Metaphor and What is Said

Abstract

In this paper, I argue for an account of metaphorical content as what is said when a speaker utters a metaphor. First, I show that two other possibilities-the Gricean account of metaphor as implicature and the strictly semantic account developed by Josef Stern -face several serious problems. In their place, I propose an account that takes metaphorical content to cross-cut the semantic-pragmatic distinction. This requires rethinking the notion of metaphorical content, as well as the relation between the metaphorical and the literal. Semantics, Pragmatics, and What is SaidTo proceed, it is necessary to sharpen the nature of the confl ict over how hearers recover metaphorical content. Two distinctions -between semantics and pragmatics , approaches metaphor on the model of indexicals and demonstratives developed by David Kaplan (1989Kaplan ( , 1979 . It is characteristic of demonstrative expressions that their content changes with the context of utterance, even while there is something uniform about the determination of that content across uses. Determining the content of a demonstrative expression involves the combination of specifi cally linguistic information with information about the context at hand. Using these expressions as a model, Stern offers an account of what is uniform across all instances of metaphorical speech, namely, what he takes to be the specifi cally linguistic knowledge that we bring to bear in understanding metaphors.The key to Stern ' s account is his introduction of an operator, 'Mthat', which acts as the linguistic controller of metaphorical interpretation. 5 In other words, Stern takes this operator to constitute an aspect of our linguistic competence. As with demonstratives, context-dependence is what allows metaphorical content to vary, while the variation is constrained by the Mthat-operator. In placing metaphorical content within the scope of linguistic interpretation in this way, the proposition (metaphorically) expressed by a sentence in the context of utterance is able to constitute what is said.The semantics of the Mthat-operator are as follows. The sub-sentential metaphorical unit, when it is being used metaphorically, does not have its usual representation in the underlying structure of the sentence. Instead, it is represented by the combination of that word or phrase and the Mthat-operator. For example, the metaphor ' Juliet is the sun ' is properly understood as composed of two elements, ' Juliet ' and ' Mthat[ ' is the sun ' ] ' , rather than simply ' Juliet ' and ' is the sun ' . When we hear the words ' Juliet is the sun ' , our linguistic knowledge prompts us to generate a metaphor set of possible interpretations, including all grammatically admissible combinations of Mthat with the various sub-parts of the sentence. 6 5 This operator parallels Kaplan ' s ' Dthat ' operator, introduced to deal with referential uses of defi nition descriptions ( Kaplan, 1979 ). 6 Cf. Stern, 2000 , p. 134. According to Stern, the members of the metaphor set in this case are:

XIII-Metaphor: Ad Hoc Concepts, Literal Meaning and Mental Images

“…An utterance of (10) could be intended and understood in any of the following ways: strictly literally, communicating that the water is boiling, so at or above boiling point; as an approximation, communicating that it is close enough to boiling for the differences to be inconsequential for current purposes (e.g. for making a cup of coffee); hyperbolically, so not boiling but closer to it than expect-7 See, for instance, Bezuidenhout (2001), Glucksberg (2001), Stern (2001), Carston (2002), Wilson and Sperber (2002), Recanati (2004), Wearing (2006), Sperber and Wilson (2008), Wilson and Carston (2008). 8 Small caps are used throughout to represent concepts as distinct from linguistic expressions.…”

“…11 Behind this suggestion lies a particular view of the language-thought or word-concept relation, according to which human conceptual resources far outstrip the meanings encoded in linguistic systems (Carston 2002). 12 See Wearing (2006) for a characterization of a notion of metaphorical content which puts it on a par with the standardly 'thin' notion of literal content. 13 This is most marked for accounts that take the ad hoc concept to be superordinate to the literal encoded concept, e.g.…”

Metaphor, Idiom, and Pretense*

“…So they seem to constitute cases in which the proposition asserted by an utterance is not the proposition that seems to be literally expressed by the sentence uttered. If this is right, then perhaps the metaphysical fictionalist does not need make‐believe at all – a non‐pretense‐based direct account of metaphor (such as Stern's (2000) operator‐based account or any of the pragmatic accounts of Bezuidenhout (2001), Carston (2002), Sperber and Wilson (2008), or Wearing (2006)) might allow for the rehabilitation of P2 in the above argument 30 . But it is clear that the appeal to metaphorical or idiomatic discourse on grounds of make‐believe will not go through.…”

Computing with prepositions: Fuzzy semantics

“…The metaphor, as vast and clearly inconclusive scholarship on it illustrates [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50], is an extremely complex phenomenon that linguistic semantics (and pragmatics) have been having a very hard time to explicate.…”