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Figurative Language – Intersubjectivity and Usage
Edited by Augusto Soares da Silva
[Figurative Thought and Language 11] 2021
► pp. 75–108

Evaluating metaphor accounts via their pragmatic effects

| University of Alberta

A prominent pragmatic effect of metaphor is meaning enhancement (Colston, 2015). Relative to comparable non-metaphorical language, metaphors can provide stronger, richer, or more poignant delivery of a proposition, idea, attitude, emotion, schema, or other meaningful construct. Metaphor constructions also alter their component parts (e.g., source and target domains). The paper measures pragmatic effect performance when metaphors are assembled in different ways, as a means of evaluating metaphor accounts. In four experiments metaphors were altered by using; (1) weak versus strong SDs, (2) mixed versus unmixed SDs, (3) single versus double instantiations of SDs, and (4) using standard metaphor versus simile constructions. Observed differences (e.g., in meaning enhancement) support the idea that metaphor understandings arise in part due to embodied simulations.

Keywords: pragmatic effect(s), metaphor, metaphor accounts, meaning enhancement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metaphor accounts
    • 2.1Similarity
    • 2.2Categorization
    • 2.3Conceptual metaphor
    • 2.4Blending
    • 2.5Embodied simulation
  • 3.Varyingly structured metaphors
  • 4.Predictions of metaphor accounts
    • 4.1Similarity predictions
    • 4.2Categorization predictions
    • 4.3Conceptual metaphor predictions
    • 4.4Blending predictions
    • 4.5Embodied simulation predictions
  • 5.Experiments
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Materials
    • 5.3Results
    • 5.5Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 19 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.11.03col
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