Metaphor: Art and Nature of Language and Thought

By Emilio Rivano Fischer

Years of use of this text have proven it to be both an excellent self instructing method and an effective teaching aid. The book is written for the wide audience. It goes step by step through the essential topics surrounding metaphor. It uses a plain style; yet, it manages to present and clarify the most profound and controversial aspects of this classical topic. Its underlying dialogical form engages the reader from the start. Its attention to the practical sides of mastering metaphor makes it a key to all sorts of linguistic applications. Anyone working with language will profit from this reading. It is a superb introduction to metaphor and a useful tool for the design and production of verbal communication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456736354

Emilio Rivano Fischer

Professor Rivano Fischer (Associate Professor, 1994, Full Professor, 2002) holds a Ph.D. in General Linguistics from Lund University. He has a vast professional experience as an instructor, lecturer and researcher at Lund University, Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, founder and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Concepcion University, and Director of the University of California Language and Culture Program in Chile for many years. He has taught and lectured in many universities, most recently at the University of Stanford Chile Program. He has published fifteen books in the subjects of Native American languages, Spanish grammar, syntax, semantics, morphology, logic, rhetoric, philosophy of language, and lexicology. He has published extensively on metaphor and figurative language. He has published three dictionaries of Chilean Spanish. His latest works have been in the fields of lexicography, style, and second language learning.

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© 2011 Emilio Rivano Fischer. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 3/18/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3635-4 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3138-0 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011901347

Printed in the United States of America

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Table of Contents

Preface

I Traits and Definition

II Pairings

III Infinite Expression

and

the Mental

IV Metaphorical

Symphonies

V Origins and Meanings

VI Duality and Beyond

VII Knowledge

Preface

Metaphor permeates expert as well as everyday language and thought. While there is a considerable body of specialized articles and academic books on the subject, the topic matters to all branches of knowledge and to every sphere of human understanding and expression. It is important to present it plainly and free from heavy philosophical, cognitive, and linguistic theorizing. That is the main purpose of this text, which furthers on a previous book of mine, Seven Lessons on Metaphor (2002).

The guiding lines of the treatment of metaphor found in this book come mainly from the ideas of Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Mark Turner, and others working in similar veins. I will mention here three of their books on the subject: Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980), Johnson’s Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (1987), and Lakoff and Turner’s More than Cool Reason (1989), all from The University of Chicago Press. The present text, however, differs from these books in many ways: in its primary audience and form of presentation, its scope of work and purpose, some specific ideas, and the general evaluations reached on the different topics. It also differs in the assessments made on the quality of its concepts and on the status of the knowledge acquired.

Starting with Aristotle, many other authors, writing from different perspectives, may be acknowledged on a topic as classic as this. Here, I will only mention two enduring sources: Kenneth Burke, who has given us deep and creative thoughts on the subject throughout his production, and my father, Juan Rivano, from whom I learned my first lessons on metaphor.

I

Traits and Definition

1. What is a metaphor?

Better than attempting a definition of the term or a description of the thing up front is to show some metaphors and then talk about what they might be. Here are a handful of them:

a. Someone says to his or her beloved: You are the light of my life, You are a treasure, You are the sugar in my coffee, You and I will sail together through life.

b. Someone says, angrily, to another: Do you have half a brain?

c. An old sage says in a movie: Life has run out like a river and now I meet the Great Ocean. We read in the newspaper: Politics is like a game: some win, some lose.

d. We read in a book: Atoms are really gravitational fields, like planetary systems, only of the smallest proportion known. We hear in a talk: The mind is a computer of incredible complexity and capacity.

2. The above are metaphorical expressions.