A History of Metaphor Theory
The history of metaphor theory is a history of changing questions as well as changing answers. Writers have asked how an expression transfers a name, creates a resemblance, organises thought, communicates an attitude or changes a reader's understanding. These approaches overlap. They should not be arranged into a simple story in which metaphor was once mere ornament and later became meaningful.
This article introduces a selected line of influential work relevant to the wiki's reading library. It is not a complete history of every rhetorical or philosophical tradition. Dates identify particular publications, and a later theory's description of an earlier position should be checked against the earlier text.
A selective timeline
| Work or period | Question brought into focus |
|---|---|
| Aristotle, Poetics, chapter XXI | How names are transferred, including through proportional relationships |
| Gertrude Buck, The Metaphor (1899) | How rhetorical explanations relate to accounts of mental activity |
| I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) | How different thoughts operate together in metaphor |
| Max Black, “Metaphor” (1954–1955) | How a system of implications reorganises a principal subject |
| Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process” (1978) | How semantic innovation relates to imagination and feeling |
| Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980) | How everyday expressions relate to systematic conceptual patterns |
| Fauconnier and Turner, “Conceptual Integration Networks” (1998) | How selected inputs combine to produce additional structure |
| Contemporary corpus, discourse and experimental research | How to identify uses and investigate processing, variation and effects |
Aristotle: transfer and proportion
In the Poetics, Aristotle describes several kinds of transfer and includes analogy understood as proportion. This is broader in some respects than the modern everyday contrast between metaphor and literal language. His discussion connects choices of expression with clarity and distinction in poetic diction, rather than offering only a licence to decorate a thought that is otherwise unchanged.[1]
When reading an ancient classification, begin with its examples and categories. A term translated as metaphor may cover relationships later classified separately. The historical question is what the account explains within its own framework, not whether it uses today's taxonomy.
Rhetoric and psychology before the cognitive turn
Gertrude Buck's The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric examines earlier explanations based on linguistic need and ornament. Her opening chapters assemble and question these accounts, demonstrating that the relation between metaphor and mental activity was already an explicit subject of inquiry in the nineteenth century.[2]
The book is useful both as an argument and as a record of the writers Buck read. Its historical psychology should not be treated as contemporary experimental evidence. Equally, its existence cautions against dating every interest in metaphor and thought to the late twentieth century.
Richards and Black: interaction
I.A. Richards is associated with the interaction of the subject under discussion and the expression through which it is understood. Max Black explicitly develops and critically discusses Richards's approach. His focus-and-frame terminology draws attention to the expression within its sentence, while his account of associated implications explains why a metaphor can reorganise attention rather than simply replace one word with another.[3]
This approach invites close analysis of what a description makes salient and what it leaves in the background. It also makes cultural assumptions relevant: familiar beliefs associated with an image need not be scientifically correct for an audience to recognise them.
Ricoeur: meaning, imagination and feeling
Paul Ricoeur asks how metaphor's capacity to produce new meaning relates to imagination and feeling. In his 1978 essay, these are not merely incidental effects added after a purely verbal operation. He develops the question at the boundary between semantics and accounts of experience.[4]
The historical importance of this line of inquiry is its refusal to reduce the issue either to a dictionary substitution or to an unexplained emotional impact. It asks what is contributed by the new description itself.
Conceptual metaphor and blending
Lakoff and Johnson's work foregrounds recurring patterns in ordinary language. Conceptual Metaphor Theory analyses correspondences between domains, while embodied approaches investigate their relation to experience. Lakoff's later neural account represents a further theoretical development, not simply another name for the original linguistic observations.[5]
Conceptual Blending and Mental Spaces shifts attention to networks in which selected material combines and new relations emerge. The difference concerns the explanatory focus, not a requirement to choose one vocabulary for every kind of text.[6]
Communication, evidence and unresolved questions
Pragmatic theories ask how the speaker's intended meaning is inferred in context. Corpus approaches ask how expressions can be systematically collected and identified. Experiments ask what changes when wording, familiarity, context or tasks are varied. These are related questions but they do not have the same evidential requirements.[7][8]
When comparing theories, specify their object: a word, an utterance, a pattern across language, an act of interpretation or a mechanism of processing. A disagreement may be substantive, or the accounts may be explaining different things. Reading this history is most useful when it sharpens that distinction rather than replacing it with a succession of fashionable labels.
Related pages
- Interaction Theories of Metaphor
- Conceptual Metaphor Theory
- Metaphor, Context and Speaker Meaning
- People and authors
- Metaphor Research Library
Sources
- ↑ Aristotle, Poetics, S. H. Butcher translation, chapters XXI–XXII.
- ↑ Gertrude Buck (1899), The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric, introductory chapters and historical appendices.
- ↑ Max Black (1954–1955), “Metaphor”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55:273–294, especially pp. 285–293. Black discusses Richards's 1936 and 1938 works.
- ↑ Paul Ricoeur (1978), “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling”, Critical Inquiry 5(1):143–159.
- ↑ George Lakoff (2014), “Mapping the brain's metaphor circuitry: metaphorical thought in everyday reason”.
- ↑ Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (1998), “Conceptual Integration Networks”, Cognitive Science 22(2):133–187.
- ↑ Robyn Carston (2015 manuscript), “Relevance Theory and Metaphor”.
- ↑ Anatol Stefanowitsch (2020), Corpus Linguistics: A Guide to the Methodology, chapter 11.