Monday, September 7, 2009

METAPHOR

Metaphor is a figure of speech concisely comparing two things, saying that one is the other. The English metaphor derives from the 16th c. Old French métaphore, from the Latin metaphora “carrying over”, Greek (μεταφορά) metaphorá “transfer”, from (μεταφέρω) metaphero “to carry over”, “to transfer”and from (μετά) meta “between”  + (φέρω) phero, “to bear”, “to carry”. Moreover, metaphor also denotes rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison, and resemblance, e.g. antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy, and simile; all are species of metaphor.

Structure

The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), by I. A. Richards, reports that metaphor is in two parts: the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the subject whose attributes are borrowed. Other writers employ the general terms ground and figure to denote tenor and the vehicle. Consider the All the world's a stage monologue from As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances; — William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7

In this metaphoric example, "the world" is compared to a stage, describing it with the attributes of “the stage”; "the world" is the tenor, and "a stage" is the vehicle; "men and women" is a secondary tenor, "players" is the secondary vehicle.

In cognitive linguistics, the terms target and source correspond to the terms tenor and vehicle. In this nomenclature, metaphors are named with the small-capital typographic convention TARGET IS SOURCE, and all-capitals when small-caps are unavailable; in this notation, the metaphor discussed above would be LIFE IS THEATRE. In a conceptual metaphor the elements of an extended metaphor constitute the metaphor’s mapping — in the Shakespeare quotation above, exits would be mapped to “death” and entrances mapped to “birth”.

Types, terms, and categories

A metaphor is more forceful (active) than an analogy, because metaphor asserts two things are the same, whereas analogy acknowledges difference; other rhetorical comparative figures of speech, such as metonymy, parable, simile, and synecdoche, are species of metaphor distinguished by how the comparison is communicated. [7] The metaphor category also contains these specialized types:
allegory: An extended metaphor wherein a story illustrates an important attribute of the subject
catachresis: A mixed metaphor used by design and accident (a rhetorical fault)
parable: An extended metaphor narrated as an anecdote illustrating and teaching a moral lesson

Common types

  • A dead metaphor is one in which the sense of the transferred image is absent.Examples: "to grasp a concept" and "to gather what you've understood" use physical action as a metaphor for understanding, most do not visualize the action; dead metaphors normally go unnoticed. Some people distinguish between a "dead metaphor" whose origin most speakers ignore, e.g. "to break the ice". Others use dead metaphor to denote both concepts, and generally use it to describe a metaphoric cliché.
  • An extended metaphor (conceit), establishes a principal subject (comparison) and subsidiary subjects (comparisons). The As You Like It quotation is a good example, the world is described as a stage, and then men and women are subsidiary subjects further described in the same context.
  • A mixed metaphor is one that leaps from one identification to a second identification inconsistent with the first. Example: "He stepped up to the plate and grabbed the bull by the horns" two common metaphors for "taking action" are confused, and create a nonsensical image.
  • Per Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology, absolute metaphor denotes a figure or a concept that cannot be reduced to, or replaced with solely conceptual thought and language. Absolute metaphors, e.g. “light” (for “truth”) and “seafaring” (for “human existence”) – have distinctive meanings (unlike the literal meanings), and, thereby, function as orientations in the world, and as theoretic questions, such as presenting the world as a whole. Because they exist at the pre-predicative level, express and structure pragmatic and theoretical views of Man and the World.



No comments:

Post a Comment