ABSTRACT
Let me very briefly recapitulate the most important insights we have gained hitherto. The essence of metaphor, as Lakoff and Johnson pointed out, is understanding or perceiving one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing. A metaphor, then, consists of two ‘things’: a ‘literal’ primary subject and a ‘figurative’ secondary subject. Metaphor occurs first of all on the level of cognition, and can manifest itself on the pictorial as well as the verbal leveland possibly in yet other ways. Both the primary and the secondary subject of the metaphor can be envisaged as domains of meaning elements, ranging from verifiable facts to connotations, and including beliefs about and attitudes towards that subject. According to Black, in each metaphor one or more features of the domain of the secondary subject (the ‘source domain’) are mapped on to the domain of the primary subject (the ‘target domain’). This mapping process involves the foregrounding, adoption or modification of certain features in the primary subject. There is thus a matching between elements from the source and target domains. The similarity between the two terms of the metaphor is not necessarily pre-existent, but is often created by the metaphor itself. The three crucial questions to be asked of anything purporting to be a metaphor are: (1) What are the two terms of the metaphor, and how do we know? (2) Which of the two terms is the metaphor’s primary subject and which is its secondary subject, and how do we know? (3) Which features are projected from the domain of the secondary subject upon the domain of the primary subject, and how do we decide on these features? In answering all three questions various contextual factors must be taken into account. Moreover, it is important to realize who is the communicator of the metaphor and who is its addressee. The principle of relevance, as defined by Sperber and Wilson (1986), plays a vital role in assessing the interpretation of the metaphor.
