Metaphors have always played a crucial role in mental conceptual processes ever since the Sumerian people. As we can read in Mitchell’s (2004) translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh:
Beloved friend, swift stallion, wild deer, / leopard ranging in the wilderness — / Enkidu, my friend, swift stallion, wild deer, / leopard ranging in the wilderness — / together we crossed the mountains, together / we slaughtered the Bull of Heaven, we killed / Humbaba, who guarded the Cedar Forest — / O Enkidu, what is this sleep that has seized you, / that has darkened your face and stopped your breath?—
As we can see from this narrative quotation, the friend is compared to a stallion, a wild deer, and a leopard to indicate that the speaker sees traits from these animals in his friend. The death of Enkidu is in turn described as a sleep, as something that seizes, as something that darkens one's face, and as something that stops one's breath.
These are all metaphorical and metonymical expressions to describe something intangible, like death is.
The Greeks also highly emphasized the importance of metaphors. In Cratylus, one of Plato’s dialogs, there is the distinction between primary names and secondary names, where the superiority of the metaphor is stated:
Socrates: but if the primary names are to be ways of expressing things clearly, is there any better way of getting them to be such than by making each of them as much like the thing it is to express as possible? Or do you prefer the way proposed by Hermogenes and many others, who claim that names are conventional signs that
71 express things to those who already knew the things before they established the conventions? Do you think that the correctness of names is conventional, so that it makes no difference whether we accept the present convention or adopt the opposite one, calling big what we now call small, and small what we now call big? Which of these two ways of getting names to express things do you prefer?
Cratylus: a name that expresses a thing by being like it is in every way superior, Socrates, to one that is given by chance…
Socrates: […] And even if usage is completely different from convention, still you must say that expressing something isn’t a matter of likeness but of usage, since usage, it seems, enables both like and unlike names to express things. Since we agree on these points, Cratylus, for I take your silence as a sign of agreement, both convention and usage must contribute something to expressing what we mean when we speak… I myself prefer the view that names should be as much like things as possible, but I fear that defending this view is like hauling a ship up a sticky ramp, as Hermogenes suggested, and that we have to make use of this worthless thing, convention, in the correctness of names. (Plato, Cratylus, 433-35, trans. By John H. Cooper (Cooper and Hutchinson 1997: 149-51))
In ancient Greece, even before Plato, metaphors can be traced back to Aristotle who, in his “Poetics” (ca. 335 BC), defined “metaphor” as“ the application of a strange term either transferred from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy”16, or as translated by Bywater (1984) as “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from
16 Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 23, translated by W.H. Fyfe. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1932, 1457b.
species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion” or again according to Halliwell’s (1996) “the application of a word that belongs to another thing: either from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or by analogy.”
Irrespective of whose translation we choose to adopt, the key aspect of a metaphor is a specific transference of a word from one context into another. In his Poetics 21, 1457b9–16 and 20–22 the four different Aristotelian metaphors are exemplified as follows:
Table 2
Type Example Explanation
(i) From genus to species There lies my ship Lying at anchor is a species of the genus “lying”
(ii) From species to genus Verily ten thousand noble deeds hath Odysseus
With regard to the four kinds of metaphors which Aristotle distinguishes against each other, the last one (transference by analogy) is the most eminent one so that all important theories on metaphor have a reference to this characterization.
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Later on, with the rise of Christianity, metaphors have been increasingly used as a rhetorical tool for the exegesis of the Sacred Scriptures. Saint Augustine excelled in this and thus became very influential in the development of Western Christianity.
In recent decades, and especially in postmodern studies, metaphor, i.e. the description of one thing as something else, has become of interest also to analytic and continental philosophy. However, for reasons of space we will not focus on philosophical issues and on the importance of authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Paul Ricoeur, and Derrida, and their philosophical discussion on metaphor, in this chapter. Our main emphasis in the second part of this study will be put on the role of metaphors in sign languages in general, with a particular emphasis on their iconicity and, most particularly, in TSL by providing real examples aimed at supporting my analysis. I will point out, for instance, that according to the context different strategies are used when interpreting metaphors into TSL. Some of the strategies include transfer mechanisms, clarification, localization, cultural adaptation, omission and replacement (when a simile substitutes a metaphor or vice versa).
As a preliminary introduction, general features of sign languages, and in particular Taiwan Sign Language (TSL), will be summed up, as many readers may be unfamiliar with sign languages and sign language research. Considering the fact that this chapter can be read as a single paper, it seems opportune to emphasize the main points of sign language research.
As previously mentioned, a sign language is a language which transmits information via sign patterns, thus by using a different channel, simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts. The very first linguist who studied signed languages by giving them their called-for status of “languages” was William Stokoe, according to whom wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages naturally develop and their complex spatial grammars are markedly different from the grammars of spoken languages (Stokoe, 1960, 1976). Stokoe’s work was ground-breaking because “almost everyone, hearing and deaf alike, at first regarded Stokoe’s notions as absurd or heretical and his books when they came out as worthless or nonsensical [as is] often the way with the work of genius” (Sacks, 1989:63).
Nowadays, most scholars accept the fact that “Sign17 is natural to all who learn it (as a primary language) and has an intrinsic beauty and excellence sometimes superior to speech” (Sacks, 1989: 29). It is “seen as fully comparable to speech (in terms of its phonology, its temporal aspects, its streams and sequences), but with a unique, additional powers of a spatial and cinematic sort – at once a most complex and yet transparent expression and transformation of thought” (Sacks, 1989: 72). It has been proved that Sign is a language even at the neurolinguistic level by Bellugi
17 Sign, capital letter, is intended as a language with a different mode of expression.
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and her team (Bellugi et al. 1991a, 1991b, 1992, 1993, 1997a, 1997b, 2001, 2010), which was investigated in detail in the first part of the present thesis. We have seen that “the left hemisphere in signers ‘takes over’ a realm of visual-spatial perception, modifies it, sharpens it, in an unprecedented way, giving it a new, highly analytical and abstract character, making a visual language and visual conception possible”
(Sacks 1989: 76), which can be perceived as a proof of the plasticity of the brain.
In the last couple of decades, postmodern scholars around the world have increasingly been focusing their attention on signed languages, by analyzing their structure, their syntax, their semantics and also some of the strategies or difficulties underlying interpreting skills between oral and signed languages. Different countries have led to the discovery of different aspects because every country has a different sign language which has developed itself independently from the language of that country. For example, Taiwan Sign Language (TSL), which is the object of our attention, is more structurally similar to Japanese Sign Language (JSL) than to Chinese Sign Language (CSL). As pointed out by linguists, signs have their own phonology, which is properly speaking called cheirology. The phonemes of sign languages, i.e. the smallest segmental unit to form meaning, are the location of hands in space, the configuration of hands, a.k.a. handshape, the orientation and the movement of hands. Therefore, minimal pairs differ for one of these three aspects.
Some scholars have also devoted their attention to interpreting from and into signed languages. In Italy, for example, a reality with which the author is more familiar with, there have been many studies researching different aspects of interpretation from and into Italian Sign Language (LIS), which in Italian is called Lingua Italiana dei Segni (Amorini, Cortazzi and Eletto 2000; Bove and Volterra, 1984; Stocchero, 1991, 1995; Cameracanna and Franchi, 1997a, 1997b; Carli, Folchi and Zanchetti 2000; Cokely 2003; Del Vecchio and Franchi, 1997; Franchi,
1992, 1993; Gran and Bidoli, 2000; Sala 2005; Woll and Porcari Li Destri, 1998; to name just a few). In Taiwan much less has been done, especially on Taiwan Sign Language Interpreting (TSLI) that, to the author’s best knowledge, is quite unexplored as an area of research. However, in American Sign Language (ASL) or Italian Sign Language (LIS), which have been more thoroughly explored than TSL, interpreting scholars have been focusing mainly on interpreting in the educational sector (Cokely, 2005; Davis, 2005; Forestal, 2005; Lee, 2005; Marschark, et al 2005a, 2005b; Monikowski and Peterson, 2005; Napier, 2005; Quinto-Pozos, 2005;
Turner, 2005; Winston, 2005). Furthermore, to the author’s best knowledge, no paper in Taiwan has ever been written on metaphor as a postmodern rhetorical device in TSL.
Therefore, this chapter aims at filling a gap in the literature by exploring first the issue of iconicity in sign languages and then, more specifically, the use of metaphor in TSL. Before moving on to the postmodern issue of iconicity and metaphors in sign language, it seems opportune to shed some light on Taiwan Sign Language by summing up some of the most important pieces of information analyzed so far, for the reader’s sake.
As far as the teaching of TSL as a second language is concerned, according to local professional interpreter Ginger Hsu (personal communication, 2012), in the traditional approach, it is usually taught starting with songs, which does not seem the most effective or quickest way of learning it. Indeed, Ginger Hsu told me that when she first started studying TSL, she did an eight week course and she thought that maybe after these eight weeks she could communicate with deaf people.
Unfortunately, she found out that it was not that easy. At present, there are courses for those who want to become interpreters even though the problem is that not many young people take part in these courses, it’s mostly elderly people, resulting in a
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slow learning process. There are also many alternative learning resources, such as the TV show Ting Ting Kan (聼聼看, listening eye), which presents different topics every episode both in Mandarin Chinese and in TSL18.
Also, according to Ginger Hsu (personal communication, 2012), in the first weeks of class, apart from emphasizing the importance of Deaf culture, some attention is also put on the issue of iconicity in sign languages, which will be further explored in the next paragraph.