XIII-Metaphor: Ad Hoc Concepts, Literal Meaning and Mental Images

Abstract

I propose that an account of metaphor understanding which covers the full range of cases has to allow for two routes or modes of processing. One is a process of rapid, local, on-line concept construction that applies quite generally to the recovery of word meaning in utterance comprehension. The other requires a greater focus on the literal meaning of sentences or texts, which is metarepresented as a whole and subjected to more global, reflective pragmatic inference. The questions whether metaphors convey a propositional content and what role imagistic representation plays receive somewhat different answers depending on the processing route. or insightfulness of the metaphor (its accuracy in capturing an experience or feeling) would be to the point, and the same might hold also for the more prosaic (5).Clearly, some of the examples are more familiar, more frequently used (even conventionalized), than others: (1) tops the list in this respect, (2), (4), (5) and (6) are based on fairly familiar metaphorical schemes, and (3), 2 (7) and (8) are the most unusual and inventive, although the 'fog as a cat' has occurred before in English poetry. Some are spontaneous, spoken and conversational while others are highly wrought, extended over a length of text and clearly literary or poetic. I've tried to present a good range of linguistic forms rather than just the 'X is a Y' construction that sometimes dominates discussions. This is a frequent form in conversational metaphors where the aim is often to achieve a strong swift expression of praise or blame ('She's a saint/angel/bulldozer/pig/mouse/battle-axe/ dragon/block of ice/etc.'). It is also an easy form to convert into a corresponding simile, so serves well the purpose of those who want to explore the simile-metaphor relation. 3 In fact, there seem to be few, if any, formal linguistic restrictions on where a metaphorically used expression can appear in an utterance.Some of these properties seem to cluster together: being conversational, spontaneous, conventional, single-word metaphors and having a propositional content, on the one hand; being literary, carefully crafted, extended and developed, expressive of a feeling or sensation, highly imagistic, on the other hand. So it may seem that there are two kinds of metaphor, the 'ordinary' and the 'literary', and that we should not expect a single account that applies to both. While I don't think that there is a clear-cut distinction between two kinds of metaphor, I will argue that there are two different routes to the understanding of metaphors-a quick, local, on-line meaningadjustment process and a slower, more global appraisal of the literal meaning of the whole.As a philosophical backdrop to the dual processing account that I will present, the next section sets out two broad positions on the 2 The example in (3) is a line from a poem which is quoted more fully (in translation) in §v.3 Virtually every possible relation between a metaphor and its corresponding simile has its advocates: metaphors as elliptical similes, sim...

DMIP: A Method for Identifying Potentially Deliberate Metaphor in Language Use

“…Due to this cognitivelinguistic emphasis on the conceptual nature of metaphor (e.g., Kövecses 2002;Johnson 1980, 1999;Ortony 1993;Gibbs 1994), the distinct and variegated role of metaphor as a specific communicative device was given much less attention. Recently, researchers from various backgrounds have proposed to take the communicative function of metaphor into account, including in pragmatics (e.g., Carston 2010;Goddard 2004;Needham-Didsbury 2016), cognitive semiotics (e.g., Brandt and Brandt 2005;Bernárdez 2016), English as a Lingua Franca (e.g., MacArthur 2016; Nacey 2013), (discourse) dynamic approaches to metaphor (e.g., Cameron 1999Cameron , 2003Müller 2008), corpus linguistics (e.g., Deignan 2005;Goatly 1997) and discourse analysis (e.g., Charteris-Black and Musolff 2003;Semino 2008;Steen 2008Steen , 2011bSteen , 2015. The proposals by Cameron (2003), Charteris-Black and Musolff (2003), and Steen (e.g., 2008Steen (e.g., , 2011bSteen (e.g., , 2015 are most closely related to the two-dimensional model of metaphor Johnson 1980, 1999), in that they all take the dimensions of language and thought as a starting point.…”

Metaphor in psychotherapeutic discourse: Implications for utterance interpretation

“…The outcome of this alternative processing route will therefore be an interpretation that consists of an array of implicatures concerning the mental and physical anguish that Karla is experiencing. I believe that the interpretation of the extensively developed metaphorical articulations in psychotherapeutic discourse is best explained by a similar comprehension process to that described by Carston (2010). As in the Zoe Heller example, construction of multiple ad hoc concepts for the metaphors in these exchanges requires an unnecessary expenditure of effort -since the literal encoded meanings are so closely related (recall: full of air, inflated, stable etc.…”

“…While I concede that this approach offers an accurate depiction of how simpler or more accessible lexical and phrasal metaphors are understood, I argue in favour of an alternative account for many complex or developed metaphorical utterances such as those found in psychotherapeutic discourse. In line with Carston (2010) and other philosophers, I advocate a view on which greater weight is given to the literal meaning of the metaphorically used language in the comprehension procedure. I begin this article by analysing two examples of metaphorical language which are attested cases from the domain of psychotherapy.…”

“…Literal meaning (imaginary worlds) approaches to metaphor 3.2.1. Two routes to metaphor comprehension: Carston (2010) Consider, as Carston does, this extract from Zoe Heller's novel The Believers.…”

A konvencionális és az újszerű metaforák megértési folyamata a serdülő és fiatal felnőtt korosztály esetében

“…Láthatjuk, hogy a metafora két alkotóelemének, a topicnak és a hordozónak nincsenek közös tulajdonságai. CARSTON (2002CARSTON ( , 2010 szerint ekkor a két rész enciklopédikus ismeretei és az aktuális kontextus alapján egy magasabb rendű ad hoc fogalmat generálunk, amely egyszerre tartalmazza a hordozó pszichológiai (absztrakt) és a fizikai (alapjelentés) jelentésének tulajdonságait is. A relevanciaelmélet összességében nem különbözteti meg a szó szerinti nyelvhasználat és a nem szó szerinti nyelvhasználat feldolgozását, hanem egy kontinuum két végére helyezi őket.…”