Metaphor Pragmatic Analysis

The study of metaphor has a long history. Numerous linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and semiotists have rendered incisive analyses to this kind of utterance phenomenon. Metaphor is both a hot issue and a focal one, while different theories provided different views from different perspectives, which laid a foundation for the full development of metaphor. This thesis starts with commenting on the prominent metaphor theories and on that basis presents an objective and scientific interpretation of metaphor within the framework of relevance theory, which performs as the core of cognitive pragmatics, thereafter readers will get a totally new understanding of this thousand-year-old topic.Relevance theory was first put forward by Sperber & Wilson in the book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, which reveals two principles of relevance that people follow in communication (Cognitive Principle and Communicative Principle), and illustrates the production and interpretation process of natural language. The key concepts of relevance theory, such as relevance, cognitive context, ostensive-inferential model, will be employed to reorientate and interpret metaphorical utterances. The cause of formation, working mechanism, nature and understanding process of metaphor will be explored in great detail in the main body part.The interpretive power of relevance theory for metaphor derives from the fact that it disregards the distinction made between literalness and non-literalness. According to this theory, there is no substantial difference between the two, which are just the outcome of the speaker's consistency with the relevance principle in different contexts, therefore metaphor understanding requires no special abilities and procedures. People's use of metaphor derives from the need to achieve optimally relevant representation of their thoughts. In addition, Sperber & Wilson proposed two dimensions of language use, i.e. descriptive & interpretive. While metaphor falls together with descriptive uses of language, and it involves an interpretive relation between the propositional form of the utterance and the thought it represents, which descriptively represents some state of affairs. Meanwhile, it is emphasized that metaphor is an effort-imposing loose talk. Processing efforts are needed for the hearer/reader to exploit a large array of weak implicatures yielded by metaphor, and any extra processing effort demanded will be offset by extra contextual effects. The interpretation process of metaphor still follows the ostensive-inferential model, which includes three processes: identification of explicatures, construction of contextual assumptions and construction of contextual implicatures. The semantic premises of metaphoric expression are incomplete, so the hearer/reader needs to construct appropriate contextual assumptions and infer the implicatures according to the optimal relevance achieved between the utterance and context. At the end of this thesis, the author evaluates the account of metaphor in relevance-theoretic framework and makes some complement.