Volume 2006, Issue 161

This special issue of Semiotica , titled Perspectives on Metaphor , presents a series of papers on this timely subject. The call for papers for this issue was issued in fall of 2004 with a final submission date of fall of 2005, a date which coincides with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of George Lako and Mark Johnson's (1980) landmark work Metaphors We Live By . Thus, it is no surprise that this work is cited in several of the essays in this volume. That volume reinvigorated scholarly research on metaphor as evidenced by the fact that there now exist several volumes that consist entirely of annotated citations of studies of metaphor (Noppen et al. 1985; Noppen and Hols 1990; Knop et al. 2005), as well as Shibles' (1971) earlier and now classic annotated bibliography.

This article examines the status of human language as constituting one system of signs among others, with a particular aim to establish the sense in which the classical distinction between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ ought best to be understood in the context of semiotics today.

Metaphor is founded in the logic of otherness and excess and involves a movement of displacement that leads sense outside the sphere of the same, the commonplace, plain meaning. The processes of metaphorization activate interpretive trajectories in the sign network that may be distant from each other, and favor the migration of sense through interpretive and translative processes among signs. Associations and interconnections are created in the sign network on the basis of similarity understood à la Peirce in terms of affinity and attraction. Such associations are not only of the analogical type but also of the homological. Metaphor is structural to the acquisition of knowledge, to inferential procedure; it is the place where sense is generated in human language systems. The capacity for metaphor is specifically human and is connected with the human primary modeling device, the human capacity for creativity, innovation, the play of musement.

We are all to a greater or lesser degree creative, and metaphor making is one of the most common channels along which the creative process flows. Three general theories of metaphor — comparison, substitution, and interaction — and three theories of creativity — mechanicism, organicism, and contextualism or holism — surface in the following pages. Peirce's categories delineating the semiosic process, his concept of signs incessantly becoming other signs, and his insight regarding abduction, are brought to bear on these theories of metaphor and creativity, leading to the conclusion that both theories are a matter of overdetermined Firstness becoming under-determined Thirdness through nonlinear, emergent interdependent, interrelated interaction between signs and their makers and takers.

How do you describe the ‘nature of metaphor’? Two dilemmas block your path. The first occurs when you encounter the metaphor's status as ‘real’ in the face of its mere symbolic reference to objects. A second dilemma occurs when you look inward to describe the origin of metaphor. Although this look focuses the inner self as originator, it also reveals a mind-boggling question. How does your look inward relate to that of others? Resolution 1: A logical level analysis of metaphor reveals similarities of the forms of thought, which point to the ‘real’ nature of inner experience. Resolution 2: ‘Metaphorizing’ requires a logic of the imaginary — a set of forms, which accommodate an exchange of originating by ‘dramatist’ and ‘audience.’ The major assumptions are these: To describe the nature of metaphor requires a look inward from which to see formal similarities and origins. A focus on formal cause provides a robust account of how a thinker originates a metaphor. The regularities constraining the thinker looking inward are the same for other persons looking inward. These regularities are classifiable in terms of semiotic and logical phenomena by which parallel thinking is communicative and to some extent collaborative.

Research on metaphor in the last few decades has made it obvious that it is a fundamental form of communication and cognition. The models and theories that have emerged, especially conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), hint at the sensory basis of metaphorization. However, CMT still lacks a ‘sensory-based framework’ for explaining how concrete forms of reasoning are transformed metaphorically to produce abstractions known within CMT as idealized cognitive models. This paper discusses one possible framework, developed from previous work in this area, called ‘sense-implication,’ so that it can be used as a means to conduct future work on the relation between metaphor and cognition.

We investigate how C. S. Peirce's theory of metaphor can provide us with an insight into concept formation. It is interesting that Peirce does not write much about the metaphor; still his suggestion that the basic mechanism of metaphor is that of parallelism is very interesting. This seems to suggest that metaphor is important to Peirce however, not as a poetical adornment but as a special branch of abduction and as a basic esthetic element that pushes science forward towards the esthetic ideal: growth in concrete reasonableness.

My thesis is that the most prominent theories of metaphor in the Anglo-American tradition have not sufficiently taken into account the idea that some metaphors may create insights. More attention needs to be given to dissimilarities in metaphorical expressions and to the constraints that contribute to the expressions and interpretations of metaphors. I offer brief expositions and critiques of the views of Max Black, John Searle, Donald Davidson, and Monroe Beardsley. With this in mind, I try to expand my interactionist view of metaphorical reference in terms of the dissonances and dissimilarities that have been recognized as one of the marks of metaphors. Expanding on Monroe Beardsley's idea of Metaphorical Twist, I argue that what some metaphors create are new complexes of related connotations. The interactions among the connotations constrain interpretive processes, and interpretation encounters an aspect of independent objectivity. The objectivity is experienced in the negative suggestions some connotations have and the vectoral direction these suggestions have in nudging the interpretation to completion. The resulting complexes, then, are metaphorical insights, and they contribute to evolution in language and the realities referred to by language.

This paper is part of ongoing research on metaphor conducted from a semiotic perspective, implementing, in particular, theoretical instruments as developed by Charles S. Peirce. According to Peirce, metaphor is a type of icon and, like all signs, is part of an interpretive route. The specific object of analysis is metaphor as studied by Giambattista Vico, who recovers the connection between verbal language and the senses, that is, the body. In his studies he refers to Aristotle, Galen, as well as to other philosophers. According to Vico metaphor is a fundamental and primal instrument of thought, a concept developed by Du Marsais and Rousseau. Particularly important is the Vichian concept of poetic logic.

Yuri Lotman describes metaphors and culture as semiospheres or ‘semiotic spaces.’ This account of metaphors is self-referential insofar as it is itself expressed in the form of a metaphor. Moreover, according to Lotman, cultures in general are self-referential systems insofar as they tend to define themselves and evince isomorphic semiotic spaces at mutually inclusive levels and metalevels. Lotman describes semiospheres on the basis of dualisms, levels, stratifications, and spatial opposites that exemplify the Tartu semiotician's theory of the duality of the discreteness of semiotic spaces and their verbal representations versus the continuity of physical space and of pictorial representation.

Our goal for this paper is twofold. First, we will provide an overview of George Lako and Mark Johnson's theory of embodied cognition and argue that it is a useful, ‘empirically responsible’ perspective for understanding the importance of metaphors and other cognitive models (e.g., frames, prototypes, metonymic models) in our thinking and understanding. Second, we will use and critically assess the value of the analytic tools provided by the theory in understanding the cognitive processes and models underlying our thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Specifically, we will use the concepts of metaphor, metonymy, frames, and prototypes as analytic tools to gain insight into the cognitive structures underlying the ideas and claims found in descriptions of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001.

Metaphors and, more broadly, metaphorical discourse, are widely recognized as not merely significant aspects of human language use, but also as both pervasive and essential elements of the communicative process as we understand it. Metaphors are important to understand for a variety of reasons, and their use and analysis has important implications for many disciplines. Nowhere, though, is this more true than in the case of semiotics. In this article, it is suggested that both historical and contemporary learning theories in general, and theories of language learning in particular, are in fact examples of metaphorical discourse. The case of constructivist epistemology will be examined in particular. The implications of the use of metaphor in such contexts will be explored, and suggestions will be offered for how educators might more carefully discuss and apply metaphorical models of learning.

The literal application of the notion of ‘metaphor’ to the iconic system of signification and communication requires, first, to release the theory of verbal metaphor from its linguistic bias and, second, to propose a theory capable of explaining adequately both verbal and iconic metaphor. I suggest such a comprehensive theory, which attempts to compensate for these limitations, as well as a set of basic kinds of iconic metaphors that reflect the same deep structure, the same rules of ellipsis, and the specific constraints of iconic media, as follows: (a) iconic metaphor on the level of characterization (including costume, set, etc.); (b) iconic metaphor on the level of nonverbal interaction; (c) iconic metaphor on the level of verbal interaction; (d) verbal metaphor in iconic dialogue; (e) iconic allegory; and (f) the metaphoric nature of the spectator's experience. I illustrate these kinds of iconic metaphor using examples from theatre, while supporting their general application with examples from other iconic arts.

The article aspires to present a systematized view on the contemporary understanding of metaphor essence and structure, reviews various classifications of metaphor, and discusses cognate ‘similarity-based’ phenomena in natural language. The opposing views on metaphor as a three- and two-component structure are reconciled in the article through the analysis of different kinds of metaphors. Three types of classifications of metaphor — semantic, structural and functional — are specified and reviewed. Finally, the article examines the cognate phenomena, viz. metaphoric personification (prosopopoeia, pathetic fallacy, apostrophe), animalification, metaphoric antonomasia, metaphoric allusion, metaphoric periphrasis, synesthesia, allegory, and metaphoric symbolism.

Medicine and language have had a tumultuous relationship at best. The two fields inform and describe each other. The methods of each have been applied to the other at various times in history. The medical symptom and the linguistic sign have much in common and yet are not the same. Nonetheless, literature offers us a perspective on our cultural perceptions of certain realities and disease is unmistakably one of the most ambiguous of those realities. The unique combination of medical thought and linguistic expression present in literary metaphors incorporating or referring to illness reveals a conceptual understanding of health that informs our interpretation of related signifiers. This study is an attempt to identify and explore some of the most prevalent metaphors and metonymies related to disease and through the process, comprehend the way in which culture thinks about the more general concept of health.

The paper develops a characterization of nominal compounds. The analysis is carried out on frame-schematic and construction-grammatical grounds. It rests on assumptions about cognitive processing long since known within cognitive linguistics, but it criticizes certain linguistic applications of Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual integration, which historically is a reelaboration of Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor. The first section sums up two classical approaches in the analysis of nominal compounds; it comments on their inadequacies, and how these have been assessed by Fauconnier and Turner; next, it sketches out the way these two authors and other scholars in blending theory have traditionally analyzed nominal compounds in terms of conceptual integration, and finally one of the major drawbacks of this approach is identified: namely, its limited descriptive import. In the following section, the authors unfold their own semantic analysis. A non-trivial and non-standard compositional theory is proposed, likely to capture the general way in which semantic parts of a compound configure into a semantic whole. Hereafter the authors proceed to a summary survey of how this scaffolding is actually instantiated or processed cognitively. A crucial difference between processing of literal and metaphorical compounds is established. Thus, the approach has a double scope: it aims at characterizing both the semantics of compounds and the way the semantics is cognitively accessed.