Conceiving Language: The Case of Metaphor

by Marie-Cécile Bertau

The metaphor is not only interesting as a linguistic phenomenon, but rather its rhetorical, linguistical and philosophical consideration through times can be seen as a paradigm of the conception of language: how is language conceived, as stable system, as dynamic process? How much deviation is permitted from a fixed rule? This perspective allows a certain history of the idea of language, shown via a linguisitic device that, because of its very ungraspability, is challenging models of language.
The first section presents various ways of describing metaphor since Aristotle, regarding a) the idea of space, b) the idea of deviation. In the next step, a model which takes into acount the users and the process of language within a dialectic of „normal space“ and „metaphorical space“ will be developped.

 

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