Poetic Effects Of Metaphor

Metaphor, as a multi-disciplinary subject, has captured a number of scholars'attention. I am attracted mainly because it conveys so much in such a condensation and because where there is a metaphor, there is imagination and vivid effects. However dull and ordinary a sentence is, when you revise it to a metaphor, it will shine with mystery and brilliant beauty.Many scholars show interest in metaphor's linguistic structure and cognitive function. They want to trace the reason why metaphor is different from common words and how it achieves this goal. My focus is on another orbit. In this thesis, I take a cognitive relevance approach to seek where metaphor's charm lies. Poetic effects are the primary and inclusive reason I have found.Through the analysis of quite a lot of typical examples and logical inference, I carry out a study on poetic effects'nature, production and evaluation. My emphasis is on its evaluation and I try to work out the factors that influence the degree of poetic effects. We find that poetic effects are peculiar effects of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures. It's the illocutionary effect of an utterance and weak contextual implicatures in the cognitive environment. It is greatly in accordance with the content, range and degree of potential implications. The wider the range of potential implicatures, the richer the content is and the weaker the implications are, the greater the hearer's responsibility for constructing them, the more poetic the effects are, and the more creative the metaphor is.In addition, based on other scholar's findings, I put some commonly recognized factors under the relevance theory and find out that these factors have a strong influence on poetic effects: conventionality, similarity, abstractness and explicitness.As is known, the production and factors influencing poetic effects are manifest. We shall take advantage to analyze linguistic phenomenon, make literature comments and even properly control its degree to achieve best contextual effects.