Metaphor, Context and Cognition

Most people are able to recognize when utterances are meant metaphorically. Also, in most cases, interpreting metaphors appropriately is not a major problem. On closer inspection, however, both the knowledge of metaphors and the ability to interpret them raises a number of fundamental questions. In order to understand metaphors, it must first be clarified what constitutes them. Are the statements Sam was burned up and Juliet is the sun (Willia m Shakespeare) both to be understood as metaphors? The usual interpretation of the first utterance in the sense that Sam was very angry is a conventionally established interpretation. There is no such conventional interpretation for the second utterance. Hence, it might be argued that it is only the second sentence that is actually a metaphor while the first one must be classified as a idiomatic and literal statement. If so, how large must the deviation from the conventional meaning of an expression or sentence be in order to speak of a metaphor? In addition, one would have to find criteria for how metaphors differ from other tropes such as ironic speech, metonymies or synecdoches. These also exhibit a strong discrepancy between the conventionally established meanings and the results of the interpretation intended by the speakers. According the classic answer to this question, metaphors differ from other tropes in that they are derived on the basis of similarity considerations. However, it is not clear whether this applies to every metaphor. In addition, there is a need for clarification between what exactly the similarities are seen here and how such similarity considerations must be carried out so that they can lead to informative results. This also raises the question of whether metaphors ultimately represent comparisons or whether they must be categorically distinguished from them. These and other questions are discussed in detail in this book. In addition to research from philosophy of language, reference is also made to linguistics, cognitive science as well as to psychology and neurology. The result of the book is a theory that is supposed to capture both the linguistic characteristics of metaphors as well as the specific structure of metaphorical interpretations.

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