Johnson and Malgady: "Some Cognitive Aspects of Figurative Language" (1979)

The purpose of this paper is to map the correlations between a number of variables related to metaphor comprehension, such as the difficulty of understanding the metaphor and the similarity of the concepts it is constructed out of. The experiment and its results are them selves utterly forgettable, but the paper is a good source of references as well as a probe of the mood of the cognitive science of metaphor around 1979.

First some references:

• Bolinger: "The Atomization of Meaning" (1965)
• Sheehan: The Function and Nature of Imagery (1972)
• Thomas: Metaphor and Related Subjects (1969)
• Verbrugge and McCarrell: "The Role of Inference in the Comprehension of Metaphor" (1973; probably lost in the seas of time, but possibly also similar to this 1977 paper)
• Weinrich: "Explorations in Semantic Theory" (in Current Trends in Linguistics 3, which was either published in 1966 as the paper says, or in 1970, as the publisher says)

About the last reference: Note that the the Polish-American linguist Uriel Weinrich (1926–1967) is distinct from the German classist, philogist, and literary scholar Harald Weinrich (born 1927). The latter also wrote a number of texts on metaphor ("Semantik der Metapher" and "Wieder die Bildstürmer"/"Against the iconoclasts"). I was myself confused about this for a while.

Now for some quotes.

In the introduction of the paper, the authors approvingly quote Bolinger as saying that metaphor should be covered by a good semantic theory, and they continue:

Others … have also suggested that metaphor and related figurative language use ought to be thought of as an intrinsic (perhaps central) part of language, and not something that can be dismissed by simply shunting it off to the poet's corner as a deviant curiosity—albeit an aesthetically satisfying one. (p. 250)

In the concluding discussion section:

The ubiquity of both metaphor and association (alluded to in the introduction and elsewhere) gives the impression that both must play a central role in everyday cognition—and that they both may be simply "symptoms" of a single underlying process. It is no more correct, therefore, to say that metaphor is simply similarity or simply association than it would be to say that association or similarity judgments are simply examples of metaphor. (p. 263)

And finally:

It is the flexibility of the relationship between words and categories, augmented by the linguistic device labeled "metaphor," that allows productivity in thinking. Perhaps the chief function of metaphor is to provide—by setting the stage for the perception of similarity between dissimilar words—a way of forming new categories. (p. 264)

Michel Bréal: Semantics (1900)

Bréal; from Wikimedia Commons.

Apparently, this book by Michel Bréal is considered by some to be a foundational document in semantics. However, it's not mentioned in Saeed's textbook, and I wouldn't have heard of it if it weren't for a footnote in a paper by Harald Weinrich — so think it's fair to say it's fallen pretty much into obscurity by now.

I looked at because I was interested in seeing what Bréal had to say about metaphor. It turns out that his observations are that the phenomenon is (1) widespread (2) mostly dead (3) often synaesthetic.

The Psychological Basis of Metaphor

As for the widespread nature of metaphor:

Our business is not to claim admiration for these images, which indeed have ceased to be images, but to show that language is full of them. (p. 123)

His take on the emergence of metaphors seem to be that they are invented for communitative purposes, not that that it reflects deep psychological structure. Most of his attention is devoted to the connection between cultural variables (e.g., Roman land ownership institutions) and the choice of metaphors.

However, he says that they demonstrate "the universal intelligence, which does not vary much from one nation to another" (p. 123). In his discussion of grammatical analogy, he also claims that opposites like night/day and dead/alive tend to take on similar forms, and that "Language here reveals to us a fact of psychology;" providing a hand-wavy sketch of the psychology of this phenomenon (p. 68).

The Death of a Metaphor

There is not doubt that Bréal thinks that metaphors wither and die over time:

But the metaphor remains such at its outset only; soon the mind becomes accustomed to the image; its very success causes it to pale; it fades into a representation of the idea scarcely more coloured than the proper word. (p. 122)

But for the child who learns to speak them the complication [of faded historical meanings] does not exist: the last meaning, the meaning farthest removed from it original, is often the first learnt. (p. 133)

More indirectly, this is also evidenced by his interest in the difficulty of etymological problems. He notes, for instance, that it is not immediately obvious which of the meanings of the Latin gemma are the older, "pearl" or "bud." In fact, Cicero seems to have gotten the historical order wrong (p. 125).

Synaesthetic Metaphors

Bréal also notes the importance of cross-sensory transfers of meaning:

A special kind of Metaphor, extremely frequent in all languages, comes from the communication between our organs of sense, which permit us to transport the sensations of sight into the domain of hearing, or the ideas of touch into the domain of taste. We speak of a "a warm reception," "a broad style," "a bitter reproach," "a black grief," with the certainty of being understood by everybody. … A deep sound, a high note were originally images. (pp. 129-30)

Again, however, he warns the reader not to pull etymologies out of a hat:

Sometimes it is difficult to tell exactly from what organ of the body these expressions came: for example, it was long considered doubtful whether the adjective clarus came from sigh or from hearing. Without the words acies, acus, acutus, acer, we should not know that acid (the French aigre) did not always belond to the sense of taste. (p. 130)

 So much for introspective psychology, then.

Olaf Jäkel: "Kant, Blumenberg, Weinrich" (1999)

In this article, Olaf Jäkel quotes passages from Kant, Cassirer, Whorf, and Blumenberg that preempts many of the core ideas in cognitive metaphor theory. He then goes on to discuss the theory of Harald Weirich, which is almost a notational variant of the original cognitive metaphor theory.

Interstingly, Weinrich makes the following reservation:

Is every metaphor rooted in an image field [= a conceptual metaphor]? That would be too much to claim. In fact, every word can take on metaphorical meaning, every matter can be addressed metaphorically, and imagination knows no bounds. Arbitrary, isolated metaphors are always possible. But they are rarer than some may think, and what is more important, usually they are not successful in [i.e., adopted by] the linguistic community. (p. 19)

The quote comes from his 1958 article "Münze und Wort: Untersuchungen an einem Bildfeld."