An Analysis Of Poetic Metaphors From The Perspective Of Semiotics

Metaphor is both an ancient and a novel topic. The research of metaphor can be traced back to ancient Greek-Roman times and is confined to rhetorical area. It still enjoys a prosperity in modern times. In recent years, metaphor has become the focus of multidisciplinary research. In essence, metaphor is a process in which one thing is used to replace another. Its process shares essential similarity with the process of the semiotic activity. According to Peirce's classification of signs, metaphor is a kind of icon which represents its object by describing a parallelism between the sign itself and the metaphorical objects. Deriving from normal metaphor, poetical metaphor which is a greatly-favored expression by poets is also an icon. Based on Peirce and Barthes' theory, this paper tries to illustrate the generation process of metaphor from the semiotic perspective. The generation of poetical metaphor is a process in which poets treat both tenor and vehicle as signs and try to find out the iconicity between them through interpretation, hence to create a metaphor with the aid of a sign to express the metaphorical meaning. Poetical metaphor meaning occurs in the dynamic derivation process of semiotic meaning and appears on the second level of semiotic hierarchy. Seen from the semiotic perspective, a word or phrase, a sentence or even a whole text can be regarded as an icon in poetry. This paper aims to explain the generation process of poetical metaphor and to build a universal analytical framework to analyze sound metaphor, form metaphor and semantic metaphor in English and Chinese poems, hence to offer a novel approach to analyze poetical metaphor.