Abstract

Despite remarkable advances in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language, metaphor has remained an obscure and potentially anomalous phenomenon--obscure, because to date, not satisfactory theory has been offered; potentially anomalous, because questions concerning the linguistic status of metaphor raise problems for a number of assumptions typically made in theories of language regarding the nature and scope of lexical semantics. Consequently, a theory of metaphor is needed that satisfactorily answers two questions: What is a metaphor? and What are the reasons and consequences for including or excluding metaphorical interpretations as a subset of the word-meaning assignments in the lexicon of a natural language? As an answer to , I argue that a metaphor is simply an assignment of meaning to an expression, where this assignment differs from some prior assignment for that word, and the meaning assignment and the prior meaning assignment both play similar roles in similar conceptual schemes; where the conceptual schemes are similar in virtue of being instances of a conceptual scheme with a more general level of content. As a consequence, and in answer to , I argue that the reasons for excluding metaphorical interpretations from the lexicon rest either on false analyses of metaphor, or they rest on attributing properties to metaphors that are equally attributable to literal interpretations. For instance, metaphorical as well as many literal interpretations are both generated, incorporating in the same way information gained in context rather than prior to it; metaphors as well as many literal uses of language are both interpretively indeterminate and open-ended; and so on. Consequently, the differences between literal and metaphorical interpretations are merely differences in degree rather than differences in kind. The link between metaphorical and literal interpretations is a general function that is fundamental for the lexicon of a natural language--for this function generates and accounts for not only metaphors but the general capacity of natural language to be fine-tunable to the variety of particular demands imposed by a vast range of potential contexts of use