Rhetoric Today: Metaphor and Image

This essay offers an illustration and a development of tensive semiotics. The article analyzes the definitions of metaphor and image formulated by Aristotle, Du Marsais, Fontanier, Ricoeur, and Breton, discussing concepts such as resemblance, comparison, semantic distance, coherence, and surprise. Using these notions, we define the two discursive devices within the framework of tensive semiotics. Metaphor concerns its extensive syntax, which operates by the contrasting operations of sorting and mixing, since the figure aims to mix two entities apprehended on the syntagmatic plane. Assessing an occurrence of the figure entails evaluating its tempo and its tonicity. Inversely, the image interests the intensive syntax of increases and decreases, governed by the junctive syntax which operates according to implication or concession. The exploration of these two figures will allow us to conduct a more thorough investigation of the semiotic concept of tempo.