Metaphor

Up until the 1970s and 1980s, metaphor was generally regarded as a literary device and a tool for rhetorical flourish. From this perspective, metaphor definitions were in line with the work of Aristotle, who in the Poetics described metaphor as “the application of a word that belongs to another thing.” Metaphor was, thus, traditionally considered an ornamental feature of language that was crafted by writers and speakers for creative and emotional effects. However, with the advancement of psycholinguistic research and cognitive linguistic theory since the 1970s, definitions of metaphor have shifted away from this idea of metaphor as exceptional language use. In fact, psycholinguistic and cognitive linguistic approaches concur that metaphor is used for mundane everyday talk, and it is generally this ubiquity of metaphor ...