Pragmatics, Metaphor Studies and the Challenge of Mental Imagery

Abstract

Metaphor is considered a figurative use of language, a term that seems to recall the imagistic dimension characterizing this kind of utterances. Tzvetan Todorov (1967) speaks of “figure” as “visibility of speech”: as a figure, metaphor provides a kind of figurability to what is communicated. As Paul Ricoeur wrote in La métaphore vive (Ricoeur, 1975), metaphor makes “speech appear”. Precisely because of the reliance on the idea of figure, it is therefore not surprising that discussions on metaphor often refer to the role that mental images play in their comprehension. A long tradition holds that the formation of a mental image is fundamental for the comprehension of certain kinds of metaphor. This is the case of authors such as Aristotle, Gianbattista Vico, George W. F. Hegel or Friedrich Nietzche in the classical tradition, or Raymond Gibbs, Daniel Gleason and Marcel Just in the more recent experimental tradition (Aristotle, 2014; Gleason, 2009). By contrast, for other authors, mental imagery is, at most, a tangential phenomenon, playing no important role in metaphor comprehension. This is the position of several authors such as I. A. Richards (1936), for whom mental imagery “is a mere distraction and of no service” (Richards, 1936, p. 130). Pragmatics today follows this latter direction and most accounts of metaphor omit any mention of mental imagery (Grice, 1975; Searle, 1979; Glucksberg, 2001) and explain the comprehension of metaphor entirely in terms of implicitly communicated propositions (Sperber & Wilson, 2008). Within the framework of Relevance Theory, Robyn Carston (2018) takes up the problem and discusses directly what role, if any, mental imagery plays in under standing metaphor, concluding that although mental images can be activated an Metaphor is considered a figurative use of language, a term that seems to recall the imagistic dimension characterizing this kind of utterances. Tzvetan Todorov (1967) speaks of “figure” as “visibility of speech”: as a figure, metaphor provides a kind of figurability to what is communicated. As Paul Ricoeur wrote in La métaphore vive (Ricoeur, 1975), metaphor makes “speech appear”. Precisely because of the reliance on the idea of figure, it is therefore not surprising that discussions on metaphor often refer to the role that mental images play in their comprehension. A long tradition holds that the formation of a mental image is fundamental for the comprehension of certain kinds of metaphor. This is the case of authors such as Aristotle, Gianbattista Vico, George W. F. Hegel or Friedrich Nietzche in the classical tradition, or Raymond Gibbs, Daniel Gleason and Marcel Just in the more recent experimental tradition (Aristotle, 2014; Gleason, 2009). By contrast, for other authors, mental imagery is, at most, a tangential phenomenon, playing no important role in metaphor comprehension. This is the position of several authors such as I. A. Richards (1936), for whom mental imagery “is a mere distraction and of no service” (Richards, 1936, p. 130). Pragmatics today follows this latter direction and most accounts of metaphor omit any mention of mental imagery (Grice, 1975; Searle, 1979; Glucksberg, 2001) and explain the comprehension of metaphor entirely in terms of implicitly communicated propositions (Sperber & Wilson, 2008). Within the framework of Relevance Theory, Robyn Carston (2018) takes up the problem and discusses directly what role, if any, mental imagery plays in under standing metaphor, concluding that although mental images can be activated an Metaphor is considered a figurative use of language, a term that seems to recall the imagistic dimension characterizing this kind of utterances. Tzvetan Todorov (1967) speaks of “figure” as “visibility of speech”: as a figure, metaphor provides a kind of figurability to what is communicated. As Paul Ricoeur wrote in La métaphore vive (R