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word literal. Thus the very field of philosophy of language comes with defining
assumptions that contradict the main conclusions of the contemporary theory of
metaphor. Consequently, we can see why most philosophers of language have the
range of views on metaphor that they have: They accept the traditional literal-
figurative distinction. They may, like Davidson (1981), say that there is no
metaphorical meaning, and that most metaphorical utterances are either trivially
true or trivially false. Or, like Grice (1989, p. 34) and Searle (this volume), they
will assume that metaphor is in the realm of pragmatics, that is, that a
metaphorical meaning is no more than the literal meaning of some other sentence
which can be arrived at by some pragmatic principle. This is required, since the
only real meaning for them is literal meaning, and pragmatic principles are those
principles that allow one to say one thing (with a literal meaning) and mean
something else (with a different, but nonetheless literal, meaning). Much of
generative linguistics accepts one or more of these assumptions from the
philosophy of language. The field of formal semantics accepts them all, and thus
formal semantics, by its defining assumptions, is at odds with the contemporary
theory of metaphor. Formal semantics simply does not see it as its job> to account
for the generalizations discussed in this paper. From the perspective of formal
semantics, the phenomena that the contemporary theory of metaphor is concerned
with are either nonexistent or uninteresting, since they lie outside the purview of
the discipline. That is why Jerrold Sadock in his chapter in this volume claims that
metaphor lies outside of synchronic linguistics. Since he accepts mathematical
logic as the correct approach to natural language semantics, Sadock must see
metaphor as being outside of semantics proper. He must, therefore, also reject the
entire enterprise of the contemporary theory of metaphor. And Morgan (this
volume), also accepting those defining assumptions of the philosophy of language,
agrees with Grice and Searle that metaphor is a matter of pragmatics.
Chomsky s theory of government and binding also accepts crucial assumptions
from the philosophy of language that are inconsistent with the contemporary
theory of metaphor. Government and binding, following my early theory of
generative semantics, assumes that semantics is to be represented in terms of
logical form. Government and binding, like generative semantics, thus rules out
the very possibility that metaphor might be part of natural language semantics as it
enters into grammar. Because of this defining assumption, I would not expect
government and binding theorists to become concerned with the phenomena
covered by the contemporary theory of metaphor.
Interestingly, much of continental philosophy and deconstructionism is also
characterized by defining assumptions that are at odds with the contemporary
theory of metaphor. Nietzsche (see, Johnson, 1981) held that all language is
metaphorical, which is at odds with those results that indicate that a significant
amount of everyday language is not metaphorical. Much of continental
philosophy, observing that conceptual systems change through time, assumes that
conceptual systems are purely historically contingent-that there are no conceptual
universals. Though conceptual systems do change through time, there do,
however, appear to be universal, or at least very widespread, conceptual
metaphors. The event structure metaphor is my present candidate for a
metaphorical universal. Continental philosophy also comes with a distinction
between the study of the physical world, which can be scientific, and the study of
human beings, which it says cannot be scientific. This is very much at odds with
the conceptual theory of metaphor, which is very much a scientific enterprise.
Finally, the contemporary theory of metaphor is at odds with certain traditions in
symbolic artificial intelligence and information processing psychology. Those
fields assume that thought is a matter of algorithmic symbol manipulation, of the
sort done by a traditional computer program. This defining assumption puts it at
odds with the contemporary theory of metaphor in two respects: First, the
contemporary theory has an image-schematic basis: The invariance hypothesis
applies both to image-metaphors and characterizes constraints on novel metaphor.
Since symbol-manipulation systems cannot handle image-schemas, they cannot
deal with image-metaphors or imagable idioms. Second, those traditions must
characterize metaphorical mapping as an algorithmic process, which typically
takes literal meanings as input and gives a metaphorical reading as output. This is
at odds with cases where there are multiple, overlapping metaphors in a single
sentence, and which require the simultaneous activation of a number of
metaphorical mappings.
The contemporary theory of metaphor is thus not only interesting for its own sake.
It is especially interesting for the challenge it brings to other disciplines. For, if the
results of the contemporary theory are accepted, then the defining assumptions of
whole disciplines are brought into question.
Notes
This research was supported in part by grants from the Sloan Foundation and the
National Science Foundation (IRI-8703202) to the University of California at
Berkeley. The following colleagues and students helped with this paper in a
variety of ways, from useful comments to allowing me to cite their research: Ken
Baldwin, Claudia Brugman, Jane Espenson, Sharon Fischler, Ray Gibbs, Adele
Goldberg, Mark Johnson, Karin Myhre, Eve Sweetser, and Mark Turner.
Appendix: An Annotated Bibliography
Most of the papers in this edition also appeared in the first edition of 1979 and
thus predate the contemporary theory of metaphor. Because of this, I thought
might be a service to readers to provide a short annotated bibliography of
fundamental books and papers on the contemporary theory written since the first
edition of this volume appeared.
Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1990. Psycholinguistic studies on the conceptual basis of
idiomaticity. Cognitive Linguistics, 1-4: 417-462.
A survey of psycholinguistic results demonstrating the cognitive reality of
conceptual metaphor and imagable idioms.
Johnson, Mark. 1981. Philosphical Perspectives on Metaphor Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
The best collection of papers by philosophers on metaphor. Thae author s
introduction is the best short historical survey of the history of metaphor in
philsophy.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: the Bodily Basis of Meaning,
Reason and Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
A discussion of philosophical issues arising from the discovery of the system
of conceptual metaphor.
Kovecses, Zoltan. 1990. Emotion Concepts. Springer-Verlag.
A thorough and voluminously documented demonstration that emotion is
conceptualized metaphorically. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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