Metaphorical Statements Research Articles

The Literal and the Metaphorical: Dialectic or Interchange

The opposition of fictive to nonfictive (i.e., scientific) discourse current during the last 350 years is linked here to the relations between metaphorical and literal discourse. The problem is this: if metaphorical usage is somehow a “misuse” of the literal relation of words to things, what are we to make of the fact that all language is metaphorical? (A) Metaphorical usage retroactively affirms the “dictionary” meanings of its words as if they were literal. (B) Fictive and nonfictive discourses encompass a (literal) heterocosm and a (metaphorical) second world, between which there is a dialectical liaison. (C) Langue stands metaphorically for extra-linguistic reality, but parole may become metaphorical by retroactively affirming its words' meanings within its langue as if they were literal. (D) Fiction is discourse that makes metaphorical statements by defining these as if they were literal, and nonfiction makes literal statements by defining these as functions of metaphorical statements.

The development of metaphoric understanding.

Two tasks were used to assess children's capacities to interpret metaphoric statements. Subjects ranging in age from 6 to 14 years were required either to explain a metaphoric sentence or to select one of four possible paraphrases. There was a developmental trend toward appropriate apprehension of metaphor. Several steps preceding mature comprehension were described: metonymic and primitivemetaphoric interpretations were frequent prior to the age of 10, and the youngest children sometimes interpreted metaphors as descriptions of magical situations. In general, cross-sensory metaphors proved easier to comprehend than psychological-physical metaphors. The results suggest certain cognitive prerequisites of mature metaphoric comprehension and help to clarify the ontogenetic relations among the abilities to produce, comprehend, and explicate the rationale of metaphoric language.

Linguistic Realism in Flaubert's "Bouvard et Pecuchet"

Realism, Ortega writes, is the exemplum crucis of esthetics.' This is true quite simply because realism derives its claim to truth from something which is outside the realm of art: nature, the real, the given. The task of the literary realist consists in making his reader forget that he is reading a book, that his experience is being mediated through a symbolic system of signification. Cervantes discovered the most effective formula to accomplish this task: the hero will himself be a reader of books and a believer in their truth, their transparency; his actions will constitute an attempt to interpret the world in their terms and his failure to do so will authenticate the which defeats him as somehow non-bookish, material, unmediated. Thus the reality unmasks the purely metaphorical status of earlier literary language in order to mask the metaphorical status of the language he himself is using. The hero of realism typically believes in the continuity between literature and reality, but his own reality is established by the novelist's revelation of the gap, the essential difference, between a self-reflexive system of signs and the concrete presence of things. Of all Flaubert's novels Madame Bovary most closely represents this prototype. Emma's belief in the realizability of fiction, her faith that her experience can correspond to literary models, is ultimately the cause of her suicide. For the dimension of fiction is the imaginary, the absent, and the Quixotic attempt to materialize this absence is bound to be defeated in confrontation with the inert mass of the phenomenal world. But in Flaubert's novel this emphasis on the incompatibility of the written and the real, developed mimetically on the level of plot, is counteracted by the striking similarity in the stylistic treatment accorded both elements of the dialectic. Emma's romantic dreams and the hum-drum events of everyday life which shatter them are created in the same meticulously constructed prose with its famous ternary rhythms, harmonious sound effects, pervasive use of style indirect libre and progressive et. As Proust puts it: In Flaubert's style . . . all parts of reality are converted into a single substance, with vast surfaces which shimmer monotonously. . . . Everything that was different has been converted and absorbed.2 Flaubert's homogeneous style is actually calculated to destroy the contrast between the imagined and the real which his language creates through its referential transparency. He felt that literary language, instead of pretending to be full of

The logical requirements for explanations of systematic desensitization

A number of explanations of systematic desensitization have been suggested, each claiming some supportive evidence. The purpose of this paper is not to evaluate this experimental support, but to examine the logical structure of the explanations themselves. Many prove to be no more than loose, metaphorical statements, or models incongruent with clinical desensitization. The extinction explanation seems to have some precision, so the sort of empirical validation it would require is considered in some detail. Extinction as a low-level model is also contrasted with reciprocal inhibition as a higher-order construct for explaining response decrement. It is concluded that greater attention should be given to the formal structure of explanatory propositions so they may more effectively guide relevant research and clinical practice.