particular kind of animal (a snake), which is literally untrue. Nonliteral

U N I T   2 7
Non-literal meaning: idioms, metaphor, and metonymy
331
interpreted as though they are actually literally true. Under such an analysis,
when the hearer recognizes that the language is anomalous in some way
when understood literally, various kinds of inference strategies are used to
give the intended non-literal interpretation within the context in which the
sentence is uttered. Note that this approach, the details of which we won’t go
into here, assumes that there is something defective about non-literal
language that has to be repaired before communication can occur. Another
approach is to assume that such expressions, essentially uninterpretable when
understood literally in most contexts, can be interpreted as though they have
a more literal equivalent that signi
fies or assumes a resemblance between two
very di
fferent kinds of entities, as if the speaker were saying something like
My car is like a lemon or Dr Jones is like a butcher. The corresponding simile
induced with the word like would then be interpretable because, presumably,
it would not be asserting or assuming an anomalous meaning as such, but
rather a meaning in which two concrete entities are being compared to each
other. Since such comparisons do not in principle appear to violate
restrictions that might preclude any use of language that is not completely
literal, they are interpretable and therefore acceptable.
Another way of looking at metaphor is the approach presented by George
Lako
ff and Mark Johnson (henceforth abbreviated as LJ) in their influential
book Metaphors We Live By (1980). In the rest of this unit we will examine
some of their ideas and give you the opportunity to work with them in the
following practices and exercises. Let us 
first consider how LJ view metaphor
in general.
Definition METAPHORS are conceptual (mental) operations re
flected in human
language that enable speakers to structure and construe abstract areas of
knowledge and experience in more concrete experiential terms.
Comment According to this view of metaphor, speakers make use of a familiar area of
knowledge, called the source domain, to understand an area of knowledge
that is less familiar, the target domain. The source domain is typically
understood through our experience in and with the physical world around
us. There is a kind of conceptual mapping operation in which aspects of
knowledge in the more familiar source domain are placed in correspondence
with aspects of the less-familiar target domain in order to structure the target
domain in a way that makes it more accessible to human understanding.
Example Consider our earlier examples of My car is a lemon and Dr Jones is a butcher.
In each case a certain aspect of the more complex and/or abstract areas of
knowledge involving what we generally know about cars and doctors has
been explicitly highlighted in each metaphorical expression by linguistically
linking the more abstract target domains of knowledge about cars and

PA RT   S I X
Interpersonal and non-literal meaning
332
doctors to more particularized familiar concrete source domains (i.e.
knowledge about lemons in the ‘fruit’ domain and butchers in the domain of
possible professions, respectively) in order to specify that there is something
negative about each. We know from experience, for example, that lemons are
sour and that butchers can be messy and rough in their work. This familiar
knowledge helps us understand certain negative aspects of car ownership and
medical practice in a particularly immediate way via metaphor.
Comment Even though conceptualizing a car as if it were a lemon or a doctor as if he or
she were a butcher may be literally anomalous, these metaphorical expressions
bring out certain pertinent aspects of each knowledge domain that might be
relevant on some occasion. The metaphors evoked in these particular
expressions have become standardized, i.e. ‘
fixed by convention’ (LJ 1980: 54),
and as such have become common ways of expressing negative judgements
about cars and doctors in English. They are also very limited in scope, however,
since we typically only compare cars with lemons in the familiar fruit domain,
for example, to convey some kind of metaphorical meaning. With the possible
exception of My car is a peach (meaning that it is an excellent car for some
speakers of English), it is not possible, for example, to say such things as My
car is a pear or My car is an apple without causing an anomaly. This is because
a metaphor such as A CAR IS A PIECE OF FRUIT, like the metaphor A
MOUNTAIN IS A PERSON cited by LJ as underlying the expression foot of the
mountain, is ‘marginal in our culture and our language’, consisting of ‘only one
conventionally 
fixed expression of the language’ (LJ 1980: 54).
Similarly, we cannot say things like Dr Jones is a 
florist or Dr Jones is a
baker with anything other than the literal (and somewhat odd) compositional
meanings in each case, because whatever metaphor might underlie the

tải về 1.74 Mb.

Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn: