point about methodology, which is worth quoting at length: A shortcoming of all these approaches to metaphor is their reliance on artificial examples, invented to demonstrate a particular point, and in general on metaphors removed from any actual discursive context. In spite of the central emphasis in relevance theory on context, Wilson and Sperber and their colleagues also rely almost exclusively on examples that are either invented or abstracted from any actual conversational context. This shortcoming may be part of the reason they have not thus far managed to move the discussion beyond an implicit information-transfer model to incorporate the richer emotional and relational dimensions of language use (e.g. see Edwards, 1997). It is disappointing to see context, which in principle involves everything mutually known to the participants in a conversation, including their relationship, defined so narrowly. Wilson and Carston acknowledge the potential importance of aspects of the communicative interaction such as vocal inflection and gesture, but they do not (Searle 1981: 273)

Semantics, Notes on Metaphor

Steve Nicolle

incorporate any of this into their theory of metaphor. They entirely disregard the relational context, both as a resource in understanding utterances and as part of what may be changed by the effects of processing. (Ritchie 2013: 65, original emphasis)

As Davidson notes, “Metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight. Since in most cases what the metaphor prompts or inspires is not entirely, or even at all, recognition of some truth or fact, the attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply misguided.” (Davidson 1981: 218) On-line resources An excellent website dealing with how to study metaphor in discourse is proved by the Open University: http://creet.open.ac.uk/projects/metaphor-analysis/index.cfm References Black, Max. (1954–55). Metaphor. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55: 273–294. Reprinted in Mark Johnson (ed.) [1981]. Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 63–82. Davidson, Donald. (1981). What metaphors mean. In: Mark Johnson (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 200–220. Reprinted from Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 31–47. Edwards, D. (1997). Discourse and Cognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Frost, Robert. (1923). Stopping by woods on a snowy evening. In: E. C. Lathem (ed.) The Poetry of Robert Frost. New York: Henry Holt. Glucksberg, S. & Keysar, B. (1990). Understanding metaphorical comparisons: Beyond similarity. Psychological Review 97: 3–18. Glucksberg, S., Keysar, B. & McGlone, M. S. (1992). Metaphor understanding and accessing conceptual schema: Reply to Gibbs (1992). Psychological Review 99: 578–581. Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. (1981). Conceptual metaphor in everyday language. In: Mark Johnson (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 286–325. Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy 77, (1980): 453–486. Richards, I. A. (1936). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pages 87–112 reprinted in Mark Johnson (ed.) [1981]. Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 48–62. Ritchie, L. David. (2013). Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. (1981). Metaphor. In: Mark Johnson (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 248–285. Reprinted from John R. Searle (1979). Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 76–116. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. (2008). A deflationary account of metaphors. In: R. W. Gibbs Jr. (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 84–105. Wilson, Deirdre & Carston, Robyn. (2006). Metaphor, relevance, and the ‘emergent property’ issue. Mind and Language 21: 404–433. Yanow, D. (2008). Cognition meets action: Metaphors as models of and models for. In: T. Carver & J. Pikalo (eds.) Political Language and Metaphor: Interpreting and changing the world. London & New York: Routledge, 225–237....