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تسجيل

Metaphor

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C13-P463

2026-02-02

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Metaphor

Finally, we briefly consider Sperber and Wilson’s account of figurative language, focusing on their discussion of metaphor. Sperber and Wilson argue that relevance and inference are also central to the interpretation of figurative language. Consider example (22) from Sperber and Wilson (1995: 236).

According to the Relevance Theory account, the hearer is licensed to assume that the speaker is aiming for optimal relevance in uttering (22). Because the utterance is literally false (the room is not literally a pigsty), the literal interpretation is uninformative and therefore irrelevant. The hearer therefore assumes that the speaker intends some other interpretation and draws upon encyclopaedic knowledge and contextual knowledge in order to construct an inference. Encyclopaedic knowledge gives rise to the fact that a pigsty is associated with filth and untidiness. The resemblance between the encyclopaedic representation of a pigsty and the condition of the room (contextual information) allows the hearer to infer that the speaker intends to convey that the room is filthy and untidy. As Sperber and Wilson point out, the use of this metaphor carries additional contextual effects that could not be conveyed by the utterance This room is filthy and dirty. By comparing the room to a pigsty, the speaker provides a much richer representation of the condition of the room which might give rise to further implicatures (e.g. the filth and untidiness goes ‘beyond the norm’ for a room inhabited by humans rather than animals, the room smells bad, and so on). In this way, metaphor also rewards the hearer’s extra processing cost with a richer set of contextual effects than a literal utterance: ‘the wider the range of potential implicatures and the greater the hearer’s responsibility for constructing them, the more poetic the effect, the more creative the metaphor’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 236). Table 13.4 summarises the main assumptions of Relevance Theory.