Metaphor As A Subject Of Research example essay topic

Metaphor, as a subject of research, has enjoyed great popularity among philosophers, stylists and linguists in ancient times as well as in modern days. Different approaches have been taken to explore into the nature of metaphor and accordingly varying results emerge through researchers! constant efforts. This paper, though of little length, is a venture to take a snapshot at the developments of metaphor study Study of metaphor in view of rhetoric continued its way through the long history, and today it is still a puzzling subject in modern rhetoric and stylistics. In addition, this approach, given its deep-rooted influence over the past two thousand years or more, may be the most popular among non-researchers since metaphor, as it were, has been traditionally viewed as a figure of speech involving a meaning transference from a word!'s literal meaning in rhetorical theory, and so is defined in most dictionaries. This model, however, is out of vogue among today!'s linguists and other researchers as well. More and more effort is spared to examine the role played by metaphor from different perspectives such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines.

Study of metaphor in the view of poetry: Poetry has always occupied a great position in every culture, and metaphor is considered as the most important element in poetic production and is said to have reached its most sophisticated forms in literary or poetic language. What Aristotle was talking about in his Poetics about metaphor actually refers to the role of metaphor in written language, including poetry, but that does not belong to what we call poetic perspective here. Since cognitive semantics is one of the most influential branch of linguistics nowadays, and metaphor always involves meaning, it is justifiable that we take a close look at the cognitive view on metaphor here. Contrary to the traditional or rhetorical view, metaphor is no longer understood as a speaker or writer!'s violation of norms in language.

Rather, the cognitive paradigm sees metaphor as a means whereby more abstract and intangible areas of experience can be conceptualized in terms of familiar and concrete. Metaphor is thus motivated by a search for understanding. It is characterized, not by a violation of selection restrictions or norms, but by the conceptualization of one cognitive domain. Although metaphor has been an interesting subject in semantics rather than syntax, Halliday has successfully brought these two together and owing the influence of his theory his point of metaphor has drawn considerable attention from other researchers.

Metaphor, as is described in the rhetorical sense, is traditionally viewed as a deviant use of words, but Halliday sees metaphor from a contrasting angle, viewing metaphor as variation in the expression of meanings. Contrary to the traditional limitation of metaphor to lexical restriction (or selections), it is now incorporated into a larger concept of lexicogrammatical selection, or! ^0 wording! +/-; and the metaphorical variation is lexicogrammatical rather than simply lexical. Halliday maintains that grammatical variation accompanies lexical variation. He thus introduces to us a concept -- - grammatical metaphor.

While there is not yet a recognized definition of grammatical metaphor, Hu Zhuang lin holds that at least one of the two concepts of metaphor, namely, tenor and vehicle, or target and source, is related to grammar. We have up till now profiled metaphor through its developmental stages, so it is now of necessity to lay bare the relationships among and our evaluation of these varying approaches. The traditional view of metaphor as a figure of speech is actually suggesting the relationship between norm and deviation. Metaphor deviates from normal language and attains its intended effects. M.A. K Halliday indeed carries on this tradition in his description of grammatical metaphor. He regards the transference of meta functions as well as other semantic functions at subordinate levels as metaphorical. This is in fact echoing the deviation from norm by metaphor.

The greatest contribution Halliday has made in his account of metaphor, as I see it, is his success in pushing metaphor onto the stage of grammar, thus freeing metaphor from its purely semantic prison house. Alternatively the poetic and cognitive models take a different stance in tackling this question. The pervasiveness of metaphor seems to argue against the deviance hypothesis, for metaphor will eventually destroy the norm against which deviance is to be recognized as such. Halliday himself also admits that the congruent realization is no better or worse than the incongruent form and metaphorical realizations in many instances have become part of the norm, i.e. metaphor ceases to be metaphorical. Therefore there seems no need to argue too much whether metaphor is a deviation from the norm in language. This paper is an attempt to offer a general picture of the study of metaphor and four perspectives, i.e. rhetorical, poetic, cognitive and grammatical, are investigated to provide a glimpse of metaphor research over history.

Metaphor has remained an intriguing subject even though research into this phenomenon, be it linguistic or of thinking, has continued ever since Aristotle!'s period and still deserves attentions from researchers in the days to come.

Bibliography

Halliday, M.A.K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2000.
Saeed, J.I. Semantics. Taylor, J.R. Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001.