Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 211

not just in literary language but also in mundane fiction, news chapters, classroom
discourse, advertisements, doctor/patient dialogue, blogs, device manuals, internet
chat, and so on; and creative metaphor can be found in such everyday discourse as
well. But, in such discourse, what appears to be much more common than novel
pairings are phenomena such as the extension of familiar metaphorical views of
things and the novel compounding of familiar metaphorical views. Indeed, Lakoff
and Turner [ 31 ] claim that even in poetry, creative metaphor makes heavy use of
extension and compounding. Extension will be clarified shortly. Compounding is
illustrated by the example given by Deignan et al. [ 16 , Chap. 9] of a chronic-pain
sufferer describing himself both as being in a concrete straitjacket and as being in a
black isolated space.
This chapter outlines and extends an approach to metaphor understanding called
ATT-Me t a [ 1 , 3 , 5 , 6 , 8 ] that has been strongly directed at accounting for how
creative metaphor extensions and compounds can be handled. Because of space
constraints, I do not address compounding here except for a brief mention late in
the chapter, but ATT-Meta's approach to it is discussed in Barnden [ 8 ], extending
Lee and Barnden [ 33 ].
There is an ambiguity in the word “extension” when applied to metaphor. One
phenomenon it can describe is when a metaphorical view of something is used on
multiple occasions over some possibly extensive swathe of discourse rather than just
locally within a short sentence. But the sense of extension important in this chapter
is a form of conceptual extension. It is a matter of exploiting some unusual aspect of
the source subject matter of some familiar metaphorical view—unusual in the sense
that that aspect is not normally exploited in uses of the view. For example, Semino
[ 40 ] discusses a case of a pain being described as “viciously twisting” in the person's
head. It is common to describe pain as “sharp” or “stabbing”, using a familiar view
of pain as the presence of an intrusive physical object that can cause pain, even when
the pain is not in fact caused by any such object. But Semino shows that it is unusual
to talk about vicious twisting when metaphorically describing pain. Such extensions
are open-ended: there is no boundary to what a speaker might in principle say about
the sharp object that is being twisted or otherwise manipulated, in the service of
conveying useful information about the intensity and quality of the pain, and Semino
and Deignan et al. ( loc. cit. ) give further creative examples.
To avoid the ambiguity of “extension” I will use the phrase “scenario elaboration”
instead (or just “elaboration” for short). This is because some details of a scenario
based on the source subject matter are being laid out, going beyond the basic source
concepts used in the metaphorical views at hand. If a pain is metaphorically described
as vicious twisting of a knife in the head, the source scenario is more elaborated
than in just describing the pain as the presence of a knife, or yet more vaguely as
stabbing. It is important to realize that what is being elaborated is a source scenario,
not necessarily the source matter introduced by any one, specific metaphorical view.
The elaboration might involve the source matter of more than one view, but might
also introduce subject matter not belonging to any familiar metaphorical view. These
points are missed by the term “extension”, which is naturally taken to imply that a