Extended Metaphor—a Text-World Account

Abstract

The essential structural property of metaphor is that it represents a double-layered conceptualisation of the target domain (the ‘literal’ or ‘tenor’ language) in terms of the source domain (the ‘figurative’ or ‘vehicle’ language). Most linguistic approaches to metaphor provide sentence-level accounts of the phenomenon. But literary metaphor is frequently discursive: there is an entire metaphorical ‘undercurrent’ running through a whole text, which may manifest itself in a large number and variety of ‘single’ metaphors. What is needed, therefore, is (i) a way of accounting for metaphor discursively, rather than sententially; (ii) a way of dealing with the resolving ‘undercurrent’ stratum rather than the superficial ‘single metaphor’ stratum; and (iii) a way of representing 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.