Natural language and human semiosis: A socio-cognitive account of metaphor

Natural Language and Human Semiosis presents proposals for a framework for a socio-cognitive linguistics. This framework is an attempt to represent knowledge of language within a theory of language use. As such, it draws on theoretical and descriptive insights from both functional (largely but not exclusively systemic) linguistics and formal linguistics (broadly, work within the American generative tradition). The work of Hudson (1984, 1990) on inheritance relations in dependency grammars has also been used extensively. Knowledge of language is interpreted as knowledge of structural potential characterized in the morphosyntax in terms of how words project their argument structures, categorial constraints, and idiosyncratic properties onto an X-bar syntax. Linguistic structures occurring in instances of discourse are seen to be motivated by knowledge of generic potentials relative to the instance. The dissertation presents arguments for regarding discourse in general and metaphor in particular as being matters of knowledge of language when this is conceived of within a theory of language use. The arguments are exemplified by a description and interpretation of W. H. Auden's In Memory of W. B. Yeats.; The particular claim made as regards metaphor are that metaphors always involve multiple inheritance of properties from models which, for the language knower, are located in different experiential fields, or which are contrastive. Metaphoric multiple inheritance is distinct from nonmetaphoric multiple inheritance because the former depends on the occurrence of words (as lexical/conceptual entities) in a syntagmatic (argument) structure. The inheritance relations entailed by metaphors are compared with those involved in similes, idioms, 'prototypical' concepts, ambiguous structures, and 'literal' arguments. Adapting work from Berlin (1978), an argument is made for positing a hierarchy of 'projected' property specifications for the arguments of a predicate (from sub- to super-ordinate levels) which can be used to explain the persistence of codified metaphors.