Talk:Metaphor

Intoduction

I find the Intro to Metaphor a bit too abbreviated. I'd like it if it explained more, perhaps exemplified, and if it introduced the broader context of metaphor. Perhaps it needs to wait for the article to develop first. Personal opinions. --Anthony.Sebastian 03:59, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Jakobson

It seems to me that any discussion of metaphor really should include a discussion of the rather specialized way in which Roman Jakobson talks about metaphor (in opposition to metonymy). Not that I'm really qualified to do so, of course...

I just looked at the WP metaphor article, and they don't have any discussion of Jakobson either. If we did it, it would be one way our article could be made more useful than WP's.

Brian P. Long 04:12, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Lede paragraph

I'm not a college undergraduate, the person for whom, supposedly CZ is being written, but a college grad, in English, moreover, and I think that this lede para *may* be suitable for a doctoral dissertation (meaning that it's essentially unreadable and incomprehensible), but certainly not for a general purpose encycl. Sorry to whoever wrote it -- I'm sure you meant well, but it *really* needs major restructuring.... Hayford Peirce 03:32, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

You take my breath away, or knock me over with a feather, so excellent is the rewrite! Thanks! Hayford Peirce 15:20, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the initial feedback, and for the compliment on the rewrite. Anthony.Sebastian 03:01, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Tenor and vehicle

What would you think about adding the terms "tenor" and "vehicle" as synonyms for "target" and "source" in this article? I've always heard those terms rather than the ones that are currently in the article -- are "target/source" used more in linguistics, while "tenor/vehicle" are used more in literary studies, maybe?

It might also be useful to the reader to explain where each pair of terms comes from, and in what contexts they are used. I know (from the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics) that I.A. Richards introduced, or re-introduced, or resurrected, "tenor and vehicle" in 1936 in his "Philosophy of Rhetoric," but I am ignorant about the other terms (and that reference book doesn't tell me anything about them). Bruce M. Tindall 20:37, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Bruce, I agree a full account of metaphor must include other concepts (metaphors themselves) besides source and target. I plan to do so. Incidentally, re vehicle, the referred to domain tenor, introduced by Richards, has largely given way to topic. See the examples below:

In verbal metaphor, there are usually two explicit parts: a topic, which is the entity being talked about, and the vehicle, which is the metaphoric material being predicated of the topic. (Some authors refer to these as the target and source, respectively.) For example, in Lee is a block of ice, Lee is the topic, and block of ice is the vehicle. The implicit connection between the two is often referred to as the ground. In this case, the ground is that blocks of ice have a cold temperature, and this is interpreted in terms of emotional unresponsiveness. More generally, the relation between temperature and emotion provides the ground.

Central for traditional studies of metaphor is the distinction—introduced originally by Richards (1936)—between the tenor (since Black [1962], called ‘topic’) and the vehicle of a metaphor. Tenor or topic is what is described by the metaphor, while vehicle is the term used to describe the topic. So, in the metaphorical expression ‘Physicians are gods’, ‘physicians’ is the topic, which is described by means of the vehicle ‘gods’. In the CLVM [cognitive linguistic view of metaphor], topic and vehicle become target and source, respectively. This terminological modification obeys Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) claim that metaphor should be looked for not in metaphorical linguistic expressions (such as the example about physicians), but in the conceptual system of the speaker. In other words, metaphor is conceptual, not just linguistic. So, the metaphorical expression ‘You make my blood boil’ is constructed upon a more basic conceptual metaphor, namely: ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER (following a long tradition in lexical semantics, cognitive linguists distinguish [simple] words from concepts by writing the latter in capitals). At this conceptual level, a metaphor does not consist of a superficial vehicle substituting or interacting with a superficial topic. Rather, a metaphor is: . . . such a set of correspondences that obtains between a source domain and a target domain, where metaphorical linguistic expressions (i.e., linguistic metaphors) commonly make the conceptual metaphors (i.e., metaphors in the mind) manifest (although there may be conceptual metaphors that have no linguistic metaphors to express them). (Kövecses, p. 27) In this sense, according to the CLVM, most of our abstract concepts are metaphorical: they are grounded in at least one conceptual metaphor.

I happen to like the vehicle/topic idea for some types of metaphor, as it accords with the 'transfer' concept in metaphor's etymology — the 'vehicle' transfers (transport) the source (the metaphorical expression) to the topic, or target. Anthony.Sebastian 23:01, 31 October 2009 (UTC)