FORCEVILLE, C (1995) (A) Symmetry in Metaphor The Importance of Extended Context (Artigo)

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
(A)symmetry in Metaphor: The Importance of Extended Context

Author(s): Charles Forceville
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 677-708
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773369
Accessed: 05-05-2015 00:33 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Duke University Press and Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Poetics Today.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 130.133.8.114 on Tue, 05 May 2015 00:33:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
(A)symmetry in Metaphor:
TheImportanceof ExtendedContext
CharlesForceville
FreeUniversity,
Literature, Amsterdam
Abstract A crucial part of the investigation of any metaphor is to assess which

of its two terms is the tenor and which the vehicle. This issue is less uncontro-
versial than is often thought. The present essay discusses three related aspects
of the matter. In the first place, Black's (1962, 1979) interaction theory is shown
not to support the bidirectionality of feature transfer or even the reversibility of
terms, as is sometimes claimed (e.g., by Hausman 1989 and Lakoff and Turner
1989). Second, three experimental studies of the principles guiding the distribu-
tion of tenor and vehicle (Malgady and Johnson 1980; Verbrugge 1980; Connor
and Kogan 1980) are criticized for ignoring context levels beyond the sentence.
Third, whereas the overall stance taken in this essay is that the projection of fea-
tures in a metaphor is only from vehicle upon tenor, not vice versa, there appear
to be exceptions to this principle. Four examples are discussed in some detail,
and an attempt is made to account for them.
This essay was written as part of research project no. 301-180-039 ("PictorialMeta-
phor in Advertisements"),financed by the Netherlands Organizationfor Scientific
Research. I would like to thank Elrud Ibsch and Lachlan Mackenzie (both of the
Vrije UniversiteitAmsterdam)for their critical reading of drafts of this essay. I am
further indebted toJohan Hoorn (VrijeUniversiteitAmsterdam),whose challenging
comments alwaysforce me to define my own position more sharply.Moreover,I am
gratefulto MarkJohnson(Universityof Oregon) for commenting on an earlier,widely
different version, of this essay. I also owe thanks to Etienne Forceville for a critical
reading from a psychologist'spoint of view. Finally,I would like to thank the editors
of PoeticsTodayfor their helpful comments on an earlier version. The responsibility
for any errors or mistaken interpretationsremains, of course, entirely mine.
PoeticsToday16:4 (Winter1995). Copyright? 1996 by The Porter Institutefor Poetics

and Semiotics. CCC0333-5372/95/$2.50.
678 PoeticsToday16:4
A crucial part of the investigation of any metaphor is to assess which

of its two terms is the literal A-term (Black's [1979] "primary subject";
Richard's [1965 {1936}] "tenor") and which the figurative B-term ("sec-
ondary subject"; "vehicle"). While this might seem to be a rather uncon-
troversial matter, there are, in fact, several problems involved in the dis-
tribution of tenor and vehicle in a metaphor. The present essay discusses
three related aspects of this issue. In the first place, Black's interaction
theory is taken by some authors (e.g., Hausman 1989; Lakoff and Turner
1989) to support the bidirectionality of feature transfer or even the re-
versibility of terms. If they are correct, this is indeed a serious flaw in
a theory that, although it poses minor problems, has never been sup-
planted by a better one. I will argue, however, that this criticism of Black
is unjustified.
Second, while many theoretical papers on metaphor analyze examples
in which the tenor-vehicle distribution is simply taken for granted, sev-
eral studies by psychologists have addressed the question of what prin-
ciples actually guide this distribution. Experiments pertaining to this
matter were reported by Malgady andJohnson, Verbrugge, and Connor
and Kogan in Honeck and Hoffman 1980 and by Kogan, Chadrow, and
Harbour (1989). These studies, however, are based on an approach that
ignores context levels beyond the sentence, which has some unfortunate
consequences. These will be outlined here. Sperber and Wilson's (1986)
relevance theory, although only briefly referred to, can be seen as an im-
portant source for my arguments in favor of a more pragmatic attitude
on this score.
Third, whereas the overall stance taken in the present essay is that
the transfer of features in a metaphor is only from vehicle to tenor, and
not vice versa, there appear to be exceptions to this principle. Four ex-
amples are discussed in some detail, and an attempt is made to account
for them.
1.TheDistribution of Tenorand Vehicle

in Metaphorin Black'sInteractionTheory
In my view, Black's (1962, 1979) account of the interaction theory of
metaphor clearly holds that the primary and the secondary subjects (or
tenor and vehicle) cannot be reversed, that is, not without creating a
different metaphor altogether. There appears, however, to be some con-
fusion about this aspect of Black's interaction theory. Both Hausman
(1989) and Lakoff and Turner (1989), for instance, claim that Black en-
dorses the idea that the transfer of features between A and B is bidirec-
tional; it goes from A to B as well as from B to A. And if the two directions
of feature transfer are equally important, this would even boil down to a
reversibility of the two terms. I agree that this is an untenable view but
believe that it is due to a misreading of Black. Since both the present
Forceville* (A)symmetry
in Metaphor 679
essay and my other work (Forceville 1988, 1991, 1994a, 1994b, 1995, in
press) rely heavily on Black's theory, I would like to discuss briefly this
alleged misinterpretation of Black and examine where it may stem from.
Carl Hausman, a philosopher of art, explains his claim that there are
metaphorical processes at work in art by grafting it onto Black's inter-
action theory. A verbal example Hausman discusses is the situation of
"someone sitting by a river bank, looking at a stream of bubbling, gleam-
ing, and flowing water, who says, 'It is life."' The extralinguistic, percep-
tual context in Hausman's example, as he correctly claims, suggests that
it refers to the river. He then proceeds, however, as follows: 'Assuming
the relevance of the river, the speaker's statement could be translated
as the metaphor 'The river (or the flow of the river) is life' or 'Life is
a river'" (Hausman 1989: 52), thereby suggesting that the two terms of
the metaphor can be unproblematically reversed. Hausman, referring
to Black's example Man is a wolf, explicitly claims that Black supports
this reversibility: "If man is seen as vulpine, wolves may also be seen as
human. Black himself suggests this" (ibid.: 70).
Hausman's view that Black holds the view that tenor and vehicle are
interchangeable is shared by Lakoff and Turner. Pointing out that one
of the mistakes often found in traditional theories of metaphor is "the
claim that metaphors do not have a source and a target domain, but are
merely bidirectional linkages across domains" (Lakoff and Turner 1989:
110-11), they appear to associate this error with Richards's (1965 [1936])
and Black's (1962, 1979) interaction theory: "Unfortunately ... the target
domain is described as 'suffusing' the source domain, and it is claimed
that the metaphor is bidirectional--from target to source as well as from
source to target. Indeed, according to this theory, there is no source or
target. There is only a connection across domains, with one concept seen
through the filter of the other" (Lakoff and Turner 1989: 131). In trying
to clear the air, let us have a closer look at three obscure or ambiguous
passages in Black's two articles that may have contributed to the view
that Black advocates the bidirectionality/reversibility of metaphor.
To begin with, in Black 1962, where the labels principal and subsid-
iary subjectare used for what in Black 1979 are rebaptized as primary
and secondarysubject,lthe following passage occurs: "We can say that the
principal subject is 'seen through' the metaphorical expression-or, if
we prefer, that the principal subject is 'projected upon' the field of the
subsidiary subject" (Black 1962: 41). Taken at face value, this statement
indeed suggests that the transfer of features runs from A to B as well as
from B to A. It seems more likely, however, that this is merely a slip of the
pen. Surely, what Black meant to say here is ". .. or, if we prefer, that the
1. The two pairs of labels themselves, incidentally, already suggest that, in Richards's
terms, the vehicle is subservient to the tenor.
subsidiary subject is 'projected upon' the field of the principal subject."

The interjection if weprefer strongly suggests that Black intends to say the
same thing twice using different descriptions (or indeed "metaphors"):2
seeing A through B is the same as projecting B upon A. Moreover, Black
(ibid.: 44; 1979: 28), when summing up the matter of feature projection,
in both versions of his theory explicitly limits the transfer of features
to that of B to A: "The metaphor works by applying to the principal
subject a system of 'associated implications' characteristic of the sub-
sidiary subject," and "The metaphorical utterance works by 'projecting
upon' the primary subject a set of 'associated implications,' comprised in
the implicative complex, that are predicable of the secondary subject."
These characterizations, therefore, provide circumstantial evidence that
the passage quoted above is probably no more than a momentary lapse
and should not be seen as proof that Black argues in favor of the bidirec-
tionality of metaphor.
It will be serviceable to investigate a second passage pertaining to this
issue, since, while containing the crucial tenets of the interaction theory,
it is also very condensed:
The maker of a metaphorical statement selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and
organizes features of the primary subject by applying to it statements isomor-
phic with the members of the secondary subject's implicative complex. .... In
the context of a particular metaphorical statement, the two subjects "inter-
act" in the following ways: (a) the presence of the primary subject incites the
hearer to select some of the secondary subject's properties; and (b) invites
him to construct a parallel implication[sic]-complex that can fit the primary
subject; and (c) reciprocally induces parallel changes in the secondary subject.
(Black 1979: 29)
Black's remark under (c) may be another source of confusion. A reformu-
lation of the entire passage hopefully resolves the problem. I interpret:
In a particular metaphor a number of aspects associated with the implica-
tive complex of the B-term (vehicle, secondary subject) of the metaphor
are projected upon, or transferred to, the implicative complex of the
A-term (tenor, primary subject). Nowadays we would call the implica-
tive complexes of B and A the "source domain" and the "target domain"
of the metaphor, respectively (as do Lakoff and Turner [1989]). Black
suggests that in the interpretation process of the metaphor a number of
correspondences between elements from the source and target domains
are to be established. That is, the interaction between the domains of A
and B takes the form of a matching process between elements in them.
2. Furthermore,this would be consistent with his own earlier reminder that he has
"no quarrelwith the use of metaphors (if they are good ones) in talking about meta-
phor. But it may be as well to use several, lest we are misled by the adventitious
charms of our favorites"(Black 1962: 39).
in Metaphor 681
This process is described under (a)-(c) above. In a given metaphor, the

primary subject activates certain properties in the source domain that
are subsequently projected upon the target domain. This projecting of
properties from source to target domain sometimes entails a degree of
adaptation or translation. In the metaphor SCHOOLSARE PRISONS,3 for
instance, the prisoners and guards from the source domain PRISONSpre-
sumably correspond to the SCHOOL'S pupils and teachers, respectively.
In this projection or transfer, then, the features "harbors prisoners" and
"employs guards" in the source domain correspond to "harbors pupils"
and "employs teachers" in the target domain. The metaphor transforms
the pupils into prisoners and the teachers into guards. Whatever we
thought about pupils and teachers before being confronted with the
metaphor SCHOOLS AREPRISONS is affected for as long as we entertain
that metaphor. Our adaptation of pupils and teachers into pupils-as-
prisoners and teachers-as-guards is an example of what, in my view, Black
means by "construct[ing] a parallel implication-complex that can fit the
primary subject."
Now let us assume that the above adaptations were the first that in-
duced the use of the metaphor in the first place. The metaphor, however,
lends itself to elaboration; it reconceptualizes, for instance, the relations
between teachers and pupils. Whereas teachers commonly are expected
to help pupils acquire knowledge about and insight into a wide variety of
subjects, they are now primarily seen as enforcing their authority on the
pupils and as exercising a controlling function. Furthermore, the meta-
phor emphasizes the pupils' limited freedom: the pauses in the school
day's routine can be viewed as "airings" at fixed times; homework can
be matched with the compulsory activities to which prisoners are sub-
jected.4 These "matches"or "correspondences" between the two domains
(and no doubt many more can be found) in effect boil down to building
up implicative complexes (or domains) of both primary and secondary
subjects. For in the metaphor it is not only the target domain that is
momentarily transformed, but also the source domain. Every property
or feature of PRISONSthat cannot be matched by one in SCHOOLSis
eliminated or downplayed. Thus, for instance, the fact that prison cells
usually contain only one person, or a few, while the average school class
contains considerably more, makes "number of people involved" a diffi-
cult feature to match; hence this feature of PRISONis downplayed in the
metaphor. Similarly, prison cells are locked, whereas classrooms, while
3. Capitalizedmetaphorsrefer to the conceptuallevelof the terms involved,as distinct

from the particularmanifestation (verbal, pictorial, or otherwise) they may have.This
usage is consistent with LakoffandJohnson's (1980).
4. Notice that this is a possible elaboration, even though the notion of "home-"has
no place in the source domain PRISON.
in use, normally are not. In short, the implicative complex of the B-term
that is built up for the purposes of a particular metaphor is a selec-
tion from, and adaptation of, a far richer complex of facts, beliefs, and
associations that adheres to the concept PRISON.
It is in this spirit, I take it, that Black formulated his observation that
"changes in the secondary subject" are effected. I would like to add
that the process need not stop here: finding and creating correspon-
dences between features in the source and target domains assumes the
form of an oscillation that may exceed the three phases suggested by
Black's stages (a)-(c). But whether this last observation is correct or not,
it should be clear that whatever intermediate adaptations there occur
during the metaphor's interpretation in the implicative complex of the
vehicle, Black would argue that these are in the last resort always made
subservient to the implicative complex of the tenor.
There is a third passage in Black that may have misled his critics. Re-
turning for a moment to Hausman's claim that "Black himself suggests"
the reversibility of terms in a metaphor, we might guess -in the absence
of a specific reference in Hausman (1989) -that Hausman concludes this
on the basis of Black's (1962: 44) somewhat enigmatic line that "if to call
a man a wolf is to put him in a special light, we must not forget that the
metaphor makes the wolf seem more human than he otherwise would."
A line shortly before this one may be illuminating: "The nature of the in-
tended application helps to determine the character of the system to be
applied" (ibid.: 43-44). What Black means here, I propose, is that since
only features from the domain of WOLF are selected that can be matched
with features from the domain of MAN, this necessarily focuses on quali-
ties that allow adaptation to the human domain and ignores qualities of
WOLF that are not adaptable. It is in this sense that the wolf seems "more
human than he otherwise would."
I conclude, then, that both Lakoff and Turner, and Hausman are
wrong to claim that Black supports the reversibility of primary subject
and secondary subject in a metaphor.5
2. (A)symmetry of Metaphors:ThreeExperimentalStudies
Three experimental studies in Honeck and Hoffman 1980, those of
Malgady and Johnson, Verbrugge, and Connor and Kogan, all investi-
gate subjects' asymmetry judgments in metaphors of the "Ais B" type.
These studies reject the idea that the two terms of a metaphor are sym-
5. This mistakenbelief has no grave consequences for Lakoffand Turner,since they

reject reversibilityanyway,so that in fact they agree with Black. In Hausman'scase, it
results in a serious misapplicationof Black'stheory to the realm of art, as I argue in
Forceville in press.This latter study also contains a substantialsection that examines
and evaluates Black'sinteraction theory at greater length than can be done in the
present essay.
in Metaphor 683
metrical (or bidirectional) and in this respect are consistent with Black's
theory as I understand it. Unfortunately, all three have chosen to ex-
clude (higher levels of) context in the presentation of stimulus material
to subjects, giving them considerable freedom to express a preference
for either the metaphor of the form "Ais B" or that of "B is A." However,
as Miller (1979: 215), treating metaphors and similes as types of analogy,
points out, "In the abstract. .. verbal analogies, like equations, seem to
have no intrinsic directionality. As soon as we consider how authors use
analogies, however, we find that the context imposes a direction, that
it is no longer possible to rearrange freely the order of the terms." In
this section, therefore, I will argue that ignoring wider levels of context
seriously detracts from the validity of the results obtained in the studies
under consideration.
2.1. MalgadyandJohnson1980
Reviewing their earlier work, Malgady and Johnson (1980: 241) report
an experiment (Johnson, Malgady, and Anderson 1974) suggesting that
the degree of similarity between tenor and vehicle is an important factor
in subjects'judgments as to both a metaphor's comprehensibility and its
"goodness": "Generally speaking college students found metaphor com-
posed of highly similar terms (e.g., Thesnow this morningwas likeconfetti,
pickedup by the wind.) easier to interpret and rated them as 'better' fig-
ures of speech relative to their more obscure counterparts (e.g., Your
smile was a warmwall.)." In a later experiment reported (Malgady and
Johnson 1976), metaphors were expanded from the simple "noun A
is noun B" type into one of the type "modifier X-noun A is modifier
Y-noun B" to see how this influenced subjects' similarityjudgments and
metaphor-goodness judgments. The conditions in which the metaphors
were presented to subjects varied, depending on whether the modifiers
"emphasized semantic features shared by both nouns (e.g., High moun-
tains are mightykings), distinctive features of the tenor and vehicle sepa-
rately (e.g., Smokymountainsare noblekings), or features unrelated to the
two nouns (e.g., Fragilemountainsarestripedkings)"(Malgady andJohnson
1980: 245), the adjectives having been determined by norms provided
by a group of college students. It was found that
adjectivesthat emphasizedfeatures shared by both nouns in a metaphor
created the most similarconcepts and the "best"metaphoriccomparisons
of tenor and vehicle. Modificationby adjectivesunrelatedto the tenor and
vehicle impairedsimilarityand goodnessjudgments relativeto unmodified
metaphors,presumablybecause irrelevantinformationabout the compari-
sons was not integratedin the feature overlapdefining the meaning of the
metaphor.These so-calledmetaphorsseemed to borderon what most might
regardas anomaly(e.g., Gaytowers arebravenecks.). (Ibid.:246)
Building on these findings, Malgady andJohnson address the matter of
asymmetry in metaphors. Expanding on Tversky (1977), who empha-
sizes the asymmetry of similarity relations, they hypothesize that "tenor-

vehicle similarity and free recall of metaphors should be greater when
the vehicle is more salient than the tenor" (Malgady andJohnson 1980:
250). Subjects are provided with twelve metaphors in two presentation
orders: in one variant the twelve have as the tenor a high-salient noun,
whereas the vehicle is a low-salient noun; and in the other variant it is
the other way around, presentation order being offered in randomized
sequences.6 The results indicate that subjects significantly prefer meta-
phors with a low-salient tenor and a high-salient vehicle to those with
a high-salient tenor and a low-salient vehicle. Recall tasks led to similar
conclusions.
A further experiment was devised to test the influence of context on
comprehensibility, similarity, and goodness, this time in similes rather
than in metaphors. Six noun pairs of the type "A is like B" were con-
structed, the more salient noun in each case occurring in vehicle posi-
tion. Each of the six similes was subsequently embedded in each of six
different contextual conditions, the conditions varying as to the verb
and adjectives used. The conditions increased the salience of either com-
mon, tenor-distinctive, or vehicle-distinctive features. One group of sub-
jects was asked to judge the tenor-vehicle similarity without specific in-
structions to employ a directional strategy, whereas the second group
judged the degree of "figurativeness"of the similes. It was found that
the subjectsjudging similarity focused more on the features of the topic,
whereas those judging figurativeness considered the vehicles' features
more decisive.
On the basis of the experimental research cited in their article, Mal-
gady andJohnson (ibid.: 255) conclude that "metaphors are successful,
in the sense that one understands and appreciates their purpose, to the
extent that the semantic relationship drawn between remote concepts is
neither too bizarre nor overly mundane."
While the findings reported are plausible results of the experiments
as they were conducted, it is problematic that the metaphors used as
stimulus material were all presented virtually out of context. It is true
that in two experiments Malgady and Johnson embed the metaphors
(or similes) in a context by supplying various adjectives to tenor and
vehicle and by varying the verb connecting the two terms, but this con-
text is a highly abridged one. Admittedly, Malgady andJohnson (ibid.:
248-49) are aware of this limitation: "We acknowledge that the 'mo-
mentary' or situational meaning of a word is a function of the linguistic
and extralinguistic context, as well as individual differences (e.g., mem-
6. Nouns were classified as high-salient and low-salientdepending on whether they

elicited relativelymany or relativelyfew properties when presented in isolation to a
group of raters(MalgadyandJohnson 1980: 249).
in Metaphor
Forceville? (A)symmetry 685
ory, knowledge of the lexicon), in which it occurs in a speech act." They

seem insufficiently aware, however, of the extent to which ignoring wider
contexts affects their findings. In the first place, it has consequences for
their use of the notions of a metaphor's goodness and comprehensibility,
both of which concepts were left for the subjects themselves to define.
Malgady and Johnson suggest that a metaphor tends to be judged good
and comprehensible if the two terms are rather similar, without being so
similar as to result in triteness. But it is not surprising, surely, that their
subjects' responses point in this direction, for the metaphors with rather
similar terms can be fairly easily understood out of context. Another way
of putting this is that the similarity between the two terms is more or less
inherent in their default values. Kittay (1987: 55) defines defaultvaluesas
follows:7
By default assumptionsI mean those assumptionsupon which speakersrely,
in both verbal and non-verbalbehaviour,in the absence of any contextual
evidence cancellingor questioningsuch assumptions.Because speakersare
scarcelyconsciousof employingsuch assumptions,they presume,againwith
little consciousnessof makingsuch presumptions,that their audiencehas the
same assumptions.They are defaultassumptionsbecause they are what we
assumein the absenceof anycontradictoryevidence.
The default values of the two terms of a metaphor, or simile, can be
formulated as those features and connotations that occur in their impli-
cative complexes or domains if they are presented out of context. Thus,
in Malgady andJohnson's example Thesnow this morningwas like confetti,
pickedup bythewind,both snowand confettihave in their domains features
that could be described as "consisting of a large number of small items
which in great numbers fall from above," "weighing little," and "landing
in a floating movement." Even if the metaphor were presented as Snowis
confetti,interpretation would be unproblematic because of features that
are immediately understood as shared. On the other hand, listing the
default values of smileand wall leads to few, if any, obviously shared fea-
tures, and hence Yoursmilewas a warmwall, I would claim, turned out to
be more difficult to interpret for the subjects (see Malgady andJohnson
1980: 241).
In my view, then, what Malgady and Johnson's experiments show is
that subjects find it easier to comprehend metaphors whose two terms
have overlapping default values than metaphors whose terms do not, or
to a lesser extent. And it looks as if students label metaphors they can
easily make sense of good. That is, when students call a metaphor easily
comprehensible and when they call it good, they mean exactly the same
thing. If this interpretation is correct, there is not a correlation between
7. Kittay (1987: 55 n. 15) mentions Hofstadter 1985 as the source from which she has
borrowed this notion.
these concepts, as Malgady andJohnson argue, but simply a conflation.

This conflation is particularly unfortunate, moreover, since there are
good reasons to keep the two concepts separate. Take, for instance, Your
smile was a warm wall, which by the criteria of Malgady and Johnson's
subjects is a rather bad metaphor, because it is difficult to make sense of.
But if one tries to make sense of it, it is possible to come up with a valid
interpretation. For instance, a wall can offer support, it is something you
can lean against, and the adjective warmcould be seen as reinforcing
these positive connotations. Hence in the metaphor, the feature trans-
ferred from warmwall to your smilecould be "providing support," which
after the "matching process" (see my section 1 above) comes out as some-
thing like the attribute encouraging.In short, while this may be a difficult
metaphor,8it may nonetheless be simultaneously meaningful, suggestive,
or apt-in short, a good metaphor. I will come back to the issue of a
metaphor's goodness in the summary of this section.
My second problem with Malgady andJohnson's findings is related to
the goodness-of-metaphor issue, and it pertains to the matter of con-
text. Now Malgady andJohnson implicitly anticipate my phrase "if one
tries to make sense of [a metaphor]" above, for it turned out in the ex-
periments originally reported in Malgady and Johnson 1976 that even
the "anomalous" metaphors were not always perceived as such: "Never-
theless, some persistent students were able to imagine rather creative
interpretations of these metaphors. This is consistent with the finding
(Hoffman 1977; Johnson 1975; Pollio and Burns 1977) that people can
interpret anything" (Malgady and Johnson 1980: 246). What I suggest
these "persistent students" did, in the absence of a tenor and vehicle
that showed overlap in their default values, was to imagine a context
in which these so-called anomalous metaphors made sense. This means
going beyond default values: these students decided that there was no
obvious overlap between tenor and vehicle, so they started looking for a
nonobvious overlap. This search can be reformulated in terms of one of
the most important insights of Black's interaction theory: that often the
similarity between tenor and vehicle is not preexistent, showing obvious
overlap, but rather is created; that is, a previously undiscovered over-
lap suddenly is seen to obtain, thanks to the metaphor. What Malgady
andJohnson's persistent students did is something that under ordinary
circumstances they would not have needed to do. For it is only in the
testing conditions of a psychologist's lab that metaphors are presented
as single sentences; under normal conditions metaphorsalwaysappearin
a contextextendingbeyondthe sentence.Metaphors occur in texts that are
usually coherent and are aimed by an addresser to a specific addressee.
8. Since, like the other metaphors used in this experiment, this is a literary metaphor
(Malgady andJohnson 1980: 245), moreover, one would expect it to be difficult, and
readers would be expected to spend more than the usual energy to make sense of it.
in Metaphor 687
Moreover, since we can assume that an addresser wants to make sense

to his interlocutor,9 most metaphors can be expected to serve the pur-
pose of conveying something to the addressee. It is in this wider per-
spective that the context (in the form of prior or following verbal text,
perceptual information, social or cultural conventions, the previously
shared experiences of addresser and addressee of the metaphor, etc.)
may play a considerable role in the interpretation of a particular meta-
phor. One way in which this can happen is that the context alters, mo-
mentarily at least, the default values of the vehicle - and, by implication,
of the tenor, since it is the "newly created" features of the vehicle that
are projected upon the tenor. Black (1962: 43) anticipated this: "But in
a poem, or a piece of sustained prose, the writer can establish a novel
pattern of implications for the literal uses of the key expressions, prior
to using them as vehicles for his metaphors.... Metaphors can be sup-
ported by specially constructed systems of implications, as well as by
accepted commonplaces; they can be made to measure and need not be
reach-me-downs." In this sense, then, the way is "paved"for a metaphor
that in isolation would probably have confused or misled an addressee.
This is particularly true for metaphors whose tenor and vehicle at first
sight would seem to allow no room at all for projections from vehicle to
tenor. Indeed, it has been argued that innovative ideas and discoveries
take the form of such metaphors; what seemed an anomalous coupling
proves to be a completely new way of looking at some object or concept
(see, for instance, Boyd 1979; Indurkhya 1991). Another way in which
context can influence the interpretation of a metaphor is in hinting
which of the features that are part of the default value of the vehicle are
to be projected upon the tenor. In an earlier article I gave the example
Truly, the man is an elephant,where the feature projected from vehicle
upon tenor is (a) possessing great physical strength, (b) having an excel-
lent memory, or (c) being extraordinarily heavy,10depending on whether
the preceding sentence was
a. "Roy managed to carry the piano upstairs all on his own";
b. "Even thirty years later, Roy still remembered the names of all those
present at the occasion"; or
c. "Roy had hardly sat down when the chair collapsed." (Forceville
1991: 8)
Let us consider what effects the (virtual) absence of context has on
Malgady andJohnson's finding that subjects prefer metaphors with the
high-salient term in vehicle position and the low-salient word in tenor
9. Or rather, wants to be relevant to the addressee; see Sperber and Wilson 1986,
and Forceville 1994b for applications of Sperber and Wilson's ideas to the realm of
metaphor. The latter article specifically addresses pictorial metaphor in advertising.
10. Obviously, this is by no means an exhaustive list; other sentences could tap the
feature "having a thick skin" or "runs the risk of becoming extinct," etc.
position to the inverse situation. The results of the experiment, as it

stands, are convincing. They corroborate the intuition that one way to
gain some sort of understanding of a certain concept is to place it in the
tenor position of a metaphor and have it interact with a concept that
is, in one way or another, fairly well understood and can hence fill the
vehicle position. After all, "the essence of metaphor is understanding or
experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (Lakoff andJohnson
1980: 5).
But again, the (virtual) absence of context significantly distorts the
situation as it obtains in "real life." To be fair, Malgady and Johnson
(1980: 256) are aware of at least one dimension of this limitation: "Un-
fortunately, it is difficult to reconcile a functional account of metaphor
interpretation without recourse to such 'fuzzy' considerations as the
speaker's intention in uttering a metaphor, or conversely, the listener's
inference." Indeed, in a companion piece, Johnson and Malgady (1980)
discuss in more detail how varieties in speakers' intentions and conse-
quent listeners' inferences can affect the interpretation of metaphors.
Thus, they report a study by Johnson (1978), who asked seventy-five
subjects to interpret twenty metaphors. One of these metaphors, People
are doors,yielded no fewer than twenty-seven different interpretations.
Although Johnson and Malgady are certainly right to draw attention to
the variety of interpretations that a particular metaphor can evoke, here
again they disregard the matter of the particular context of a metaphor.
They ignore that presenting their sample metaphors in a decontextual-
ized "Ais B" form opens up a much wider range of potential interpreta-
tions than is possible in the real-life context in which metaphors actually
appear.
2.2. Verbrugge1980
Verbrugge (1980) also contrasts "A is B" types of metaphor with "B is
A" types. Expanding on Black (1962), he avoids Malgady andJohnson's
(1980) mistake that similarity between A and B is necessarily preexis-
tent. Indeed, he had already rejected approaches based on preexistent
similarity in Verbrugge and McCarrell 1977: 511. More explicitly than
Malgady and Johnson, moreover, Verbrugge (1980: 107) draws attention
to the influence of both textual and situational context on metaphor in-
terpretation. When describing an experiment carried out with Deborah
Davidson and Richard Santucci, Verbrugge (ibid.: 109-10) defends the
decision to leave out context as follows:
Presentingthe sentencesin isolationwouldbe a problemif one wereinterested
in how discoursecontext constrainsa reader'sexperience. But our primary
concernin this experimentwaswith sentence structureand how it constrains
interpretation.Wewerewillingto let the remainderof constraintson interpre-
tation be suppliedby the readersthemselves,which produced considerable
variabilityin the specificsof the reported experiences. In naturalcommu-
in Metaphor 689
nication settings the extrinsic constraints would normally be much tighter.

Fortunately, the range of types of responses was sufficiently small to make
classification manageable and the study of sentence structure profitable.
After the excellent series of experiments in Verbrugge and McCarrell
1977, the rather loose position reflected here is somewhat disappointing.
It seems to me that Verbrugge does not heed his own perceptive insight
that "the crucial question for metaphor is not what constraints need to
be relaxed, but what constraints need to be imposed to make metaphoric
combinations interpretable" (ibid.: 518). I will argue that relaxing con-
straints on context affects Verbrugge's (1980) findings more profoundly
than he seems willing to acknowledge.
The aim of Verbrugge's experiment was to gain insight into the extent
to which subjects exposed to metaphors "transformed" one term of the
metaphor into the other term (as predicted by Black's interaction view
and Verbrugge's own variant of this theory, the transformation view).
More specifically, the effects of the order of the two noun phrases ("A
is B" versus "B is A") and the form of the sentence (the metaphor "A is
B" versus the simile "A is like B") were tested. Subjects were asked to
"write out a description of the images or thoughts that came to mind
when they read a sentence" (ibid.: 109). The material was presented in
four different conditions to four different groups: each group received
ten sentences in one of the following four conditions:
1) Order AB (preferred) in simile form, e.g.: "Skyscrapersare like giraffes."
2) Order BA (non-preferred) in simile form, e.g.: "Giraffes are like sky-
scrapers.
3) Order AB (preferred) in metaphor form, e.g.: "Skyscrapersare giraffes."
4) Order BA (non-preferred), in metaphor form, e.g.: "Giraffes are sky-
11
scrapers."
The responses were first scored as either condensed or uncondensed
descriptions. Condensation was defined as "the combination, in a single
imagined event, of elements from two or more domains-in this case,
the topic and vehicle domains. Most of the condensed responses were
transformations" (ibid.: 110).12 Transformational responses were then sub-
classified as "A becomes B" if As identity had been transformed by B's,
or as "B becomes A" if the reverse was true. Some further scoring sub-
divisions were made that for present purposes can be neglected.'3
11. "Order AB is also labeled 'Preferred,' because it is the word order chosen by more
than 50% of readers, in a separate study, when asked which of the two sentences they
preferred" (Verbrugge 1980: 109).
12. Verbrugge's "transformation view" of metaphor is a variation on Black's inter-
action view. The term transformationcaptures the familiar Blackian idea that the tenor
of a metaphor is, for as long as the metaphor is entertained, changed by, altered by,
transformed by, or seen as its vehicle.
13. For the same reason, the differences between the metaphor form and the simile
form will be ignored in my comments on Verbrugge's experiment.
Among the interesting findings Verbrugge (ibid.: 113) reports were

that almost half of the responses exhibited transformational conden-
sation and another 22 percent showed "a transformational influence
without condensation." Verbrugge (ibid.: 106) interprets this as proof
that people's experiences are "fanciful"when comprehending metaphor,
where "fanciful transformations" have been described earlier as the ex-
perience of metaphor as "unconventional and unusual, not . . . neces-
sarily 'untrue' or 'impossible.'" A second facet of this general finding,
Verbrugge (ibid.: 113) argues, was the pervasiveness of one particular
type of fanciful experience, namely, "transformations of one domain by
another," where "for most of the transformational responses ... the re-
lation between the two domains showed a strong directionality." These
findings corroborate Black's theoretically developed views and are com-
pletely plausible. The problem, again, resides in the form in which the
stimulus material was offered to subjects. My contention is that, as in
the Malgady andJohnson experiments, since the metaphors and similes
were given context-free, the subjects had to imagine a context in which
they made sense. Some subjects were obviously better at this than others,
and people who were good at the task no doubt scored higher in the
transformation category than those who were not. The point, however,
is that in real life metaphors very rarely, if ever, occur context-free. That
does not only mean, as Verbrugge suggests in the passage quoted above,
that an actual context, verbal and/or situational, constrains the number
of possible or plausible interpretations of a metaphor; it also guides the
process of metaphorical interpretation itself. Thus, as Verbrugge (ibid.:
102) himself argues earlier in his paper, whereas in Highwaysin a rain-
stormaresnakesthe projected property of snakestends to be slipperiness,
in Alpine highwaysare snakesit is more likely to be sinuousness (see also
the experiments reported in Verbrugge and McCarrell 1977). In a nut-
shell this example points up the limitation of Verbrugge's experiment.
In real life, a metaphor never occurs without a context. Often, a context
is provided by other linguistic elements within the sentence, as in the
two versions of the highways-snakes example just quoted. But the con-
text, as I have argued above, may well exceed the boundaries of a single
sentence. Briefly, in ordinary circumstances there is always a context,
and this context to a considerable extent determines which property or
properties of B are projected onto A.
Again, ignoring higher levels of context affects Verbrugge's findings
with respect to the order in which the two terms of the metaphor were
presented. This order, he claims,
had a strongeffect on the directionalityof the experiencedtransformations.
In general,the firstterm of a sentence more frequentlyspecifiedthe domain
thatwastransformed.Forexample,44%of the people who read Skyscrapers are
experienceda condensedtransformationof skyscrapers
giraffes into giraffes...
in Metaphor 691
while only 12% experienced the opposite direction of transformation...

Similarly, of those reading Giraffesare skyscrapers,35% experienced giraffes
turning into skyscrapers ... and 28% experienced the opposite direction. This
pattern of ordinal differences was also found for the corresponding similes.
(Verbrugge 1980: 115)14
What is remarkable here, I would argue, is not so much that the ma-
jority of people confronted with, say, Giraffes are skyscrapersresponds by
projecting features from skyscrapers upon giraffes; rather it is surprising
that still such a high percentage responds by projecting features from
giraffes to skyscrapers! Although the context of this sentence is minimal,
it at least establishes that giraffes is its grammatical subject and that some-
thing is predicated about that subject in terms of skyscrapers, in much
the same way as the literal sentence Brothers are students would be taken
to predicate something about brothers rather than students. I would
suggest that the 28 percent of Verbrugge's subjects who in Giraffes are
skyscrapersopted for projecting features from giraffes to skyscrapers were
confused-for that, in my view, is what they were-by the metaphor,
or rather, by the paucity of context. I would claim that the proportion
of subjects reported by Verbrugge's subjects making this mistake would
have been considerably lower than 28 percent if they had encountered
that metaphor in context.15 Consider the following situation:
Yesterday I took my youngest daughter, aged five, to the zoo for the first time.
She was filled with wonder by all kinds of animals, but she could hardly believe
her eyes when she saw the giraffes. She watched them for a long time and then
concluded admiringly, "Giraffesare skyscrapers."
Surely, the addressee has no difficulty whatsoever in establishing that

my daughter wanted to convey something about giraffes in terms of
skyscrapers, and not the other way around. Anybody interpreting the
reverse would simply be wrong. In a different situation, of course, the
metaphor could well occur with reversed terms. Consider Skyscrapersare
giraffes as occurring in the following (imaginary but plausible) context:
[(Partially nonverbal) context: A member of a desert tribe in the middle of
Africa has had the opportunity to study in New York. After many years he
returns to his native village. His fellow tribesmen ask about his experiences
and want to know what New York is like. As part of his explanations, the man
tries to indicate how extraordinarily high skyscrapers are, but the others find
it impossible to visualize such heights. Suddenly the man hits upon an idea
and says:] "Skyscrapersare giraffes."
14. The percentages not covered here comprise the people whose responses were
scored as uncondensed.
15. Note that, as Steen (1992: thesis 2; my translation)points out, "mostmetaphors
are not noticed as such."In other words, people are perfectly capable of interpreting
a metaphor without being necessarilyawarethat what they are interpretinghappens
to be calleda metaphor.
Again, in this context it is crystal clear that the topic of discussion is

skyscrapers and not giraffes. The fellow tribesmen now hopefully under-
stand, as they were meant to, something more about the phenomenon of
skyscrapers, and very likely the respondents of Verbrugge's experiment,
if provided with this extended context, would have understood how the
metaphor is to be interpreted. As it is, Verbrugge's experiment suggests
more about his subjects' imaginative capacities than about their ability
to interpret metaphor.16
2.3. ConnorandKogan1980
A third study in Honeck and Hoffman that focuses, among other things,
on asymmetry relations in metaphor is Connor and Kogan 1980.17 One
important difference with the two studies discussed above is that Connor
and Kogan do not restrict their investigations to verbal material but also
offer pictorial stimuli. As they correctly point out:
Metaphor is a cognitive rather than strictly linguistic phenomenon. By this, we

mean that there are certain perceptual and conceptual processes involved in
metaphoric thinking that are common to a variety of forms of expression (e.g.,
metaphor, simile, personification, proverb).... We would ... like to suggest
that apprehension of figurative relations may normally occur in nonlinguistic
media and only later be expressed through verbal forms. Clearly, if this is the
case, it becomes important to study these perceptual bases of metaphor and
their relation to verbal processes. (Ibid.: 283-84)
Connor and Kogan first report their earlier research pertaining to the
interpretation of pictorial metaphors. In these so-called metaphor triad
tasks, subjects are presented with three pictures. Two of these are meta-
phorically related, and the third shares a nonmetaphoric relation with
each of the other two. The latter may be based on function, category
membership, or thematic appropriateness. The subjects are then asked
to choose the two that "go together best." "The interest, of course, is
in whether the subject recognizes the metaphoric pairing and explains
16. Although Verbrugge1984 is a theoretical article on metaphor,and only fleetingly

refers to the one under discussion here, it shows that the author is increasinglyaware
of the role of a context that, in various ways, exceeds that of the sentence. His ob-
servation that it is probably"fallaciousto suggest that 'a sentence has a meaning' in
isolation from a user and a context of use" (ibid.: 179) is typical of the spiritof the en-
tire article. And Verbrugge (1986: 241) even explicitly criticizes "muchof the earlier
researchon children (like psycholinguisticresearchin general) [for] present[ing] sets
of isolated sentences .... These are unusual kinds of communication settings and
place a large burden on a child to supply contextual support for interpreting each
sentence."
17. In Kogan, Chadrow,and Harbour 1989 similarexperiments are conducted, using
the same stimulus material.Although more recent than the article under discussion,
no significantmethodological alterationshave been introduced, so that it is open to
the same criticismsas the article discussed here.
in Metaphor 693
it clearly" (ibid.: 285). Research of this kind led to an empirical investi-

gation of metaphors that, as Connor and Kogan (ibid.: 287) point out,
"often involves a directional comparison."
In the experiment described in the article under discussion, the au-
thors provided their subjects with two terms, both verbal or both picto-
rial, by projecting one on a left-hand screen and the other on a right-
hand screen. The subjects were asked to construct with these two terms a
" is like because ..."
metaphor, or rather simile, of the type
(ibid.: 293). The left-hand term was called A and the right-hand term
B; in a second group, the left-right order as projected was reversed. The
subjects in both groups were explicitly asked to ignore the particular
left-right order in which the two terms happened to be projected on the
screens and decide on an order for themselves.
Like Malgady andJohnson (1980) and Verbrugge (1980), Connor and
Kogan find, both in the verbal and in the pictorial examples, that their
subjects tend to prefer one order of the two terms to the other. Despite
warnings to the subjects to ignore it, the left-right order in which the
terms are projected do affect responses, but not enough to overrule pre-
ferred order. But again, the experimenters offer their metaphoric pairs
out of context, although Connor and Kogan (1980: 292), too, are aware
of what they do: "Although the present task format is based on the pro-
duction of metaphoric relations, we do not claim to be modeling the
production of metaphors in the real world. In the latter context, the
topic is often immediately available and the metaphor-producer attempts
to find a fitting vehicle. Nevertheless, we would expect that choice to
be determined by the kinds of conceptual properties under study in the
present investigation." The problems, of course, reside in this last expec-
tation. I will briefly discuss some of their tentative conclusions. Connor
and Kogan hypothesized that in pairs that involved a human and a non-
human term, the human term would be favored for the tenor position.
This was indeed found to be a tendency, but there were exceptions. One
of these was the (verbal) pair flock of geeseand marchingsoldiers,which
yielded no significant preference for one order or the other. As a possible
interpretation of this lack of preference Connor and Kogan (ibid.: 301)
venture that "while soldiers are indeed human, the underlying ground
of the metaphor pertains to the structure or formation of a group of
soldiers, an aspect that does not really tap their 'humanness."' This con-
clusion sounds quite plausible, but even if it is correct, we should be
aware of its limitations. As in the experiments of Malgady and Johnson
(1980) and Verbrugge (1980), it probably suggests less about the mecha-
nisms of metaphor than about the way people perceive or experience the
default values of concepts, that is, about the connotations these concepts
evoke when encountered out of context. In a particular, real situation
there will seldom be any preference or even choice as to what is tenor
and what vehicle. In a context where there is talk about soldiers,'8 only
the metaphor Soldiersaregeeseseems possible, whereas in a discussion of
geese it is the other way around.19Moreover, a consideration of the con-
text in which a metaphor occurs does not only decide the order of tenor
and vehicle in cases where Connor and Kogan's subjects find no clear
directionality; even where they find a strong directionality, it is not at
all difficult to imagine a context in which this directionality is reversed.
Consider the pictorial metaphor involving a city lit up at night and a
woman with jewels that in the experiment yields a strong preference for
the WOMANIS CITY variant (Connor and Kogan 1980: 296, 308). Picture
a situation in which a good friend and I have, against the rules, achieved
the feat of secretly climbing the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam
in the middle of the night. We have brought drinks and celebrate our
stunt by toasting each other and slapping each other on the shoulders,
looking out over the most beautiful city in the world. We are elated. We
did it! The city is lying at our feet! By climbing one of its high points
we conquered her. And I say, "Look-a woman with jewels" (although
hopefully, at this moving moment, I would find a more poetic way of
expressing the metaphor). The brightly lit city is a jeweled woman, and
not the other way around. The context, to repeat Miller (1979), imposes
the direction of feature transfer.
The failure to take contextual factors into account may also provide
the clue for a result that puzzled Connor and Kogan in the metaphor
triad tasks referred to above. Among other things, the experimenters
found that providing verbal labels for each of the pictures helped the
"subjects 'see' the appropriate qualities in the stimuli" (Connor and
Kogan 1980: 286), thus facilitating the matching process. In a follow-up
experiment the subjects, all children, were subdivided into three groups.
Before the pairing process began, one group was asked to provide its
own labels for each of the pictures in the triad; the second group was
given labels developed by the experimenters; and the third group had
to do without labels at all. The results indicated that
those children who saw labels provided by the experimenter improved dra-
maticallywhile the childrenwho providedtheir own labelsand the children
in the controlgroup improvedonly slightly.Our initialspeculationaboutthe
importance of the way in which children encode stimuli received further sup-
port from an examination of change scores for individual items. When one
or both members of the critical pair were complex or ambiguous enough to
18. Of course, the context need not be of a verbal nature.

19. A context in which the metaphor Geeseare soldiersmight be appropriate is a
conversationbetween two Romans of antiquity.Since geese were sometimes used to
guard temples because of the noise they make when somebody approaches,much as
dogs are used today, one of the men could well have said, "Geeseare soldiers."I owe
this example tojohan Hoorn.
in Metaphor 695
permit multiple encodings the item benefited from the experimenter's labels.
Those items where both pictures were simple and unambiguous showed little
improvement. (Ibid.)
The part of the findings that puzzled Connor and Kogan, however, was
that even in those cases where the children who had to provide their own
labels came up with labels that corresponded with the experimenters'
labels as presented to the first group-which showed that they had at-
tended to the "appropriate" feature overlap--these children still scored
significantly lower than the second group.
This outcome suggests that these children were not treating their own labels as
seriously as the experimenter-label group treated ours. Although the present
results do not provide enough information to draw conclusive inferences
about the reasons for this difference, they point to a possible distinction be-
tween the "seeing" and the "attaching significance to" aspects of forming a
concept about visual information. Alternatively, perhaps children need the
kind of extra encouragement provided by a directive examiner before they will
put useful information to work in performing a task-in this case, identifying
the metaphorical pair. (Ibid.)
I would venture that Connor and Kogan's interpretation of this phe-
nomenon is in the right direction but could be rendered in terms of
context: the experimenter's labels provide a context that helps the chil-
dren see the similarity between two pictures as intended to be seen by the
experimenter.Even children tapping, in a given case, the same similarity
feature as the experimenter might therefore be still uncertain whether
they tapped the "correct" feature, whereas the other children, helped to
spot this "correct" feature because the experimenter indicated it verbally
as well as pictorially, better realized how they were supposed to perform.
This points up a problem: unlike what Connor and Kogan (and Malgady
andJohnson) seem to think, similarity is not an objectivelygiven feature. In
cases where, as the authors themselves state, "both pictures were simple
and unambiguous," a recourse to default values was probably enough
to tap the grounds of similarity between the two pictures. But in cases
where both terms are complex, default values alone do not suffice. In
such cases, context is an indispensable clue to tap the "right" similarity
or, as Black stresses, to create it.
2.4. Summary
The experiments of Malgady and Johnson, Verbrugge, and Connor and
Kogan all confirm Tversky's (1977) claim that the asymmetry of similarity
judgments holds for metaphors. They reveal, moreover, that subjects
usually show a preference either for "Ais B" or "B is A"when asked to pro-
duce a metaphor with the terms A and B. Malgady andJohnson further-
more find that embedding the metaphors in a minimal context created
by adding modifiers to A and B influences subjects' ratings of metaphors'
goodness. However, none of these authors pays sufficient attention to

the influence of the (extended) context in which metaphors function.
They ignore the fact that one cannot simply work "bottom up" in the
interpretation of metaphor and consider the inclusion of the "wider con-
text" of a metaphor as a variable that, perhaps, could be added in some
follow-up experiment. As I have tried to demonstrate in my discussions
of the experiments, both the results pertaining to the preferences for a
certain order of the two terms in a metaphor and those concerning the
interpretations of these metaphors remain rather gratuitous if the wider
context is not taken into account. Put differently, while the results as pre-
sented in the experiments are plausible, the wider context in which they
would, in a normal situation, always appear "overrules"all the mecha-
nisms that the authors under consideration address. Or, in Kittay's(1987:
158) words, "the fact that an interpretation takes place both from the
bottom up and from the top down means that an interpretation is always
revisable in the light of a larger context."
The failure to take this larger context into account may reflect inade-
quate insight among the authors discussed into two aspects of metaphor
that are central to its importance. In the first place, two of the studies
discussed (those by Malgady and Johnson and by Connor and Kogan)
focus too much on preexistent similarity between the two terms of a
metaphor, building on the unfortunate premise that similarity obtains
objectively, contra Black's (1962, 1979) crucial insight that many meta-
phors - and they are often the more exciting ones - create the similarity
between tenor and vehicle.
Related to this is a problem that mars all three experiments, and that is
a deliberate ignoring of the function of metaphors. Metaphors are used
to argue or convey something. In the argumentative variant they occur
in a communicative situation in which an addresser wishes to persuade
an addressee to look at something from a certain angle.20More specifi-
cally, the addresser wants to suggest something about the tenor of the
metaphor in terms of the vehicle, thus providing a certain perspective
on the tenor. Basically the same happens in situations where metaphors
are employed as cognitive instruments for didactic or scientific purposes.
A good metaphor (or rather, source domain) can be a great help to an
instructor illuminating a phenomenon that, for a pupil or student, is
largely unknown or unstructured; and a scientist can attempt to acquire
a greater insight into an obscure phenomenon by turning it into a meta-
20. This is inspired by, and consistent with, the relevance perspective on communi-
cation as argued by Sperber and Wilson (1986). Brief summaries of their theory are
found in Sperber and Wilson 1987 and Wilson and Sperber 1989. A highly accessible
introduction to and expansion on their work is Blakemore 1992. A specific application
of Sperber and Wilson's theory to (pictorial) metaphor appears in Forceville 1994b.
in Metaphor 697
phorical tenor and selecting one or more promising vehicle domains to

see if a transfer of features yields any interesting implications.21
Thus, whether a metaphor is used to persuade, to teach, or as a heu-
ristic device, whatever somebody might find a preferable order of A and
B for a metaphor when confronted with it out of context, this preference
becomes completely irrelevant when the metaphor occurs in a specific
situation, as it nearly always does. It is in the light of this situational
context, moreover, that the notion of a metaphor's goodness should in
my view find a place. A metaphor, I propose, is good to the degree to
which it succeeds in emphasizing, illuminating, or creating aspects of the
tenor that without the metaphor would not have been emphasized, illu-
minated, or created. In order to be able to judge that goodness, however,
one should have access to the context in which a particular metaphor
occurs. And that context is not necessarily (only) the surrounding ver-
bal text; it may also consist of the perceptual environment in which the
metaphor is used, of the (sub)cultural context, and, in the case of per-
suasive or didactic communication, of the intentions that the utterer of
the metaphor has. In the broadest sense, these intentions alwaysare the
triggering of some sort of effect in the addressee's cognitive environment
(see Sperber and Wilson 1986: 39 and passim). Grossly simplified, the
communicator wants to bring about some change, however minimal and
however temporary, in the way the addressee thinks about an aspect of
the world. Or, in a didactic situation, the communicator wants to make
the interlocutor (pupil or student) understand something. In my view, a
metaphor's goodness had best be understood as a measure of its success
in conveying (some of) the aspect(s) of the tenor that the communica-
tor had in mind when using that metaphor vis-a-vis a particular listener
(or group of listeners). When metaphor is used as a heuristic device, its
goodness is to be rated in terms of the extent to which a (new) metaphor
improves on existing models in explaining the internal coherence and
relationships of aspects of the phenomenon under scrutiny, or in high-
lighting hitherto ignored aspects of it. In all these cases, an assessment
of contextual factors is indispensable for understanding a metaphor.22
21. For an extensive discussion of studies exploring the use of metaphors in educa-
tion, see Van Besien 1992.
22. Goodness, of course, here has nothing to do with ethical acceptability. If a meta-
phor fulfills the purposes of the communicator, it is a good metaphor, but the pur-
poses can be despicable. This, in turn, means that it can be highly desirable to subject
metaphors to ethical scrutiny. See, for instance, the metaphors BMW MOTORBIKE IS
GIRLFRIEND and PITBULLS ARE JEWS discussed in section
3.Johnson (1993) offers an
extended reflection on the fundamental way morality is expressed in metaphors.
3. AreMetaphorsAlwaysAsymmetrical, Then?
I have argued that (extended) context always unequivocally determines
the distribution of tenor and vehicle in a metaphor and, moreover, that
the transfer of features is from vehicle to tenor. As I suggested in my
introduction, however, there are cases where matters seem less clear-cut.
I now come back to this point. The questions at issue in this section,
which will have a more speculative character than the previous ones, can
be formulated as follows: Is there neverany doubt about the distribution
of tenor and vehicle in a metaphor? Are there situations where both the
metaphors "Ais B" and "B is A"are possible? Is there always onlya trans-
fer of features from vehicle to tenor, and not vice versa? I will discuss
these questions with reference to four examples.
My first example is not a verbal but a pictorial one. It pertains to
two scenes in the American film The TurningPoint (directed by Herbert
Ross, 1977) that intriguingly pose the question whether the two terms of
the metaphor under consideration are reversible.23In this film, a scene
occurs in which the young ballerina Emilia (played by Leslie Browne)
is practicing with somebody else while the jeune premierYuri (Mikhail
Baryshnikov) watches them. They have eye contact and obviously fall
in love with each other. In the next scene, which seems to be a dream
of Emilia's, she and Yuri are dancing together in an otherwise deserted
studio. The sensual nature of their dance, certain gestures and looks, and
a near kiss, reinforced by their earlier eye contact, give their dancing
erotic overtones. It is possible (though not necessary) to perceive the
metaphor DANCING IS LOVEMAKING in this sequence. In the scene im-
mediately following this one, Emilia and Yuri are in bed making love. The
continuity between the two scenes is reinforced by the fact that there is
no break in the music. Here, conversely, the couple make certain move-
ments and gestures that are reminiscent of their earlier dancing together,
so that the metaphor LOVEMAKING IS DANCING is hinted at. At first sight,
it might seem, then, that the two terms are reversible. I would, however,
argue against such an analysis. It is true that we are confronted with a
metaphor allowing two different distributions of the same two terms A
and B as A IS B and B IS A. But if we consider the context in which each of
these metaphorical variants occurs, there can be no doubt which variant
of the metaphor is, at a given moment, the appropriate one. The context,
here provided by the studio and the bedroom, respectively, firmly de-
termines the distribution of tenor and vehicle. There is no doubt that if
we register metaphors here, in the first scene we are supposed to under-
stand the couple's dancing in terms of lovemaking, while in the second
23. The analysis of this example was inspired by Whittock's (1990: 55) discussion of
these scenes.
in Metaphor 699
we are to see their lovemaking in terms of dancing. Nonetheless, it could

be argued that by explicitly introducing the two metaphors after each
other, the link between DANCING and LOVEMAKING is reinforced, so that
whenever we see people dancing after these scenes, we are possibly more
prone to perceive the latent metaphor DANCING IS LOVEMAKING than
if we had not been exposed to the metaphor LOVEMAKING IS DANCING.
But this sort of effect should not mislead us into thinking that, at a given
moment, the two terms of the metaphor are reversible or symmetrical:
in the first scene described, the metaphor is DANCING IS LOVEMAKING;
in the second scene, LOVEMAKING IS DANCING. Marvelously juxtaposed
for artistic purposes though they may be, the two variants of the meta-
phor are in fact better seen as two different metaphors, and not as a
single bidirectional one.24
Next, consider lines 5-6 of William Blake's (1971 [1789]) poem "The
Divine Image": "For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love / Is God, our father
dear."25We are here confronted, it seems, by a metaphor with a multiple
tenor, Mercy,pity,peace, and love,and the vehicle God,yielding the meta-
phor MERCY, PITY, PEACE, AND LOVE IS GOD. Let us, for convenience'
sake, take the multiple tenor as a single one, say, MPPL.A linear reading
of the metaphor then gives a clear distribution of tenor(s) (MPPL) and
vehicle (GOD). We might, however, wish to read against the linear order
and consider GOD the metaphor's tenor, yielding a metaphor that invites
us to see GOD in terms of MPPL, rather than the other way around. And
of course there is no grammatical objection against taking this stance;
it is arguable that Blake deviated from the conventional word order to
give MPPLextra emphasis by placing the vehicle in front position. In that
case, the terms of the metaphor would be reversed, and the metaphor
would in fact be GOD IS MPPL.
Now consider the metaphor in the context of the first two stanzas in
which the lines occur:
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
24. Notice that the overall context of the film, which is primarilya ballet film, not
an erotic one, gives more emphasis to the metaphor DANCINGIS LOVEMAKING than
to LOVEMAKING IS DANCING. In a more surrealist film, which would stress the con-
cepts LOVEMAKING and DANCING with equal force, it might well have been far more
difficult to make such an assessment. Even the order in which the two variantswere
presented would not play a decisive role in the assessment of which of the two was
the most dominant. In such a film, the distribution of tenor and vehicle would pose
problems that are close to the Blake example discussed next.
25. The following discussionwas inspired by Brooke-Rose's(1965: 108) comments on
this passage.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
The extended context in this case does not really solve the problem
whether GOD or MPPL is the tenor of the metaphor; both readings still
seem possible. Rather, the complexities increase; not only does a second
metaphor manifest itself (MPPL IS MAN or MAN IS MPPL), but, due to
the parallelism between lines 5-6 and 7-8, the metaphor GOD IS MANor
MAN IS GOD is also suggested.
A more detailed discussion of the relative acceptability of these meta-
phorical varieties would require, in line with my own exhortations in
the previous section, an examination of the wider context of the rest of
the poem, the rest of the collection, maybe of Blake's other works, and
possibly even his personal and poetic views on the interrelationships of
the human and the divine. Suffice it to say, however, that if the matter
of asymmetry, with the corresponding issue of the direction of feature
transfer, is not open to an unequivocal solution in this instance, this may
well be because Blake did not want the matter to be unequivocal. In all
likelihood he wished his readers to ponder the implications of GOD IS
MPPL and of MPPL IS GOD; of MAN IS MPPL and of MPPL IS MAN; of GOD
IS MAN and of MAN IS GOD. Thus in this case we could say that we indeed
have three (interrelated) symmetrical, or bidirectional, metaphors, in
the sense that each pair can be read with a reversed distribution of tenor
and vehicle, while it is impossible to decide definitively on a "best" order.
Since Blake is a notoriously complex and difficult poet, it might be
that this example is a very rare one, even in poetry. And indeed I sus-
pect that this is true. Let us leave poetry and switch for a moment to the
realm of advertising for another example of a metaphor where there are
hints of the reversibility of the metaphorical terms. In Forceville 1991 I
discuss a Dutch advertisement from the 1980s for BMW motorbikes in
which the visual part is a motorbike and the heading can be translated
as "Instead of dating," and which contains, I argue, the metaphor BMW
MOTORBIKE IS GIRLFRIEND. The complete copy runs:
With a BMW motorbike you know what you've got. And with a date that re-
mains to be seen. Of course dating someone [or: a date] can be very attractive.
But so is a BMW motorbike.
If, however, you are really looking for a long-lasting relationship, what could
be more reliable than a BMW motorbike? A BMW motorbike is what you could
call the very opposite of a dayfly.
For one of its strong points is its life expectancy. It lasts for years. With-
out aging quickly. And without high maintenance costs. They are machines of
almost indestructible quality.
Moreover, they are comfortable. The rider controls his machine. And not
in Metaphor 701
the other way around. What is noticeable is the sense of peace when you're
riding on a BMW. You will discover that you are not the only one who wants
to ride on a BMW.
That becomes particularly apparent when you find out about the very high
trade-in value if you sell it. But that won't happen until much later. First take a
test drive at your BMW dealer's. A date can wait. BMWmakesridingmarvelous.
(My translation)
There seems little doubt as to the distribution of tenor and vehicle in this
advertisement. The advertising context generates the expectation that
the communicator (the advertiser) will make a claim about his product,
here BMW motorbikes, so we slot BMW MOTORBIKEas the tenor. The
heading, "Instead of dating," yields the vehicle term, GIRLFRIEND.The
two opening paragraphs support the idea that the underlying metaphor
can be verbalized as MOTORBIKEIS GIRLFRIEND.26 They exploit a num-
ber of alleged features from the relationship between the boy and his
(would-be) girlfriend, which are then projected upon the relationship of
the boy and his (would-be) BMW.27 But we may wonder whether there is
not something more going on here, particularly if we consider the meta-
phor in its complete context. After the opening paragraphs, there are
almost no further explicit references to the source domain of (relation-
ship with a) girlfriend, but a lot to the target domain of (relationship
with a) motorbike. From a metaphorical point of view, this is curious.
Ordinarily, if a metaphor is used, this is to present the tenor in terms of
the vehicle, necessitating projections of features from the domain of the
vehicle that transform, or highlight, features in the domain of the tenor.
Here, however, soon after its introduction, the vehicle domain seems to
be largely ignored, whereas the target domain is apparently extensively
explored on its own. Now this, of course, could well mean that the source
domain has done its work and is no longer necessary for elucidation of
the tenor. The metaphor simply is finished. But although the rest of the
ad copy can indeed be read as independent of the metaphor, it is difficult
to escape the sensation that the metaphor has not been altogether aban-
doned-not in the last place because the penultimate line once more
refers to the vehicle domain ("A date can wait").
I suggest that after the establishment of the metaphorical correspon-
dence between the two domains, in the heading + picture and in the
opening paragraphs of the ad copy, the reader is invited to go on sup-
26. The advertisement is reproduced in Forceville 1991, which discusses verbopicto-

rial metaphors, i.e., metaphors in which one of the terms is rendered pictorially, the
other verbally.
27. The fact that the features projected from source to target domain change their
value from "negative" to "positive" (e.g., "not-long-lasting relationship" becomes
"long-lasting relationship") does not at all affect the principle, because of its sustained
regularity.
plying correspondences in the remainder of the text. This, in fact, boils

down to something odd: whereas normally the vehicle domain is ex-
ploited in order to build up the target domain, here what happens is the
reverse. What makes this hypothesis plausible is that it indeed proves
possible to do this, and hence the metaphor mightalso be read the other
way around, as GIRLFRIENDIS MOTORBIKE:"For one of its strong points
is its life expectancy. It lasts for years. Without aging quickly. And without
high maintenance costs." (Supply something in the tenor domain like:
"You never know how long a relationship with a girl will last. Moreover,
she ages [quickly], and it is a costly business to have a girlfriend.") Later
on we read that "the rider controls his machine. And not the other way
around." (Supply something like: "Girlfriends are always nagging; they
always want you to do this, expect you to do that . .") Moreover, "you
will discover that you are not the only one who wants to ride on a BMW."
(Supply: "Yourfriends arejealous that you make love to your girlfriend.")
Even the phrase that BMWs have a "very high trade-in value" is sugges-
tive ("If you end a relationship with a girl, that's it, but the BMW can
be sold and hence doesn't leave you empty-handed")28 If I am right in
claiming that such a mapping from the domain of BMW motorbikes to
the domain of girlfriends is suggested, a person processing this mapping
is temporarily exploring the metaphor GIRLFRIEND IS MOTORBIKE. And
of course it is not merely the textual context that suggests such a read-
ing; the general macho image surrounding the product enhances such a
reading as well.29
What are the implications of this example for the question of reversi-
bility? If it is accepted that there is a feature transfer from MOTORBIKE
to GIRLFRIEND besides one from GIRLFRIEND to MOTORBIKE, does this
mean that the two terms are simply reversible? Even though I con-
tend that there is a strong suggestion of a transfer from MOTORBIKE to
GIRLFRIEND, this does not amount to a reversibility of terms. Again, the
context makes that quite clear. Whereas in the poem by Blake we are
not likely to arrive at a definitive assessment of the distribution of tenor
and vehicle in the metaphors discussed, nor indeed do we need to, the
fact that the present metaphor occurs in an advertisement activates the
assumption on the receiver's part that the advertiser will be claiming
something about his product in terms of something else, and not vice
28. I owe this last observationto Etienne Forceville.

29. A more recent Dutch billboard ad for a brand of mopeds, Puch, ran as fol-
lows: "Whenyou are young, you've only got one thing on your mind. [FollowsPuch
Logo, and underneath, in small print:] All right, let's say two"(my translation).Here
again, the erotic overtones can hardly be missed. Notice, incidentally, that it is the
general cultural context of machismo surroundingmotorbikes that suggests (or sug-
gested in the early 1980s) that the prospective partner is GIRLFRIEND rather than,
gender-neutrally,LOVER, although the ad copy leaves this deliberately(?) vague.
in Metaphor 703
versa. The contextual factor of genre, that is, makes sure that we will
not mistake the intentions of the sender in this case; it simply makes no
sense to say that the advertiser would want the metaphor to be inter-
preted with equal plausibility both as GIRLFRIENDIS MOTORBIKEand
as MOTORBIKEIS GIRLFRIEND.If we nonetheless feel that some sort of
transfer from tenor to vehicle obtains, this cannot be a transfer at the
same level or intensity as the transfer from vehicle to tenor.
Before digging deeper into this matter, I will examine a final example.
Following a period during which, on different occasions, innocent by-
standers were attacked and severely wounded by pit bull terriers, the
Dutch government decided that from February 1, 1993, all pit bull ter-
riers were to wear muzzles, should be kept on a leash, and were to be both
officially registered and sterilized. The purpose of the last-mentioned de-
cision was to have the pit bull gradually die out in Holland. In that same
month, a number of pit bull owners demonstrated in The Hague against
this policy. Some of them created quite a shock by having their dogs wear
the notorious Star of David. Clearly, this action metaphorized the pit
bulls, yielding the metaphor PIT BULLS AREJEWS. The whole situation
(that is, context) in which this metaphor was used makes it abundantly
clear that the tenor of the metaphor is pit bullsand the vehicleJews, since
the dog owners wanted to say something about pit bulls in terms ofJews,
not about Jews in terms of pit bulls. Some of the features transferred,
presumably, are "being stigmatized," "being relentlessly pursued," and
"being systematically killed."
Why was all this considered to be, at the very least, in bad taste?30 As a
first approximation, we would intuitively say that what makes the meta-
phor so shocking is that the two terms are felt to be somehow incongru-
ous. But of course this holds for every metaphor, since every metaphor
maps only some of the features of the source onto the target domain.
One way of accounting for the disapproval that the metaphor met with
is the following. The domain of JEWSis colored and saturated by the
whole horrendous and shameful history of the Holocaust and everything
that it evokes in terms of facts and emotions. It is thus a very sensitive,
charged source domain. In the present case there are highly salient and
important features in the domain of JEWSthat cannot easily be trans-
ferred to the domain of PIT BULLS. How, one might object, can theJews'
humanity, for instance, be transferred to the domain of PIT BULLS? Or
the fact ofJews' essential innocence? But perhaps the real danger consists
in the possibility that those wielding the metaphor will insist that these
features can be adapted to fit the target domain. Thus, the defender of
the metaphor might argue that the Jews' "humanity" shares the charac-
30. For reports of the demonstration see, for instance, the following Dutch news-
papers: Trouw,De Volkskrant,and NRC Handelsblad, all of February 20, 1993.
teristic "being a living creature" with the dog's "animality,"and that this
is sufficient ground for mapping. Similarly,a proponent of the metaphor
could say: "Justbecause one or two pit bulls happened to have attacked
innocent people, you cannot advocate the extermination of the entire
race. That is what they did to the Jews, who were threatened with ex-
tinction not because of something that individual Jews did but because
of a prejudice against the whole people." It is here, I would say, that we
come to the core of the problem. If only a transfer of features was felt to
obtain from vehicle to tenor domain, everything would be fine; certainly
the pit bull owners managed to highlight certain-to them-relevant
elements in the pit bull domain (enforced registration, restricted free-
dom, violation of physical integrity, institutionalized extermination) by
choosing the source domain JEWS.The profound inappropriateness of
the metaphor, I would venture, stems from the fact that the metaphor is
somehow felt to reflect not only on pit bulls but also on the Jews and the
whole history of the Holocaust. The terrible suffering of the Jews in the
Holocaust is felt to be unacceptably diminished by its use as vehicle in
this metaphor. I would like to go one step further and suggest that this
can be so experienced only if there lurks somehow a latent reversibility
of the two terms in the metaphor; there hovers the troubling possibility
of the metaphorJEws ARE PIT BULLS.
If this is correct, the same situation obtains as in the BMW example.
On the one hand, given the context, there can be no doubt as to the dis-
tribution of tenor and vehicle in the metaphor, and as we have seen, the
metaphorical feature transfer ordinarily goes only from vehicle to tenor.
But on the other hand, the particular vehicles in question are here ex-
perienced as being themselves affected by the tenors they are supposedly
subservient to. As a matter of fact, this phenomenon is anticipated by
Black in one of the presumedly problematic remarks that was discussed
in section 1 of this essay: "If to call a man a wolf is to put him in a special
light, we must not forget that the metaphor makes the wolf seem more
human than he otherwise would."Applied to the two examples examined
above, this means that in the metaphor BMWMOTORBIKE IS GIRLFRIEND
the girlfriend becomes more motorbike-like, and in the metaphor PIT
BULLS ARE JEWS the Jews more like pit bulls.
If the analyses of the BMW/GIRLFRIEND and PIT BULLS/JEWS meta-
phors are at least plausible, then we can tentatively conclude that in
some cases the direction of feature transfer is not restricted to that of ve-
hicle to tenor but is complemented by a transfer of features from tenor to
vehicle. Nonetheless, even in these cases, the transfer from tenor to ve-
hicle remains clearly subordinate to that of vehicle to tenor; after all, the
overall context makes it abundantly clear that the addressers (here the
advertiser and the pit bull owners, respectively) want to say something
about BMW motorbikes in terms of girlfriends, about pit bulls in terms
ofJews, rather than the other way around. Consequently, if we label the
in Metaphor 705
transfer of features from vehicle to tenor (the transfer that obtains in

everymetaphor) the dominanttransfer, the transfer from tenor to vehicle
(which obtains in rare cases) can be termed the subsidiarytransfer.
In this section, then, I have considered four examples of metaphor
that appear to deviate from the standard case, which can be described
as follows: In a metaphor, contextual factors of various kinds determine
unequivocally what is the tenor and what the vehicle of a metaphor. The
relationship is asymmetrical, in that the transfer of features is from ve-
hicle to tenor, and not vice versa. This also entails that the context does
not allow the two terms to be reversed. But the four examples examined
in this section deviate from this standard situation in seemingly allowing
a reversal of terms. The four, however, cannot simply be lumped into one
category. It is defensible to claim that the metaphors in the Blake poem
are fully reversible; that is, both the metaphors A IS B and B IS A can be
construed, while a privileging of one over the other seems impossible.
The equal validity of the two versions is suggested by the fact that the
grammar allows a reversibility of tenor and vehicle in the very metaphor
itself: "Mercy,Pity, Peace, and Love / Is God" can be construed both as
MPPL IS GOD and as GOD IS MPPL. The surrounding context, moreover,
does not help (and in all likelihood is not meant) to disambiguate the
possibilities.
The TurningPoint example should be viewed as exemplifying the rare
situation in which two metaphors A IS B and B IS A, that is, two meta-
phors with the same, but reversed, terms are presented immediately after
each other. However, contrary to the Blake example, where context sup-
plies no clues for a definitive decision as to a privileged distribution of
the metaphor's tenor and vehicle, the context in this cinematic example
doesprovide decisive clues for identifying tenor and vehicle. Considered
within its scene, there is no ambiguity at all about what in each case is
the metaphor's tenor and what its vehicle. In the first scene the meta-
phor (if we register one) is DANCING IS LOVEMAKING, with DANCING the
tenor and LOVEMAKING the vehicle; in the second it is LOVEMAKING IS
DANCING, with LOVEMAKING the tenor and DANCING the vehicle.
The examples BMW MOTORBIKE IS GIRLFRIEND and PIT BULLS ARE
JEWS are rather similar. In both, the context makes it unambiguously
clear that BMW MOTORBIKE and PIT BULLS are the metaphors' respec-
tive tenors, since these represent the subjects about which the meta-
phors' users wanted to claim something, and GIRLFRIEND and JEWS are
the metaphors' vehicles (that is, the concepts in terms of which the
metaphors' users wanted to claim something for the concepts that were
the focus of attention), and thus that the (dominant) transfer is from
GIRLFRIEND/JEWS to BMW MOTORBIKE/PIT BULLS. However, it was ar-
gued that there was simultaneously a suggestion of a second-level (sub-
sidiary) transfer of features the other way around. In a kind of undercur-
rent something is suggested about GIRLFRIEND and JEWS as well. This
subsidiary transfer does not, to be sure, reverse the distribution of tenor

and vehicle.
Close scrutiny of four alleged counterexamples to the thesis that the
two terms in a metaphor are irreversible, then, reinforces this initial idea.
With the possible exception of those in the Blake poem, the metaphors
examined turn out to have a clear-cut tenor-vehicle distribution, with a
corresponding feature transfer from vehicle to tenor. However, the BMW
advertisement and the pit bull owners' action alert us to the possibility
of a latent transfer of features from tenor to vehicle, which was labeled
subsidiarytransferto distinguish it from the standard, dominanttransfer
from vehicle to tenor that is characteristic of every metaphor. Now if it
is correct, first, that in these two examples31 a subsidiary transfer can be
identified and, second, that this transfer does not standardly obtain, the
intriguing question presents itself under what conditions such subsid-
iary transfer obtains.3 I have no ready-made answers, but the examples
suggest in what direction we should look. In the BMW case, there seems
to be a clear intention to have subsidiary transfer recognized (and the
same holds for TheTurningPoint, if we see it as obtaining there, as I sug-
gest in note 31). Similarly, in Blake's poem, where a complete reversal
proves possible, this is only so because the poet allows us to read the
metaphors two ways. In PIT BULLS ARE JEWS, on the other hand, there
are no contextual clues suggesting that the dog owners intend us to read
a subsidiary transfer in the metaphor; tactlessness rather than intention
seems to be at issue here. It seems likely that the sensitivity of the "past
history" of the source domain as well as the situation in which the meta-
phor is used plays a role in alerting us to the possibility of subsidiary
transfer. Before anything more definite can be said about this, far more
examples of subsidiary transfer will need to be identified and analyzed.
But if metaphor users' intentions, the past histories of source domains,
and the circumstances wherein metaphors are used are to be taken into
account to assess subsidiary transfer, then this suggests once again that
the study of extended context is a conditiosine qua non for a balanced
analysis of metaphor.
References
Black, Max
1962 "Metaphor," in Models and Metaphors,25-47 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
1979 "More about Metaphor," in Ortony 1979: 19-43.
31. It is arguable that even the metaphor DANCING IS LOVEMAKING on its own, as
rendered in The Turning Point, hints at a subsidiary transfer, one that is turned into
the dominant transfer in the following LOVEMAKING IS DANCING.
32. Possibly the claim that standardly subsidiary transfer does not at all obtain will
prove too strong. If so, the question should be reformulated as why subsidiary transfer
is felt to obtain so much more strongly in some cases than in others.
in Metaphor 707
Blake, William
1971 [1789] Songs of Innocence(New York: Dover).
Blakemore, Diane
1992 Understanding Utterances:An Introduction to Pragmatics (Oxford: Blackwell).
Boyd, Richard
1979 "Metaphor and Theory Change: What Is 'Metaphor' a Metaphor For?" in
Ortony 1979: 356-408.
Brooke-Rose, Christine
1965 A Grammarof Metaphor(London: Secker and Warburg).
Connor, Kathleen, and Nathan Kogan
1980 "Topic-Vehicle Relations in Metaphor: The Issue of Asymmetry," in Honeck
and Hoffman 1980: 283-308.
Forceville, Charles
1988 "The Case for Pictorial Metaphor: Rene Magritte and Other Surrealists," in
VestnikIMS9(1), edited by A. Erjavec, 150-60 (Ljubljana: Institut za Marksisticne
Studije).
1991 "Verbo-Pictorial Metaphor in Advertisements," Parlance 3(1): 7-19.
1994a "Pictorial Metaphor in Advertisements," Metaphor and SymbolicActivity 9(1):
1-29.
1994b "Pictorial Metaphor in Billboards: Relevance Theory Perspectives," in
Towards a Pragmatics of the Audiovisual, edited by Jiirgen Muller, 1: 93-113
(Mfinster: NODUS).
1995 "IBM Is a Tuning Fork: Degrees of Freedom in the Interpretation of Pictorial
Metaphors," Poetics23: 189-218.
in press Pictorial Metaphorin Advertising (London: Routledge).
Hausman, Carl R.
1989 Metaphorand Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Hoffman, Robert R.
1977 "Conceptual Base Hypotheses and the Problem of Anomalous Sentences."
Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Midwestern Psychological Asso-
ciation, Chicago, May.
Hofstadter, D.
1985 Metamagical Themas (New York: Basic).
Honeck, Richard P., and Robert R. Hoffman, eds.
1980 Cognition and Figurative Language (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum).
Indurkhya, Bipin
1991 "Modes of Metaphor," Metaphorand SymbolicActivity 6(1): 1-27.
Johnson, Mark
1993 Moral Imagination: Implicationsof CognitiveScienceforEthics(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press).
Johnson, Michael G.
1975 "Some Psychological Implications of Language Flexibility," Behaviorism 3:
87-95.
1978 "Similarities in the Comprehension of Metaphors and Paintings." Paper
presented at the annual meetings of the American Psychological Association,
Toronto, August.
Johnson, Michael G., and Robert G. Malgady
1980 "Toward a Perceptual Theory of Metaphoric Comprehension," in Honeck
and Hoffman 1980: 259-82.
Johnson, Michael G., Robert G. Malgady, and S. Anderson
1974 "Some Cognitive Aspects of Metaphor Interpretation." Paper presented at
the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, November.
Kittay, Eva Feder

1987 Metaphor:Its CognitiveForceand Linguistic Structure(Oxford: Clarendon).
Kogan, Nathan, Mindy Chadrow, and Heleen Harbour
1989 "Developmental Trends in Metaphoric Asymmetry," Metaphor and Symbolic
Activity 4(2): 71-91.
Lakoff, George, and MarkJohnson
1980 MetaphorsWeLive By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner
1989 More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press).
Malgady, Robert G., and Michael G. Johnson
1976 "Modifiers in Metaphors: Effects of Constituent Phrase Similarity on the In-
terpretation of Figurative Sentences," Journal of PsycholinguisticResearch5: 43-52.
1980 "Measurement of Figurative Language: Semantic Feature Models of Compre-
hension and Appreciation," in Honeck and Hoffman 1980: 239-58.
Miller, George A.
1979 "Images and Models, Similes and Metaphors," in Ortony 1979: 202-50.
Ortony, Andrew, ed.
1979 Metaphorand Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Pollio, Howard R., and B. C. Burns
1977 "The Anomaly of Anomaly," Journal of PsycholinguisticResearch6: 247-60.
Richards, I. A.
1965 [1936] The Philosophyof Rhetoric(New York: Oxford University Press).
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson
1986 Relevance:Communicationand Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell).
1987 "Precis of Relevance:Communicationand Cognition,"Behavioral and Brain Sciences
10: 697-710, 736-51.
Steen, GerardJ.
1992 "Metaphor in Literary Reception: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of
Understanding Metaphor in Literary Discourse." Diss., Vrije Universiteit Am-
sterdam.
Tversky, Amos
1977 "Features of Similarity," PsychologicalReview 84(4): 327-52.
Van Besien, Fred
1992 Metafoor en Onderwijs [Metaphor and education] (Ghent: Communicatie en
Cognitie).
Verbrugge, Robert R.
1980 "Transformations in Knowing: A Realist View of Metaphor," in Honeck and
Hoffman 1980: 87-125.
1984 "The Role of Metaphor in Our Perception of Language," in Discoursesin Read-
ing and Linguistics, edited by SheilaJ. White and Virginia Teller, Annals of the New
YorkAcademyof Sciences433: 167-83.
1986 "Research on Metaphoric Development: Themes and Variations," Human
Development29(4): 241-44.
Verbrugge, Robert R., and Nancy S. McCarrell
1977 "Metaphoric Comprehension: Studies in Reminding and Resembling," Cogni-
tive Psychology9: 494-533.
Whittock, Trevor
1990 Metaphorand Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber
1989 "An Outline of Relevance Theory," Working Papers in Linguistics 1: 1-28, Uni-
versity College London, Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, Linguistics
Section.

FORCEVILLE, C (1995) (A) Symmetry in Metaphor The Importance of Extended Context (Artigo)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

FORCEVILLE, C (1995) (A) Symmetry in Metaphor The Importance of Extended Context (Artigo)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

(A)symmetry in Metaphor: The Importance of Extended Context

Abstract A crucial part of the investigation of any metaphor is to assess which

PoeticsToday16:4 (Winter1995). Copyright? 1996 by The Porter Institutefor Poetics

A crucial part of the investigation of any metaphor is to assess which

1.TheDistribution of Tenorand Vehicle

subsidiary subject is 'projected upon' the field of the principal subject."

This process is described under (a)-(c) above. In a given metaphor, the

3. Capitalizedmetaphorsrefer to the conceptuallevelof the terms involved,as distinct

5. This mistakenbelief has no grave consequences for Lakoffand Turner,since they

sizes the asymmetry of similarity relations, they hypothesize that "tenor-

6. Nouns were classified as high-salient and low-salientdepending on whether they

ory, knowledge of the lexicon), in which it occurs in a speech act." They

these concepts, as Malgady andJohnson argue, but simply a conflation.

Moreover, since we can assume that an addresser wants to make sense

position to the inverse situation. The results of the experiment, as it

nication settings the extrinsic constraints would normally be much tighter.

Among the interesting findings Verbrugge (ibid.: 113) reports were

while only 12% experienced the opposite direction of transformation...

Surely, the addressee has no difficulty whatsoever in establishing that

Again, in this context it is crystal clear that the topic of discussion is

Metaphor is a cognitive rather than strictly linguistic phenomenon. By this, we

16. Although Verbrugge1984 is a theoretical article on metaphor,and only fleetingly

it clearly" (ibid.: 285). Research of this kind led to an empirical investi-

18. Of course, the context need not be of a verbal nature.

goodness. However, none of these authors pays sufficient attention to

phorical tenor and selecting one or more promising vehicle domains to

we are to see their lovemaking in terms of dancing. Nonetheless, it could

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

26. The advertisement is reproduced in Forceville 1991, which discusses verbopicto-

plying correspondences in the remainder of the text. This, in fact, boils

28. I owe this last observationto Etienne Forceville.

transfer of features from vehicle to tenor (the transfer that obtains in

subsidiary transfer does not, to be sure, reverse the distribution of tenor

Kittay, Eva Feder

You might also like