CRITICAL BOOK REVIEW ‘The Language of Metaphors’ By Andrew Goaltly

              Andrew Goatly lecturers in English at the National Institute of Organization Nanyang Technological University,Singapore. In this ambitious and wide-ranging text, Andrew Goatly explores the language of metaphor. Combining insights from relevance theory and functional linguistics, he provides a powerful model for understanding how metaphors work in real communicative situations, how we use them to communicate meaning as well as how we process them. Examining the distinction between literal and metaphorical language, Goatly surveys the means by which metaphors are realized in texts and locates the interpretation of metaphor in its social context. The Language of Metaphors is enlivened by the choice, variety and humor of its real examples which are taken from a wide variety of genres including conversation, popular science, advertising, news reports, novels and poetry. Supplemented with exercises and a suggested reading list, this book will provide students of language, psychology and literature with an invaluable guide to understanding precisely how metaphor functions. The languages of metaphors presumes no prior knowledge of linguistics by encompassing not only the cognitive, but also the social and linguistic aspects of metaphor. It provides a timely complement to recent phsychological investigations. This book will be essential reading for students and researches interested in communication, language, literature, and psychology.

            Metaphor and the mental processes it entails, are basic to language and cognition, then a clearer understanding of its working is relevant, not just to literature students, but to any students. Because metaphore is basic to language and thinking, any well-educated person should have some understanding of its processes. However this book does assume as specific interest in language, linguistic, and analysis of the text. For the general linguistic student, it raises important questions about whether language can be conceived of as a code, and about how syntax affects interpretation. For the student whose special interest is in pragmatics and semantics, it can be exploited as a case study investigating to important questions: how to draw the boarder line between semantics and pragmatics; and how pragmatic theory in order to achieve explanatory adequacy, needs to be combined with a theory of social context and purpose. The student of text and discourse analysis will find a comprehensive account of the varieties of metaphor and methaporical interpretation. And the book will enable the student of literary stylistics and literary theory to understand more fully, precisely and formally, the nature of literary metaphor and its interpretation, how it differs from metaphor in other genres, and patterns of interplaybetween metaphors.

            The book aims to be a comprehensive introduction to the linguistics of metaphor, its syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, as manifest in different text-types. It should prove indispensable to any serious student of metaphor.

This book contents of 10 chapters

In chapter 1 ‘Metaphorical and Literal Language’. The writer explores the overlap between metaphor, approximation and semantic subcategorization. What is the difference, for example, between the meaning of a kind of as used in Margaret Thatcer was a kind of lapdog of Ronald Reagan, a wolf is akind of dog and a collie is a kind of dog? The writer discusses further the claim that language is fundamentally metaphorical, showing in detail that the strategies used for creating and processing metaphor are also used with literal language, and suggests that there are metaphorical clines from the most active original transfer metaphors at one end, to the most conventional, dead, and approximative ones at the other.

In chapter 2 ‘Metaphor and Dictionary: Root Analogies’, explores the ways in which conventional metaphorical analogies structure the cognition of speakers of english as this is reflected in the lexicon.

In chapter 3 ‘ Metaphor and the Dictionary: Word class and Word Formation”. The writer discusses the important relationship between word-class and metaphorical interpretation, showing how word-formation procesess affect metaphorical recognition and richness of interpretation. The writer ask why, for example, if the following clauses are applied to a human, he was my dog seems more strongly metaphorical than he dogged me. Considering the intrepretative effects of word class and derivation deliberately avoids the problem of generalizing theories based on only one word-class.

In chapter 4 ‘ How Different Kinds of Metaphors Work’, the writer elaborates a definition of metaphor in terms of unconventional reference and collocation. Working through the definitonm it demarcates seven kinds of metaphorical interpretation, and develops the distinction between analogy and similarity as part of the interpretative process. It covers other theoritical areas: different theories of metaphorical interpretation; the strategic social importance of subjuctive and asymmetrical metaphors, where there is no mutual  recognition of metaphors between speaker and hearer: and the concept of phenomenalistic construal that the unconventional reference of metaphor can be to an imaginary world. For instance the lion spoke is literal within the fantastic metaphoric world of fables.

In chapter 5 ‘Relevance Theory and The Functions of Metaphor’, the writer introduce the introduces the pragmatic theory known as Relevance, which can provide a framework for understanding the pragmatic procesess involved in recognizing and understanding metaphor,providing we allow for the specific purposes for which metaphors might be used. With this proviso in mind it sketches out the most common metaphorical functions and purposes. It is an attempt to overcome the theoretical weaknesses arise when we divorce the metaphorical process from the social process.

Chapter 6, 7 and 8 underline the importance of co-text and syntax as a factor in interpreting metaphor. They survvey the textual resources which guide recognition and interpretation, and because they are relatively detailed and theoretical, especially chapter 7, they may be more suitable to researchers than undergraduates, and readers may wish to use them as a handbook.

Chapter 9, ‘The Interplay of Metaphors’, analysis the relations between metaphors within literary texts and develops a detailed taxanomy. It factors in three complicating phenomena: compounding. When one metaphor is embedded in another; literalization, where the same lexical item is used both literally and metaphorically in the same text; and overdescription, where obsessional repetition pushes the reader to a symbolic reading. And it outlines how these complicating factor are exploited for thematic purposes in literature.

Chapter 10, ‘Metaphor in its Social Context’, investigates how the varieties of metaphor established in the first five chapters. As far as possible all metaphors cited in this volume are from authentic text, in an effort to  theory  number of texts of different styles, not only insist on authenticity, but provides a wider co-text and context for the testing of metahorical theory.

The final chapter is the theoretical climax of the book. It develops the framework for text interpretation in Fairlought’s language and power (1989) to show that a Hallidayan theory of context and socially determined purpose in combination with a pragmatic theory like Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance.