EXTENDED METAPHOR

Аннотация:

The fundamental structural characteristic of a metaphor is that it is a conceptualization of the source domain (the "figurative" or "vehicle" language) in terms of the target domain (literal, or "tenor") on two levels. Sentence-level explanations of the phenomena are offered by the majority of linguistic approaches to metaphor. However, literary metaphor is often discursive; a work as a whole has a metaphorical "undercurrent" that can take many different forms, including several "single" metaphors. Therefore, in order to properly account for metaphors, it is necessary to do the following:  account for metaphors discursively as opposed to sententially;  deal with the resolving "undercurrent" stratum as opposed to the superficial "single metaphor" stratum; and  represent the double-layered conceptual structure of metaphors. A new conceptual discourse model of text-worlds is presented here, which naturally captures the conceptual layering inherent in language generally (and not just in metaphor), which treats the ‘undercurrent’ aspect as being equivalent to ‘gist’ or ‘macrostructure’ in text linguistics (using the concept of the ‘megametaphor’), and which automatically provides a discursive account of the phenomenon of extended, or sustained, metaphor