A Few Words On Metaphor

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main (John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions)

I have started with the quotation from John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. I think it is the most famous phrase that people associate with the poet. When reading this sentence or while listening to it we do not need to think about it too much to understand its meaning. Everyone, I guess, understands that the Dean of St Paul’s wrote these words not meaning literally that a man is a piece of land, soil or some beautiful island near Europe. We unconsciously understand these words metaphorically.

What is a metaphor and how to decipher it?

Oxford English Dictionary describes metaphor as ‘a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable.’ The words resemble those expressed by Aristotle in Poetics some few thousand years ago. For the Greek philosopher a metaphor is ‘the application [to something] of a name belonging to something else, either from the genus to the species, or from the species to the genus, or from a species to [another] species, or according to analogy.’

For many centuries after Aristotle expressed his views, the linguists and rhetoricians followed the path. The major breakthrough came with the early twentieth century and modernism. I. A. Richards in 1936 in Philosophy of Rhetoric introduced the terms tenor for the subject and vehicle for the metaphorical term itself and started the interaction theory of metaphor. In 1954 Max Black continued (although disagreeing with Richards) and proposed to look at metaphor in relation to focus and frame, the interaction between the word written or spoken metaphorically and the frame of the sentence that it exists in. Metaphor does not belong to syntax or grammar, but to semantics. To understand the expression that uses metaphor the reader / listener has to look at the relation between the words in the phrase or sentence that they were uttered within.

If it is not possible to deduce the meaning of the metaphor within the sentence, the meaning can be attained when the unit of metaphor is attributed to the surrounding grammatical structures. To gather the meaning of metaphor it is in many instances necessary to obtain the speaker’s intention in relation to the historical and cultural background that formed the speaker or the reader.

Sometimes it is not possible to know what the author had in mind when (s)he spoke / wrote the words. The cognitive school of linguistics proposes to map the words of the metaphor within the source and target domains. It leads to deducing metaphors in relation to the cognitive aspects of human existence, i. e. spatial relations (up/down), and conceptual metaphor (concept: LIFE IS JOURNEY). The cognitive linguistics blurs the boundaries between the literal and figurative language. It also proposes to include as a form of metaphor other figures of speech, such as simile and metonymy.

Whatever the school or theory we accept as best describing the concept of metaphor, one thing is certain. People instinctively understand metaphors. We may differ in understanding particular metaphors or have difficulties in resolving the puzzle that the poet or our interlocutor just presented us with. Nevertheless, the beauty of language, be it poetry or spoken language, is that it can be understood in different ways thanks to metaphor.