Pragmatic Interpretation Of Metaphor

Our life is filled with creative and novel metaphors. The study of metaphor has a long history, which can be traced back to Aristotle's time 2000 years ago. Ever since the 1960's, particularly after the publication of classic Metaphors We Live By compiled by Lakoff and Johnson, the research on metaphor has been prevailing and flourishing. With the current fascination on the topic of metaphor, it is said that the world has entered Metaphormania age (Shu Dingfang, 2000b). Traditional Theories regard metaphor as a figure of speech which makes language more elegant and colorful. Cognitive views consider metaphor a unique thinking approach or a mapping from source domain to the target domain. In the real communication, metaphor reflects people's intention which is a pragmatic phenomenon that depends on subjective factors. This dissertation attempts to interpret metaphor from pragmatic approaches. Metaphor, as a kind of indirect speech act is a particularized conversational implicature arising from the flouting of the first maxim of quality. Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT) is an influential reinterpretation of Grice's work. In the framework of RT, metaphor can be viewed as a descriptive use of language. It involves a descriptive relation between the speaker's thought and an actual state of affairs. Metaphor can also be regarded as effort-imposing loose talk. The ultimate goal of the understanding of metaphor is in pursuit of optimal relevance or the greatest cognitive effect for the smallest processing effort. The recognition and interpretation of metaphor are inseparable from context. It can be justified that both linguistic context and non-linguistic context play a decisive role in interpreting the metaphorical ideas. However, the studies on metaphor from a pragmatic angle also have some weaknesses: Cooperative principle can only explain some of the metaphorical sentences. Searle's approach is too complicated to be understood. Both of them do not attach great importance to cognitive factors of metaphor. S & W do not make it precicely clear when the hearer will derive a metaphorical interpretation, but only give a broad sketch on how metaphor fits in their theory. Based on the strengths and weaknesses of the studies on metaphor, the dissertation suggests a further study on metaphor should be along with cognitive perspectives as the applications and interpretation of metaphors are actually the reflection of human creative thinking ability.