Semantics Approach To Metaphor Essay

2.1.2 Semantics Approach to Metaphor

In the following two thousand years, Aristotle’s “Comparison theory” has been in a dominated position in western rhetorical metaphor research. Until 1936, with the publication of The Philosophy of Rhetoric, British rhetorician Richards challenge the Rhetorical approach to metaphor, and presented the famous “interaction theory” in metaphor study. Richards early made metaphor analysis related to the concept of cognitive domain (Lin Shuwu, 1997).

Richards (1936) argued that metaphor was “the omnipresent principle of language”, and our daily life was full of metaphors. In our daily communication, on average there would be one metaphor in every three sentences (Richards, 1936:92). That is to say metaphor is “ordinary” rather than “extraordinary”.

Richards claims that “in the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor

This age in the west was called the time of ‘metaphor mania’ by M. Johnson (1987). According to summary by Lan Chun (2005, 111-112), Richards and Max Black, the represented interactionists, abandoned the traditional view of metaphor, and began to emphasize the metaphor’s cognitive value. Besides them, Nietzsche, Shelley, Wemer, Cassirer and Reddy, also researched metaphor as a linguistic phenomenon separately from the perspective of philosophy, literary criticism, psychology, anthropology and linguistics. But it is the book “Metaphors we live by” written by Lakoff & Johnson in 1980 that really established the metaphor’s status in the cognitive studies.

In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (2003) discussed the essence, structure, mechanism and function of metaphor. George Lakoff and Johnson defined “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”(Lakoff and Johnson,