Metaphor in Context

The many philosophers linguists and cognitive scientists writing on metaphor over the past two decades have generally taken for granted that metaphor lies outside if not in opposition to received conceptions of semantics and grammar. Assuming that metaphor cannot be explained by or within semantics they claim that metaphor has little if anything to teach us about semantic theory. In this book Josef Stern challenges these assumptions. He is concerned primarily with the question: Given the received conception of the form and goals of semantic theory does metaphorical interpretation in whole or part fall within its scope? Specifically he asks what (if anything) does a speaker-hearer know as part of her semantic competence when she knows the interpretation of a metaphor?According to Stern the answer to these questions lies in the systematic context-dependence of metaphorical interpretation. Drawing on a deep analogy between demonstratives indexicals and metaphors Stern develops a formal theory of metaphorical meaning that underlies a speaker's ability to interpret a metaphor. With his semantics he also addresses a variety of philosophical and linguistic issues raised by metaphor. These include the interpretive structure of complex extended metaphors the cognitive significance of metaphors and their literal paraphrasability the pictorial character of metaphors the role of similarity and exemplification in metaphorical interpretation metaphor-networks dead metaphors the relation of metaphors to other figures and the dependence of metaphors on literal meanings. Unlike most metaphor theorists however who take these problems to be sui generis to metaphor Stern subsumes them under the same rubric as other semantic facts that hold for nonmetaphorical language.