Ambiguity and metaphor
-
Alan Bailin
Abstract
We often consider semantic-pragmatic properties of language independently of each other. In actual texts, however, the properties frequently interact. For this reason a robust theory should allow us to account not only for semantic-pragmatic properties in isolation, but also for the ways in which they are combined. This is especially important for the understanding of literary texts because the exploitation of semantic-pragmatic properties is characteristic of literary language. This article argues that it is possible to account systematically for the occurrence of metaphorical\literal poetic ambiguity in terms of the interaction of such properties. Using the notion of conceptual domains and subdomains, the article proposes two necessary conditions and shows how the interaction of these conditions allows for a simple account of metaphorical/literal ambiguity. The article concludes by suggesting that examining the ways in which basic semantic-pragmatic principles of language are used in literature to create poetic effects offers us another path in understanding the poetic, one which neither equates poetic effects with a distinct poetic language, as do many formalists, nor reduces the exploration of the poetic to the properties of everyday language, as cognitivists often have.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Théorie du récit et sémiotique: apport d'A. J. Greimas et nouvelles propositions
- Comments regarding Charles Sanders Peirce's notion of consciousness, abduction, and the hypo-icon metaphor
- Purification of medical terms in Turkish: A study on the significance of mother tongue for language and thought
- Terminological equivalence in legal translation: A semiotic approach
- Dissent and environmental communication: A semiotic approach
- From frontrunners, to paper dolls, to fiends: Semiotic analyses of premeditated teacher images
- Wittgenstein as Mastersinger
- Ambiguity and metaphor
- Emotion and community in a semeiotic perspective
- Saussure and the elusive question of the origin
- Towards applied semiotics: An analysis of iconic gestural signs regarding physics teaching in the light of theatre semiotics
- Resistance and rescue in Beauvoir's The Blood of Others and The Mandarins: A semiotic contribution to the thinking of the ‘being-for-other’ existential category
- Communication resources and the consequences of linguistic censorship
- Whewell's metaphorical usage of light and the ultimate reality underlying it
- What do the ten commandments do? A study of lawyers' semiotics
- Narcissus in language: A semiotic contrast of natural and computer language through self-reference
- Multi safe compound constructions: A reply to Anders Søgaard
- On the linguistic expression of subjectivity: Towards a sign-centered approach
- Semiotics and ancient history
- Textual mapping of imitation and intertextuality in college and university mission statements: A new institutional perspective
- Catchments, growth points, and the iterability of signs in classroom communication
- The role of structures in semiotic systems: Analysis of some ideas of Leonardo da Vinci and the portrait Lady with an Ermine
- Biosemiotics: Protoscience, interdiscipline, new biology
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