Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphor to Idioms

Oxford Psychology

by Sam Glucksberg

This book examines how people understand utterances that are intended figuratively. Traditionally, figurative language such as metaphors and idioms has been considered derivative from more complex than ostensibly straightforward literal language. Glucksberg argues that figurative language involves the same kinds of linguistic and pragmatic operations that are used for ordinary, literal language. Glucksberg's research in this book is concerned with ordinary expressions that are used in daily life, including conversations about everyday matters, newspaper and magazine articles, and the media. Metaphor is the major focus of the book. Idioms, however, are also treated comprehensively, as is the theory of conceptual metaphor in the context of how people understand both conventional and novel figurative expressions. A new theory of metaphor comprehension is put forward, and evaluated with respect to competing theories in linguistics and in psychology. The central tenet of the
theory is that ordinary conversational metaphors are used to create new concepts and categories. This process is spontaneous and automatic. Metaphor is special only in the sense that these categories get their names from the best examples of the things they represent, and that these categories get their names from the best examples of those categories. Thus, the literal "shark" can be a metaphor for any vicious and predatory being, from unscrupulous salespeople to a murderous character in The Threepenny Opera. Because the same term, e.g.,"shark," is used both for its literal referent and for the metaphorical category, as in "My lawyer is a shark," we call it the dual-reference theory. The theory is then extended to two other idioms and conceptual metaphors. The book presents the first comprehensive account of how people use and understand metaphors in everyday life.

Genres: Linguistics

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Nat]

Glucksberg argues for what is called the "property attribution model" of metaphorical comprehension, which holds that metaphors are essentially akin to statements like "Trieste is no Vienna", where "Vienna" is not the name of a city, but stands for some exemplary category that characterizes Vienna (in this case, something like being a cosmopolitan city). This contrasts with the traditional picture (advocated by Grice and Searle, for example), that comprehending a metaphor involves first grasping its literal meaning, which is usually semantically anomalous in some way (so "Trieste is no Vienna" would be read as absurdly obviously true), which then triggers a metaphorical interpretation that precedes by applying general conversational principles (informativeness, e.g.) to derive the metaphorical meaning (Trieste is not a cosmopolitan city).

Glucksberg gives convincing evidence (involving speed of comprehension tests) against the idea that listeners have to compute the literal meaning of a sentence before they can give it a metaphorical interpretation. Though I confess that it's not at all clear to me what "understanding" or "comprehension" of either a literal sentence or a metaphorical one is supposed to amount to; as far as I can tell it's when the test subjects indicate that they understand, rather than actually successfully explaining it (what would it even BE to show that you had understood a literal sentence or a metaphor? Obviously, it depends on the circumstances). So the tests seem to measure the feeling of understanding rather than understanding itself, which, as Wittgenstein is at pains to point out in the Investigations, is not anything like a unified phenomenon or simple inner state.

And throughout the discussions in this book of which metaphors are interpretable and which are not, I found myself disagreeing with some of Glucksberg's assessments. For example, Glucksberg says that metaphorical comparisons are "nonreversible": "The clearest examples of nonreversibility are provided by assertions that become anomalous when reversed. For example, ALCOHOL IS LIKE A CRUTCH becomes uninterpretable when reversed (A CRUTCH IS LIKE ALCOHOL)" (p.32). Really? A crutch is like alcohol in that it numbs (part of) you, it is like alcohol in that once you start using it all the time, you don't want to stop, or that it's like alcohol in that it's a good way to start a conversation at a party. I'm sure there are other ways in which a crutch is like alcohol.

There is a lot of interesting material in the chapter on idioms, which thoroughly debunks the idea that idioms are just "long words" with no syntactic or semantic complexity. For example, an idiom like "skating on thin ice" is quasi-compositional: "jumping on thin ice" and "skating on thick ice" seem to have different but systematically related meanings, though some work would be required to make sense of either "skating on thin water" or "skating under thin ice".