Two ways to metaphor comprehension in comparison: towards a bidimensional account of metaphor comprehension - poster

In this paper we will discuss the role of literal meaning and mental imagery in metaphor comprehension, showing their link and the problematic nature of these notions in pragmatics (Wilson & Carston 2019). We will try to overcome these problems by putting in dialogue the typology of metaphors offered by Carston (2010, 2018), based on the parameter of literal meaning, and the typology offered by Green (2017) based on the parameter of mental imagery. Carston (2018) recognizes the existence of two kinds of metaphors: (1) local metaphors such as “Giulio is a professor” in which a single lexical item - PROFESSOR - is modulated pragmatically; (2) metaphors such as “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes” in which it is necessary to resort to the literal meaning of the sentence, metarepresenting it and deriving the metaphorical meaning as implicatures. In this kind of metaphor, mental imagery can be activated, playing a role in the derivation of metaphorical meaning. At the same time, Green (2017) distinguishes between (1) local metaphors such as "Giulio is a professor" that require local, pragmatic modulation and do not activate mental imagery (image-permitting metaphors), and (2) novel metaphors such as “the snow is a winter closet”, understood through pragmatic modulation but in which the activation of a mental imagery is necessary for metaphorical comprehension (image-demanding metaphors). We will analyse potentials and limits of these two typologies of metaphor comprehension and, combining the two accounts, we will recognize four kinds of metaphor and four ways to metaphor comprehension (instead of two ways to metaphor comprehension). Finally we will organize our proposal into a bidimensional account of metaphor, covering the full range of cases.