The categorization approach to metaphor

The categorization approach to metaphor rests on the assumption that metaphors are assertions of categorization.

How metaphor works

All names can be divided into two groups: basic level categories (chair, table, bed) and superordinate level categories (furniture) (see also Rosh’s prototype theory).

A person who says “my job is a jail” is employing a prototypical basic object name to refer to a superordinate category that has no conventional name of its own. The category referred to as “a jail” can be described by a list of distinguishing features. By naming the category “jail”, “my job” inherits those properties of “jail” that can plausibly be attributed to “my job”: involuntary, unpleasant, confining, punishing, unrewarding, etc. Bur certainly not the structure or the fines.

The supporters of this approach assume that when new and novel metaphors are created, either new categories are created or new members are added to existing “metaphorical” categories [38].

Pragmatic theory of metaphor.

The most influential ideas about trope understanding in pragmatic account come from Grice‘s theory of conversational implicature and Searle’s work on speech act theory.

The core stone of their theory is the distinction between literal and figurative or metaphoric language. Literal language means directly what it says and figurative language means more or something different from what it says. Searle suggests one should discriminate between speaker’s utterance meaning and word or sentence meaning. In case of literal utterance, the speaker’s meaning and the sentence meaning are the same. In case of metaphorical utterance they are different.

How metaphor works

Grice assumes that figurative language requires additional cognitive effort to be understood because such utterances violate one of the conversational maxims (usually quantity and/or quality).

Searle offers a similar rational analysis of figurative language interpretation. He proposes various principles that allow listeners to figure out just how sentences and speaker meaning differ. But his main assumption is that figurative language is often seen as a violation of conversational norms. Searle relies on the analysis of a sentence’s literal meaning which is unconditional priority. He approaches the problem of metaphor comprehension not from the speakers but from the hearer’s point of view. According to him the first step in understanding metaphors is to recognize that a sentence meaning is defective in the context of utterance. If the sentence meaning is plausible (not ‘defective”), then the hearer accepts sentence meaning as speaker’s meaning. If the sentence is not plausible in context, the hearer must decide which kind of alternative meaning the speaker might intend. Once the hearer has established that he is to look for an alternative meaning, he has a number of principles by which he can compute the possible value of it. (to look for ways in which the tenor might be like vehicle, or look for salient, well-known, and distinctive features of the vehicle, etc.)

Suppose he hears the utterance “Sam is a pig”.

Step 1. He knows that that cannot be literary true, that the utterance if he tries to take it as literary, is radically defective. (The defects which cue the hearer may be obvious falsehood, semantic nonsense, violation of the rules of speech acts, or violation of conversational principles of communication). Step 2. Then the hearer is supposed to look for an alternative meaning and find some features in the vehicle (a pig) to compute the possible value of the statement. In this case the speaker might invoke his factual knowledge to come up with such features as that pigs are fat, gluttonous, slovenly, filthy, and so on. This indefinite range of features provides possible values of the utterance. However, lots of other features of pigs are equally distinctive and well-known: pigs have a distinctive shape and distinctive bristles.

Step 3. The hearer should restrict the range of possible features (step 2) that make the value of the statement.

Thus, if the hearer is told, “Sam’s car is a pig”, he will interpret that metaphor differently from the utterance, “Sam is a pig”. The former he might take to mean that Sam’s car consumes gas the way pigs consume food, or that Sam’s car is shaped like a pig. Though the vehicle is the same in the two cases, in each case it is restricted by the tenor in a different way [102].