Metaphorical Meaning and Its Effect on Interactions in Language Use: An Overview

Citation: Ayad Enad Khalaf Al-Luhaibi (2017). Metaphorical Meaning and Its Effect on Interactions in Language Use: An Overview. Yobe Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (YOJOLLAC), Vol. 5. Department of African Languages and Linguistics, Yobe State University, Damaturu, Nigeria. ISSN 2449-0660

METAPHORICAL MEANING AND ITS EFFECT ON INTERACTIONS IN LANGUAGE USE: AN OVERVIEW

Ayad Enad Khalaf Al-Luhaibi

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with metaphorical meaning and its effects on interactions in language use from the standpoint of Levison’s (1983) theory of pragmatics of interactions in language use. The thesis that successful language interactions occur when objects and events mutually influence one another is widely discussed and commonly accepted in literature on language meanings and pragmatic interactions (Levison, 1983; Mey, 1993 and Yule 1996). Yet much attention is needed by blending pragmatic assumption with cognitive linguistic principles to enhance valuable insights about meaning of a metaphor in interactions in language use. On the premise of that, the paper as part of its research goals, adopts eclectic principles to explain not only the different ways of metaphorical use in language and show its potential in attracting language users’ attention but unravels the conceptual and semantic mechanisms of metaphorical choices which allow language users to highlight variety of meanings and inferences. 

Key words: Interaction, Language, Meaning, Metaphor.  

1.0  INTRODUCTION

Metaphor with its ability to blend two different ideas can create a lot of new meanings for the existing words. Thus, it is the most prominent example of semantic creativity in which the use of a word to give another meaning than its original meaning. The transference of meaning, or ‘metaphor’ in its widest sense, as Leech (1982) shows, is the process whereby literal absurdity leads the mind to comprehension on a figurative plane. Creativity, in terms of finding new meaning for existing words, depends on some principles, such as the context in which the word is used. Gerrig and Gibbs (1988) define a creative language to be “any utterance, phrase, or word whose meaning varies with the context in which it is produced in a way that could not be predicted from the lexicalized meanings of its component words” (Gerrig and Gibbs (1988:2).Depending on the context, metaphors can give different meanings; positive or negative. For example, speakers/writers can use metaphors to give opposite meaning and to create mock expressions when they use these metaphors in a context which is not suitable for them. Thus, speakers/writers can use a metaphorical expression and intend the opposite meaning of the metaphorical meaning of that expression to create irony.

Generally, theorists have worked hard to assimilate metaphor to theories of speaker/writer meaning (whether semantic or pragmatic). Davidson has argued that there is no distinctive speaker/writer meaning in metaphor. What is distinctive about metaphor is that there is a correspondence between a particular perspective on the topic and target of the metaphor and that one thinks through that perspective to whatever insights he gets. This article will show the ways by which one can match the meaning of a metaphor, and how this meaning can affect the general meaning of a sentence.

2.0 WHAT IS A METAPHOR

Metaphor is defined variously by different scholars depending on the various perspectives of metaphors. There are two major views regarding metaphor; the traditional view which considers metaphor as a stylistic device, and the current view which considers metaphor as a way of thinking or part of our cognition.

According to the traditional view, metaphor is a stylistic device that consists in presenting one entity by associating it with the qualities of a different entity (Galperin, 1977). In virtually all studies of metaphor, metaphors are defined as a figure of speech that is typically used when meaning is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable; an instance of this Ɗisɗ a metaphorical expression that is mapping from a source to a target domain (Carter, 2004). As a rhetorical device of transference, metaphor shifts ideas or meanings from one thing to another to achieve “a new wider ‘special’ or precise meaning”. Ortony (1993) shows that metaphors were seen as “deviant” and needed to be explained in terms of “normal” language usage. Indeed, metaphors were generally seen as novelties, to be used for specific rhetorical purposes. Metaphor, as it was thought, is a decorative means in language to depict the “literal” world, which could be comprehended fully without metaphor.

As a result of the traditional view, linguists feel that the meaning of a metaphor (figurative meaning) can only be understood by depending on the literal meaning, for example, Searle (1993) argues that metaphors could only be understood by starting with the literal meaning, then comparing it to the figurative meaning, creating a literal-figurative split that later linguists would rebuke. This idea about metaphor came from Aristotle’s idea when he argues that the listener/reader of a metaphor has to find something common between the metaphor and its subject in order to get a full understanding. A metaphor is not only a means of referring to things but also describes some aspects of these things. Thus, from metaphor, as Aristotle says, “we can best get hold of something fresh.” (Rhetoric, III.10).

Another expansion for the traditional view of metaphor is from Kenneth Burke who, in his Permanence and Change (1935) and “The Four Master Tropes” (1945), notes that metaphor is about perception and how we view things. For him, to consider the target from the point of view of the source is to use the source as a perspective upon the target. He goes further to explain that it is possible to understand the character of something by approaching it (via metaphor) through a variety of perspectives (1945). Thus, the traditional view looks at metaphor as a comparison between two things. Until the late 1970s and the 1980s, metaphor was considered by most linguists and scholars to be an abnormal part of speech, a poetic flourish that was merely decorative language.

The current view considers metaphor as a way of thinking/ part of our cognition. The idea that metaphors are not just decorative embellishments but central not just to language but human cognition and thinking has been flourished at the end of the seventies of the 20th century, in particular by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) who illustrate the pervasiveness of metaphorical conceptualizations in all kinds of contexts. From the cognitivist perspective, metaphor is seen as a result of a conceptual mapping from a source domain (source) to a target domain (target). Thus, metaphor is seen as a conceptual process that plays an important role in our structuring and categorising of the world around us for the sake of the creation of meaning. By considering metaphor as a way of finding new meanings for existing words, it can be said that metaphor is a type of semantic creativity.

2.1 METAPHOR AND INTERACTION

It can be suggested that in every metaphor, there are two types of interaction; internal interaction (between the target and the source of the metaphor), and external interaction (between the interlocutors in a conversation). Interaction, for Carter (2004), is a basic principle of creativity. Creative acts have variable values depending on the language used to describe such values. One may ask how listeners/readers can understand a metaphoric expression uttered by a speaker/writer, and what the importance of metaphor is in an interaction in a sentence, such as the following:

1) Tom is a wolf.

The role of a metaphor in any conversational interaction is important because it can provide cues to listeners/readers of how to understand these metaphors. When a listener/reader wants to understand sentence (1), s/he will not imagine Tom’s behaviour and shape as a full resemblance for a "wolf". S/he will not imagine Tom’s mouth or the way of eating as simply in terms of similarities to a wolf feeding on another animal in a wood but through a more complex process of interaction of the systems of ideas. What the listener is doing is only selecting some elements from the "wolf" and mapping them to Tom’s character such as; cunning, viciousness, eating, and cleanliness. At the same time, the listeners/readers will not transfer some elements and features such as; long ears and a long tail. Such understanding of metaphor comes from the fact that when speakers/writers use metaphors, they only try to transfer some selected characters from one thing to another and these selected characters are known and acceptable for the users of a language.

The interaction, as a process, brings into being what Black terms e.g., ‘implication-complex’, a system of associated implications shared by the linguistic community on the basis of an impulse of free meaning, was unavailable prior to the metaphor’s introduction (Black 1979:28).It can be concluded that metaphoric use of language elements is one of the possible and important resources of strengthening the efficiency and effectiveness as well as compactness of the interactional communication.The successful interaction between interlocutors is caused by meaning understanding of a metaphor in a discourse. Understanding the term of ‘meaning’ in general sense and the ‘meaning of in metaphor’ are two subjects that will be discussed separately in the following sections.

3.0 MEANING AS AN IDENTIFICATION OF OBJECTS WITH NOTHING IN COMMON   

Before starting with ‘meaning’, a brief description will be given to understand the relationship between concepts and meanings. It is known that every concept has one meaning but its multiple terms come from different languages. The oneness of the meaning of a concept in different languages comes from the relation between language and thought. Behind every concept there is a single thought. Thus, when people use a language they use symbols to reflect their thoughts on life. Richards (1936) considered speech as a repetition of what is available as a thought already. Thus, every word is connected with a thought or an object and refers to it. There are many approaches to meaning which explain the relationship between meaning and the objects in the world. One of these approaches is the ‘Referential approach’ to meaning which describes that the meaning of an object or a referent is connected with the referent (object of reality denoted by the word). In order to find the meaning, one must establish an interdependence between words and objects of reality they denote. So, according to referential approach, meaning is often understood as an object or phenomenon in the outside world that is referred to by a word.

Another approach to meaning is the ‘Functional approach’ which defines a word by its functioning within a phrase or a sentence. The functional approach is applied in contextual analysis, semantics, syntax and other branches of linguistics. The meaning of a linguistic unit is studied only through its relation to other linguistic units because meaning is viewed as the function of a word in speech.

‘Stylistics’ is more subjective in the perception of meaning in words, unlike other branches of linguistics. A crucial issue for stylistic studies is the ability of a word to be polysemous, i.e. to comprise several lexical meanings. Every word, no matter how rich in meaning, leaves the door open for new shades of meaning and even for independent meanings. Stylistics takes for granted that a word has an almost unlimited potentiality of acquiring new meanings. Different kinds of meanings viewed from different angles are;

1- The ‘contextual meaning’ which is related to the context and thus it is borne in the context and disappear if the context is altered, for example:

2) a. The road was a snake around the edges of the mountain.

   b. The man was a snake in his business dealings with the elderly people.

 c. I was startled by a large black and yellow snake that was in the back yard.

The word snake has three different meanings in the above sentences according to its context. In (a), the word snake is used metaphorically as a source for its target The road to transfer the meaning of convolution to depict the shape of the road. In (b), the word snake is also used metaphorically as a source for its target. The man to transfer the wickedness and deceiving character of that man in his business dealings with the people. In (c), the word snake is used literally to depict a reptile poisonous hurt animal. In each case, the context is the determiner of the meaning of the word in the sentence.

2- The ‘dictionary meaning’ which is more stable than other kinds and materialized in a definite context. For example, by looking at the meaning of the word snake at a Mariam Webster Dictionary, it will give the meaning as “any of numerous limbless scaled reptiles (suborder Serpentes synonym Ophidia) with a long tapering body and with salivary glands often modified to produce venom which is injected through grooved or tubular fangs”. Thus,‘dictionary meaning’ refers to the literal meaning of a word.

3- The ‘grammatical meaning’ refers to the relations between words and constructions bearing upon their structural functions in the language as a system. There are no words deprived of grammatical meaning since all words belong to some system and consequently have their place in the system and function in speech. So, it can be defined as the expression in the speech of relationships between words. An example of grammatical meaning is the meaning of plurality in the following words students, boob, windows, and compositions.

4- The ‘lexical meaning’ is a means by which a word-form is made to express a definite concept. Lexical meaning refers to some concrete concepts, phenomena, or things of objective reality, whether real or imaginary. The definitions of lexical meaning given by various authors, though different in detail, agree in the basic principle: they all point out that lexical meaning is the realization of concept or emotion by means of a definite language system. Lexical meaning of any word can consist of two types of meanings; ‘denotative’ and ‘connotative’.

Denotative’ meaning is connected with the extralinguistic reality. It is the precise naming of the feature of an idea, phenomenon, or object, the name by which we recognize the whole of the concept. The conceptual content of a word is expressed in its denotative meaning. It is the denotational meaning that makes communication possible.The other type ‘Connotative meaning’ is connected with the conditions and participants of communication. It is the pragmatic communicative value the word receives depending on where, when, how, by whom, for what purpose and in what contexts it may be used. Connotation comprises four components: emotive, appraising, expressive and stylistic. If denotation is obligatory in any word, connotation is optional. All four components of connotation can be acting together, or in different combinations or can be entirely absent. Both of these types of lexical meaning are interdependent and important in understanding a text because every one of them has definite purposes. The denotative meaning of a word can fulfil the significative and the communicative functions of that word. Thus, it can be regarded as the central factor in the functioning of language. Other functions such as; the expressive function of the language (describing things) and the pragmatic function (the effect of words upon listeners/reader) can be fulfilled by the connotative meaning.

It is important here to differentiate between the connotative and the implicational meaning of the word because both of them refer to the non-literal meaning and they may seem similar. Implicational meaning is the implied information associated with the word, with what the speakers/writers know about the referent. A ‘wolf’ is known to be greedy and cruel (implicational meaning) but the denotative meaning of this word does not include these features. The denotative or the intentional meaning of the word wolf is "a wild animal resembling a dog that kills sheep and sometimes even attacks men". Thus, another type of meaning such as the "figurative meaning" can be derived from implied information, from what we know about wolves as; cruel, greedy and wild animal. So it can be used to describe cruel and greedy persons, such as;

3) He is wolfish.

To conclude, any word can have many meanings for two reasons; first, the ability of a word to be polysemantic, i.e. to comprise several lexical meanings. Second, the effect of other factors such as; the context and the speaker/writer’s intention behind using this word and not others. Thus, a word may have either direct or figurative meaning. The ‘direct meaning’ is understood when it nominates the referent without the help of a context, in isolation, and the ‘figurative meaning’ is understood when the referent is named and at the same time characterized through its similarity with other objects, e.g.

4) a. It was a heavy box.  (Direct meaning)

   b. It was a heavy rain.  (Figurative meaning)

The adjective heavy in isolation possesses the meaning "of great weight, weighty". In the figurative use of the word heavy, there are various meanings according to the combined words. When combined with the lexical group of words denoting natural phenomena as wind, storm, etc, it means "striking, following with force, abundant", e.g. heavy rain, wind, storm, etc. In combination with the words industry, arms, artillery and the like, heavy has the meaning "the larger kind of something as heavy industry, artillery"

The above study for kinds of meaning, in general, will be useful in understanding meanings of metaphor in the next paragraphs. The next section will focus on meanings in metaphor, its types and different views regarding it.

4.0 MEANINGS IN METAPHOR

Metaphor is one of the resources of meanings by which people represent the world. The study of meaning in a metaphor in a sentence becomes necessary because metaphor has an effect on the general meaning of the sentence. Metaphor affects the meaning of the sentence because it allows for the production of meaning by transforming the meaning of the target and source into a new form. It is known that a metaphor is a non-literal use of language. In order to examine the meaning of a metaphor, it is necessary to look beyond the literal meaning such as; the implied or connotative meaning of that word which is used metaphorically. Some words have positive connotation i.e., lion, flower, sea... etc. while others have negative connotations i,e, snake, pig, bitch, etc. Speakers/writers deliberately choose appropriate words depending on the implied or the connotative meanings behind these words, to achieve their goals by transforming the meaning of the source into the target.

Thus, we can say that in general, metaphor can be used to give two kinds of meaning; positive and negative. Although some metaphorical words such as, table, car, computer have neutral meaning, these metaphors can get positive or negative meaning by adding some more modifiers with them such as, adjectives or adverbs that are used metaphorically, as can be seen in:

5) a. John is a computer. (Neutral)

   b. John is a computer that is not connected to the internet. (Negative)

   c. John is a computer in his thinking. (Positive)

   d. John's mind needs a new format. (Negative)

From the above examples, we can understand that even neutral words which have no specified feelings can be used negatively or positively according to speaker/writer’s intention in the sentence. We can understand the speaker/writer’s intention of using neutral words by looking at the surrounded words of the metaphor which can create a specific impression. For more understanding of the metaphorical meaning, it is necessary in this place to differentiate it from the literal meaning, as it will be explained in the following section.

5.0 METAPHORICAL MEANING AND LITERAL MEANING

The meaning in metaphors cannot be found easily by looking at a dictionary, as it is explained in the last section, because dictionaries and the meanings they contain, as Kövecses (2005) states, represent what is static and highly conventional about particular languages. It will be helpful to preface our discussion about meanings in metaphors by tackling some relevant views of scholars which play an important role in the explanation of the current topic. Therefore, it is necessary to talk about each of these views to understand what the relationship between the metaphorical meaning and the literal meaning in a metaphor is.

It is known that behind every concept there is a single thought in the mind of the speaker/writer. This means that the meaning of a concept is something stored already in the mind of language users.As a metaphor is a combination of two ideas, Richards (2001) states that behind every metaphor there are two thoughts. The meaning of metaphor is somehow complicated and required more work from the side of the listener/reader to understand it because it is the combination of two thoughts together from different contexts in a new special context. Metaphor cannot be understood directly by the literal meaning of every word in a sentence because the literal meaning, according to Craig (1998), is obvious and differs from the metaphorical meaning which is ineffable and can be understood only by understanding the reason for using metaphors. This discussion will lead to another question which is, what is the effects of the literal meaning on the understanding of metaphorical meaning?

It is known that the literal meaning of every word has an importance in the general meaning of a sentence. I. A. Richard (1936) shows, in his "The Philosophy of Rhetoric", that the meaning of a sentence is understood to be something built up from the separate meanings of its words. According to the semantic view, the interpretation of metaphor is totally dependent on the literal meanings of the objects (the target and the source). For the purpose of the metaphorical interpretation, the semantic view looks at the relationship between the two objects or ideas in a metaphor and therefore, it either makes the similarity between the two objects as the basis of metaphor interpretation or takes the difference between the objects as the primary factor of interpretation. It can be concluded that the semantic view deals with the metaphorical meaning as a secondary one that arises from the interaction of the target and the source on the level of the literal meaning (Leezenberg, 2001:93)

Lakoff, from his part, shows that a metaphor is the ‘result of some operation performed upon the literal meaning of the utterance…’ (Lakoff& Johnson, 1980a:453). For Lakoff, all linguistic metaphors are motivated by conceptual metaphors found in our minds. These conceptual metaphors are regarded as the source of metaphors where a single conceptual metaphor can be expressed by different linguistic metaphors as in the following conceptual metaphor THE MIND IS A MACHINE which can be expressed by different expressions as in:

6) My mind is not operating today.

7) “I am a little rusty today” and “We are running out of steam” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 27).

So, from the above discussion, it becomes clear that the literal meaning has an importance for the appearance of metaphorical meaning. There is another view which calls for a balance between the literal and the metaphorical meanings as the basis of metaphor interpretation. This balance came from Black (1962) in his interaction theory when he argues that a metaphor involves an interaction between the literal meaning of a sentence and a metaphorical element. Black calls the literal element "frame" and metaphorical element “focus” and states that there are always two elements in any metaphor and one of these elements must be treated literally. To explain this point, let’s take two examples suggested by Black himself.

8) a. The chairman ploughed through the discussion.

    b. I like to plough my memories regularly.

To call the above sentences cases of metaphor, there should be at least one word (here, the word " ploughed ") used metaphorically in these sentences, and that at least one of the remaining words is being used literally. Black calls the word ploughed ‘the focus’ of the metaphor, and the remainder of the sentence in which that word occurs ‘the frame’. In the above two metaphors, the focus ploughed is the same while the ‘frames’ are different because of the differences in the meaning of between the two sentences. The differences in the two frames will produce some differences in the interaction between focus and frame in the two cases.

Other philosophers such as; John Searle, Nelson Goodman, Stanley Cavell, and Mary Hesse have offered their own accounts of metaphors which enhance Black's view. Although each one provides a unique explanation, they all agree with Black that metaphors carry some additional cognitive content and that the words in a metaphor take on a special figurative meaning.

So, it can be said that the literal meaning shares the importance with the metaphorical meaning in understanding a metaphor. But, can we generate this theory for all kinds of metaphor? Or, can we say that all metaphors have literal meanings? The answer came from Searle (1993) who opposes this theory because he rejects the idea that a metaphor is comparisons and this objection comes from the idea that some metaphorical expressions have no literal meaning and he gave this sentence as an example:

9) The bad news congealed into a block of ice.

Searle shows that this expression is a mixed metaphor but it contains no word with literal meaning. Another objection is that the word “interaction” is metaphoric in itself because there is no real interaction between words in a sentence. Searle agrees with the interaction theory in that the components of metaphor are related so that both the subject and predicate terms must be taken into account if utterance meaning is to be determined.

A different kind of objection to interaction theory came from Donald Davidson (1979) who insists that, semantically, metaphors mean what the words to convey them literally mean and nothing more. It seems that he rejects all the views that claiming that a distinction must be drawn at the level of words or sentences between two kinds of meanings: literal meaning and metaphorical meaning. Davidson argues that the process of understanding a metaphor is the same kind of activity as understanding any other linguistic utterance. But, he additionally explains that any understanding of any metaphor must depend on two things: first, an `inventive construal` of the literal meaning of the metaphorical utterance. Second, what the speaker/writer believes about the world. This again shows that for understanding a metaphor, one cannot depend or neglect the literal meaning completely because there are more than one meaning in every metaphor which is a way of creating new meanings.

The idea that metaphor actually creates new meaning is developed by Black (1979). His interactionist theory asserts that at the heart of a metaphor is the interaction between two subject terms, where the interaction provides the condition for a meaning which the subject cannot possess it independently of the metaphorical context. The primary subject in a metaphor, as Black shows, is coloured by a set of ‘associated implications’ normally predicated of the secondary subject (Black, 1979:28). From a number of possible meanings which could result, the primary subject sieves the qualities predictable of the secondary subject, letting through only those that fit.

The literal meaning and metaphorical meaning of a metaphor have different names in the speech act theory of Grice (1989) who distinguishes between two kinds of meaning in every utterance. The first one is the `utterance occasion meaning` (the meaning of an utterance in a definite occasion or context) and the `timeless utterance meaning` (the literal meaning of an utterance). When a speaker/writer produces a metaphor, according to this theory, s/he intends to make the listener/reader to infer the occasion meaning of the utterance by depending on understanding the timeless meaning of the utterance.

In all the cases, it becomes clear that a metaphor is a production of an interaction of two different types of meanings. I.R. Galperin (1981) shares this view when he argues that metaphors, as well as other devices, come from special kind of interaction between different types of lexical meaning. He singles out four general types of interaction which produce different devices, these are:

(1) Interaction of primary dictionary and contextually imposed meanings;

(2) Interaction of primary and secondary (derivative) logical meanings;

(3) Interaction of logical and emotive meanings;

(4) Interaction of logical and nominal meanings.

Galperin shows that the first interaction above between the dictionary and contextual meanings may produce three different lines of relations. The first line is the principle of affinity and the device based on this principle is metaphor. The second principle is symbol - referent relations and the stylistic device based on this principle is metonymy. The third principle is the opposition and the stylistic device based on the third is irony (Galperin, 1981).

In conclusion, although the interpretation of metaphor is studied by different theories, Knowles and Moon (2006: 60) argue that none of the theories associated with the approaches; (The Comparison Theory, The Interactional Theory or The Conceptual Theory of Metaphor) is completely right, nor is completely wrong or misguided. It can be said that the best way to analyse metaphors is to follow Levinson (1983) who suggests combining the cognitive, semantic, and pragmatic approaches. Thus, in order to analyse the meaning of a metaphor, the researcher can suggest an eclectic model by which we can give a comprehensive account of how metaphors can be analysed cognitively, semantically and pragmatically.

5.1 PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS ON THE APPROPRIATENESS OF METAPHORICAL USE OF LANGUAGE

In our speech communication, one can only understand the language being used if s/he is familiar with the language. For example, Wittgenstein (1958) believes that religious language is meaningful, but only to the religious believers because they are all part of a group that regularly uses that language, which has field-specific meaning to them. The same is with metaphors; one will only understand the metaphors being used if s/he is familiar with these metaphors. Metaphors have precious value in expressing the experiences of people and the metaphors used to describe the positive or negative aspects of this experience can thus be value-laden (Petersen et al, 2001).

Traditionally, metaphor was controversial between literature and philosophy departments who did not get on well with each other. Philosophers think that to use metaphor is to go far from reality and thus it must not be used in philosophical writings. The members of the literature department, on the other hand, find that philosophers are not serious with this claim because the philosophers themselves use metaphors in their analysis and even the titles of their articles such the title of Derrida "white methodology" or Hegel‘s name "the end of history". This cross point comes from the idea of the appropriateness of metaphorical expressions and which, in turn, is directly connected with the question whether a metaphor must have a truth value or not.

The comparison theory of metaphor asserts that the truth value of a metaphor can be expressed by listing all the respects in which the two terms are alike or similar. In contrast, two leading theorists emphasize the fact that truth conditions cannot be specified for a metaphor. Max Black (1962) maintains that metaphors have the function as referring expressions and thus, no need for them to have truth conditions. Moreover, he argues that when a metaphor is used in a definite context, its role is purely heuristic (it is a means to an end or a way of assisting understanding), and cannot be tested for truth or falsity (Black, 1962:37). Davidson (1984) shares the idea of Black, thinking that metaphor is a prompt to thought which cannot be reduced to or contained by a series of truth conditions. Metaphor, for Davidson, makes us see one thing as something else by "making a literal statement inspire or prompt the insight" (Davidson, 1984:263). Therefore to see one thing as something else is not the recognition of some truth or fact, and so "the attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply misguided" (Davidson, 1984:263). Glucksberg (1993) explains this fact by explaining that the literal meaning of metaphoric expressions such as; “My job is a jail”, as a class inclusion assertion, is recognized as false according to standard pragmatic theory. According to the standard pragmatic theory, listeners/readers assume that people generally say the truth (Grice, 1975), and the false class inclusion assertion is converted into a comparison assertion.

So, why did philosophers, who consider philosophy as a space for abstract concepts and propositions, use metaphor in their writings though they reject using them in philosophy? The answer is that Philosophers allow only three definite kinds of metaphors to be used in philosophy because they can contain truth-claims, as suggested by ‘Al-Karaki (2012) in her article "Thinking More’ as a Function of Metaphors in Philosophy", these are:

(1) Dead metaphors which are the roots of some supersensible concepts.

(2) Living metaphors which provide new conceptualizations of these concepts.

(3) Metaphors which are part of extended analogies and allegories that may support the persuasiveness of an argument.

All the above three kinds can contain truth-claims: the ‘container’ dead metaphor of the mind involves as much a proposition as Freud’s living ‘iceberg’ metaphor of the mind and Plato’s allegory of the cave. Thus, it can be said that metaphors are accepted in philosophy because they are not only figures of speech, but also figures of thought.

6.0  CONCLUSION

 As it was shown in this article, the metaphoric use of parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives …etc. is one of the possible and important resources in language to strength the efficiency and effectiveness as well as compactness of the interactional communication.It is also shown that any successful interaction between interlocutors is caused by meaning understanding of a metaphor in a discourse. The metaphoric use of language exploits the ability of words to be polysemous in the production of various lexical meanings. Moreover, it becomes clear from this study that the effect of other factors such as; the context and the speaker/writer’s intention are behind the use of specific words in specific contexts. Although interlocutors can understand some words which have positive or negative impression, the understanding of the speaker/writer’s intention of using neutral words can be matched by looking at the surrounded words of the metaphor which can create a specific impression.

From the theoretical points of view, this article has shown different views regarding the metaphorical meaning. It has shown how the semantic view, on the one hand, deals with the metaphorical meaning as a secondary one that arises from the interaction of the target and the source on the level of the literal meaning while, the pragmatic view, on the other hand, asserts on the pragmatic communicative value that a word receives depending on where, when, how, by whom, for what purpose and in what contexts it may be used. This article concludes that, the best way to analyse metaphors is to follow Levinson’s (1983) method by combining the cognitive, semantic, and pragmatic approaches. And, in order to analyse the meaning of a metaphor, the researcher can suggest an eclectic model by which we can give a comprehensive account of how metaphors can be analysed cognitively, semantically and pragmatically.

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