Summary: The Nature Of Metaphors

LITERATURE REVIEW

1. METAPHOR

Over the years scholars have studied the nature of metaphors from different perspectives and today it is a primary object of linguists, who research and investigate its role in nowadays language. The first ones who had shown a great interest in studying it were philosophers. In A Universal Approach to Metaphors, Lin Ma (2008) states that according to philosophers literal speech was thought to be the vital part of a language whereas a metaphor is only an aberration or a device to make the discourse more persuasive or embellished. Despite that, from the time of Shakespeare metaphors are used in poetry, literature, music and spoken language until this day. As a professor of Semiotics Marcel Danesi (2017) has explained, “This situation changed in the twentieth century, starting with the work of I. A. Richards and the early gestalt psychologists, who put forward arguments and evidence that led, by the later part of the century, to the view that metaphor was more than a digression from literal language; rather, it was a trace of how meaning and concepts are formed.” (p. 15)

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980:3) conclude, metaphor once was considered to be an optional figure of speech,

TYPES OF METAPHORS

In order to gain a better understanding of the role of a metaphor in a discourse, we need to identify the types of metaphors existing in the English language, since these days they are intensely present in everything ranging from casual conversations and online messages to news reports and political speeches. While researching, the abundant number of types and kinds of metaphor was noticed, but to make things clearer James Geary (2011) suggests to firstly divide metaphors into three abstract stages: active, dormant and extinct.

1. Active metaphor - when used, it is still noticeable as a metaphor which is not considered to be part of the everyday language. As in Wyndham Lewi’s definition, “Laughter is the mind