Simile

Abstract: Abbreviations 1. Formal intelligence: formalism, romanticism, and formalist criticism 2. Sketching verbal form: Blake's Political Sketches 3. The formings of simile: Coleridge's 'comparing power' 4. Revision as form: Wordsworth's drowned man 5. Heroic form: couplets, 'self', and Byron's Corsair 6. Teasing form: the crisis of Keats's last lyrics 7. Social form: Shelley and the determination of reading Notes Index.

Abstract: This paper examines patterns of metaphor in usage. Four samples of text excerpts of on average 47,000 words each were taken from the British National Corpus and annotated for metaphor. The linguistic metaphor data were collected by five analysts on the basis of a highly explicit identification procedure that is a variant of the approach developed by the Pragglejaz Group (2007). Part of this paper is a report of the protocol and the reliability of the p rocedure. Data analysis shows that, on average, one in every seven and a half lexical units in the corpus is related to metaphor defined as a potential cross-domain mapping in conceptual structure. It also appears that the bulk of the expression of metaphor in discourse consists of non-signalled metaphorically used words, not similes. The distribution of metaphor-related words, finally, turns out to be quite variable between the four registers examined in this study: academic texts have 18.5%, news 16.4%, fiction 11.7%, and conversation 7.7%. The systematic comparative investigation of these registers raises new questions about the relation between cognitive linguistic and other approaches to metaphor.

Abstract: Since Aristotle, many writers have treated metaphors and similes as equals: any metaphor can be paraphrased as a simile, and vice-versa. This property of metaphors is the basis for psycholinguistic comparison theories of metaphor comprehension. However, if metaphors cannot always be paraphrased as similes, then comparison theories must be abandoned. The different forms of a metaphor — the comparison and categorical forms — have different referents. In comparison form, the metaphor vehicle refers to the literal concept, e.g. ' in my lawyer is like a shark ' , the term ' shark ' refers to the literal fi sh. In categorical form, ' my lawyer is a shark ' , ' shark ' refers to an abstract (metaphorical) category of predatory creatures. This difference in reference makes it possible for a metaphor and its corresponding simile to differ (a) in interpretability and (b) in meaning. Because a metaphor cannot always be understood in terms of its corresponding simile, we conclude that comparison theories of metaphor are fundamentally fl awed.

Abstract: According to recent work on lexical pragmatics within the relevance-theoretic framework, grasping the intended meaning of a metaphorically used word requires a process of adjusting the linguistically encoded concept to derive an ad hoc concept whose denotation is broader than that of the lexical concept. Metaphorical uses are claimed to be one kind of loose use of language, on a continuum with approximations, hyperboles and other kinds of meaning extension. The question addressed in this paper is whether this account fully captures the processes involved in understanding metaphors and the kinds of cognitive effects they have. We tackle this question by examining the similarities and differences between metaphors and hyperboles and between metaphors and similes. The upshot of our analyses is two proposals, both requiring further investigation: (a) that a distinction should be drawn between the kind of ad hoc concepts derived for hyperbolic and other loose uses, on the one hand, and metaphorical uses, on the other, and (b) that the understanding of some metaphorical uses, in particular extended and/or novel creative cases, is achieved by a different mode of processing altogether, one which gives much greater weight to the literal meaning.