Poetic Metaphor and the Questioning of Analytic Truth.

Abstract

Although Lakoff & Turner and Samuel Levin both see poetic metaphor as a conceptual phenornenon, their understandings of this conceptuality are very different. Levin’s approach can however be accorded an irnportant. supplerneutary, role in the l~akoiI & lLirner theory. Levin sees poetic metaphor as creating strange, underspecified. poetie worlds. Although Lakoff & Turner show that poetic metaphor isto a large degree an extension of ‘ordinary’, unpoetic, metaphor. Levin accounts for an important dimension of it that they miss. His theory can be incorporated into the Lakoff & Turner framework by a]lowing their asymrnerrical mapping relation frorn source to target dornain to becorne in sorne instances symrnetrical,thereby erasing conceptual boundaries and so creating strange. new, conceptual categories. The basis of this incorporation is the severe curtailment of the scopc of analytic trutb that is common to botb levin and Lakoff & Turner. Finally, there are very importani limitations to the application of Levin’s theory ro abstract personification.