the Role of Literal Meaning in the Construction of Metaphorical Meaning

Abstract

This paper explores the role of literal meaning in the construction of metaphorical meaning, challenging traditional views of metaphor theory. First, we contrast the direct access hypothesis, in which the metaphorical meaning is under-stood without activating the literal meaning, with the indirect access hypothesis, which holds that the literal meaning is accessed first. We argue that this distinction concerns only the process of accessing metaphorical meaning, without clarifying the role of literal meaning in the construction of metaphors. In the second chapter, we shift the focus from the question of how we get from literal to metaphorical meaning to the more fundamental question of what role literal meaning plays in metaphor construction. We introduce the Onefoldness and Twofoldness Hypotheses to replace the dichotomy of direct and indirect access. In the third section, we examine factors that influence the relationship between literal and metaphorical meaning in shaping the meaning of the metaphor. After an overview of syntactic (Carston, 2018) and semantic (Giora, 2003) approaches that assume that the processing of metaphor is determined by intrinsic linguistic features, in the fourth section we argue for a radical contextualist approach. This approach assumes that the processing of metaphors depends on the pragmatic use of metaphors within the specific “language game” in which they are deployed and offers a dynamic perspective on how metaphorical meaning is constructed.