The Extent of the Literal: Metaphor, Polysemy and Theories of Concepts (review)

Marina Rakova’s The extent of the literal is an ambitious contribution to metaphor literature. Instead of following the trend of considering language as a sign of metaphorical thought, R claims that all of the meanings of synaesthetic and double-function adjectives are literal.

The book begins with a literature review. Ch. 1, ‘Introduction: On the nature of the literal-metaphorical distinction’, shows that all twentieth-century metaphor theories assume the literal-metaphorical distinction and claims that this assumption stems from a belief in the conceptual primacy of one of the word’s meanings. This belief is explicitly stated in conceptual metaphor theory, where concepts arising from embodied experience are conceptually primary and are activated whenever nonprimary concepts are processed. Ch. 2, ‘Metaphor in cognitive linguistics’, criticizes conceptual metaphor theory and, in particular, the account of polysemy jointly given by theories recently developed within it, primary metaphor theory and conflation theory.

In the next four chapters, R examines independent experimental evidence relevant to her claim. Ch. 3, ‘The “hot” polysemy’, illustrates how neurological data indicate that a word’s ‘metaphorical’ meaning may stem directly from experience and that it is, therefore, literal. The meanings under consideration are those of ‘hot’, as in hot weather and hot food. R presents evidence that the same protein is the neuronal receptor for both painful heat and substances that cause the sense of pain. In Ch. 4, ‘Across sensory modalities’, R reviews experimental literature indicating that both adults and children make systematic crossmodal associations. She argues that one cannot explain the children’s data by considering such adjectives metaphorical. Hence, R supposes that synaesthetic adjectives are linked to a primitive concept that is not specific to any modality. In Ch. 5, ‘Double-function terms’, a review of Solomon Asch and his associates’ comparison of double-function adjectives shows that such adjectives express the same range of possible physical-psychological meaning associations crosslinguistically. Young children’s lack of acceptance of double-function adjectives as descriptions of people in Asch and Harriet Nerlove’s experiment is attributed to attentional constraints. In Ch. 6, ‘Double-function terms again’, R reinterprets experimental results usually considered as evidence of the differential status of literal and metaphorical word meanings. Two experiments by J. N. Williams (Processing polysemous words in context: Evidence for interrelated meanings. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 3.193–218, 1992) are usually seen as evidence that the literal meaning of a double-function adjective is activated even when irrelevant to a sentence’s meaning. R attributes these results to a flaw in materials construction. Then, when reviewing experiments usually interpreted as indicating that the figurative meanings of polysemous words are stored in the right hemisphere, she points out that right-hemisphere damaged patients do not seem to have impaired semantic representations for polysemous adjectives, but just meaning-retrieval problems.

In the next four chapters, R defends her stance against possible counterarguments and explains it in greater detail. Ch. 7, ‘Words and concepts’, introduces the rest of the chapters. In Ch. 8, ‘Back to cognitive semantics’, R criticizes the cognitive semantic view of double-function and synaesthetic adjectives as metaphorical, based on theoretical arguments in the former case, and experimental findings in the latter. Ch. 9, ‘Polysemy in lexical semantics’, shows that theories of lexical semantics do not offer satisfactory explanations for the comprehension of polysemous words and that none of them can explain the aforementioned experimental data. Ch. 10, ‘The non-polysemy view: What it is and what it is not’, first specifies that the primary concepts posited are denotational and adopts the causal theory of reference to explain how they are learned. Then, R explains how the comprehension of the vocabulary under consideration is supposed to occur, arguing, along the way, for a congruent ‘job allocation’ to semantics and pragmatics. Finally, the chapter gives a typology of the relation of concepts to lemmas in order to explain how the conceptual structure...