On Poetic Effects Of Metaphor In Literary Texts From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As an old language phenomenon, metaphor has been studied in various disciplines from all kinds of perspectives: traditional rhetorics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy and psychology. Relevance theory first put forward in 1986 particularly provides new points of view on metaphor's nature, interpretation and effects. Metaphor is just a"loose talk". It requires no special interpretive procedures; like that of literal use of language, its interpretation involves an inferential process based on relevance principles and cognitive context to achieve contextual effects in a pursuit of optimal relevance. Relevance principles include: human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance; every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Optimal relevance can be achieved by paying proper processing efforts and creating enough contextual effects in interpretation of utterances in communication. The lesser processing efforts means the greater relevance while the more contextual effects mean the greater relevance. Therefore it can be concluded that relevance and efforts are two dimensions in measuring the contextual effects which is the same thing with poetic effects of metaphor. Other two issues related to poetic effects of metaphor from relevance-theoretic perspective are implicatures and style. Metaphor achieves relevance through an array of weak implicatures, which are poetic effects of metaphor; the wider the range of implicatures and the weaker implicatures mean the greater poetic effects.The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's novel The Edible Woman has been chosen in this study as the source of data. According to the identification and classification criteria of metaphor put forward by Shu Dingfang (2000) and other scholars, metaphorical expressions are picked out from the text of the novel and classified. All identified metaphors are classified at syntactic and structure level as lexical metaphor, which mainly includes nominal metaphor, verbal metaphor and adjective metaphor, syntactic metaphor and textual metaphor. The distribution of metaphors in this novel shows that noun metaphors take the most part in amount and they are mostly rich in creativity; while adjective and verb metaphors mostly appear in idioms and proverbs and are relatively rare in number, most of which can be categorized into conventional metaphors. All identified metaphors are classified as conventional and creative metaphor in terms of their creativity. In consideration of the themes of the novel, that is human gets materialized in consumer society and the protagonist Marian tends to see objects as living and even humans in search of inner self supports, metaphors are classified into two categories: category 1 includes metaphors whose topics are humans, and whose vehicles are humans, animals, plants or even objects; category 2 includes metaphors whose topics are objects, and whose vehicles are humans, animals, or plants. Most theme metaphors are creative. In combination with the three classifications illustrated above, based on the frameworks of relevance theory, this study is focused on the poetic effects of metaphor in literary texts through data analysis.This study is composed of six parts. Chapter one includes the research background, aims and significance of the present study. Chapter two is literature review over studies on metaphor abroad and domestically. Chapter three demonstrates the frameworks of relevance theory. Chapter four is about the research questions and data collection and classifications. Chapter five is the main body of this study. This section explains how poetic effects are created by metaphors by applying relevance theory to analysis of metaphors in the text of The Edible Woman, and conclusions are reached concerning the potential influential elements on the creation of poetic effects. It is usually believed that the more creative the metaphor, the more poetic effects can be derived. Though conventional metaphor is considered as hardly capable of producing poetic effects, the case is different in this study and the effects of conventional metaphors cannot be neglected. Besides, conventional metaphors are further classified as culture-specific and non-culture-specific metaphor in consideration of cultural elements involved in them. The degree of creativity is a major factor which impacts on the poetic effects of metaphor. Creative metaphors, as the dominant elements in the metaphorical expressions of the whole text, are more powerful in producing poetic effects than those conventional ones for a wider array of weak implicatures are derived from them to achieve optimal relevance, and thus stronger poetic effects. It is also found that most textual metaphors are very complex. In spite of their complexness, all kinds of metaphors contained in textual metaphors are consistent and contribute to the coherence of the text, and they interact with each other by extending the context, which is a set of contextual assumptions from which an array of weak implications arise in the process of searching for optimal relevance. Chapter six is the concluding part which contains not only conclusions reached in this study but also limitations of this present study and implications for further study.