Metaphorical Discourse – How to Tell the Woods from the Trees

The purpose of this article is to present theoretical and empirical arguments for an analytic distinction between metaphorical discourse and conventional metaphor. Traditionally, in linguistics and anthropology, the formal approach to metaphors is to decompose them into conventional units of meaning, e.g., analytic predications. However, when dealing with everyday discourse, an analyst confronts many perspectives that affect the ways in which verbal signs are composed. The processes involved when either composing metaphors in discourse or decomposing them out of context demands radically different points of view, i.e., negotiations between several perspectives versus predications of one of them. Therefore, two types of metaphorical expressions must be acknowledged, i.e., metaphorical discourse versus conventional metaphor. 18 – The dynamics of metaphor