ABSTRACT
The pioneering job done by I.A. Richards’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric cannot be overestimated. The theory of metaphor that we find in the fifth and sixth chapters of his book is connected to a new definition of rhetoric, and not initially to a semantics of the sentence. But it is not difficult to demonstrate that his idea of rhetoric20 derives from a semantic conception close to the one that has just been articulated. Furthermore, he is aware that his is an attempt ‘to revive an old subject’ (3) on the basis of a new analysis of language.
