ANALYSING METAPHORS

tenor, vehicle, and ground: These are traditional terms referring to elements of the structure of a metaphor.

The word used metaphorically is the vehicle. Its metaphorical meaning is the tenor (sometimes called the topic). The ground represents the resemblances or analogies which justify the metaphor. 


AUFGABE:
Analyse the following metaphors. What are their tenor, vehicle, and ground?

The storm in Snoilsky's Lützen.
Tenor: "war, battle". Vehicle: "thunderstorm". Ground: both scenarios have got a few traits in common: chaos, noise, violence.

"Wallflower".
The tenor of this expression is an "overlooked, anonymous person, without anything special." The vehicle is "a small and modest flower which is usually overlooked".

Eliza Cook: "And banished reason to her throne,/usurped, advances fast".
Tenor: "an intoxicated person regains consciousness". Vehicle: the realm is that person's system as a whole, the throne room would be the cortex, reason is the rightful ruler, ethanol is the usurper who claimed the throne. Ground: liquor deprives one of logical reason and takes over one's body and psyche.

Let the cat out of the bag.
Tenor: explain something, especially a secret. Vehicle: the cat is the secret, the bag is the concealment of said secret. Ground: the cat is hidden in the bag, just like the secret as long as it's kept.

"It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness."
Tenor: a good time, a bad time. Or a time of knowledge/intelligence, a time of ignorance. Vehicle: "light" for knowledge/intelligence or good, "darkness" for ignorance or evil. Ground: when it's completely dark and there's no light, everything appears black and impossible to distinguish.

Computer mouse.
The vehicle is the "rodent". The tenor is the "device". The ground: similar shape and size.

To wear one's heart upon one's sleeve.
Tenor: to express oneself freely. Vehicle: the heart, as seat of emotions, and the sleeve, which is visible. Ground: one can't see a person's heart in his/her chest, while it could be seen if it had been worn upon a sleeve. Plus,  the heart, as seat of emotions.

image metaphor In the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, image metaphors are metaphors in which the source domain and the target domain are equally well structured, conceptually, in their own right (Her eyes were dark holes, Icicles bared long teeth from the eaves – both from the novelist Patricia Cornwell). In this, they differ from many conceptual metaphors (for instance, life is a journey), in which an abstract, less structured domain borrows structure from a more concrete, familiar and well-structured domain. Image metaphors are therefore less important as aids to reasoning and tend to have more of an aesthetic role, adding colour and feeling and moulding perception. Many literary metaphors are of this type. 

Many idioms are ‘frozen metaphors’, that is to say, metaphors that have become conventionalised and established: all over the place, fall into place, have one’s heart in the right place, know one’s place, a place in the sun, keep someone in his place, go places, have friends in high places.

 One indication that blending has occurred is the presence of so-called ‘emergent’ features of meaning – features observable in a combination AB which cannot be attributed to A or B separately. An example is the metaphor That surgeon is a butcher, which strongly suggests that the surgeon in question is incompetent, although this is not a conventional characteristic either of surgeons or butchers and is thus an emergent feature. Briefly, the explanation is that in interpreting That surgeon is a butcher, we extract relevant features from both the concept surgeon and the concept butcher, and then elaborate these on the basis of our knowledge of the world to form a ‘blend’. We infer that the butcher-surgeon is incompetent because we picture him in the operating theatre cheerfully wielding his instruments with the degree of delicacy and control of a butcher tackling a carcass, and with the same level of concern for the patient that a butcher has for his meat.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory This is a theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff. The basic idea is that metaphor is essentially a relation between conceptual domains, whereby ways of talking about one domain (the ‘source domain’) can be applied to another domain (the ‘target domain’) by virtue of ‘correspondences’ between the two. Typically, the source domain is relatively familiar and conceptually well-structured, and the structures are used to articulate the target domain. In the case of well-established metaphors, the correspondences are held to be permanently laid down in the cognitive system. By this theory, metaphor is not tied to particular linguistic expressions: a given conceptual metaphor can in principle underlie any number of metaphorical expressions, some of which may be conventionalised, others not. An example of a conceptual metaphor is life is a journey. Here, the source domain is that of journey and the target domain – what the metaphorical expression refers to – is that of life. The following are some of the relevant correspondences between these domains:

journey                                                         life

beginning of journey                                  birth

end of journey                                            death

reaching destination                              achieving aim                     

crossroads                                            point of choice

going uphill                                            finding life difficult
obstacles                                                 difficulties
fellow-travellers                                partners, colleagues, friends

These correspondences allow expressions such as the following to be interpreted:

My son is just beginning life’s journey. 


The effect of this is to highlight some aspects of the situation and play down others. Metaphors start their lives as fresh creations. As time passes, however, they may settle down and become established in the language as conventionalised or ‘frozen’ metaphors. A novel metaphor is usually recognised as such by the fact that its literal interpretation is in some way odd, and this triggers a search for a figurative interpretation. Conventional metaphors typically do not have to be processed in a special metaphorical way – their ‘metaphorical’ meanings are permanently stored alongside their literal meanings and simply have to be ‘looked up’ in the mental lexicon. Metaphor is probably the most important aspect of the flexibility and creativity of language.

metaphorical entailments This term is used in Conceptual Metaphor Theory to refer to patterns of reasoning in the source domain of a metaphor which carry over into the target domain. Take the conceptual metaphor "argument is war", which underlies expressions such as to attack/undermine/shoot down one’s opponent’s arguments. In a war, if one manages to put all the enemy’s armaments out of action one wins the war; likewise, if one demolishes all of one’s opponent’s points in an argument, one wins the argument. Or take the "linear scales are paths" metaphor, which allows us to say, for instance, that team A is ahead of team B in a league table, meaning that it has more points. Several aspects of the logic of paths carry across in the metaphor. For instance, if A is ahead of B on a path, then B can overtake A but not vice versa. Likewise, if Team A has more points than team B, then B can overtake A but A cannot overtake B. Similarly, if A is ahead of B on a path and B is ahead of C, then it follows that A is ahead of C. The same logic applies to the metaphorical path of the league table.