Metaphor

Metaphorical Content

Although metaphors are notoriously resistant to being paraphrased, there is no doubt that they can provoke extensive and vivid effects. The nature and status of these effects has been a matter of considerable recent debate. Four main positions have been defended regarding the nature of metaphorical content and how that content is related to the literal meanings of the words (or sentence) uttered: a broadly semantic account, a non-cognitivist account, and two pragmatic accounts, one in terms of implicature, the other in terms of direct content.

According to semantic accounts of metaphor, particular words or phrases of the metaphorical sentence are reinterpreted so that the sentence as a whole takes on a new (metaphorical) meaning. Whereas early versions of the semantic account attributed this to an interaction or conflict between the literal meanings of the sentence's subparts, more recent work by Josef Stern posits a metaphor-operator in the sentence's logical form that demands metaphorical instantiation. The metaphor-operator is a covert marker in the underlying structure of the sentence, attaching to the part of the sentence that is interpreted metaphorically and directing the interpretive process toward the generation of a metaphorical, rather than literal, interpretation.

Although semantic accounts give full credit to the centrality and importance of metaphorical language, it remains difficult to defend the idea that metaphor is a matter of semantic, that is, linguistically encoded, meaning, rather than of language use. Early semantic accounts struggled to explain the status of metaphorical meanings in relation to literal meanings; insofar as metaphorical meanings are both novel and contextually sensitive, it's difficult to see why they should count as an aspect of what the words of the metaphor mean, rather than something that the speaker means (which she manages to convey by uttering those words). Stern's metaphor-operator neatly sidesteps this worry, but at the cost of a substantial increase in the complexity of the general process of semantic interpretation.

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