ABSTRACT
The study of figurative language in linguistics, philosophy, literary criticism, rhetoric, and psychology can be traced to several fundamental ideas expressed in Aristotle’s Poetics and Plato’s Dialogues. This chapter aims to review the ontogeny of scientific thought on the subject of metaphor and related forms of figurative language. Psycholinguists have failed to acknowledge metaphor as a common aspect of language usage, tending instead to dismiss the phenomenon as a qualitatively distinct linguistic form, or a mere curiosity of human discourse. Metaphoric sentences are those in which the tenor and vehicle share a resemblance, much like literal sentences. Accounting for subjective judgments of differences between any pair of metaphoric sentences with respect to a unidimensional attribute. The chapter shows that metaphor goodness and similarity judgments are scaleable, that the scales are correlated with each other, and that experimental manipulation of metaphor similarity produces corresponding changes in goodness judgments.
