ABSTRACT
Much of our thinking about metaphor can be traced to the writings of Aristotle in The Poetics and in The Rhetoric. In the former he defines metaphor as the act of giving a thing a name that belongs to something else. From the examples he provides we can understand the cognitive work in producing and comprehending metaphor as involving the replacement of one term with another in a meaning hierarchy (from ‘species’ to ‘genus’) or by reasoning through analogy. In The Rhetoric the emphasis is on the aesthetic force of metaphor. Aristotle claims in part that lively or good metaphors (a) convey information rapidly, (b) are especially apt if the information is not already cognitively represented and (c) involve an eye for seeing resemblances between otherwise unlike things. The emphasis here then is on novelty, the emergence of new ways of understanding and the creation of pleasurable communication. Aristotelian thought has influenced subsequent study of metaphor, and here I examine two of the emphases that arise from the Aristotelian tradition: the cognitive work involved in comprehending and constructing metaphor, and second, its aesthetic force and novelty. I do this unabashedly, from the perspective of a cognitive psychologist and experimental psycholinguist. As such, the extensive literature that arises from the cognitive linguistic tradition, or some other traditions, such as Relevance Theory, only makes an appearance now and then and only as it has been adapted by experimentalists.
