ABSTRACT
Perhaps in keeping with the linguistic theories of the early and middle of the twentieth century, Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary defines metaphor as “a figure of speech in which a word or a phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.” This definition includes the idea of transference that goes back to Aristotle’s seminal understanding in the Poetics: “Metaphor is the application of an alien name by a transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion” (1457b, Butcher, 77–78). Since Aristotle, a great number of philosophers and literary scholars, among them Nietzsche, I. A. Richards, and Max Black, have tackled the phenomenon of metaphor and explained or modified it, offering new insights. 1 Aristotle compares a style containing metaphors to “a riddle” and one wonders if that is what led some modern linguists to define metaphor as a linguistic aberration. More recently, some cognitive theorists have recognized that the use of metaphoric language is not an aberration but an essential part of our mind. Yet this advance in our understanding is hampered by the lure of the taxonomic impulse, the tendency to think in terms of categories and to apply logical processes to phenomena that are mnemonic in their essence.
