Senin, 11 April 2016

METHAPHOR IN SEMANTICS

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hy guys.. ^^ as usually, i will give you the summarry it's about 'methaphor' this is the explanation,,

 
Metaphor is a complex cognitive phenomenon. It is traditionally thought of as a kind of comparison, although how we make instant and internally consistent comparisons between quite disparate things is not really understood. No artificial system, such as models in artificial intelligence, can decode metaphors, and certainly no such system can produce them. Examples of metaphors in everyday language abound. The expression, You are the sunshine of my life compares someone's beloved with sunshine; something that is impossible in literal terms unless that person becomes a ball of nuclear fusion. The expression candle in the wind likens life to a candle flame that may easily be blown out by any passing draft or gust. The fragility of life is thus emphasized. But metaphor is not just associated with poetic language or especially high-flown literary language. Metaphor is an extremely common and pervasive process in language usage and its results frequently become conventionalized. Thus, the meanings of many words have their origin in metaphor. For example, a cape-like garment that protected against the weather was given the name cloak, a word borrowed from French, in which it meant 'bell'. The garment was given the name for a bell because of its cut: It created a somewhat bell-like shape when draped over the shoulders and allowed to fall vertically to the knees or below, where it "belled" out from the body.
Metaphor is considered by cognitive scientists to be a very powerful conceptual tool because it allows language users to express abstract concepts by reference to more concrete concepts which are more accessible and understandable. For example, many words for concepts without visible correlates, such as temporal terms, are taken from the vocabulary of spatial language. The words long and short describe a spatial dimension (of, for example, a table), but they also can describe a span of (invisible) time. Metaphors occasionally impede understanding, when people fail to recognize the metaphor. For example, petrified literally means 'turned to stone', but now figuratively means 'terrified' (because of the way that people and animals freeze when in extreme fear). Those who don't know the literal meaning and take the metaphorical meaning as the basic one may wonder why petrified wood has the name it does! Sometimes what was originally a metaphor can completely lose its metaphorical force, when most or all speakers can no longer see the metaphor. Such cases are called dead metaphors or opaque metaphors. The word understand, for example, is a dead metaphor, having its origins in the idea that "standing under" something was akin to having a good grasp of it (another, slightly less dead metaphor) or knowing it thoroughly. Another example is the word consider which was originally a metaphor meaning 'consult the stars (using astrological principles) when making a decision', mantel once meant 'cloak or hood to catch smoke', gorge means throat, and so forth for thousands more.

Conceptual metaphors

Some theorists have suggested that metaphors are not merely stylistic, but that they are cognitively important as well. In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but also in thought and action. A common definition of a metaphor can be described as a comparison that shows how two things that are not alike in most ways are similar in another important way. They explain how a metaphor is simply understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. The authors call this concept a "conduit metaphor". By this they meant that a speaker can put ideas or objects into words or containers, and then send them along a channel, or conduit, to a listener who takes that idea or object out of the container and makes meaning of it. In other words, communication is something that ideas go into. The container is separate from the ideas themselves. Lakoff and Johnson give several examples of daily metaphors we use, such as "argument is war" and "time is money". Metaphors are widely used in context to describe personal meaning. The authors also suggest that communication can be viewed as a machine: "Communication is not what one does with the machine, but is the machine itself." (Johnson, Lakoff, 1980).


Nonlinguistic metaphors

Metaphors can also map experience between two nonlinguistic realms. In The Dream Frontier, Mark Blechner describes musical metaphors, in which a piece of music can "map" to the personality and emotional life of a person. Musicologist Leonard Meyer demonstrated how purely rhythmic and harmonic events can express human emotions.
Art theorist Robert Vischer argued that when we look at a painting, we "feel ourselves into it" by imagining our body in the posture of a nonhuman or inanimate object in the painting. For example, the painting "The Solitary Tree" by Caspar David Friedrich shows a tree with contorted, barren limbs.In looking at that painting, we imagine our limbs in a similarly contorted and barren shape, and that creates a feeling in us of strain and distress. Nonlinguistic metaphors may be the foundation of our experience of visual, musical dance, and other art forms.
 

Historical theories of metaphor

Friedrich Nietzsche's On Truth and Lies in the Non-Moral Sense makes metaphor the conceptual centre of his early theory of society. Some sociologists have found this an essay useful for thinking about metaphors at use in society, as well as for reflecting on their own use of metaphor. Sociologists of religion, for example, note the importance of metaphor in religious worldviews, but also that it is impossible to think sociologically about religion without metaphor.


Metaphor as style in speech and writing

Tombstone of a Jewish woman depicting broken candles, a visual metaphor of the end of life.
Viewed as an aspect of speech and writing, metaphor qualifies as style, in particular, style characterized by a type of analogy. An expression (word, phrase) that by implication suggests the likeness of one entity to another entity gives style to an item of speech or writing, whether the entities consist of objects, events, ideas, activities, attributes, or almost anything expressible in language. For example, in the first sentence of this paragraph, the word "viewed" serves as a metaphor for "thought of", implying analogy of the process of seeing and the thought process. The phrase, "viewed as an aspect of", projects the properties of seeing (vision) something from a particular perspective onto thinking about something from a particular perspective, that "something" in this case referring to "metaphor" and that "perspective" in this case referring to the characteristics of speech and writing.
As a characteristic of speech and writing, metaphors can serve the poetic imagination, allowing Sylvia Plath, in her poem "Cut", to compare the blood issuing from her cut thumb to the running of a million soldiers, "redcoats, every one"; and enabling Robert Frost, in "The Road Not Taken", to compare a life to a journey.
Viewed also as an aspect of speech, metaphor can serve as a device for persuading the listener or reader of the speaker or writer's argument or thesis, the so-called rhetorical metaphor.


Metaphor as foundational to our conceptual system

  A convenient short-hand way of capturing this view of metaphor is the following: CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN (A) IS CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN (B), which is what is called a conceptual metaphor. A conceptual metaphor consists of two conceptual domains, in which one domain is understood in terms of another. A conceptual domain is any coherent organization of experience. Thus, for example, we have coherently organized knowledge about journeys that we rely on in understanding life.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) greatly contributed to establishing the importance of conceptual metaphor as a framework for thinking in language. In recent years many scholars have investigated the original ways in which writers use novel metaphors and question the fundamental frameworks of thinking implicit in conceptual metaphors.


 ok, guys that's the explanation about Methaphor Hope it's usefull ^^

references : Thanks to  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor
                   http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/meaning/#top

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