Rethinking the Connection of Metaphor and Topos

Having survived the «death of rhetoric» (R. BARTHES 1985: 115), metaphor has become the centre of intensive research by philosophers of language and linguists in the twentieth century. Nowadays it is widely accepted that metaphor is not reducible to «a sort of happy extra trick with words» (I. A. RICHARDS [1936] 1964: 90), but is rather said to be a fundamental principle of linguistic creativity with an invaluable cognitive function and heuristic potential. Topos or rather commonplace has, in contrast, a predominantly negative connotation in everyday and scientific language. Topos, which originally designated the place where to find the arguments for a speech, has become the cliché, the worn out phrase, or the stereotype. Nevertheless, there are numerous critical studies focusing on topoi in their heuristic and argumentative function. Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric is one of the first and most important ‘textbooks’ for speech production. Following Aristotle, the purpose of rhetorical speech consists in persuading by argumentation. In this respect he defines rhetoric as «the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever.» (Rhetoric I, 1355b/14,2). Now, persuasion presupposes – as any perlocutionary act – that the utterances have been understood by the audience, in short: it presupposes (text) comprehension. When analysing the first three phases of rhetoric – heuresis, taxis and lexis – two features in particular stand out on account of the role they play in argumentation: topos and metaphor, which are treated in the heuresis and the lexis. Metaphor works in a heuristic and aesthetic manner, while topos operates in a heuristic and logical manner. This difference is grounded in their respective characteristics, which will be discussed in the second and third sections of this paper. In the fourth section it is shown how metaphor and topos are based on common knowledge and how they are used in rhetorical text production.