| Metaphor has long been the interest of scholars as a wonderful rhetorical method. Aristotle appreciates metaphor for its excellent rhetorical function, and he insists that to teaching others how to use metaphors is impossible. From the early Qin Dynasty, Chinese scholars began to realize the importance of metaphor. Metaphor remained a rhetorical method till the late 20th century. Gradually, we are now accepting the idea that metaphor is cognitive, and it is the way to familiarize the unfamiliar world, and also, to concrete the abstract.Based on the similarities of two different entities, metaphor is the most efficient, if not the only, way to a unknown world. And it is also the most tricky way, that is, it sometimes acts as a barrier instead of a bridge to the unknown world. Metaphor is a password for intra-cultural communication, and also a key to the door open to another culture.Concerning metaphor interpretation, there are different theories, none of which can be accepted as perfect. A semantic approach is to distinguish the metaphorical meaning of certain words and phrases from the relative literal meaning. Taking context into consideration, a pragmatic approach differentiates the utterance meaning from sentence meaning, that is, metaphor means what the speaker means. A truly pragmatic approach employs a pure linguistic context to interpret a metaphor, whereas the Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson is more cognitive. The interpreters are believed to have the intuition, which is based on cognition, to search for the optimal relevance, in certain contexts. Due to different cognitive environments and constructions, which can be further explained by the Frame Notion, metaphors are interpreted differently. Frame, as a cognitive model, further explains how the socio-cultural factors functions in metaphor interpretation. Thus, employing the Relevance Theory and the Frame Notion to explain metaphor interpretation seems to be promising. |
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