Metaphor
The metaphor (from the Latin metaphŏra, taken in turn from the Greek μεταφορά; properly “transfer”, “displacement”; derived from metapheró “I transport”) is one of the most important rhetorical figures. A metaphor is understood as a displacement of meaning between two terms for an aesthetic purpose: A is B (Your heart, already faded velvet. Miguel Hernández). The study of him goes back to the Poetics and the Rhetoric of Aristotle.
In the field of Literature, it has been classified as a trope or identification of two realities that contain some similarity between them. For example, Miguel de Cervantes in chapter XIII of the first part of Don Quixote de la Mancha, builds the description of Dulcinea from a set of metaphors:
That their hairs are of gold, their forehead of elysian fields, their eye arches of the sky, their sun eyes, their pink cheeks, their lips coral, pearls their teeth, praising their neck, marble their chest, ivory their hands, their white snow (....)
Each pair of elements share a similarity that allows the idealization of Dulcinea's beauty: eyes with suns, cheeks with roses, lips with the color of coral, pearls with teeth, and the whiteness of the skin is expressed through elements such as marble and snow
The metaphor consists of a type of analogy or association between elements that share some similarity of meaning to substitute one for the other in the same structure. A metaphor puts two things together that allow the suggestion to be compared and interpreted as a single concept. It is found basically in all fields of knowledge, since it responds to semantic conventions given by a culture, which are implicit in language. The set of metaphors in the same structure is called continuous metaphor or allegory.
The term is important both in literary theory (in traditional rhetoric where it defines a trope of diction, and also in recent studies that place it as a fundamental element to understand narrative discourse from a hermeneutic and phenomenological perspective); and in linguistics (where it is one of the main causes of semantic change).
Metaphor in literary theory
Literary theory has attributed to Aristotle the first studies on metaphor in his Poetic Art. His Treatise gave guidelines for the specialization of the study of metaphor in various branches of thought and in literary theory itself. Its most recognized meaning is as a literary trope, that is, an aesthetic resource that has to do with the relationship between two terms that produce a certain tension in the meaning of a poem.
On the other hand, throughout history, reflections in linguistics and philosophy led the abstraction of metaphor to a new direction. Solidifying its bases in a hermeneutic point of view, it becomes a threshold that gives access to sensitive communication. The concept is not limited to the structural form of lyric poetry, but also began to be used in fictional narrative discourse, since it starts from the point that the "worlds" expressed in literature do not differ from the tangible world and sensitive processes. communicated by the metaphor connect both worlds. Metaphor was no longer limited to an aesthetic resource in the formal structure of two words, but rather acquired a symbolic meaning that structures various parts of a discourse, thanks to its ability to express new meanings, both conceptual and sensory implicit in the descriptive sentences.
Aristotle's definition of metaphor (4th century BC)
From Aristotle comes the first theoretical definition of metaphor. The Aristotelian concept of Metaphor is as follows: "Metaphor is the transfer of a name from one thing to another." Metaphor was understood as a substitution of one name for another.
Aristotle calls each object name and with respect to their own qualities or aspects he classifies them into two categories or paradigms: the first corresponds to the genus names and the second to species names. He also distinguishes between a common language and an aesthetic and metaphorical language. The common suggests that each name be combined with structures belonging to its same category: species names are conjugated and structured with terms corresponding to their same group. And the genus names as well.
A poet, being able to observe the similarities between names that do not belong to the same group, makes movements or transfers that endow common language in metaphorical language.
The transfer of meaning can occur in four ways:
- From species to species
- From the species to the genus
- From the genus to the species
- Metaphor by analogy
From this semantic classification of things, a mathematical form is expressed to replace them; showing that the result is a metaphor, a result with a new aesthetic or beautiful meaning. «Aristotle defines the metaphor as a double metonymic mechanism of four terms, the second maintains the same relationship as the fourth with the third: B is to A, what D is to C; old age is to life what evening is to day. Between old age and life there is a metonymic relationship, and the analogical displacement is based on continuity».
In addition, consider an intrinsic relationship between poetics and morality:
"It is above all else important to know how to use metaphors, for in truth, this alone cannot be learned from another, and it is an index of well-born nature, because the good and beautiful metaphor is contemplation of similarities"
The Later Aristotelian Tradition
The tradition that followed Aristotle, focused its attention on the character mentioned by the philosopher, where metaphor belongs to the transfer or substitution of a phrase within its paradigms, in order to develop similarities between two terms in a lyrical language. The metaphor played a very important role in poetry from the Baroque. (See Conceptism and Culteranismo). Until the s. From the 18th century, starting with César Chesneau Dumarsais, with his treatise on tropes (Traité des tropes) in 1730, the perception of metaphor evolved towards a syntagmatic criterion, constituting itself as a trope, a product of union of the combination of terms.
The conception of metaphor as a process of substitution changes at the end of the s. XVIII, with the studies of Ivor Armstrong Richards and William Empson, who replace the character of substitution by that of the interaction of meanings, since they consider that the origin of the metaphor is in thought and not in the word, so that when these features are combined, they produce a more complex meaning than separately.
Metaphor as a rhetorical figure
The metaphor is a rhetorical figure that consists of naming, describing or qualifying a word through its similarity or analogy with another word, therefore it is classified within the tropes. It therefore consists of three elements:
- The real tenor or term is what is actually spoken of;
- The vehicle or imaginary term is something that resembles the real term;
- The foundation is the likeness between the tenor and the vehicle.
Thus, in the metaphorical predication “Your eyes are the sea”, the phrase the eyes is the tenor; the sea is the vehicle and the foundation is the dark blue color of the eyes. The metaphor differs from the comparison or simile (which also associates two terms based on their similarity) because instead of relating these terms through verbs that indicate similarity ("Your eyes look like the sea") or comparative sentences ("Your eyes are like the sea"), unites them only by means of the verb to be ("Your eyes are the sea") or by turning one of the terms into a complement to the noun ("The sea of your eyes") or apposition ("Your eyes, the sea") of the other. That is, a comparison establishes that A is like B; a metaphor says that A is B or substitutes A for B. The metaphor asserts that the two objects of comparison are identical, and the comparison establishes a similarity. Since this difference is formal, many theorists after that definition choose to treat the comparison (or simile) and the metaphor as a single phenomenon, sometimes called an image.
The metaphor in which both terms appear is called an explicit metaphor. When the real term does not appear, it is called an implicit metaphor ("The lakes of your face").
By expressing something from something else, a correspondence (similarity) is established (or discovered) among the identified terms. This can be trivial or surprising, in which case the words that express the imaginary term acquire unexpected resonances. Throughout the history of literature, a progression in similarity is observed, which at first refers to aspects Sensitive as shape and color, but it becomes more abstract, until it reaches a limit case (the visionary image) in which the only thing that is similar between the real term and the imaginary one is the emotion that both arouse in the poet.
The metaphor as a symbol. The group "M"
In the General Rhetoric (1970), metaphor is a modification of the meaning of non-linguistic elements that are compared: the semes or minimum units of meaning common between two signs (not necessarily linguistic) come into contact. They consider the metaphor a symbol, for which it implies a correlation between the image and the culture, a semiotic vision. In other words, the "M" group sought an explanation of the metaphor based on minimal elements of meaning, «semes», which when those of one structure interact with those of the other structure in a &# 34;intersection", produce a new meaning: an example, in the words of Helena Beristáin, is the verse of Pablo Neruda: «In the clear hip of the coast». In the interaction between the noun «cadera clara» and the genitive «from the coast», there is a "excess of meaning" between common semes: the light line of human skin and the light line of the shoreline of the earth. In addition, the non-common semes («human being» and «coast») allow us to appreciate a special metaphor, called «sensitizing», since it gives human characteristics to something that is not; what had traditionally been called prosopopeia.
The living metaphor
The Living Metaphor (1975) is based on the epistemology of Husserl, and on the semantics of Emile Benveniste. It is a method of interpretation composed of eight studies where Paul Ricoeur defends the hermeneutic nature of the metaphor, previously proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche and José Ortega y Gasset. It endows the metaphor with the condition to describe reality through a symbolic and therefore pristine language. However, his texts under a philosophical and linguistic conception, establish interconnections with the literary studies of the 20th century, placing the metaphor as a first conceptual level within the discourse. Ricoeur takes the phrase as the minimum unit of conceptual meaning, but does not rule out the word as a form as well.
In this book he introduces the concept of living metaphor. The primordial value of the metaphor does not reside in being ornamental, but rather it offers new levels of information, through a metaphor posed in a text, beyond the meanings that it can have at a first level, it corresponds in parallel to human actions. From this point of view, the worlds expressed in literature do not differ from the human world and the metaphor plays the role of "activating" that memory through moments reflected in semes that reconstruct perceptions and concepts, which are linked in the construction of a broader message. Literary theorists have used this concept for the hermeneutic analysis of poetic texts. A discourse is studied from a structuralist point of view; that is, starting from the metaphor-phrase as the first unit of conceptual significance of a larger structure, with literary intentions.
The metaphor is not only perceived as an element with resonances with the human thought in which the text is written, but also with the other metaphors and structures that complete the poem.
The iconic metaphor, the metaphorical narrative
Luz Aurora Pimentel, takes Paul Ricoeur's living metaphor applied to the literary theory of fictional texts as an antecedent and focuses her study on narrative discourse. The metaphor is a structure that reveals its character of abstraction when thought from several levels.
Unlike Ricoeur who located a symbolic character in the metaphor, he recognizes its iconic value within the fictional discourse, as a synthetic and simultaneous meaning, a tension between two contexts that produces aesthetic pleasure and that reconstructs spaces within the discourse, not only intelligible, but sensitive.
Metaphor in linguistics
Metaphor is one of the most common pathways for semantic change. Often the metaphorical use of a word coexists with the literal one until it acquires its own rank: the mountain skirt receives this name because of its resemblance to skirts, the legs of furniture by the feet of animals, the computer mouse by the small rodent mammal, etc.
Metaphor in cognitive linguistics
According to the perspective developed by Lakoff and Johnson within cognitive linguistics, metaphor is a mechanism of human cognition that allows understanding and experiencing one type of thing in terms of another, that is, metaphor allows handling abstract concepts and complex by means of more concrete and simple ones.
Conceptual metaphors
A common example, collected in Cuenca (2007), is in the concept of ideas, which we handle in terms associated with the concept food: THE IDEAS THEY ARE FOOD corresponds to the conceptual metaphor that systematizes metaphorical expressions such as I don't swallow what you say, The topic is difficult to digest, metaphors? What do they eat with?, among others. According to Lakoff and Johnson, the internal structure of the metaphor contains a source domain, which lends its concepts, and a target domain, in which the concepts overlap. borrowed. In the conceptual metaphor IDEAS ARE FOOD, the source domain is FOOD, while IDEAS is the target domain.
The source and target domains are linked by establishing ontological correspondences and epistemic correspondences. The ontological correspondences link portions of both domains, in the case of the aforementioned metaphor IDEAS corresponds to FOOD, DIGER corresponds to UNDERSTAND. The epistemic correspondences "express[n] the intuitions that we extract from the source domain to reason about the destination domain" (Cuenca, 2007, p. 102), in this case, if food nourishes the body, ideas would nourish the mind.
Other conceptual metaphors, presented by Lakoff and Johnson (1995) and Cuenca (2007), are:
- A DECUSION IS A WAR: Your arguments are helpless.
- THEORIES ARE EDIFIC: His thesis is built on weak foundations.
- LOVE IS A WAR: I won't stop fighting for your love.
- THE TIME IS ALGO VALUE: Don't waste your time.
Orientational metaphors
According to Lakoff and Johnson (1995), they are another type of metaphors in which a concept is not structured in terms of another, most are related to spatial orientations up-down, inside-outside, front-back, central-peripheral; the functioning of these metaphors is based on the physical and cultural experience of individuals. For example, in Spanish there are the following relations:
- FELIZ IS ARRIBA, TRISTE IS ABAJO: lift the mood, be depressed.
- MÁS ES ARRIBA, MENES IS ABAJO: the price is very high, unemployment goes down.
- A FAVORABLE SOCIAL CONDITION IS ARRIBA, A SOCIAL CONDITION DESFAVORABLE: The lower part of society is climbing in social classes.
Image metaphors
They are another type of metaphors, “they are concrete metaphors that project the schematic structure of one image onto that of another” (Cuenca, 2007, p. 104). Some simple examples are Italy is a boot, The computer mouse or The mouth of the river.