Novel and Conventional Metaphors: A Matter of Methodology

Abstract

A central methodological question that any theory of metaphor has to confront is what type of metaphor should serve as its paradigm case. Anyone familiar with the literature has noticed that in general literary critics and rhetoricians are concerned with the so-called 'novel,' 'imaginative' or 'poetic' metaphors, whereas linguists and philosophers of language typically deal with 'conventional,' 'frozen' or even 'dead' metaphors. Those disciplines, like cognitive psychology and anthropology, which have developed an interest in the subject fairly recently, tend to use both living and dead metaphors as their examples, but they rarely present any explicit motivation for having chosen one type rather than another. Actually, the number of authors within any discipline who address this problem at all is very small. One obvious explanation for this phenomenon, as well as for the differences among the disciplines in the type of metaphor they choose to consider, is this: each discipline has asked different questions about metaphor and has thus selected the paradigm cases that most naturally fit its interests, usually without being concerned with the adequacy of these cases for other points of view on metaphor. Since literary critics and rhetoricians concentrate on the poetic or persuasive function of metaphor, their examples tend to be drawn from original poetry and oratory and are thus closer to the 'novel' type; linguists and philosophers of language wish to understand the role of metaphor in the semantics of natural language, and their examples are therefore drawn from conventionalized modes of usage supplied by the lexicon of a native speaker; cognitive psychologists and anthropologists are interested in the way metaphor affects and/or reflects the cognitive and behavioral processes of an individual or a culture, and are therefore preoccupied with metaphor function rather than metaphor type.