Metaphor, speech act and grammatical form

Abstract

In her stimulating article ‘Metaphoring as speech act’ ’ Dorothy Mack has laid the foundations of a theory of metaphor that blends two current approaches to linguistic analysis: transformational-generative grammar and speech-act theory. The purpose of this article is to build on these foundations. I wish to suggest that while there is much of value in her paper, it presents an over-simplified view of the extent and nature of metaphoric usage, both in literature and in everyday life. And both grammatical analysis’ and speech-act theory have more to contribute to a theory of metaphor, even in the form she proposes, than she realizes. Let me first summarize briefly the main tenets of her theory, as I understand them: (1) Every metaphor must be regarded as the surface structure realization of a deep structure explicit simile e.g. “That boy barks (at his parents)” is derived from “That boy talks (...) like a dog barks”. (2) The two sentences in the underlying deep structure will always be an asscrtion, measurable and verifiable (“that boy talks”) and a presupposition (“a dog barks”), conjoined by a comparison marker. (3) The essential nature of metaphoring as a speech act lies in this combination of assertion and compared presupposition. The happiness conditions, in addition to appropriate procedures and circumstances, are essentially an intention by the speaker to compare and a willingness by the hearer to interpret the utterance as a comparison. This theory seems to me inadequate in two ways. First, the relation between grammatical form, in surface or deep structure, and illocutionary force is much more complex than the examples in the article suggest. Not every declarative sentence is an assertion; not every assertion takes the form of a declarative sentence.