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How we use metaphors – Metaphor Hacker
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Extended writing Linguistics Metaphor

How we use metaphors

I was reminded by this blog post on LousyLinguist that many people still see metaphor as an unproblematic homogeneous concept leading to much circular thinking about them.  I wrote about that quite a few years ago in:

Lukeš, D., 2005. Towards a classification of metaphor use in text: Issues in conceptual discourse analysis of a domain-specific corpus. In Third Workshop on Corpus-Based Approaches to Figurative Language. Birmingham.

I suggested that a classification of metaphor had better focused on their use rather than inherent nature. I came up with the heuristic device of: cognitive, social and textual uses of metaphor.

Some of the uses I came up with (inspired by the literature from Halliday to Lakoff) were:

  • Cognitive
    • Conceptual (constitutive)
      • Explanative
      • Generative
    • Attributive
  • Social (Interpersonal)
    • Conceptual/Declarative (informational)
    • Figurative (elegant variation)
    • Innovative
    • Exegetic
    • Prevaricative
    • Performative
  • Textual
    • Cohesive (anaphoric, cataphoric, exophoric)
    • Coherent
      • Local
      • Global

I also posited a continuum of salience and recoverability in metaphors:

  • High salience and recoverability
  • Low salience and recoverability

Read the entire paper here.

My thinking on metaphor has moved on since then – I see it as a special case of framing and conceptual integration rather than a sui generis concept – but I still find this a useful guide to return to when confronted with metaphor use.