Introducing Metaphor

Murray Knowles, Rosamund Moon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134470921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, the book provides a thorough grounding in metaphor and word meaning, theories on the processing and understanding of metaphorical language, and metaphor in other languages and translation. Rosamund Moon and Murray Knowles, draw on a wide selection of material to explore metaphor in relation to text, discourse and society. Linguistic metaphor and literary metaphor are examined across a range of contexts, such as politics, sport and advertising, whilst literary metaphor is demonstrated through authentic extracts from fiction and poetry. A final section covering non-verbal metaphor looks at metaphor in art, cinema and music.

1

INTRODUCING
METAPHOR

To begin, the opening of a speech from Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them …

Knowing that this is a book about metaphor, you might, as you read through those lines, have picked out examples of figurative language: the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or a sea of troubles, and the idea of taking arms, taking up weapons, against something intangible. Here now are the closing lines of Yeats's poem ‘Byzantium’:

Marbles of the dancing floor

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

The whole poem is packed densely with symbols and elaborate ideas, and here you might have picked out figurative language such as bitter furies of complexity or that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea, or the idea of images ‘begetting’ other images. These kinds of creative, poetic, expression and idea are typical of literature, and it is literature with which metaphor is often associated.

But metaphor is not just a kind of artistic embellishment, at the rarefied end of linguistic usage, divorced and isolated from everyday communication. It is instead a basic phenomenon that occurs throughout the whole range of language activity. It is the intention of this book to introduce the study of metaphor and other kinds of figurative language, and to show how and why it is so important.

And, as you read that last paragraph, you might have noticed its metaphors: for example, rarefied and divorced. A typical context for rarefied is in relation to air which is less easy to breathe because of its distance above sea level (rarefied means ‘less dense’ or ‘less solid’); and the typical context for divorced is in relation to the ending of marriages. We will come back later to the question of how we make sense of metaphors like these: for the time being, it is worth noting that ‘divorced’ might have different connotations for different people, according to their moral, religious, or political viewpoint. Isolated, too, could be classified as metaphorical, at least in terms of its etymology: it ultimately derives from a Latin word insula meaning ‘island’. At a deeper, perhaps subconscious, level, we can identify a metaphorical conceptualization in phrases such as at the … end of linguistic usage and occurs throughout the whole range of language activity: here ‘diversity’ is represented, in some way, as if it had physical dimensions and existed in physical space. Finally, by referring to the intention of this book, we attributed our own intentions as authors to an inanimate object. This too is figurative.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book deals first with background and theoretical issues. In this first chapter, we will begin to define metaphor and to identify its different aspects, along with other kinds of figurative language, including metonymy. Chapter 2 looks at metaphor in relation to the meanings of words and phrases; Chapter 3 at systems of metaphor (some obvious, some operating subconsciously) and at how we conceptualize experience through them; and Chapter 4 looks at metonymy. Chapter 5 looks at models of how we understand metaphor, while Chapter 6 looks at crosslinguistic aspects of figurative language. Later chapters of this book take a different approach, and focus on figurative language in context. Chapter 7 considers evaluative and ideological aspects of metaphor in a range of social contexts; Chapter 8 considers literary metaphor; Chapter 9 considers non-verbal metaphor; and Chapter 10 rounds off by presenting some final examples. We give suggestions for what to read next at the end of each chapter, and suggestions for student research into aspects of figurative language in an appendix.

THE MEANING OF METAPHOR

Before going any further, we need to establish a working definition of metaphor. When we talk about metaphor, we mean the use of language to refer to something other than what it was originally applied to, or what it ‘literally’ means, in order to suggest some resemblance or make a connection between the two things. We can illustrate this with two examples taken from the Bank of English corpus (BoE), a 450-million-word corpus of recent English texts (see Chapter 5 for discussion of corpus linguistics and metaphor). In this case, they are metaphorical uses of single words or phrases, although metaphors can be developed over much longer stretches of text:

The jewel in Northumbria's ecclesiastical crown is Lindisfarne Priory on Holy Island, built as a monastery in 635 and reached by a tidal causeway.

We used to thrash all the teams in the Keith Schoolboy League. We had a great squad and no-one could touch us.

Clearly, a priory is not a jewel in the way that a diamond or sapphire is, nor does Northumbria have any sort of ceremonial headgear in the way that a monarch traditionally has: the literal meanings of jewel and crown. Clearly, one team is unlikely to have hit the other teams with sticks or whips, and equally unlikely is the impossibility of anyone making physical contact: the literal meanings of thrash and touch. We recognize these words in these contexts as exaggerations and non-literal, and we interpret them accordingly. Jewel represents something that is valuable, attractive, and desirable, and a jewel in —'s crown refers to the most important or valuable achievement; thrash suggests the totality of a victory, and touch suggests achievements and success which are much greater than others seem capable of.

This explanation of metaphor is of course dependent on a definition of literalness. Unless we identify and agree what the literal meaning of a word or expression is, we cannot identify and agree what is metaphorical. We will come back to defining literalness when we consider different kinds of figurative language later on in this chapter.

THE IMPORTANCE OF METAPHOR

Metaphor is pervasive in language, and there are two principal ways in which it is important.

First, in relation to individual words: metaphor is a basic process in the formation of words and word meanings. Concepts and meanings are lexicalized, or expressed in words, through metaphor. Many senses of multi-sense words are metaphors of different kinds, as in he meanings of field, hurt, and dark in the following BoE examples:

She has published extensively in the field of psychology.

The failure has hurt him deeply.

… the end of a long tale, full of dark hints and unspeakable innuendos.

Similarly, the names of many new concepts or devices are metaphorical or extended uses of pre-existing words: for example, computer terms such as web, bug, and virus. Many compound words encapsulate metaphors: browbeat, foothill, pigeonhole. Idioms and proverbs are often metaphorical in origin: don't put all your eggs in one basket, miss the boat, rattle someone's cage, and, more obscurely, kick the bucket and a red herring. These are mainly conventional metaphors (see below), and we will discuss them further in Chapter 2.

Second, in relation to discourse: metaphor is important because of its functions — explaining, clarifying, describing, expressing, evaluating, entertaining. There are many reasons why we use metaphors in speech or writing: not least, because there is sometimes no other word to refer to a particular thing. But where we have a choice, we choose metaphors in order to communicate what we think or how we feel about something; to explain what a particular thing is like; to convey a meaning in a more interesting or creative way; or to do all of these. We will look at examples later. Significantly, a lot of our understanding of things is mediated through metaphor. That is, we might well not understand them except with the help of metaphorical models or analogies, and our understanding is itself conditioned by the metaphor. For example, the cells in our bodies react biologically in complex ways to infection: we can understand the process more easily through a metaphor of war, thinking of it in terms of fighting and invasion, as in

Scientists believe stress may suppress development of T-cells, the white blood cells which help to fight off invading micro-organisms.

(BoE)

Other metaphors might have been used, but this is the dominant, most familiar one, and the way in which we now conceptualize the biological process is determined by it. Similarly with the example throughout the whole range, from earlier in this chapter: we represent diversity as physical space. It is typical that metaphors use concrete images to convey something abstract, helping to communicate what is hard to explain.

CREATIVE AND CONVENTIONAL METAPHORS

We began this chapter with examples of literary language: with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea, Shakespeare and Yeats create poetic effects by creating new images. We informally described this kind of language as creative, but creative has a more technical meaning when applied to metaphor. Creative metaphors are those which a writer/speaker constructs to express a particular idea or feeling in a particular context, and which a reader/hearer needs to deconstruct or ‘unpack’ in order to understand what is meant. They are typically new (another term is novel metaphor), although they may be based on pre-existing ideas or images, such as a traditional representation of fortune as a person, whether enemy or friend. Creative metaphor is often associated with literature, but there are plenty of instances of it in other genres. Here are two taken from, r...