The Pragmatics of metaphor use: From the conceptual view to the Relevance-theoretic perspective

This chapter aims at presenting two main theoretical frameworks for metaphor use analysis: the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and the relevance approach to metaphor understanding (Sperber and Wilson 1986). The former has considered metaphor not only as a linguistic phenomenon, but also as a cognitive mechanism. On the one hand, corpus linguistics, as well as artificial intelligence, provides an empirical answer to the criticism for conceptual reduction in relation to the conceptual metaphor theory. On the other hand, the relevant-theoretic approach showed that metaphor is not “special,” but rather the result of a pragmatic process of “narrowing” or “broadening” of the literal meaning. Interestingly, an alternative route to metaphor understanding has been proposed in the relevance-theoretic framework (Carston 2002, 2010), referencing images evoked in metaphor use.