文档介绍：The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor Pagina 1 di 41
From ******@ Fri Jan 29 20:06:36 1993
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 93 18:02:16 -0800
From: e Lakoff
To: ******@.
Subject: Re: metaphors
The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor
e Lakoff
(c) Copyright e Lakoff, 1992
To Appear in Ortony, Andrew (ed.) Metaphor and Thought (2nd edition), Cambridge
University Press.
Do not go gentle into that good night. -Dylan Thomas
Death is the mother of beauty . . . -Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning
Introduction
These famous lines by Thomas and Stevens are examples of what classical theorists, at
least since Aristotle, have referred to as metaphor: instances of novel poetic language in
which words like mother, go, and night are not used in their normal everyday senses. In
classical theories of language, metaphor was seen as a matter of language not thought.
Metaphorical expressions were assumed to be mutually exclusive with the realm of
ordinary everyday language: everyday language had no metaphor, and metaphor used
mechanisms outside the realm of everyday conventional language. The classical theory
was taken so much for granted over the centuries that many people didn't realize that it
was just a theory. The theory was not merely taken to be true, but came to be taken as
definitional. The word metaphor was defined as a novel or poetic linguistic expression
where one or more words for a concept are used outside of its normal conventional
meaning to express a similar concept. But such issues are not matters for definitions; they
are empirical questions. As a cognitive scientist and a linguist, one asks: What are the
generalizations governing the linguistic expressions re ferred to classically as poetic
metaphors? When this question is answered rigorously, the classical theory turns out to be
false. The generalizations governing poetic metaphorical expressions are not