Against Metaphorical Meaning
Speakers can use metaphors to make their views plain. Matt Groening, with (1), presents an unmistakable characterization of the feelings of love. 1. Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come. Groening’s image...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.151.378 http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~mdstone/pubs/topoi09.pdf |
| Summary: | Speakers can use metaphors to make their views plain. Matt Groening, with (1), presents an unmistakable characterization of the feelings of love. 1. Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come. Groening’s imagery has an absurd particularity, of course, yet many readers still resonate to his portrayal of the exhilaration of a new relationship, and in particular, to the gnawing, trapped, painful feelings that too often appear once the exhilaration subsides. Suppose we grant that love really does follow a trajectory from excitement, to misadventure, to torment. Is that what Groening means by (1)? Is he, thereby, using (1) to communicate something true? It is tempting to answer these questions in the affirmative. Once we do, we can then describe metaphorical interpretation in the traditional semantic and pragmatic terms, thus, assimilating metaphor to other familiar uses of language. Moreover, there are a range of familiar theoretical tools to allow us to implement this view. Perhaps, metaphors supply new, context-dependent meanings to words and phrases (Stern, 2000); or enrich and adapt our ordinary meanings to more relevant alternatives (Carston, 1991; Bezuidenhout, 2001; Recanati, 2001). Maybe their uses carry implicatures beyond literal meaning (Grice, 1989; Searle, 1979); or let us construct propositions by distinctive metaphorical thinking, substituting for the ordinary meaning in further steps of semantic and pragmatic |
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