Metaphor: Pragmatics, Relevance and Cognition

This article examines the pragmatic interpretation of metaphor. It first looks at traditional approaches to this phenomenon, such as the Gricean model, which classify metaphor alongside other tropes like hyperbole or understatement. This type of approach analyses metaphor as resulting from an overt violation of the maxim of quality (involving the speaker saying a blatantly false statement). This violation forces the hearer to search for a related proposition that will save the application of the maxim, which in the case of metaphor is a true proposition related to what has been said, which is then taken as an implicature of the utterance. However, there are many counter-examples to this approach, which suggest that an alternative analysis is needed. It is argued that the best alternative approach is provided by relevance theory, which relies on the idea that metaphor is a form of non-literal use of language involving the inferential derivation of a communicated concept from an encoded one. It is shown that this framework seems to solve the problems encountered by earlier approaches.