metaphor

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For more information on metaphor, visit Britannica.com.

The derivation of metaphor means "to carry over." Thus the "desktop metaphor" as so often described means that the office desktop has been brought over and simulated on computers.

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Ordinary language is saturated with corporeal metaphors. We frequently speak of ‘the lip of a cup’, and ‘the legs of a table’, and use expressions like ‘the walls have ears’, ‘the interviewer kept me on my toes’, and ‘let's get to the heart of the matter’. Not only are many of our metaphorical expressions rooted in the body and our experiences of it, but metaphors, in turn, significantly shape our cultural perceptions of the body.

Definitions and interpretations

From the Greek word ‘metaphora’ meaning ‘transference’, a metaphor has generally been understood as a figurative expression which interprets a thing or action through an implied comparison with something else. Aristotle, who is usually considered the originator of ‘comparison’ theories of metaphor, described metaphors in the Rhetoric as elliptical similes — comparisons of ‘things that are related but not obviously so’ without using ‘like’ or ‘as’. According to Aristotle, the best or ‘most well liked’ type of metaphor transfers its meaning from one subject or ‘register’ to another through the principle of analogy. As Aristotle observes in the Poetics, these metaphors often depend on logical relationships between multiple terms. The metaphor ‘old age is the evening of life’, for instance, relies on the relation between a set of terms describing day and another set describing age.

Aristotelian approaches to metaphor remained largely unchallenged until 1936, when I. A. Richards offered what philosopher Max Black has termed an ‘interaction’ view of metaphor. Critiquing both Aristotle's notion of metaphor as special or ornamental use of language, and his assumption that metaphor involves the mere substitution of one term for another, Richards claimed that metaphor relies on a complex interaction of thoughts, rather than a process of linguistic substitutions. To explain how a metaphor functions as a ‘double unit’, Richards introduced the terms ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’, which refer to the ‘principal subject’ and the name of the figurative term itself, respectively. (In the metaphor ‘Juliet is the sun’, for example, ‘Juliet’ would be the tenor and ‘sun’ the vehicle.) Richards' theory of metaphor as the product of an interaction between vehicle and tenor was later refined by Max Black in his 1962 book, Models and Metaphors. In this volume, Black suggested that a metaphor acts as a ‘filter’ in which two or more subjects interact according to a ‘system of associated commonplaces’ (a shared set of cultural responses) to produce new meanings for the entire phrase or sentence. In the metaphor ‘Tom is a fox’, then, not only is ‘Tom’ viewed in terms of cultural associations of foxes as sly creatures, but ‘fox’ is also reinterpreted through its juxtaposition with a human male.

In the late 1970s, John Searle rejected both interaction and comparison theories of metaphor, and offered an understanding of metaphor based on the ‘speaker's utterance meaning’. In Expression and Meaning, his 1979 study of speech act theory, Searle criticized earlier approaches to metaphor on the grounds that they tried to locate the meaning of metaphors in the sentences or metaphorical expressions themselves. Instead, Searle suggested, we must examine the slippage between the speaker's meaning and the sentence or word meaning. In other words, metaphorical utterances work not because a certain juxtaposition of words produces a change in the meaning of the lexical elements but because the speaker's meaning differs from their literal usage. Thus phrases like ‘It's getting hot in here’ or ‘Sally is a block of ice’ function as metaphors only in certain contexts with specific truth conditions: there is no single principle according to which metaphors operate.

Despite divergent theories of the ways in which metaphors operate, twentieth-century approaches have almost uniformly attempted to broaden traditional conceptions of metaphor as special use of language, offering an understanding of metaphor as a fundamental cognitive process or structure. In short, metaphor came to be seen as ‘the omnipresent principle of language’ (Richards), as a basic pattern of organizing and concertizing experience. No longer simply the domain of rhetoric or literary studies, metaphor has, over the past three decades, become a central topic of debate for fields like psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and the cultural studies of science.

Bodily metaphors

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars have shown that many of our metaphorical expressions (along with much of thought itself) develop from our perceptions and experiences of the body. In her 1956 volume on reading poetry, Modern English and American Poetry, Margaret Schlauch suggested that one of the most basic types of metaphorical transfer is the naming of a new object through its resemblance to part of the body. Citing such examples as ‘headland’, ‘foothill’, ‘the face of a watch’, and ‘blind alleys’, Schlauch offered a comparison view of corporeal metaphor in which meaning is transferred from bodily parts and sensuous experiences to other objects on the basis of similarity.

Paul Ricoeur's 1978 essay, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, likewise claimed that the body should play a key role in our understanding of metaphor. In accordance with his view that there is a ‘picturing function’ of metaphorical meaning, Ricouer suggested that the term ‘figure of speech’ is rooted in our very understanding of the body as a figure. Just as the body twists and changes position, so, too, do metaphors, which ‘turn’ or ‘twist’ standard meanings through particular usages of words or phrases. According to Ricouer, figures of speech such as metaphor provide language with a ‘quasi-bodily externalization’; in making abstract or foreign concepts more tangible, metaphors ‘embody’ ideas, offering a ‘figurability to the message’.

The body's role in shaping metaphors and cognition was expanded and refined in Mark Johnson's 1987 book, The Body in the Mind. Breaking with objectivist views on metaphor and meaning, Johnson asserted that human embodiment is central not only to metaphorical projection, but also to our most basic processes of developing and articulating meaning. Johnson argued that metaphor, one of our primary cognitive structures for ordering experience, stem from fundamental embodied schema relating to the body's movements, orientation in space, and its interaction with objects. The body's general upright position in space, for instance, creates a ‘verticality’ schema, which influences numerous metaphors. When we speak of ‘upscale living’, and use expressions like ‘she's on top of it’ or ‘he was down on himself’, we are using metaphors based on a hierarchy derived from the body's orientation in space. The body's interaction with objects likewise contributes to the general metaphorical correlation of ‘up’ (as opposed to ‘down’) with ‘more’; as we observe through our bodily interactions, when we add liquid to a container or magazines to a pile, the level increases. Thus even phrases like ‘falling stock prices’ and ‘rising costs’ derive their abstract representation of quantity through basic bodily experience. Other embodied schemata that are projected through metaphorical networks include: balance, in/out, front/back, contained/uncontained, and force or weight. Although revolutionary in its examination of the ways in which human embodiment is encoded into metaphor, Johnson's work has been critiqued by feminist scholars like Katherine Hayles for its failure to account for individual and cultural bodily specificities like gender, ethnicity, and physical ability.

In addition to influencing the names we give to objects and basic patterns of metaphorical thought, the human body has also had an impact on many of the metaphors we employ to describe society. Perhaps the most prevalent of these bodily metaphors, the body politic has contributed to our understanding of institutions like the state and church since the age of Pericles in ancient Greece. Whether in Plato's Republic, where the problems of the polis are metaphorized as diseases, or St, Paul's writings, in which the Church is compared to a human body with unified ‘members’, the metaphor of the body politic has shaped the way scholars have envisioned the hierarchies and interrelationships between various elements of society. Indeed, we still speak of ‘heads of state’, ‘governing bodies’, and crime as ‘a social disease’.

Metaphors for the body

Just as the body has played a crucial role in influencing our metaphorical networks, so too have metaphors shaped our understanding of the body. Metaphors for the body are as diverse as the cultures and civilizations that have created them; however, several key metaphors can be identified as central to Western thought. Dating back to Plato's Cratylus, the metaphor of the body as a prison or house for the soul has influenced philosophical, religious, and other cultural attitudes toward the body — especially the mind/body dualism. At the heart of Plato's metaphor is the notion that the true essence of human beings lies in their soul or spirit; the body is alien, brute matter, a vessel for the soul/mind. The metaphor of the body as dungeon or house took on particular gendered implications with Aristotle's writings on the chora and reproduction, which contend that the mother merely ‘houses’ the child, providing the shapeless matter, while the father provides the form or shape. In the New Testament and other early Christian writings, the body was again conceived of as a house or temple, offering the distinction between the immortal, god-given soul and the mortal, corruptible body in which it dwells.

Another primary metaphor in Western perceptions of the body and the mind/body split is the Cartesian metaphor of the human body as a machine. Intervening in the mechanism versus vitalism debate, René Descartes suggested that the body (res extensa) could be understood as a self-moving machine composed of separate mechanisms that function according to the laws of nature. Descartes' metaphor of body as machine and its association of bodies (but not minds) with nature was fundamental in positioning the body as a universally knowable subject fit for scientific investigation. In the twentieth century, fields like art history and medicine used the body as machine metaphor in interesting new ways. Within the art world, the metaphor intersected with modernist theories of aesthetics, as artists like Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp depicted the body in an increasingly mechanized fashion. Drawing on earlier notions of a mechanistic body, and an understanding of the Fordist mass production system, the medical community utilized new cultural perceptions of the body through its metaphorical elaborations of the ‘Fordist body’. As described by Emily Martin in ‘The End of the Body?’, the Fordist body functioned according to principles of ‘centralized control and factory-based production’. This metaphorical conception of the body not only created a hierarchy among bodily organs, with the brain (centralized control) at the top and the other organs below, but also caused the body to be considered in terms of productivity and efficiency.

Central to much recent work on embodiment is the metaphor of the body as a text or surface upon which our cultural and personal identity is written. Though widely used by many body theorists, the metaphor is most often associated with Michel Foucault. Drawing from Nietzschean notions of the body as a site of social incision, Foucault described the body as ‘the inscribed surface of events’ (‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’) and as an ‘object and target of power’ (Discipline and punish). For Foucault, the body became a text or a medium on which power operates, producing culturally and historically marked subjects. Thus, as various feminist scholars have noted, cultural gender norms are ‘written’ on female and male bodies through diet, make-up, exercise, dress, footwear, and other practices. We should be careful, however, not to see the body solely as a blank slate awaiting cultural markings; as feminist philosophers Susan Bordo and Elizabeth Grosz point out, the materiality of the ‘page’ (the body itself) must be taken into consideration when we examine the ways in which bodies are culturally or otherwise inscribed.

The relationship between metaphor and the body is quite complex. Not only do metaphors affect our cultural perceptions of the body, but many of our metaphors and patterns of metaphorical cognition are shaped by our understandings of the body and embodiment. Thus, as science studies scholar Gillian Beer observes in ‘Problems of description and the language of discovery’, metaphors are both descriptive and productive. As they move from level to level, cutting across disciplines with free movement and flexibility, metaphors become an important ‘resource for discovery’; they become sites for reconceiving and recreating the body in new and exciting ways.

— Christina Jarvis

Bibliography

• Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis.
• Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago and London.
• Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago and London. Sacks, S. (ed) (1979). On metaphor. Chicago and London

n

Definition: figure of speech, implied comparison
Antonyms: plain speech

metaphor, the most important and widespread figure of speech, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two. In metaphor, this resemblance is assumed as an imaginary identity rather than directly stated as a comparison: referring to a man as that pig, or saying he is a pig is metaphorical, whereas he is like a pig is a simile. Metaphors may also appear as verbs (a talent may blossom) or as adjectives (a novice may be green), or in longer idiomatic phrases, e.g. to throw the baby out with the bath‐water. The use of metaphor to create new combinations of ideas is a major feature of poetry, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors. Much of our everyday language is also made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as ‘dead’ metaphors, like the branch of an organization. A mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous (see also catachresis), usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing: those vipers stabbed us in the back. Modern analysis of metaphors and similes distinguishes the primary literal term (called the ‘ tenor’) from the secondary figurative term (the ‘vehicle’) applied to it: in the metaphor the road of life, the tenor is life, and the vehicle is the road. For a fuller account, consult Terence Hawkes, Metaphor (1972).

The most important figure of speech, in which one subject-matter (sometimes called the tenor) is referred to by a term or sentence (the vehicle) that does not literally describe it: the ship of state, the light of faith, etc. Philosophical problems include deciding how the border between literal and metaphorical meaning is to be drawn (Nietzsche, for example, thought that literal truth was merely dead or fossilized metaphor), understanding how we interpret metaphors with the speed and certainty which we often manage, and deciding whether metaphors can themselves be vehicles of understanding, or whether they should be regarded only as signposts to literal truths and falsities about the subject-matter.

Particular disputes in philosophy can also centre on the extent to which a phrase is metaphorical, as when philosophers talk about the foundations of knowledge, beliefs in the head, the goodness of God, or abstract objects. In a mixed metaphor, or catachresis, the combination of properties suggested becomes illogical or ridiculous, although even then interpretation need not fail, as when Hamlet contemplates taking up arms against a sea of troubles.

A descriptive phrase or term applied to an object or to a phenomenon to which it does not literally denote. Metaphors are used extensively in science and are of great value in suggesting new relationships or new explanatory mechanisms, but there are problems when they are interpreted too literally or when they are not supported by objective evidence. See also model.

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Metaphor is a figure of speech that involves designating one thing with the name of another, a process that is carried out essentially by substituting one term for another.

Metaphor is a fundamental notion that Jacques Lacan introduced in relation to his thesis that "the unconscious is structured like a language." He justified its legitimacy principally by analogy with the Freudian mechanism of "condensation," and more generally in relation to the structure of the formations of the unconscious and the metaphorical process of the Name-of-the-Father.

Lacan proposed the following symbolic formula for metaphor (2002, p. 190):

The Lacanian use of metaphor is founded on the principle of a signifying substitution that promotes the authority of the signifier over that of the signified. In language, metaphorical substitution most often occurs between two terms on the basis of semantic similarity. At the level of unconscious processes, this similarity is not always immediately apparent, and only a series of associations can bring it to light.

Thus Freudian condensation plays a role in the different unconscious formations, such as dreams and symptoms, for example. Just as the unconscious material in dreams, telescoped by condensations, reappears in a meaningless form in the manifest dream content, so the symptom expresses, in reality, something completely different from what it appears to mean.

The metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father, as it was called by Lacan, is based on the same principle—that of the substitution of signifiers. In this case, the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father substitutes for the signifier of the mother's desire, which thus becomes the object of repression and becomes unconscious.

The "fort/da game" that Freud described (1920g) directly attests to the process of metaphorization and the repression that is linked to it. A relation of signifying substitution is established by the child as soon as they "name" the signifying reference to the father as the cause of the mother's absences. In addition to the paternal metaphor, which makes it possible, the fort/da game is also inscribed in a double metaphorical process. In itself, the reel is already a metaphor for the mother, and the game of its presence and absence is another metaphor since it symbolizes her departure and return.

Bibliography

Dor, Joël. (1998). Introduction to the reading of Lacan: The unconscious structured like a language (Judith Feher Gurewich and Susan Fairfield, Eds.). New York: Other Press, 1998.

Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1-64.

Lacan, Jacques. (2002).Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.

—JOËL DOR

The comparison of one thing to another without the use of like or as: “A man is but a weak reed”; “The road was a ribbon of moonlight.” Metaphors are common in literature and expansive speech. (Compare simile.)

The topic of metaphor has a history dating back at least to Aristotle, but not until the 20th century did it come to be regarded seriously as a problem relevant to the general study of language and thought.

Aristotle took the use of metaphors to be evidence of a superior intellect. At the same time, he seemed to believe that their use was primarily the prerogative of poets and politicians. For philosophers and scientists, they were potentially too misleading. In limiting the use of metaphors to the ornamental, rather than concentrating on their communicative value, Aristotle essentially elevated metaphor from the prosaic to the esoteric. The unfortunate result was that attention to the topic came to be largely restricted to rhetoricians. Indeed, during the 19th century, the principal activity of rhetoricians became the interpretation of particular metaphors (and other tropes) in literary texts — an obsession that was largely responsible for the demise of rhetoric as a serious discipline.

In spite of limiting what he presumably considered to be the legitimate uses of metaphor, Aristotle's analysis of the underlying logic of metaphor has always dominated thinking on the topic. He believed metaphors to be implicit comparisons based on the principles of analogy. It can be argued that this view has had the undesirable effect of blurring the distinctions of metaphor, analogy, and similarity — more will be said of this later.

Around the turn of the century there appeared an English translation of Michel Bréal's Essay de sémantique. In this influential work, Bréal claimed that metaphor was a linguistic device, widespread in its use, and of great importance in linguistic change. Then, in 1936, metaphor was revitalized in the study of the language of literature by I. A. Richards. Richards introduced useful terminology for talking about metaphors (topic/tenor, vehicle, ground, and tension) — terminology that has come to be fairly standard.

In 1962 Max Black's book Models and Metaphors appeared. In it, Black rejected the Aristotelian 'comparison' view wherein metaphors are merely elliptical comparisons, and he questioned the generality of the 'substitution' view wherein metaphors are merely ornamental substitutes for literal language. Instead, elaborating on the views of Richards, he proposed an 'interaction' view. On this view, the tenor (or topic, or subject) of a metaphor is seen as interacting with the metaphorical vehicle to produce a kind of emergent meaning for the entire sentence — one that could not have resulted from the combination of the tenor with some other predicate, literal or metaphorical. Thus, in the metaphor 'man is a wolf', 'man' is viewed, as it were, through a 'wolf' filter. Our interpretation of both terms is altered.

By the mid-1970s, an active interest in the topic had spread to all sorts of disciplines, most relevant of which, in the present context, was cognitive psychology. Psychologists became interested in questions such as: does the comprehension of metaphors involve special processes not normally involved in the comprehension of literal language? Do metaphors play a role in the development of language? Why do people use metaphors? What is the interrelationship of metaphor, analogy, and similarity? Many of these questions have their counterparts in philosophy, but the empirical techniques that psychology brings to bear may throw more light on them.

The principal dispute over comprehension mechanisms is about whether or not metaphors are understood by first unsuccessfully attempting to impose a literal interpretation. According to one view, when people encounter metaphors they recognize that a literal interpretation is incompatible with the context and then proceed to reinterpret the metaphor figuratively. According to the other view, ordinarily people interpret the metaphorical meaning directly, without even entertaining a literal interpretation. Flatly stated in this way, each view has its problems. One problem with the reinterpretation account is that it does not specify the basis upon which a reinterpretation is made. Many linguistic forms require 'reinterpretation': sarcasm ('That was a clever thing to do,' said of an obviously foolish act), hyperbole ('There were millions of people at the party,' said to indicate that there were many — but obviously not millions), and indirect speech acts, such as indirect requests ('Do you know what time it is?', meant as a request to be told the hour of the day), are just some of the many examples. Reinterpretation theories need to be able to characterize the differences between these (and other) kinds of non-literal uses of language. They need both to specify the different rules that underlie the comprehension of different types, and to offer an account of how people are supposed to know in advance which rules to employ on a particular occasion: it hardly seems likely, for example, that the rules for reinterpreting sarcasm are applied, or even considered, in the ordinary interpretation of a metaphor.

The direct comprehension view finesses this last question. However, as stated, it suffers from underspecification. It amounts to little more than a statement to the effect that, when people encounter metaphors, they understand them; on its own, it has no answer to the question, how? A more general theory of language comprehension is needed to answer this question. The theory (or theoretical framework) that is most often appealed to is one based on the notion of schemas (or scripts, or frames). The idea is that comprehension in general proceeds by finding a schema that 'fits' the input. Then, the argument goes, the difference between understanding literal and metaphorical language turns out to be simply one of quality of fit.

Data from experiments suggests that elements of both views are correct. Experiments measuring (for example) the time taken by people to indicate that they have understood a sentence (either metaphorical or literal) show that, with sufficient preceding context, subjects do not require the additional time to process metaphors that the reinterpretation theory predicts. On the other hand, when a metaphor is encountered with very little prior context, the predicted increase in reaction time is found. In such cases, it seems, people have to 'work out' what the sentence means, whereas in other cases what they do seems more like confirming contextually generated expectations. Of course, 'working out the meaning' is something that is often required for literal uses of language too. Furthermore, there are many 'frozen' metaphors in the language, often idioms, that, once known, never require special processing. Thus, the evidence suggests that extra processing is required by language that is not well integrated into the context, be it literal or metaphorical, and that under appropriate circumstances metaphorical language is processed as quickly and easily as literal language.

Observant parents, as well as developmental psychologists, have often noticed that quite young children (2–3 years of age) appear to be very creative in their use of language. When the young child tries to express something for which he has not learned the conventional word, he often uses some other word that succeeds in realizing his communicative intentions, even though the choice may not be literally appropriate. This activity is described by developmental psychologists as 'semantic overextension' (see language: learning word meanings), but some have claimed that this behaviour in fact reflects the use of metaphor by young children, and that the use of metaphor is a fundamental ingredient in language development.

Attractive though this view might be, it seems to suffer from some rather serious drawbacks. First among these is the evidence that such young children are unable to understand metaphors. Estimates of the age at which children begin to understand metaphors properly vary considerably. Some investigators claim that it is not until early adolescence, while others claim that by the age of 7 or 8 many children can deal with metaphors. The variations in these estimates are the result of several factors, the principal ones being fluctuating and often rather atheoretical criteria for what is to count as a metaphor, and for what is to count as evidence of its comprehension. However, most investigators agree that 3-year-old children cannot understand metaphors. Since it is well established that children's language comprehension is far ahead of their language production, if 2- and 3-year-old children were producing metaphors it would be the only known example of behaviour contrary to the comprehension-before-production rule. A second problem is that the claim that such young children produce metaphors fails to recognize that an utterance could be metaphorical from an adult's perspective, but not from that of the child who produces it. In other words, the claim may be excessively 'adultocentric'.

Doubtless, part of the attractiveness of claiming that very young children produce metaphors is that an important function of metaphors is to permit the expression of ideas that might otherwise be (literally) inexpressible for a particular speaker in a particular language. In some cases the lack of words in the language has resulted in entire domains being mapped into other domains so that the language itself incorporates now unnoticed metaphorical means of description — this is one of the ways in which, as Bréal pointed out, metaphors are important in linguistic change. A familiar example of such a mapping is the use of temperature terms to describe personality characteristics — we talk of people in terms of their being warm, or cool, cold, or icy. When such metaphors are embedded in the language to fill systematic gaps in the lexicon, they often go unnoticed. But the same principle operates at the level of the individual speaker, except that, if the language does not supply conventional resources (be they literal or metaphorical), the speaker may have to create his own. In such cases he uses a novel metaphor.

The expression of the otherwise inexpressible is not the only communicative function that metaphors serve. They also achieve a certain communicative compactness, since all the applicable predicates belonging to the metaphorical vehicle are implied succinctly through the vehicle itself. Thus, even if what a metaphor expresses may have been more or less expressible without the metaphor, its use may be more economical and hence more effective than the long list of predicates that it entails.

The relationship between metaphors and similarity is a complex one. Without having to commit oneself to one of the various theories about how metaphors work, it is apparent that at some level, and in some way, metaphors capitalize on a similarity between the term used metaphorically (the vehicle) and the thing that the metaphor is a metaphor for. Thus, even though it may be incorrect to claim, as some have, that a metaphor is merely a statement of similarity, it is probably not incorrect to say that a metaphor is largely a statement of similarity. Clearly, if one says of jogging that it is a religion, the metaphor would not work if jogging and religion were not in some way similar. On the other hand, it is obvious that in many ways jogging is not in the least bit like a religion. It could be argued, in fact, that jogging is not really like a religion at all; if we want something that is really like a religion, a cult is. The interesting thing is that if one now considers the two similarity statements 'Jogging is like a religion' and 'A cult is like a religion', the latter, while appearing to be really true, has no metaphorical potential. This suggests that, if metaphors are based on similarity statements, only some similarity statements can fulfil the required role. The similarity statements that seem to fit the bill are those that themselves seem to be metaphorical. According to this view, that is why one can say 'Metaphorically speaking, jogging is like a religion', but not 'Metaphorically speaking, a cult is like a religion'. Now, if the only similarity statements that can form the basis of metaphors are metaphorical similarity statements, two important consequences follow. The first is that it is futile to attempt to explain metaphors by reducing them to similarity statements because the statements to which they get reduced still have the characteristic of being metaphorical. The second is that, as a research strategy, the examination of similarity statements may be the best way to uncover the difference between the literal and the metaphorical.

Psychological discussions about the nature of metaphor often seem to use the terms 'similarity' and 'analogy' as though they were interchangeable. It is possible, however, to be more precise about the relationship between the two by arguing that an analogy is a similarity between relations rather than between single-place predicates. On this view, an analogy is a particular kind of similarity statement and, from a psychological perspective, whether a particular comparison is or is not an analogy may depend on the way in which the entities being compared are conceptualized or represented at the time. A simple example will illustrate the point. Suppose we are told that cigarettes are like time bombs. If we entertain this proposition in terms of a simple similarity statement, we might say that both cigarettes and time bombs share the property of (potentially) causing death after a delay. In other words, considered in this way we would have something to the effect: 'Being a cigarette is like being a time bomb.' On the other hand, suppose one conceptualizes the statement in the following way: 'People smoking cigarettes are like people exposed to time bombs.' Now what we have is something roughly equivalent in meaning, except that it is stated as a similarity between two relations — it is an analogy. Again, from a psychological perspective, how the terms in a similarity statement will be represented is likely to depend on the context, it is not fixed by the linguistic structure of the statement itself. Thus, again, the point is not whether metaphors are built on similarity or on analogy, since both are forms of comparison. The point is that metaphors are built on comparisons which are themselves metaphorical, be they analogical or not.

(Published 1987)

— Andrew Ortony

Bibliography
• Black, M. (1962). 'Metaphor'. In Black, M. (ed.), Models and Metaphors.
• Blasko, D. G. (1999). 'Only the tip of the iceberg: who understands what about metaphor?' Journal of Pragmatics, 31.
• Glucksberg, S. (2003). 'The psycholinguistics of metaphor'. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7/2.
• Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we Live by.
• Ortony, A. (ed.) (1979). Metaphor and Thought.

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A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one object or idea is applied to another, thereby suggesting a likeness or analogy between them.

IN BRIEF: Comparing two unlike things that suggests a similarity between them.

That entire story was metaphorical because it compared a barnyard with the whole country.

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Quotes:

"The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him." - Jose Ortega Y Gasset

For a list of words related to metaphor, see:

• Devices, Techniques, and Elements - metaphor: word or phrase used in place of another to suggest likeness or analogy between them
• Rhetoric and Figures of Speech - metaphor: identification of one thing by another; trope, or turn of phrase, describing one idea in terms of another idea or image analogous to it

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See words rhyming with "metaphoric."

  See crossword solutions for the clue Metaphor.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - metafor, billede

Nederlands (Dutch)
metafoor, beeldspraak, symbool

Français (French)
n. - métaphore

Deutsch (German)
n. - Metapher

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μεταφορά (σχήμα λόγου), αλληγορία

Italiano (Italian)
metafora

Português (Portuguese)
n. - metáfora (f)

Русский (Russian)
метафора

Español (Spanish)
n. - metáfora

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - metafor

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
隐喻, 象征

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 隱喻, 象徵

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 은유

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 隠喩, 暗喩, 類似したもの

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) كنايه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮השאלה, מטפורה, העברה‬

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