Lexical stylistic devices:metaphor

However, after J.Lakoff and M.Johnson’s “Metaphors We Live By” metaphors, whether they were poetic or not started to be treated as general mappings across conceptual domains. These general principles which take the form of conceptual mappings, apply not just to novel poetic expressions, but to much of ordinary everyday language [20].In short, the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another [21]. The general theory of metaphor is given by characterizing such cross-domain mappings. Everyday abstract concepts like time, states, change, causation, and purpose also turn out to be metaphorical. The result is that metaphor (that is, cross-domain mapping) is absolutely central to ordinary natural language semantics, and that the study of literary metaphor is an extension of the study of everyday metaphor. Everyday metaphor is characterized by a huge system of thousands of cross-domain mappings, and this system is made use of in novel metaphor.Because of these empirical results, the word “metaphor” has come to be used differently in contemporary metaphor research. It has come to mean a “cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system.” The term “metaphorical expression” refers to a linguistic expression (a word, phrase, or sentence) that is the surface realization of such a cross-domain mapping (this is what the word “metaphor” referred to in the old theory). Since the everyday metaphor system is central to the understanding of poetic metaphor, we will begin with the everyday system and then turn to poetic examples.Imagine a love relationship described as follows: Our relationship has hit a dead-end street.Here love is being conceptualized as a journey with the inplication that the relationship is stalled, that the lovers cannot keep going the way the’ve been going, that they must turn back, or abandon the relationship altogether. This is not an isolated case. English has many everyday expressions that are based on a conceptualization of love as a journey, and they are used not just for talking about love, but for reasoning about it as well. Some are necessarily about love; others can be understood that way:Look how far we’ve come.It’s been a long, bumpy road.We can’t turn back now.We are at a crossroads.We may have to go our separate ways.The relationship isn’t going anywhere.We’re spinning our wheels.Our relationship is off the track.The marriage is on the rocks.We may have to bail out of this relationship [21].These are ordinary everyday English expressions. They are not poetic, nor are they necessarily used for special rhetorical effect. Those like lookhow far we’ve come, which aren’t necessarily about love, can readily be understood as being about love.Linguists and cognitive scientists, ask two commonplace questions:Is there a general principle governing how these linguistic expressions about journeys are used to characterize love? Is there a general principle governing how our patterns of inference about journeys are used to reason about love when expressions such as these are used?The answer to both is yes. Indeed, there is a single general principle that answers both questions, but it is a general principle that is neither part of the grammar, nor the English lexicon. Rather, it is part of the conceptual system underlying English. It is a principle for understanding the domain of love in terms of the domain of journeys. The principle can be stated informally as a metaphorical scenario:The lovers are travelers on a journey together, with their common life goals seen as destinations to be reached. The relationship is their vehicle, and it allows them to pursue those common goals together. The relationship is seen as fulfilling its purpose as long as it allows them to make progress toward their common goals. The journey isn’t easy. There are impediments, and there are places (crossroads) where a decision has to be made about which direction to go in and whether to keep traveling together. The metaphor involves understanding one domain of experience, love, in terms of a very different domain of experience, journeys. More technically, the metaphor can be understood as a mapping from a source domain (in this case journeys) to a target domain (in this case love). The mapping is tightly structured. There are ontological correspondences, according to which entities in the domain of love (e.g. the lovers, their common goals, their difficulties, the love relationship, etc.) correspond systematically to entities in the domain of a journey (the travelers, the vehicle, destinations, etc).2.2. Classification of metaphors in the Conceptual Metaphor TheoryAnalyzing metaphoric concepts G.Lakoff and M.Johnson discovered that they are systematic. “Because the metaphorical concept is systematic, the language we use to talk about that aspect of the concept is systematic” [20, p.8].Such systematicity made it possible to classify metaphors according to the following ones:1. The CONDUIT metaphor. The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the idea/objects out of the word/containers:It's hard to get that idea across to him.I gave you that idea.Your reasons came through to us.It's difficult to put my ideas into words.When you have a good idea, try to capture it immediately in words.Try to pack more thought into fewer words.You can't simply stuff ideas into a sentence any old way. The meaning is right there in the words [20, p.10].The CONDUIT metaphor expresses the conventional way of thinking about language.2. ORIENTATIONAL metaphors. Most of them have to do with spatial orientation: up-down, in-out, front-back, on-off, deep-shallow, central-peripheral. These spatial orientations arise from the fact that we have bodies functioning in our physical environment. Orientational metaphors give a concept a spatial orientation; for example, HAPPY IS UP, SAD IS DOWN. The fact that the concept HAPPY is oriented UP leads to English expressions like “I'm feeling up today.” Also: I'm feeling up. That boosted my spirits. My spirits rose. You're in high spirits. Thinking about her always gives me a lift. I'm feeling down. I'm depressed. He's really low these days. I fell into a depression. My spirits sank.Physical basis: Drooping posture typically goes along with sadness and depression, erect posture with a positive emotional state [20, p.15].3. ONTOLOGICAL metaphors. There is a wide variety of ontological metaphorsbasedon our experiences in terms of objects and substances which we treat as discrete entities or substances of a uniform kind. Once we can identify our experiences as entities or substances, we can refer to them, categorize them, group them, and quantify them and reason about them [20, p. 26]. Some examples:INFLATION IS AN ENTITY: Inflation is lowering our standard of living.If there's much more inflation, we'll never survive. We need to combat inflation. Inflation is hackingus into a corner.REFERRING:My fear of insects is driving my wife crazy. That was a beautiful catch.We are working toward peace.The middle class is powerful silent force in American politics. The honor of our country is at stake in this war.QUANTIFYING: It will take a lot of patience to finish this book. There is so much hatred in the world. DuPont has a lot of political power in Delaware. You've got too much hostility in you [20, p.27]. IDENTIFYING ASPECTS:The ugly side of his personality comes out under pressure. The brutality of war dehumanizes us all. I can't keep up with the pace of modern life. IDENTIFYING CAUSES:The pressure of his responsibilities caused his breakdown. He did it out of anger. Our influence in the world has declined because of our lack of moral fiber. SETTING GOALS AND MOTIVATING ACTIONS:He went to New York to seek fame and fortune.Here's what you have to do to insure financial security. I'm changing my way of life so that I can find true happiness [20, p.27].As in the case of orientational metaphors, most of these expressions are not noticed as being metaphorical. One reason for this is that ontological metaphors, like orientational metaphors, serve a very limited range of purposes—referring, quantifying, etc. But ontological metaphors may be further elaborated. Here are two examples of how the ontological metaphor THE MIND IS AN ENTITY IS elaborated in our culture.THE MIND IS A MACHINE: We're still trying to grind out the solution to this equation. My mind just isn't operating today. Boy, the wheels are turning now! I'm a little rusty today. We've been working on this problem all day and now we're running out of steam.THE MIND IS A BRITTLE OBJECT: Her ego is very fragile.She is easily crushed.The experience shattered him.I'm going to pieces [20, p.28].4. CONTAINER metaphors. We are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us. Each of us is a container, with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation. Thus we also view them as containers with an inside and an outside. Rooms and houses are obvious containers. Moving from room to room is moving from one container to another, that is, moving out of one room and into another.We conceptualize our visual field as a container and conceptualize what we see as being inside it. Even the term "visual field" suggests this. The metaphor is a natural one that emerges from the fact that, when you look at some territory (land, floor space, etc.), your field of vision defines a boundary of the territory, namely, the part that you can see. Given that a bounded physical space is a CONTAINER and that our field of vision correlates with that bounded physical space, the metaphorical concept VISUAL FIELDS ARE CONTAINERS emerges naturally. Thus we can say:The ship is cominginto view. I have him in sight. I can't see him—the tree is in the way. He's out of sight now. That's in the centerof my field of vision. There's nothing in sight [20, p.31]. Poetic, original, genuine metaphors are used for some artistic and rhetorical purpose. One must have a special talent to be able to create them. For instance, Aristotle makes the following statement to this effect: “the greatest thing by far isbto have command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is a mark of genius.” [1].2.3. Imageable idioms and image metaphorsMany of the metaphorical expressions discussed in the literature on conventional metaphor are idioms. On classical views, idioms have arbitrary meanings, but within cognitive linguistics, the possibility exists that they are not arbitrary, but rather motivated. That is, they do not arise automatically by productive rules, but they fit one or more patterns present in the conceptual system. Let us look a little more closely at idioms. An idiom like spinning one’s wheels comes with a conventional mental image, that of the wheels of a car stuck in some substance – mud, sand, snow, or on ice – so that the car cannot move when the motor is engaged and the wheel turns. Part of our knowledge about that image is that a lot of energy is being used up (in spinning the wheels) without any progress being made, that the situation will not readily change of its own accord, that it will take a lot of effort on the part of the occupants to get the vehicle moving again – and that may not even be possible.The LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor applies to this knowledge about the image. It maps this knowledge onto knowledge about love relationships: a lot of energy is being spent without any progress toward fulfilling common goals, the situation will not change of its own accord, it will take a lot of effort on the part of the lovers to make more progress and so on. In short, when idioms have associated conventional images, it is common for an independently motivated conceptual metaphor to map that knowledge from the source domain to the target domain. The concept of quantities involves at least two metaphors. The first is the well-known MORE IS UP, LESS IS DOWN metaphor as shown by a myriad of expressions like prices rose, stocks skyrocketed, the market plummeted, and so on. A second is that LINEAR SCALES ARE PATHS. We can see this in expressions like: John is far more intelligent than Bill.John’s intelligence goes way beyond Bill’s.John is way ahead of Bill in intelligence. There are kinds of metaphors that function to map one conventional mental image onto another. Image metaphors, by contrast are “one-shot” metaphors: they map only one image into ine other image.Consider, for example, this poem from the Indian tradition:Now women-riversbelted with silver fishmove unhurried as women in loveat dawn after a night with their lovers(Mervin and Masson 1981: 71)Here the image of the slow, sinuous walk of an Indian woman is mapped onto the image of the slow, sinuous, shimmering flow of a river. The shimmering of a school of fish is imagined as the shimmering of the belt.Poetic metaphor is, for the most part, an extension of our everyday, conventional system of metaphorical thought [21].Poetic, general, original metaphor which is treated as a stylistic device is a conscious and deliberate use of words and one must have a special talent to be able to create it. Only great writers or eloquent speakers can be its masters. For instance, Aristotle makes the following statement to this effect: “The greatest thing by far is to have command of metaphor … it is the mark of genius.” [1].ConclusionsMetaphor has had a long history of investigation since ancient rhetoric, but it is in the second part of the 20th century with emergence of Linguostylistics and developments in adjacent trends in Linguistics and Literature, metaphor drew a close attention of scholars and received a new impetus in its investigations.There were presented new approaches to metaphor regarding its definitions, mechanisms of its creation, classifications. Traditionally metaphor is understood as a trope, based on interaction of dictionary and contextual meanings, the relations between two meanings being associations of similarity, identifying one object with another. The structural and semantic classifications of metaphors give us an insight into the role they play in speech and language, i.e. either they are trite lexical metaphors or are functioning as genuine, original metaphorsformed for the sake of expressiveness as an artistic stylistic device created by great writers or eloquent speakers.The discovery of componential analysis made it possible to explain a metaphor mechanism on a semantic components (seme) level when a metaphor is based on potential / associative semes present in its lexical meaning.And with the emergence of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory there emerged another understanding of metaphor, i.e. that along with the artistic, poetic, expressive metaphor, there are conceptual metaphors, by which we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another, thus metaphor is not just a stylistic device, but a cognitive procedure of conceptual mappings from one domain to another by which we express certain things in terms of others.Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject matter in terms of more concrete, or at least more highly structured subject matter.The new discoveries and developments of metaphor, as well as new linguistic and literary trends call forth new research concerning the use of metaphor in various types of discourse, translation of metaphors, corpus research of metaphors, metaphors across cultures, etc.ReferencesАристотель. 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