Live metaphors

Abstract

In this chapter, I outline two successive versions of the Relevance-Theoretic account of metaphors, the one initially proposed in Sperber and Wilson (Relevance: communication and cognition, 1995) and the new one recently proposed by Carston (Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication, 2002) and apparently adopted by Relevance Theory. The first one claimed that metaphors have propositional effects (implicatures) while the second claims that metaphors have an explicature recovered through the construction of an ad hoc concept. Both accounts are continuous accounts (i.e., they do not posit any specific interpretation process for metaphors) and both ignore the nonpropositional (sensory) effects of metaphors. But, while the first does succeed in accounting for the propositional effects of metaphors and for the impossibility of paraphrasing live metaphors without loss, this is not the case of the second, which fails on both counts.