ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on understanding poetic metaphor that involves two distinct procedures: The first, focus interpretation, consists of identifying and interpreting the 'focus expression', resulting in some literal equivalent of the metaphorical expression. The second, vehicle interpretation, involves a process of 'double perception'. Richards, Black and Beardsley may serve as representative samplings of the theories of metaphor in modern literary criticism. Although the semantic theories of literary critics are very tenuous, it is possible to use them to draw up a list of approximate semantic features for each word. Black introduced into the discussion of the constituents of metaphor two pairs of terms: 'focus and frame' and 'principal and subsidiary subject'. Linguistic analyses offered for metaphor have usually overlooked the procedure of vehicle interpretation. A recent debate in linguistic discussions of metaphor concerns the questions of whether there is such a thing as semantic deviance and whether metaphor can be treated as instance of such deviance.
