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CHAPTER1. CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF LITERARY ANALYSIS OF TEXTS IN ENGLISH
1.1 Ways of metaphor identification and analysis
1.1In the late 1970s, John Searle rejected both interaction and comparison theories of metaphor, and offered an understanding of metaphor based on the ‘speaker’s utterance meaning’. In Expression and Meaning, his 1979 study of speech act theory, Searle criticized earlier approaches to metaphor on the grounds that they tried to locate the meaning of metaphors in the sentences or metaphorical expressions themselves. Instead, Searle suggested, we must examine the slippage between the speaker’s¹ meaning and the sentence or word meaning. In other words, metaphorical utterances work not because a certain juxtaposition of words produces a change in the meaning of the lexical elements but because the speaker's meaning differs from their literal usage. Thus phrases like ‘It's getting hot in here’ or ‘Sally is a block of ice’ function as metaphors only in certain contexts with specific truth conditions: there is no single principle according to which metaphors operate.
Despite divergent theories of the ways in which metaphors operate, twentieth-century approaches have almost uniformly attempted to broaden traditional conceptions of metaphor as special use of language, offering an understanding of metaphor as a fundamental cognitive process or structure. In short, metaphor came to be seen as ‘the omnipresent principle of language’ (Richards), as a basic pattern of organizing and concertizing experience. No longer simply the domain of rhetoric or literary studies, metaphor has, over the past three decades, become a central topic of debate for fields like psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and the cultural studies of science.
The question of how we identify the metaphor has never been adequately treated, in part, because writers have not correctly identified the unit of discourse that constitutes a metaphor. Language can only be identified as metaphorical by virtue of linguistic and contextual conditions that require that we interpret it differently from its surrounding discourse; therefore we cannot give the conditions by which we recognize metaphors without identifying that unit of discourse which constitutes a metaphor. We know that metaphors need not to be a full sentence – it may be a phrase. Nor is a sentence always sufficient to distinguish a metaphorical from a literal use of term.
Some people may claim that the fact that metaphors are identifiable neither as single words (which would not thus have meanings in some way similar to or analogous to word meaning) nor as sentences (which would thus have meanings by virtue of rules concatenating single words into sentences) constitutes an argument against semantics of metaphor. But developing criteria for identifying metaphors the value of treating metaphor semantically as well as pragmatically will become evident. We should use a distinction that cuts across the semantic-pragmatic divide and is more useful in delineating metaphor – a distinction between a first-order meaning and a second-order meaning.
The first-order meaning is what we have in mind when we ask about the meaning of the word “rock” in the sentence: “the rock is becoming brittle with age”. A second-order meaning is obtained when features of the utterance and its context indicate to the hearer or reader that the first-order meaning of the expression is either unavailable or inappropriate. In our example the first-order meaning of the word “rock” is a naturally occurring solid material matter, and the first-order meaning of the sentence is a comment of the brittle quality of such matter given the passage of time. Here we uttered in the absence of any talk about geology or rocks, but in the context we could reasonably assume that any meaning the sentence might have would not be a first-order meaning. Instead we could assume that the professor was being spoken of a rock which was becoming brittle – that is the first-order interpretation while not the appropriate meaning in the context would none the less be pertinent to the meaning intended. The distinction as put forward here is necessarily rough; it will be refined as we develop the required technical apparatus and conceptual precision.
We know that many sentences have multiple meanings. For instance: “Every woman loves some man” has two literal meanings: (1) there is some man M such that, for every woman W, W loves M; or (2) for every woman W there is some man M such that W loves M. Some phrases have both literal and metaphorical meanings. Some phrases (or sentences) have multiple metaphorical meanings, e.g. three meanings of the phrase “Her lips are cherries”, represented in the table 2.1.