Metaphor in Context (review)

Within the past few decades, writing on metaphor has grown substantially, with contributions from philosophers, literary critics, linguists, and cognitive scientists. Yet the bulk of these scholars situate metaphor within pragmatics, somewhere outside classical semantics, or beyond the scope of any theoretical explanation, whether pragmatic or semantic. Josef Stern’s account instead locates metaphor in relation to current semantics. Focusing on metaphorical interpretation rather than recognition, he claims that an essential part of our knowledge of metaphor lies within our general semantic competence, although contextual knowledge is also necessary; he thus views metaphorical interpretation as context-dependent, but not to the extent that it is completely idiosyncratic or that it renders semantic theory irrelevant. Metaphor’s context-dependence, S explains, actually highlights the proper role of semantic knowledge as knowledge of constraints. As such, readers interested in metaphor, semantics, or both will find S’s theory compelling.

In the first three chapters, S provides the background necessary for the rich elaboration of his ideas in Chs. 4–8. Ch. 1, ‘Metaphorical competence’ (1–31), introduces his argument and describes the various relationships between knowledge and metaphor drawn upon throughout the book: knowledge that metaphor, knowledge of metaphor, and knowledge by metaphor. It also clarifies the three distinct terms on which S’s argument rests—metaphorical character, content, and context. Ch. 2, ‘From metaphorical use to metaphorical meaning’ (33–75), examines pragmatic or use theories of metaphor. Specifically, S complicates Donald Davidson’s influential use-based, truth-theoretic semantic treatment of context-dependence to frame his later reliance upon David Kaplan’s semantic framework. Ch. 3, ‘Themes from demonstratives’ (77–104), explicates Kaplan’s work on demonstratives and indexicals, attending especially to Kaplan’s distinction between character and content and his invention of the ‘Dthat’ operator on which S models the semantic context-dependency of metaphor.

Ch. 4, ‘Knowledge of metaphor’ (105–43), elaborates S’s conception of ‘Mthat’ and works out the key theoretical notions that constitute the semantic competence enabling us to interpret a metaphor as a kind of context-dependent interpretation of an expression. Here, S explains context as a contextually-situated set of presuppositions and metaphorical character as that semantic rule that determines a metaphor’s content or interpretation in each context. Thus the schematic knowledge of the meaning of a metaphor is an interpretive skill. Concentrating on metaphors of exemplification to further illustrate metaphor’s schematic nature, Ch. 5, ‘Knowledge by metaphorical content’ (146–96), discusses how we apply our semantic competence in metaphor to specific, extralinguistic contexts to generate the specific content of a metaphor. It thus addresses in greater detail one of the ways knowledge is conveyed by metaphor and illustrates how semantic structure constrains metaphorical interpretations. This chapter also contrasts S’s account of metaphor networks with others’ accounts, among them George Lakoff’s, Mark Johnson’s, and Mark Turner’s theory of conceptual or conventional metaphor. Ch. 6, ‘Metaphorical character and metaphorical meaning’ (197–257), describes more precisely ‘what we know when we know the meaning of a metaphor’ (197). Moreover, this chapter addresses relevant areas like metaphorical incompetence, interpretation vs. evaluation of metaphor, the relation of metaphor to indirect speech acts, and the relation of metaphor to other tropes.

One of the most thought-provoking chapters, Ch. 7, ‘Knowledge by metaphorical character’ 260–99), elaborates on how the semantic competence that allows for metaphorical interpretation is also what allows the expression of ‘knowledge by the metaphor that is not equivalently expressible except through its metaphorical mode of expression’ (261). This theme of knowledge by metaphor relates to several issues debated in metaphor literature and addressed by S: the literal paraphrasability of metaphor, the cognitive significance of metaphor, the indeterminacy or ‘endlessness’ of metaphorical interpretation, the surprise effected by metaphor, and metaphor’s pictorial (vs. descriptive) aspects. S’s discussion in Ch. 8, ‘From the metaphorical to the literal’ (302–19), takes up two main areas related to metaphorical interpretation—the range of symbols that can be interpreted metaphorically (e.g. nonlinguistic metaphors) and the...