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aspects of the pretended scenario and surrounding scenario (e.g. that the person has
subpersons). Thus, correspondence rules come into play opportunistically during the
understanding process, as a seamless part of the overall reasoning activities involved
in understanding.
Furthermore, it may be that guards of different correspondence rules might merely
overlap rather than being identical, or might merely be similar in some other way.
There may only a rough way to theoretically categorize rules as regards what
metaphorical views they are in, and it may difficult to say that a given metaphorical
view is reflected in any clearly delineated set of correspondence rules.
The flexibility of the contents of pretences inATT-Meta is boosted by an avoidance
of any restriction on correspondence rules as regards howdifferent the subject matters
they link are. In conceptual metaphor theory, it is often claimed or tacitly assumed
that metaphorical mappings cross between delineated, qualitatively very different
“domains”. This certainly respects the intuition that in much metaphor the source
and target subject matters are often completely different types of thing, as when an
idea or mind is viewed as being a physical creature (see ATT-Meta databank cited
above). But in Barnden [ 7 ] I argue for scepticism, shared with other authors such as
Haser [ 25 , p. 32ff], about the scientific utility of the notion of “domain” in describing
what metaphor fundamentally is or how it works. There is at most a general tendency
for the target and source to be completely different sorts of thing, and much metaphor
does not obey this tendency.
Indeed, Mind as Having Parts that are Persons radically fails to obey it. There,
both the target and the source subject matter involve people, thoughts, utterances,
etc. Also, there are simpler metaphors like “Japan—The Britain of Asia?” 21 and
“Tuesday is honorary Monday this week” (heard in conversation) where target and
source cannot be said to be completely different sorts of thing. Of course the target
and the source are always different (a person does not contain a conversation amongst
subpersons, Japan is not Britain) but things can be different while being the same
sort of thing, intuitively. Ironically, even some famous, much-discussed examples of
conceptual metaphors as Life as Journey and Argument as War [ 30 ] fail to exhibit
the domain difference that is usually claimed. Literal journeys are an important part
of life itself; and wars importantly contain, and may even sometimes be based on,
literal arguments. In sum, it is quite common for there to be a strong overlap between
target and source subject matters.
Accordingly, in ATT-Meta, correspondences (mappings) are not by definition
between subject matters or domains that have a radical qualitative difference. Rather,
by definition they are between the contents of a pretence and contents outside the
pretence. ATT-Meta makes no assumptions whatever as to how close or distinct,
or how disjoint or overlapping, the two subject matters are, and there is no use of
subject matter distinctions anywhere in the approach. Thus, there are no artificial
limits on what can go in the pretence, or on what source subject matter can be used
to illuminate a given target.
21
http://www.jref.com/forum/all-things-japanese-26/japan-britain-asia-17745/ .
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