Metaphorical

The Metamorphosis of King Louis-Philippe, pear, Charles Philipon (circa 1831) - From the analogy to the substitution

The metaphor from the Greek (metaphor, literally, transportation), is a figure of speech based on the analogy and / or substitution. It is a particular type of image without comparison tool that combines a term to another belonging to a lexical field to reflect different thinking richer and more complex than it was a concrete descriptive vocabulary.

Thus in the expression of Gracq ( A balcony in the forest ), "His laugh cool rain," the author describes the laughter of the girl he met in the woods on a rainy day by associating it with a rain connotations special (noise, purity, nature) of the female character being a nymph who seduces the young lieutenant stationed in the Ardennes forest. The metaphor is so vivid and expressive use of language.

More broadly, the metaphor by its covers all uses shortened form of the image differing from the comparison (in the sense style ) by the absence of reconciliation tool ("like, resembling, similar to. .. ") makes the strongest association of two terms and an equivalence points in the metaphor and comparing advertised compared with (for example:" Shepherdess, O Eiffel Tower, " Apollinaire , Zone), or use of the verb to be, ("Nature is a temple," Baudelaire , Correspondences), which can go up to the substitution of metaphor in direct comparison with the only explanation that makes more difficult and requires the context ("Those who are bald at inside the head ", Prvert Dinner heads - "I saw the hell of women down there," Rimbaud's A Season in Hell).

The metaphor is found naturally in the literature and especially in the phrase poetic , but it is a daily use in the use of epithets ("a royal gift -" a trick of Sioux ...), personification ("Nadal king of Roland Garros!"), invention verbal ("chickens" = police) or lexicalized forms ("the arm of a chair )... It is also used by specialists who want to both conceptualize a problem and disseminate (the Big Bang , the double helix of DNA , the snake, the Ottoman empire , the sick man of Europe in the nineteenth ^century ...).

It is also common in the graphic representation (painting, sculpture, cartoon ...), often codified in the form of allegory as Cupid shown love.

NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) uses too many metaphors that aim for awareness. Metaphorical language is a language full of imagery. The idea is that the metaphor has an apparent meaning and hidden meaning. This is the hidden meaning that would have its full force. Milton Erickson used the metaphor therapy.

Principle and operation

The process of language called "metaphor" is considered by both the language and the rhetoric. The metaphor is indeed, historically, a figure of speech. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it produces countless reconciliations and meaning of images and depending on the distance between these two poles, as noted by the French poet Pierre Reverdy in the glove of horsehair: "The image is a pure creation of mind (...). More reports of the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the picture will be strong, the greater its emotional power and poetic reality. "

Pluralism definitions

The Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first in his Poetics (certainly to -347 ), to evoke the metaphor as a major process of language. It explains the origin of the etymology of the figure, which refers to the concept of transport: "The metaphor is to carry the meaning of a word is different to the species of the genus or species of the genus either of the species to species, or by analogy " . Like Aristotle, Fontanier will confirm the close relationship between the figure as the words and action on the report of analogy it establishes.

However, the definition most widely accepted is that which the philosopher Michel Meyer Principia in Rhetoric: A general theory of argumentation states, incorporating the concepts from the history of rhetoric and focuses on the function replacement of the figure: "The metaphor is the substitution identity par excellence, since it asserts that A is B. . Bacry Patrick also said: "substitution in the course of a sentence, a word to another word on the same paradigmatic axis - the two words covering the realities that have some similarities, or are such data as " as in: "(..) a secret and deep melancholy that pervaded aviary streaked with laughter" ( Albert Cohen ) or "Fly under the beak of the vulture north wind" ( Victor Hugo ). The figure then go to another reality and plays on the referential function of language. The context is often necessary to understand its scope.

A trope

The metaphor is the "figure of meaning" or " trope " (or " metasememe "in the terminology of group ) the largest and most versatile language, with metonymy. As such, many authors have attempted to define which accounts for its complexity . Its integration in the class of tropes date from the early French treaty rhetoric, in Pierre Fontanier or Caesar Chesneau Dumarsais . For Pierre Fontanier it is to use a "word in a sense like, and yet different from its usual meaning . "For example the verb" eat ", whose primary meaning is" eat by tearing with teeth "or" eat greedily ", takes a different meaning in the following verse:

"The devouring remorse arose in his heart ... "

A trope is thus a specific figure which is to hijack a word from its usual sense (or own), and the metaphor is one of the most powerful figures of this type of diversion semantics, which can sometimes involve a whole text. Thus, rhetoric , metaphor is regarded as a figure "microstructural": its existence is obvious and can be isolated in a statement and did not often exceed the formal limits (the sentence), otherwise it is called rather " metaphor ".

Michael Meyer in his Principia Rhetoric: The General Theory of argument sees a single faculty of symbolization: "The metaphor expresses the enigmatic: what she says can be taken literally. It is a way of saying the issue within the scope Propositional. It is situated midway between the old, which no longer be stated as known, and the new, which is irreducible to the data available since new. In short, the metaphor is negotiating the intelligibility of new situations and emotions with respect to the former, it changes the meaning while preserving it: and it is this duality that is found in the metaphorical expressions. "

Nevertheless, the metaphor is a process rhetoric , and in this it retains a certain extent argumentative because it presupposes the cooperation of stakeholders, and issues of persuasion and belief .

Metaphor and discourse

Language translation that operating metaphor is a fundamental structure of speech. Indeed, the metaphor works on two axes of the speech: the "paradigmatic axis" or paradigm - which is the stock of words and word sounds that the speaker has a choice - and "syntagmatic" or phrase - which corresponds compliance with rules for combining words together to form a sentence understandable. This organization is universal in any language, and he who has formalized, Roman Jakobson , has clearly established the relationship between this structure and figures or tropes. It speaks of the "model of metaphor" in structural linguistics, that is to say structuralist.

Schematic of the shift in meaning as metaphor on linguistic lines .

Therefore all combinations are possible, the only criterion to meet is that of "syntactic consistency, otherwise the sentence is a grammatical-and confines the solecism . The criterion of "semantic coherence" in effect is only secondary to combine words together, if the syntax rules are observed, can lead to statements consistent with the context in which they are born. This is the case of poetic statements as "The Earth is blue like an orange" Paul Eluard , from the collection Love, Poetry (1929). The speaker can make an unexpected choice on the paradigmatic axis: instead of the word expected by the normal context, he chose another word with no direct semantic relationship with the rest of the sentence (there is a linguistic ambiguity). This movement thus enhances the expression and effect created a stylistic characteristic of the figure of speech.

In the metaphor of Victor Hugo : "This golden sickle" , "sickle" refers to the crescent moon. Hugo operates a shift in direction by moving a word "crescent", which is replaced with "sickle" and refers to sow commonalities that exist between the star and the tool, namely the form in the semi-circular arc. The diagram below shows the movement made and the result, and a prime example that the speaker may have in the paradigm. The caller has consciously referring to the two words meaning "crescent moon", one explicit and one implicit. The metaphor allows to introduce in one word the meaning of two words, a sense of displacement phenomenon .

Depending on the combination chosen, the speaker leads to different types of relationships: instead of the partitive 'gold', the poet might have said, for example, "yellow", which derives as much of the semantic field of gold (the relationship between "gold" and "yellow" is here the synonymy ). Then one can imagine other types of relationships, mainly the hyperonymy , the antonymy and disambiguation . Train is a metaphor and, linguistically, to draw a relationship between selected words (paradigmatic axis or paradigm ) using these three categories of relationship, being all on the syntagmatic axis. The group in his Rhetoric General, who is studying closely the metaphor, as the main feature to fix this right of substitution of linguistic entities to which it gives the name more generic " metaplasm " .

Paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language , according to Roman Jakobson.

Jakobson proposes that metaphor is an effective surrogate process (it implements the "poetic function" of language ) operated on the paradigmatic axis, that is to say, it makes a stylistic effect comparable to an impropriety since it binds two terms semantically disjoint. Therefore many metaphorical expressions are perceived as confusing manipulation of language and meaning, especially in the case of metaphors leading to personifications ("This man is a lion") or commodification ("This man a heart of stone ").

The hermneutess have also studied a lot of metaphor. This is the case of Paul Ricoeur , in The Metaphor , which considers it as the product of a free invention of language. They define it more generally as well as replacing a token by a second, with the first having one or more semes common. And metaphorical work is based on the tension between these opposing semes common or that the speaker wants, however, for the figure to be similar . The gap thus created the interest of the image.

The metaphor of stylistic

A collusion between speaker and interlocutor

An example of context culture: the metaphor "It's pouring in French equivalent to" It's raining cats and dogs "in English (literally: it's raining cats and dogs.)

The style is to study the effects of speech in the utterance and communication. The context literary and cultural enunciation alone to identify the nature and scope of metaphor, which combines two semantic fields, sometimes followed by a comparison. The metaphor is thus often on cliches , and platitudes or allusions that are found at any time. Therefore, it produces emotional effects that appear in the poetry , language games, and rhetoric , in this depends on receiving a complicity between the speaker and the listener. It allows the transfer between two terms was often the cause of the "theory gap", which aims to explain the style in a deviation to the standard or to the minimal use of language. This vision was abandoned, especially when modern research established that the transfer function has a semantic style for amplifying the speech . Thus, such collusion is widely used in kinds of ironic (in Voltaire , for example), in newspapers, and the wordplay. In poetry, the pact of complicity (as Grard Genette studied, particularly in the autobiographical genre ) is much more ambiguous, and requires the reader to decode an effort that makes a specific literary and symbolic poetic images.

The style is giving the text as object, she studied especially the effects on the interlocutor, and the means implemented by the speaker to do this in a macro-structural. The metaphor is a metaphor of choice for text analysis: it may indeed be based on a wider variety of linguistic and stylistic means. Nevertheless, one can not speak in case of genuine metaphor, but in a juxtaposition of metaphors. With this figure of thought, the author can match two different realities in the consciousness of the receiver is why, according to the linguist Roman Jakobson , it is proper to the functioning of the speech. Practically, the metaphor allows a concentration of meaning and not a real change of direction and there is polysemy (adding a description in one direction). It implements an activity that is affirmed in a symbolic way and helps to see something that does not give himself entirely by linguistic signs. It therefore provides information on the worldview of the author of its own, through the major recurring structures which he peppers his universe, like the isotopy , the semantic or lexical.

Assistance to the conceptualization

Catherine recalls Fromilhague for cognitive semantics, metaphor is a figure that can be employed in the service of knowledge , "our conceptual system that can make some abstract ideas and subjective through metaphors. "it allows and to "lift the veil" of certain phenomena unknown or difficult to explain and translate. Poetry Symbolist shows, for example, by his aesthetic manifesto, that metaphor is with the revelation of an unknown and mystery of nature. Scientific discourse is often used to represent educational purposes, concepts or models.

Paul Ricoeur.

Metaphor help to conceptualize this sum can not be understood by the designation (or connotation strict), and noting in particular the feelings and thoughts. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown in their book Metaphors in life daily , it is an auxiliary language to conceptualization. Literally, it makes it possible to realize a fact that grammar can only assume: the metaphor "John is a lion" is acceptable as a figure of speech , while the statement "John is a lion" is logically false. In the metaphorical expression, the meaning of the phrase is no longer the sum of the meanings of the elements: we speak of "metaphorical." In many texts, like poems, so it can serve a paradox that words can not express non-metaphorical. Linguists and philosophers like Paul Ricoeur , Cornelius Castoriadis and Jacques Derrida , have proposed a transdisciplinary approach, the metaphorology who wants the study of metaphors as cognitive and semiotic products.

Types of metaphors

Linguists are not unanimous about a strict typology of different metaphors. However, we can count two main forms, immediately recognizable: the metaphor called "announcement" and the metaphor called "direct."

Metaphor announced

Announced in the metaphor, the most common, compared the present. The comparison (the actual item) and comparing it expressed, and grammatically related. His resemblance to the comparison is great as the implicit is reduced:

• "I bathed in the poem of the sea" ( Arthur Rimbaud )
• "Literature: an ax into the frozen sea within us. "( Franz Kafka )
• "Laws are cobwebs, through which the big flies pass and remain small. "( Honore de Balzac )
• "Old Ocean, oh great single. "( Earl of Lautreamont , Les Chants de Maldoror, Chant I)

The theme of the metaphor, and explicitly announced, is also called the "metaphor explicit" , also known in praesentia (present in the statement "in Latin ). To remove the ambiguity, then there is often need to include both the word by affixing the verb copula be.

English has a concept to describe a kind of metaphor particularly comic or absurd, for fun. This is called mixed metaphor ("multiple metaphor" in French) as "Mr. Strauss-Kahn Told The French National Assembly yesterday: Today everyone should "Know That Credit Lyonnais Is on Its Feet Again; Far From Being garroted It Is Freed From The Sword of Damocles That Was Weighing on ITS Shoulders" .

Metaphor direct

Still, the eye opening half in its sails, What god, what a harvester of eternal summer Had, so carelessly thrown This golden sickle in the field of stars.

( Victor Hugo , Boaz asleep.)

Only the comparison is then expressed, it is a total replacement. It is found mainly in the slang and the vernacular, but also a poetry more hermetic or symbolist :

• "This quiet roof, where dove, pine Between beats, among the graves. "( Paul Valery , Charmes Cemetery marine): only the background (the seaside cemetery, under the same name of the poem) to understand that "roof" refers to "sea" and "doves" to "sails."
• "A golden sickle in the field of stars. "( Victor Hugo ): the presence of the "star field" suggests that the "golden sickle" shape by analogy, is the moon.

It is also called "contextual metaphor" or metaphor in absentia or "indirect metaphor" because it connects two realities by means of a specified word, but where the metaphorical term is understood and shared the same symbolic context, as in: "The night whose vast wings" (which compares the night to a bird).

There is an extreme type of direct metaphor, called "pure metaphor" - or replacement - in which only the metaphorical word can be present because the context can be interpreted:

"Clouds my twisted, mists of my temples, blacker than the wings of crows ...

Golden Lotus is my only hint, veiled with gauze scarlet

Do not take me to the common flower that grows beyond the fence. "

- Kuan Han-ch'ing, three love poems.

Here, the cultural context ( Chinese poem of the thirteenth ^century) and theme (love poem) allow the interpretation of metaphors: "Golden Lotus" is a metaphor for the usual "little feet" (criterion of beauty the time) and clouds (by "clouds" and "fog") evoking the literary romance . These metaphors are conventional and pure culture, as in the phrase "The morning star" for the rising sun, and are often common to different cultures. We thus find expression in English also present in French, for example "to Break The Ice" ("break the ice").

Other types of metaphors

The metaphor

A metaphor: the poem "Ode to the beauty of Charles Baudelaire , The Flowers of Evil

Metaphor continued by the continued use of a semantic field that was initially introduced in the speech, it is actually more of a comparison hidden. In English, we speak of extended metaphor, or conceit. Thus, according to Michael Riffaterre this is "a series of metaphors connected to each other by the syntax - they are part of the same sentence or the same narrative structure - and by the way: each expresses a particular aspect of a whole, thing or concept, that metaphor is the first of the series " . When based on the narrative, it is called "metaphor diegetic. " This, according to Gerard Genette , a metaphor related to the narrative structure of the text. Those appearing are then taken from the diegetic context. For example, Genette cites a passage in which Proust said about the steeple of Combray "golden and cooked himself as a larger bun blessed with scales and dripping gummy" and after this episode of the mass, Time pastries .

In the following example the poet (here Rimbaud) is compared to the character of the tale of Tom Thumb except that the stones he sows are here rhymes , picture of the poet free to live his life and inspired by nature:

"Tom Thumb the dreamer, in my race j'grenais
Rhymes. "

- Arthur Rimbaud

"Adolphe tries to hide the weariness that gives this torrent of words, which begins half way to his home and who can not find where the sea lay"

- Honore de Balzac , Small miseries of married life

Finally, the third such fire is here compared with a fawn, leaping and flexible: the metaphor is spun by a set of adjectives and participles , a verb and a noun which all exploit the same semantic field. The poetic works are sometimes based on large analog systems referring to metaphor, it is the case, for example collections of Arthur Rimbaud as a Heart in a cassock and The Drunken Boat:

"The beast jumped flexible fire of heather as the blows struck three o'clock in the morning. (...) As dawn was breaking, they saw, stronger and happier than ever, which twisted among the hills its wide body like a torrent. It was too late. "

- Jean Giono

extract Hill, Editions Grasset, Collection Cahiers Verts, 1929

The lexicalized metaphor or catachresis

When a metaphor passes into common parlance, we speak of catachresis. The word or phrase takes on new meaning, metaphor is lexicalized from the arts community and incorporated into the language and popular speech, such as: "life is a journey" ("Life is a journey" in French also). The metaphor "A large dark" (to describe a mysterious young man) was born and in the writings of Jean Giono , and has since passed into the daily speech.

The worn metaphor or clich

Metaphor in everyday language past and become a frozen twist: it is often direct metaphors like "time is money" or "Bruges, the Venice of the North".

The transposition or metaphor struck

They are original compared to frozen metaphors and they expand the definition of metaphor to other elements: the colors (eg "dark days"), sounds ("grossly unfair"), with synesthesia (color hot "), the personification (eg, the allegorical representation of a virtue in a theatrical character), the analogy , animalization or the objectification. This is particularly the case of the oxymoron and all the metaphors that require interpretation effort on the part of the interlocutor. So in that verse of Jean Racine : "With what rigor, Destin, you pursue me! "Fate is personified as a person chasing the speaker.

Metaphor heuristic

Science, and generally any discipline teaching , use of metaphors (often extruded) to explain the scientific models such as those relating to the Big Bang , to quantum physics , etc.. Moreover, many philosophers have resorted to metaphors called heuristics like Plato and his " cave ", or Buridan and his ass Buridan's ass. It's not cliches when they use, but images can convey an idea or theory. Over time, they can freeze and go into the same language (as the "Big Bang", which allows the oral talk about an amazing event).

Models cosmological use metaphors heuristics.

The metaphor came within the epistemology to illustrate how the models are located and operate in relation to scientific theories, and how a theoretical terminology is introduced into the scientific language. Julian Jaynes , in fact, also a central argument of his theory metaphorization of consciousness as the real. All disciplines are so creative metaphors: the biology in the theory of evolution (the "missing link" of Charles Darwin , the tree as a picture of the phylogeny ) in physics (the model of Maxwell and its demon ), in ecology (the Gaia hypothesis ) and especially in astrophysics (the string theory for example).

Types of metaphor

The metaphors are grammatically the form of predicate a verb (example: "The days are black") or that of an adjective ("The dark days"), but they can also meet in buildings with additional named ( "The dark days") or in apposition.

Linguistically, there are three elements in a metaphor which both occur in the speech, highlighted by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbretchts-Tyteca in Treaty of argumentation. The new rhetoric and follows the terminology Ivor Armstrong Richards :

1. the subject , or compared, which is the subject we are discussing;
2. the metaphor (meaning bearer in Greek) or comparing which is the term used in connection with this topic.
3. the ground or tertium comparationis which is the like - or the like - on the basis of which the first two are related, called up the quality and feature semic which is the subject of transfer of meaning. This third element, implied, is decoded by the context and cultural symbolism and the co-text .

The verb is the word preferred medium of metaphor, because of its valence, that is to say its ability to accommodate syntactic constructions: verb plus a variety of syntactic constructions, the more he is running for the metaphor. Verbs of motion or action, verbs of thought as well, and allow a variety of metaphorical meanings. The words appearing can be linked and compared by means other than syntactic ones used in the comparison. Fontanier Stone Figures in the speech emphasizes its universality and its high productivity in the speech : "The metaphor extends well far more likely that metonymy and synecdoche, for not only the name, but the adjective, the participle and the verb, and finally all the kinds of words are his domain. " . Appearing as we can find:

• the application : "The white horse dawn" ( Victor Hugo , Les Contemplations)
• the apostrophe : "Shepherdess, O Eiffel Tower" ( Apollinaire , Zone)
• the verb copula "be": "Nature is a temple" ( Baudelaire , Correspondences)
• the verb "seem" :

"Often his voice weakened
Seems the death rattle of a wounded man "

- Baudelaire , The bell cracked

• a formula like "I think I see":

"Hard grenades parted

Yielding to the excess of your grains

I think I see sovereign foreheads ... "

- Paul Valery , Grenades

• a very simple word can also create a metaphor. For example, the word "night" often refers to carnal pleasure between two people, or connotes "the favors of a woman," as in "They bought their one night life of Cleopatra" ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Emile, IV). In such cases, the multiple meanings of the word is maximum. The word "night" can refer to other themes and symbolic: the dark hidden secret, killing, among others.

The metaphor is also one of the few figures to be autonymy (which can take as object) as in this quote from Robert McKee: "A story is a metaphor for life," which is - in itself - a metaphor for a metaphor. Raymond Queneau , The sighs in , and called the figure a "double truth" and plays on this specificity:

Victor Hugo is a metaphor of metaphor when he said: "The metaphor is to say the picture is the color, as the antithesis is the chiaroscuro. "

Forms of neighboring metaphor: comparison and other figures of analogy

Metaphor and Comparison

Morphological Difference

The metaphor is often confused with the comparison , figure who also feel very close together two realities in two words with a specific word said "comparing"). The metaphor is, somehow, an implicit comparison: it is based on a substitution, which operates on the basis of properties common to the two terms are close, but disappears when comparing the term or phrase comparative . That is why specialists have often classified as "figures of the resemblance."

The metaphor is reduced, in fact, appearing alone, who disappears from the statement to be virtually in the context where the extra-linguistic discourse is generated: when San Antonio said that his taxi driver had smoked four inches from his obelisk "we understand that it is a cigarette, because the context makes a symbolic analogy between the obelisk, elongated, and smoking. Furthermore, the comparison is always through the word around which the figure.

Metaphor or comparison ? The sowing of transparency is referred here by all objects arranged.

For Patrick Bacry , the metaphor is in the schematic form:

Semantic Difference

In the case of comparison , the maneuver of association of concepts is explicit as in this example: "sly as a fox"), and leaves intact the contents of each word. For example, the famous comparison of Paul Eluard : "The Earth is blue like an orange can turn into a metaphor:" The Blue Earth Orange. The figure thus operates a "transportation sense", which is the etymological meaning of the figure.

But the interest of metaphor is to assign meaning to certain B grades, and not just any, that belong to the term A and a simple comparison can not explain. These nuances, or sow , actually add to the symbolic meaning of language so that the comparison is on a very concrete. It activates the polysemy of the word often refers to a specific cultural or symbolic universe. The confusion between these two figures is common, and not just in education.

The comparison involves two words, lexical categories homogeneous in "John is a lion", "John" and "lion" are respectively a proper noun and a noun. The statement "John is like a lion and it is linguistically equivalent. In the metaphor, and conversely in the comparison, there is a single identity to which the speaker while the comparison, as its name implies, compares two words, two concepts, two realities. The presence or absence of a comparable term is not sufficient to distinguish what is the metaphor for what is the comparison: the context and the effect sought by the speaker well inform about the scope of the figure. Nevertheless, these two figures can be combined in the same sentence as in: "this man (...) biting and tearing the ideas and beliefs of a single word , because, first, the disappearance of the words brackets, and because of the connotation other. The background also serves to generate an interpretation. The metaphor is a figure of ambiguity, it leaves a wide field of possible decoding " , from the comparison to the metaphor several successive transformations are needed, which clearly explains that the metaphor enriches the meaning, where the comparison is quite poor. Is the comparison:

1. State 1: "This man is cunning like a fox"
2. State 2: "This man is a cunning fox 'expresses the trope in its pure state (the cunning man in question has not changed, it is an analogy) through a metaphor because in praesentia and comparing the comparison are still present in the expression.
3. State 3: "This man is a fox" is a metaphor in praesentia also, however, quality has disappeared, here the reader through the context , to interpret the scope of the term.
4. State 4: "This man is an old fox" is a metaphor highlighting a feature semic (the adjective "old" is connoted as a feature of malignancy).
5. State 5: "We're dealing with an old fox" is a metaphor in absentia because the explicit mention of comparative disappeared, and there are only comparing. The effort of interpretation is maximum here.
6. State 6: "The old fox deceived us all" is also a metaphor in absentia, but here it is absolute and functions as a demonstrative proof that the predicate is "fooled us all."

Metaphor and other figures of analogy

Hans Baldung , The seven ages of woman

The polysemy of the metaphor is a figure in general, often confused with other analog processes, such as allegory (which makes concrete an abstract idea), and personification (which can incarnate in human form, something that the is not). In reality, these figures are all based on the metaphor, which is a ratio of similarity between two things or ideas. The metaphor Spanish Luis de Gngora : "quejndose venan guante sobre el / los raudos torbellinos of Noruega" which can mean "wailing came to land on the glove / the fast eddies of Norway 'is for the reader's consciousness a personification winds that nevertheless relies on a metaphor, which links human groaning noise from the wind.

The relationship between metaphor and allegory are also very close . An allegory is often a metaphor : the level of discourse is continued in an image, and thus leads to represent real and concrete as an abstract idea. The famous allegory of Death as mowing, and embodied in the guise of a skeleton, for example a sum of metaphors: the skeleton for the decomposition, the Reaper who refers to the Plague, the black mourning dress, etc.. It is the same for personification, but with less emphasis or hyperbole : the non-human living entities (plants or animals) are well represented in human form. Strictly speaking, and contrary to the allegory, personification is a metaphor for transferring a particular concrete object in a human category.

Metaphor in literature

Usage literary metaphor

The metaphor is a major figure in literature, as expressed by Denis de Rougemont in Love and the West: "Since ancient times, poets have used war metaphors to describe the effects of natural love. The god of love is an "archer" who shot his "deadly arrows." The woman "goes" to the man who "conquered" (...) ". It involves other linguistic concepts such as semantic fields, the isotopy or analogy and connotation , making sometimes very complex decoding (we speak of poetry - or style for prose - "hermetic ") as in:

Lake, divine mirror ...: metaphor metaphor as anamorphic object first, privileged analogy of romantic.

"Soir de Paris drunk gin
Brand electricity. "

- Guillaume Apollinaire , The Song of the unloved

This metaphor refers to the modern world and the Paris electric, but the decoding is difficult for the poet draws an analogy between the effect of gin, liquor, and the nature of electricity.

Metaphors are also daring approximation of terms that disturb the reader from his habits of thought. Literature has contributed to the culture and language awareness famous popular metaphors, ultimately become cliches : "The lake, divine mirror. "( Alfred de Vigny ), "You make bubbles of silence in the desert of noise" ( Paul Eluard ), "You are the earth that takes root" ( Paul Eluard ) or "serious song of the forest swayed slowly" ( Jean Giono ).

The metaphor can also usually go beyond the analogy to make an identification, creating another reality. It helps bind the soul of the poet in the world in the Romance or the symbolism , for example. Thus, Charles Baudelaire uses the metaphor as the only instrument to describe the human core. The poet attempts by the metaphor of transcribing a unique feeling, and, apart from the stereotypes, each figure is unique to the subjectivity of the author. When these figures are bound to others, they established a vast network of meanings, half-symbolic, semi-emotional, which takes the name of isotopy literature. Metaphors are often lumped together with other processes like oxymoron or the hyperbole of the most classic. Other figures may be related to metaphors: the imitative harmony or synesthesia literary example. Victor Hugo is one of the representatives of excessive use, but still creating meaning and imagery, metaphor. Associated with his face antagonist, the oxymoron , metaphor allows him to highlight the reality that words alone can not translate: "Hearts are the mirror of the dark firmament. "( Victor Hugo , The group of romance in The Legend of centuries ).

So the metaphor the poet allows the existence of a new meaning, even as seemingly absurd in the surrealist metaphor brings together two realities that have no common point and which is, in the words of Lautreamont , "meeting on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing machine ", a reality that few figures can express. Gaston Bachelard said as she can even search for "a future of language" . Besides this function of metaphor is found in other disciplines such as science or politics.

A particular metaphor: the metaphor Homeric

It consists of a name followed by a further expresses its qualities and called epithet Homeric. " Homer uses it a lot, through idioms and since become topoi literary: "The rosy-fingered Dawn. "," Fleet-footed Achilles. "" Ulysses with a thousand tricks. "But it can also be found in ancient texts as texts much more modern, like those of Homeric inspiration movement Parnassus whose metaphors refer to the field of sculpture as a picture of craftsmanship of the poet .

The metaphor outside of written language

In oral

The oral is not immune, as written, the metaphorical principle, including the ability to serve a concept or state of mind quickly. It contains so most lexicalized metaphors - or catachreses - decoded in a particular context such as: "It is still in the prime of life (family context)," The root of evil, iniquity institutionalized "(moral context)," They announced a wage freeze "(social context) or" My childhood was not a cloud "(biographical context). According to the communication situation, there are countless contexts of decoding, the same metaphor can be used to encode a message, so sociolectal , as in the jargon or technolects.

The artist Gyula Derkovits here combines the cemetery graves with upright trees pointing to the sky in a double metaphor: the life and death.

Metaphors spoken mainly used to express feelings, to natural elements like the weather ("It's raining cats and dogs") or "Nature" (which is so personal), or in situations of everyday life: "I have a brain that smokes" (after a session of brainstorming ) for example.

In sign language

In sign language , there are gestures based on a metaphor. In The body and metaphor in sign languages: In search of modes of production of signs, Danielle Bouvet analysis method of production of the signs of French sign language and proves that metaphors constructed by reference to the body can be a abstract vocabulary, which often coincides with colorful expressions of the spoken and written French.

The metaphor in the Arts

Metaphor is the major figure of similarity, it is easily replicable in other arts, especially visual like painting. Nanine , explores the rich metaphorical pictorial tradition over the centuries.

The metaphor is also used in movies (and the metonymy ), in particular for suggesting the difficult scenes to show (the metaphor therefore supports another figure: the euphemism ) such as sex or death. The metaphor in the film: the figures of analogy in the films, Jacques Gerstenkorn raises scenic practices of creating a mental universe and symbolic film.

Francesco Spampinato recently in The Metamorphoses of sound , showed how the metaphor is also useful in the field of musicology, such as an analytical tool.

The metaphor in psychology and social sciences

The metaphor goes beyond the ^twentieth century the only language framework to become an object of psychological study and even neurological. Initiated by the group and the structuralism , the figure will come in a number of major theories today.

Metaphor and Neurology

Paul Broca in 1865 and Carl Wernicke in 1874 draw the distinction still present in the brain as a double neural apparatus: a left-brain one hand (the seat of language units and their combinations, responsible for analysis) and a right brain the other (seat of the recognition of syntactic structures, melody, emotions, responsible for the synthesis and global understanding). Their research therefore demonstrate that linguistic units are psychologically real, so they have no materiality cortical demonstration supported by modern imaging techniques such as permitted by the magnetic resonance imaging.

The brain hemispheres and two cervical

A series of experiments and cognitive and neurological disorders will, in turn, lead to isolate the metaphor as inherent to the brain, not only production of language. The aphasic right hemisphere can thus form the grammar and phonology, but they do not understand metaphors. Jean-Luc Nespoulous, a researcher at the Laboratoire Jacques-Lordat, Brain Science Institute of Toulouse, for his part shows that the lack of night metaphor for understanding a complex set . Bottini (1994 ) in turn discusses the important role that play the right hemisphere in the appreciation of metaphor: the treatment of metaphor involve additional cognitive resources. Experiments on the reading time, longer for the metaphorical statements as literal statements (Janus & Bever, 1985) and the influence of cognitive context , to better understand and more quickly the metaphorical sense (for Keysar in 1989) attest to the timeliness of research on the origin and location of brain metaphor. Bonnaud et al. (2002) also show that among a pair of words with no semantic link, a pair of words with metaphorical link and a pair of words with literal link, providing their experimental protocol, there are more errors on words with metaphorical link on semantic link with the words literally.

The research leads to the conclusion that the overall treatment is less specialized than expected, and that metaphor comes from the cooperation of both hemispheres .

Metaphor and psychology

The metaphor in the structure and dynamics of the Unconscious: Jacques Lacan

When it is to understand the dynamics of an unconscious person, or to bring her designs to enrich its dynamic unconscious, the metaphor has an important place. The practice of care by the metaphor "several millennia before understanding the organization of deep thinking by metaphor. Jacques Lacan has pioneered the exploration metaphor in psychoanalysis , particularly in the subject Metaphor (1960 ). For Lacan "the unconscious is structured like a language, and desire has to be expressed in two ways: through the metaphor or metonymy. For Lacan , the signifier takes precedence over the signified. This crossing of the bar between signifier and signifier would be for him by the play of signifiers among themselves, in each individual, with an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier that occurs in psychoanalysis by the formulas of metonymy and metaphor , which he calls "laws of language" of the unconscious. Lacan posits that the unconscious, which has the same structure as the language, can also be defined by a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic axis , in a schematic picture similar to what Roman Jakobson erected for the language. Lacan takes this example as well as famous quote: "The Latin language is the old stock was one of his offspring who would flourish in Europe." This metaphor of Antoine Rivarol reveals the mental function of the latter: "The formula of the metaphor reflects the condensation in the unconscious. " By condensation, Lacan means, taking the vocabulary of Freud on the two processes at work in the dream: the substitution of one element by another, making it possible to express the repressed side. In other words, one word for another, a concrete word for word abstract, a transfer of meaning by replacing analog, this is the definition of metaphor in Lacanian psychoanalysis, figure of speech more frequent and more suited to poetry. Lacan cites famous metaphors: "The root of evil, the tree of knowledge, the forest of symbols, the garden of sloth, the skein of time, the fall of ideas," or "flowers of evil "of Baudelaire as use language expressing an inability to conceptualize the topic in all its evil and its repressed. Lacan stands out from the Saussurean linguistic sign centered on the object disconnected from its subject and felt interior; Lacan seems even extend the epistemological paradigm: "the unconscious knows that elements of the signifier" he says and he "is a chain of signifiers that repeats and emphasizes." It develops as a mathematical formula-language of metaphor, it develops as follows: . Lacan points out the manner in which the unconscious operates, as well as Freud had discovered the production of condensation and displacement along the words, through the slip / A> and especially in the dream material, but "without reference to the signified or acoustic limits of the syllables" says Lacan. The game of " Fort-da ", described by Freud in 1920 and attests to this process directly metaphorization (or condensation in psychoanalysis) and discharge it is bound: the coil itself is a metaphor for the mother, while the move back and forth symbolizes returns and departures with the mother figure.

The treatment by the metaphor

Born contributions of Jacques Lacan in the phenomenon as a metaphor for substitution of a signifier to a signified repressed unconscious and difficult for the subject, to develop therapeutic exercising the function cathartic metaphor. The magical tale , the myth , the history teaching , the fable , are texts used to allow the child or adolescent to integrate knowledge about the issues of man - birth, processing, rupture, mimetic desire , violence, death. Unlike the philosophical text in which things are explained, the text of learning and care resonates directly with parts of thought that are poorly accessible to consciousness, which show the work of Julian Jaynes and common work Joyce C. Mills and Richard J. Crowley Therapeutic Metaphors for Children .

Metaphors and cognitivism: George Lakoff

George Lakoff - Professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California (Berkeley) and founder of embodied cognition - assume that metaphors are far from being only processes within the poetic imagination, or relevant only to words, rather that thought or action. Metaphors are present in our lives every day and, according to him, at the base of the meaning of our concepts. The metaphors in everyday life, Lakoff shows that we are not aware of our conceptual system, and a careful observation of our language makes it possible to see that metaphors structure our concepts: it forges the notion of conceptual metaphor.

George Lakoff

It focuses then, through his study to show the systematic use of metaphors in different areas of life such as sleep , food, work, love or sex. Metaphors define a network of relationships between things that constitute our personal experience of the world and our cultural perception - what he calls cultural metaphors. Thus, about the war metaphor, Lakoff explains, "" The discussion is war. " This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions: Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point of my argument. His criticisms were right on goal. I demolished his argument. I've never won a point with him. You do not agree? Then defend yourself? If you use this strategy, it will crush you. The opposing arguments that I have all fly. . "

Metaphor and Consciousness: Julian Jaynes

With the discoveries of psycholinguistics , the sciences are increasingly a metaphor in the process, instead of a single domain of the aesthetic result of language. Andre Leroi-Gourhan observed for example that when men or create a new "machine", there is simultaneous occurrence of words, particularly through technolects (the jargon specific to a profession or discipline). This creation of new designation will be made according to the principle of economy: if a word already existing can " represent "the new element, then it is used rather than forge a new word. The construction of a "word for such a new thing" is done in different ways in different situations. The company is the matrix that determines the appearance and use of metaphors. In The Birth of Consciousness in the collapse of the spirit, the American psychologist Julian Jaynes argued that reflective consciousness, specifically human, is permitted by a process rooted in metaphorical mode of visual perception . Jaynes put up a new terminology to study the phenomenon of a metaphorical perspective phenomenological and cognitive development. For him, the basis of any language is raw perception, which is the first way of understanding the world: it is then sent to a metaphor of that thing by substituting something more familiar to us.

Acquisition of cognitive metaphor in children

The metaphor is a cognitive object reflecting the mental process of conceptualization. It implies a new relationship with a world built cognitive process called re-categorization .

What we see in children in pre-linguistic coding portion of the pole to the pole of the invention: the metaphor child has a linguistic freedom. The child must also be able to reference syntax, via the methods of the anaphor and cataphora.

The metaphor therefore requires the acquisition of mental abilities:

• the ability to categorize
• the generalization ability

In developmental psychology , it is observed that up to 2 years the child shows a lack of understanding and production of metaphor. It is only 4 years old that metaphors are understood and produced, but often the interpretations are at the foot of the letter (a mother tells her son "You left me fall," the child answers " where? "), characteristic expressions of baby talk and smile at the adult, who himself has no access to this world of immediate sense. 6 years after the development stage of the activity is metaphorically linked to the emergence of activity metalinguistic (or autonymy). The semantic components are differentiated, the differentiation for the acquisition of practical analogies and images, forming networks and semantic word games. From 11-12 years of handling conventional metaphors and cultural is acquired. The psychology of education is thus pass the child through the symbolic activity permitted by the metaphor of linguistic-cognitive concrete activities (immediate sense, "to literally") activities linguistic-cognitive formal , respecting the code syntax and language constraints.

References

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