Kamil Wiśniewski - linguist, translator, and philosopher :)

Theories of metaphor

For centuries metaphors have been perceived merely as ornaments in literature used for rhetorical and poetic purposes. Therefore apart from scholars dealing with literature studies hardly anybody had been occupied with examining their use and purpose. Only in the second half of the XX century did the situation change. It became clear then that metaphors are more important to language users than it had previously been thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The traditional view of metaphors, as it came to be named, is that they are characteristic to literature and are only embellishments. This is ascribed to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was the first one to define metaphors and their usage. And, although his definition has been acknowledged as valid for centuries, it was thought that according to him metaphors were peculiar to literature and not to everyday communication.
Since Aristotle’s times, representatives of various branches of science have become more and more interested in metaphors. Nowadays, not only philosophers and literary studies researchers deal with it, but also linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and representatives of relatively new branches of science such as cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics. Therefore, depending on the particular specialization of a scholar, different approaches to describing metaphors have been taken and various results achieved. Yet, according to Arseneault, the majority of scholars dealing with metaphors agree that “metaphor is essentially nonstandard and deviates either semantically or pragmatically from ordinary literal language” (Arseneault, 2005:40).
However, psychological research conducted since 1970s showed that metaphors are omnipresent in everyday discourse. Moreover, they are in most cases easily understood and produced. The way in which people comprehend metaphors has also been analyzed from various angles. According to one theory, in order for metaphor to be correctly interpreted, the addressee of the message has to follow several steps: “(1) analyze the literal meaning of an entire expression, (2) compare this literal meaning to the context, (3) if the literal meaning is appropriate, then stop, otherwise (4) derive an alternative meaning that makes the speaker’s/writer’s utterance sensible in the context” (Gibbs, 2005:45).
Nevertheless, this theory has been successfully challenged by psychologists and psycholinguists as it suggests that additional cognitive effort is needed in order to comprehend metaphors. This would also require more time to digest it. On the contrary numerous research results show that perception and comprehension of metaphors does not require any more time than understanding statements deprived of any metaphorical expressions (Gibbs, 2005:45).
The studies on the frequency of use of metaphors revealed that they are not only used on a regular basis in everyday discourse, but they are surprisingly often used in political speeches. Thus, scholars focused also on this particular type of discourse and came to a conclusion that it is extremely susceptible to metaphor use and that the most basic vocabulary used in politics derives metaphorically from spatial concepts in general and from the front-back and up-down image schemas in particular. Moreover, recent trends in the analysis of political metaphor focus both on historical speeches and present ones and the evidence suggests that metaphorical expressions were with equal frequency used in the past. (Chilton, 2005:63).