LINGUISTIC THEORIES OF METAPHOR (LITERACY, RHETORIC, SEMANTICS, PRAGMATICS)

Since the late 1960s, literary theorists have attempted to formulate a theory of metaphor that would simultaneously put literary studies on firmer scientific ground and extend the explanatory scope of linguistics to include figurative language. Each failed attempt prompted the theorists to enlarge the grounds of their explanatory mechanism--from a syntactic, to a semantic, and finally a pragmatic theory. These failures, however, stem from fundamental misconceptions about metaphor: that it is possible to state necessary and sufficient conditions for metaphor; that it is possible to spell out the procedures of metaphorical interpretation; that metaphors depend upon some defect in the utterance construed literally. These errors in turn arise from a misconception about language: that all linguistic knowledge is theoretical knowledge, knowledge which can be duplicated explicitly in a formal theory of some kind.; Taking this view, however, continually drives theorists into a circle in which a tacit concept of metaphor informs the mechanism that is supposed to explain it. This circularity is duplicated in the development of the theories themselves, when it turns out that the criteria of the pragmatic theories depend upon concepts in the semantic theories whose inadequacy was the ground for rejecting those theories. Consequently, critics who expect a formal theory of metaphor to clarify their tasks and linguists who hope to extend their formalism beyond the prosaically literal can only be disappointed.