| dc.description | The purpose of this thesis is to study contemporary linguistic theories of metaphor. The significant number of books and articles on metaphor which have appeared in recent years attests to the importance and vitality of this type of figurative language. No longer considered to be the exclusive property of rhetoric and stylistics, metaphor frequently plays a key role in the cognitive sciences (linguistics, psychology, pedagogy, computer science), as well as in philosophy, semiotics, pragmatics, hermeneutics, and in the "pure" sciences. Ultimately, however, metaphor is a linguistic construct, and as a feature of language, it is universal in scope and reaches all levels of discourse. Therefore, the theoretical analysis of metaphor belongs primarily to linguistic study. The grammatical, semantic and epistemological dimensions of metaphor are examined within the framework of theories proposed by Irene Tamba-Mecz, Joelle Tamine, Michel Le Guern, Albert Henry, Paul Ricoeur and Jean Molino. Metaphor makes full use of the grammatical resources of language, and involves the presence of a lexeme which appears to be semantically incompatible with its context. However, metaphor cannot be explained in either purely grammatical or lexical terms, nor can it be seen simply as the linguistic expression of similarities shared by extra-linguistic referents, because metaphor is grounded in the semantic structure of language. Finally, the concept of contextuality is essential to the theory of metaphor, since a metaphor cannot be recognized as such, or interpreted independently of its textual or discursive context. | en_US |
