Metaphor Theory

 

For writers and critics, metaphor is simply a trope: a literary device deriving from the schools of classical rhetoric and intending to put an argument clearly and persuasively. Boundaries are not sharp, but devices are commonly grouped as schemes and tropes. Schemes, which include alliteration, chiasmus, etc., have more to do with expression. Tropes, which include metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, are more powerful and deal with content. Metonymy entails using a name to stand for the larger whole: "Whitehall intended otherwise." where Whitehall stands for the British civil service. Metonymy does not open new paths like metaphor, but shortens distance to intuition of things already known. Metaphor therefor involves a transfer of sense, and metonymy a transfer of reference.

 

But there are larger considerations. Kenneth Burke thought tropes were ready-made for rhetoricians because they describe the specific patterns of human behaviour that surface in art and social life. Hayden White sketched a theory of history which bridged the claims of art and science by defining the deep structures of historical thought in terms of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. For Derrida, the inevitable clash of metaphors in all writing shows only too well that language may subvert or exceed an author's intended meaning. Like Derrida, Paul de Man saw language as an endless chain of words, which cannot be closed off to a definitive meaning or reference. The literal and figurative meaning of a text is not easily separated, and the realities posited by language are largely those accepted by the dominant ideology as truthful representations of the world.

 

Metaphors are much more powerful instruments in the eyes of Lakoff and Johnson. Metaphors have entailments that organize our experience, uniquely express that experience, and create necessary realities. Lakoff and Johnson attacked the two commonly accepted theories of metaphor. Previous theories derive, they believe, from a naive realism that there is an objective world, independent of ourselves, to which words apply with fixed meanings. But the answer is not to swing to the opposite and embrace a wholly subjectivists view that the personal, interior world is the only reality. Metaphors, for Lakoff and Johnson, are primarily matters of thought and action, only derivatively of language. Metaphors are culturally-based, and define what those with certain assumptions and presuppositions find real. The "isolated similarities" are indeed those created by metaphor, which simply create a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience. They are grounded in correlations within our experience.

 

What are Lakoff and Johnson saying but that there is no one central interpretation? Use different turns of speech — as we do naturally in our everyday lives — and the "meaning" alters. Without thinking twice we translate from one mind-set to another. We have probably always done so. Speech started as a primary function in oral societies. There was no "content" behind the expressions. Hieroglyphics were not word pictures but mnemonic devices initially, becoming logograms in Egypt and Mesopotamia in third millennium BC, and only later denoting a syllable sound. It was the North Semitic Byblos alphabet of BC 1400 that the ancient Greeks adapted, turning four of the consonants into vowels that allowed entire speech to be placed on the page, when the focus passed from words to invisible ideas.

 

So where then is metaphor grounded? Not in logic, nor literary theory. There is no purely literal language in terms of which metaphor may be evaluated and objectively assessed. Along a broad front in cognitive psychology and social anthropology, metaphor is currently subject to extensive analysis, but the findings can only be partial, and relative to the discipline involved. What is becoming clearer is that metaphor — like linguistic theory and theories of speech acts — is rooted in the beliefs, practices and intentions of language users.

 

A fuller account is to be found on TextEtc.

 

 

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Metaphor Theory

 

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