ABSTRACT
Bickerton describes his semantic model as a kind of 'multidimensional grid' with no fixed rank-ordering of categories, wherein, with respect to a particular binary opposition between categories, only one member of the category will be marked. A semantic theory, explains for example the late Uriel Weinreich, is of 'marginal interest if it is incapable of dealing with poetic uses of language, and more generally with interpretable deviance'. Bickerton's insistence on the distinction between metaphor and merely deviant utterances is not in keeping with his own call for a true linguistic theory of metaphor. A linguistic theory of metaphor, he maintains, ought to deal with competence in the Chomskian sense. The semantic component of the more general theory of language of which a 'theory' of metaphor would be only a part is relatively unconstrained by the assumptions in the foregoing account. Specifically, this account requires the notion of syntactical and semantic deviance, and the notion of lexical features.
