A Relevance-Theoretic Account Of Creative Metaphor In Literary Communication

This thesis is an attempt to study the comprehension mechanism and effects of creative metaphor in literary communication in a relevance theory perspective.According to relevance theory, metaphor is but a kind of loose talk whose propositional form resembles that of the speaker's thought. Metaphor understanding needs no special mechanism but simply results from the search for an interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance. Metaphors vary in the strength and range of implicatures they communicate. Based on these ideas, a detailed characterization of creative metaphor in literary communication is provided in this thesis.First of all, the major theories of metaphor are introduced and their weaknesses are pointed out. It is then suggested that relevance theory, a cognitive pragmatic theory, can give a more satisfactory account of metaphor, because relevance theory not only fully recognizes the cognitive nature of metaphor, but also examines metaphor in the context of verbal communication. Relevance theory is based on the definition of relevance and two principles of relevance: a Cognitive Principle (that human cognition is geared to the maximization of relevance), and a Communicative Principle (that utterances create expectations of optimal relevance). Relevance is a comparative notion whose measurement depends on two factors: cognitive effect and processing effort. The greater the cognitive effect and the smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance of an input to an individual will be.Then, a general account of literary communication in terms of relevance theory is offered, since creative metaphor is used most often in literary communication and cannot be properly understood without such a context. In relevance theory, an ostensive-inferential model of communication is proposed: the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions I. It is argued that this model still holds true in the case of literary communication, which is a weak form of verbal communication, except that the following distinctive features can be identified: first, the reader has to take greater responsibility for the interpretation result; second, constantreinterpretation is inevitable and necessary; third, a wide range of weak implicatures are conveyed. As an important linguistic device in literary communication, creative metaphor also shows these features.Finally, the comprehension mechanism and effects of creative metaphor are discussed in great detail. The comprehension process of creative metaphor is generally the same with that of other utterances, consisting of three sub-tasks: recovery of explicatures, implicated premises and implicated conclusions. Besides, the construction of an ad hoc concept also plays an important role in this process. Therefore, it is suggested that in the comprehension process of creative metaphor another sub-task involving the construction of an ad hoc concept be added. The ad hoc concept construction might result from an interaction similar to analogical mapping between the encyclopedic entries of two or more encoded concepts in the creative metaphor.On the explicit level, creative metaphor mainly conveys a higher-order explicature with the propositional attitude of belief and an ad hoc concept as its important components. On the implicit level, creative metaphor mainly communicates a wide range of weak implicatures. However, the effects of creative metaphor are not confined to those achieved by propositions and propositional attitudes. Creative metaphor also gives rise to non-propositional effects such as those achieved by affect, impressions, and images. According to relevance theory, at least part of these non-propositional effects can be explained by the communication of a wide range of weak implicatures. The particular effect which achieves most of its relevance through a wide range of weak implicature...