ABSTRACT
Eco (1984, p. 87) insists that metaphor ‘defies every encyclopedic entry’. Nevertheless, metaphor merits such an entry because, although sometimes seen as merely one among the different tropes (see STYLISTICS) available to a language user, it may equally be seen as a fundamental principle of all language use. It has even been claimed (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 3) that ‘our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’. It should be pointed out, however, that even researchers taking a view of metaphor very much opposed to this would agree about the importance to linguistic theory of the phenomenon of metaphor. Thus Sadock (1979), according to whom metaphor falls outside linguistics proper because it has non-linguistic parallels while linguistics should be confined to the study of the uniquely linguistic aspects of human communication (p. 46), believes, in spite of this, that an understanding of metaphor is important for linguists because ‘figurative language is one of the most productive sources of linguistic change’ and ‘Most lexical items [are] dead metaphors’ (p. 48).
