ABSTRACT
One of the remarkable features of classical writing on metaphor is the dominance of the notion of “ place”— of territory already staked out, of the tropological as inseparable from the topological-and thus also of “ property,” or of a place where a word properly belongs. The develop ment after Aristotle of the links between proper place, property, sens propre, and “ propriety” may be perceived retrospectively in nuce in the famous Aristotelian definition: “ Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy.” 1 The phora of the Aristotelian epiphora or “transfer” is, as Paul Ricoeur remarks, a “ change with respect to location,” 2 a crossing of predetermined boundaries, and this “ substitution view” of metaphor involves a conception of words as what a character in Great Expectations calls “portable property,” as “ goods” which can be moved or “ transported.” Joined to this idea of boundary-crossing is Aristotle’s notion of the transposition of an “ alien” (allotrios)y a “ name that belongs to something else,” and one which differs from “ ordinary” or “ current” (kurion) usage. Metaphor, as Ricoeur points out, is “ doubly alien” : it is a name that belongs elsewhere and one which takes the place of the word which “ belongs.” 3 Allotrios encompasses, in a single term, the notions of deviation, borrowing, and the “ in place of” of substitution.
