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11.1 Introduction
In metaphor in linguistic discourse, one subject matter is talked about in a way that
can be analysed as using the resources of another subject matter. Metaphor often
involves talking about aspects of the former subject matter as if they were aspects of
the latter. For instance, the statement “The idea is buried deep in his mind” can be
analysed as talking about the person's mind as if it were some sort of physical terrain
in which things can be buried, and talking about the idea as if it were a physical object
that can be buried. The person's mind (and its states, ideas, etc.) is the target subject
matter and the physical objects and region constitute the source subject matter. We
can also say the discourse is using a metaphorical view of the person's mind as a
physical terrain and a metaphorical view of the person's ideas as physical objects. In
such a view, target and source subject matters are paired with each other.
In the type of metaphor just discussed, an implicit similarity is assumed or created.
But I also include simile, as in “The thought [acted] like a dark angry cloud”, 1 as a
case of metaphor. Here a likeness is explicitly stated.
What I call a metaphorical view is broadly similar to the much-researched notion
of a conceptual metaphor [ 30 ], but I use a different, more intuitive term to avoid any
particular alignment with particular theories of what conceptual metaphors are or how
they work. Metaphorical views can in principle have any degree of familiarity for a
particular understander. Competent speakers of English will have great familiarity
with views of mental states as physical states (involving terrain, containers, etc),
because of the prevalent use of such views in English discourse—see, e.g., Jäkel
[ 28 ], and the metaphor databank developed in the ATT-Meta project. 2 On the other
hand, the sentences “The writing desk is a penguin” or (relatedly) “The writing desk
flapped its wings and attacked the bookcase” introduce or rest upon a metaphorical
view that is likely to be novel to most hearers. 3
To most people outside the academic discipline of metaphor, creative metaphor
metaphor is probably a matter of an interesting, novel pairing of two subject matters.
A good example, in Semino [ 40 ], is the metaphorical view of a migraine attack
as being a matter of an animal moving about in the person's head (taken from Ian
McEwan's novel Atonement ). Another example, in Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act I
Scene v), is a metaphor of Hamlet's father's ghost as a “mole” moving about beneath
the earth. Those two examples are from literary sources, and that is no accident,
as it has been claimed that in non-literary language such novel pairings are rare
(see, e.g., Cameron [ 13 ], Nacey [ 38 ]). But metaphor is important and widespread
1 Jolly, S. Marigold Becomes a Brownie, p. 44. London, U.K.: Blackie and Son—The Anytime
Series (no date).
2 http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jab/ATT-Meta/Databank/ .
3 These sentences are invented variants of the famous literary example “Why is a raven like a
writing desk?” from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . They are novel. A search of the Corpus of
Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) at http://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/ (on 21 July 2014) found
no relevant occurrences of “desk” or “desks” with “penguin” or “penguins” within seven words on
either side of them.
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