III. METAPHOR AND METONYMY
3.3 The Interaction Between Metaphor and Metonymy
correspondences between the source and target domains are represented in the conceptual system.
3.3 The Interaction Between Metaphor and Metonymy
Apart from individually functioning as cognitive instruments, metaphor and metonymy interact pervasively in our languages. First, Radden (2003) raises an intermediate notion of metonymy-based metaphor based on the
literalness-metonymy-metaphor continuum, where metonymy shades over into metaphor. Radden (2003: 409) takes the attributive adjective high for example to illustrate its gradual transition from literalness through various stages of metonymy to metaphor, as given in Table 2:
Table 2. Literalness-metonymy-metaphor continuum (Radden 2003: 409)
literal metonymic metaphoric
(a)
In (a), high is used literally to indicate verticality; in (b), high is partially metonymic since it refers to both vertical and horizontal extension, i.e., the
UP-FOR-UP AND MORE metonymy; in (c), high is fully metonymic in that it represents an entity within the same conceptual domain, namely, the scale of
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
41
verticality stands for degrees of temperature, i.e., the UP-FOR-MORE metonymy; in (d), high vacillates between a metonymic and metaphorical interpretation. On the one hand, people may consider height (of a price) and quantity (of money) in the same conceptual domain and understand high prices via the UP-FOR-MORE
metonymy. On the other, people may regard them as belonging to different domains and understand high prices via the MORE IS UP metaphor. In (e), high is used
metaphorically in that high, which refers to a scale of evaluation, is different from the conceptual domain of verticality. The GOOD IS UP metaphor is activated to conceptualize the abstract concept of good quality through the concrete source concept of verticality. In brief, height is literally correlated with quantity, and the natural association between quantity and verticality is one of metonymy (e.g., high
temperature). It is only when more abstract instances of addition are involved does
metaphor take over (e.g., high prices).
In addition to literalness-metonymy-metaphor continuum, Radden (2003: 413ff) proposes four types of metonymic sources of metaphor. The first type of
metonymy-based metaphor is grounded in a common experiential basis, including correlation and complementarity. Correlation refers to “an interrelationship between two variables in which changes in one variable are accompanied by changes in the other variable, and these two variables have to be conceptually contiguous” (414).
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
For example, the HAPPY IS UP metaphor results from people’s facial expressions, such as drawing up their mouths and eyebrows when they feel happy. These reactions are metonymically used to refer to their happiness. Complementarity, on the other hand, refers to a part-whole relationship or a part-part relationship in which parts are tightly associated with each other and such inseparability constitutes a unity.
For instance, THE MIND IS THE BODY metaphor, which allows us to understand the abstract concept of the mind in terms of the concrete concept of the body, is claimed to be based on our common complementary experience of BODY and MIND.
The second metonymic source of metaphor is the process of conversational implicature, involving (i) implicated result and causation, (ii) implicated possession, and (iii) implicated purpose and activity. (i) is found in sequential events and in correlational relationship, as in the example Once bitten, twice shy, which gives rise to the causal implicature: since I was bitten once, I am shy twice as much. The metonymic relationship between CAUSATION and CORRELATION forms the base of the metaphor CAUSATIONISCORRELATION. (ii) refers to a conceptual metaphor
POSSESSION IS HOLDING, such as to hold power, emerging through the
HOLDING-FOR-POSSESSION metonymy. (iii) indicates that the metaphor PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS, as in We’ve reached an agreement, is grounded on the
implicated PLACE-FOR-(PLACE AND) ACTIVITY metonymyand
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
43
DESTINATION-FOR-(DESTINATION AND) PURPOSE metonymy. Radden (2003)
explains that “[t]he association between such man-designed spaces and the activities typically performed there is so tight that the mention of the place suffices to invite the implicature of a special activity” (424).
The third type of metonymy-based metaphor relates to taxonomic hierarchies of categories. The relation between a category and members included in the category is widely utilized in metonymy; for example, the category pill stands for its salient member birth control pill. Quite often, the physical domain serves as a source domain for an abstract target domain. For instance, the metaphor HARM IS PHYSICAL
INJURY, as in Her death hurt him, is based on a metonymic relationship between the category psychic harm and a salient member of this category physical injury.
And the fourth source of metonymy-based metaphor derives from cultural models, subsuming (i) physical forces, (ii) communication and language, and (iii) emotions and their physiological reactions. (i) is known as impetus theory, where forces are contained in the moving objects themselves and propel them into a certain direction. For example, His punches carry a lot of force is understood in terms of the
SUBSTANCE-FOR-FORCE metonymy and the FORCE IS A SUBSTANCE CONTAINED IN AFFECTING CAUSES metaphor. (ii) refers to expressions based on the CONDUIT
metaphor, which involves two aspects: that of the relationship between form and
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
meaning and that of communication as transfer. For instance, I didn’t get my point
across is understood through the metonymy
FORM-FOR-CONTENT and the metaphorCOMMUNICATION IS TRANSFER. (iii) indicates that the relationship between a given emotion and a particular physiological reaction is considered to be causal. For example, He was breathing fire, whereby increased body heat is one of the
physiological effects of anger and this metonymic relationship fosters the ANGER IS
FIRE metaphor.
Radden (2003) concludes that the distinction of metonymy and metaphor is not to be seen as clear-cut; rather, “the classical notions of metonymy and metaphor are to be regarded as prototypical categories along a metonymy-metaphor continuum with a wide range of intermediate categories such as metonymy-based metaphor in between” (431). In other words, metaphors which are ubiquitous in our languages are generally fostered by metonymic relationships.
3.4 Idiomaticity
9Idioms are pervasive in our everyday languages. Traditionally, idioms are viewed as a larger chunk of lexical items in lexicon. They are noncompositional in that their conventional interpretations are not functions of the meanings of their
9 Here, idiom in this section is defined more rigorously, although it can be used in a broader sense, encompassing various sorts of fixed expressions, including proverbial expressions..
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
45
individual parts (Chafe 1970, Chomsky 1965; 1980, Fraser 1970, Katz 1973). The noncompositionality of idioms accounts for their restricted syntactic and lexical productivity, as well as lexical inflexibility. Thus, idioms are claimed to be learned by forming arbitrary links between idioms and their nonliteral meanings in the traditional view. Namely, they are simply linguistic expressions, which are independent of any conceptual system and encyclopedic knowledge (Carter and McCarthy 1988:19).
In contrast to the traditional view, the cognitive view, however, deems that idioms are not merely a matter of language. Rather, they are conceptual in essence.
That is, from the cognitive perspective, idioms are products of our conceptual system, usually manifested metonymically and metaphorically (Kövecses and Szabó 1996). People construe idiomatic expressions precisely because they apply the metaphorical, metonymic, and conventional knowledge to the individual word meanings of idioms (Gibbs 1995). In other words, the meanings for idioms are not arbitrary but motivated. This is consistent with Lakoff’s (1987) study, where motivation can be regarded as a cognitive mechanism—such as conceptual metonymies, metaphors, and conventional knowledge—which links domains of knowledge to idiomatic meanings. Kövecses and Szabó (1996: 332) take the idiomatic expression spit fire as an example:
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
Special idiomatic meaning: ‘very angry’
Cognitive mechanisms: metaphor: ANGER IS FIRE
Conceptual domain(s): FIRE and ANGER
Linguistic forms: spit fire Meanings of forms: ‘spit’, ‘fire’
This example illustrates that it is the conceptual domain, rather than the individual words themselves, that participates in the process of creating idiomatic expressions.
That is, the meaning of many idioms is not independent of the domains of
knowledge in our conceptual system. On the contrary, conceptual metaphors provide the link between the special idiomatic meaning and the conceptual knowledge.
Furthermore, Gibbs (1995: 104) observes that most languages have many idioms with similar figurative meanings and proposes that the figurative meanings of idioms might well be motivated by people’s conceptual knowledge that is itself constituted by metaphor. For example, people understand the idioms spill the beans and let the cat out of the bag, where both refer to the revealing of a secret, because the underlying conceptual metaphors, i.e., THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE
PHYSICAL ENTITIES, are imposed on the link between idiomatic phrases and their nonliteral meanings.
In addition, in contrast to the traditional view, Gibbs (1995) argues that idioms are considered compositional and analyzable, differing in the extent to which they are analyzable. Gibbs (1995) illustrates that blow your stack is analyzable since blow
‧
refers to the act of releasing internal pressure from the human body whereas kick the
bucket is less analyzable in that the individual word meanings do not contribute their
meaning as a whole. In other words, idioms such as blow your stack in which the literal meanings of the components can, entirely or partially, contribute to the idiomatic meaning are semantically more transparent. In contrast, idioms such as
kick the bucket where the idiomatic meaning cannot be predicted from its
components are semantically more opaque. Such an argument is in line with what is claimed by Nunberg et al. (1994), whereby the necessary feature of idioms is conventionality, which means “their meaning or use can’t be predicted, or at least entirely predicted, on the basis of a knowledge of the independent conventions that determine the use of their constituents when they appear in isolation from one another” (492).
Apart from the necessary feature of idioms, Nunberg et al. (1994: 492) further provide the typical properties of idioms in what follows:
(11) The typical properties of idioms (Nunberg et al. 1994: 492)
a. Inflexibility: restricted syntax, as in shoot the breeze vs. *the breeze is hard to
shoot
b. Figuration: figurative meaning, as in take the bull by the horns, lead a hand c. Proverbiality: description of social activity compared to a concrete activity, as
in climb the wall, chew the fat, spill the beans
d. Informality: typically associated with informal speech styles or registers e. Affect: usually have an evaluation or affective stance towards what they
describe
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
Generally, idioms carry pragmatic and social functions. The property of
proverbiality signifies that idioms are often concerned with social activities. While these social activities may be abstract, concrete activities are widely used in idioms to refer to intangible concepts. For example, the concrete activity spill the beans, where the impalpable concept of secret is compared to tangible objects, i.e., beans, presents a vivid image of the abstract social activity of revealing a secret. Also, with a figurative meaning and hence being highly expressive, idioms tend to be utilized in relatively less formal occasions. Furthermore, with the property of affect, idioms are usually used with social-communicative effects. For instance, considering the listener’s stance, the speaker uses the idiom kick the bucket, a euphemism for dying, to substitute the taboo words. Such an expression is more pleasant and less offensive towards both the speaker and the listener. Moreover, idioms usually allow us to express an evaluation towards what we describe. Take for instance the idiom Frog
forgets he had a tail (Lakoff and Turner 1989). Literally, it describes that a frog had
a tail, which is dominant and indispensable, when it was a tadpole. However, when developing from a tadpole, the frog does not remember its early stage of being a tadpole and forgets that it had a tail. As an exhortation, this idiom carries a piece of advice for human beings to remember their origins so as not to be just like the frog.
As a rule, many idioms in various languages may convey the identical meaning,
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
49
which is a reflection of cultural variation. As the idiom exemplified above, it exhorts us not to forget our origins in terms of the description of a frog, which is specific to English. The identical meaning is also found in the Chinese idiom yin shui si yuan (飲水思源) ‘when drinking water, think of its source’, admonishing us against forgetting our origins via the description of drinking water, which is particular to the Chinese culture. While some idioms are restricted to a specific culture, other idioms are more universal and hence more comprehensible in that they are motivated by people’s conceptual knowledge that is constituted by metaphor. For example, the English idiom spit fire, denoting that a person is very angry, is easier to comprehend on the basis of near-universal metaphor, i.e., ANGER IS FIRE. Since some idioms reflect cultural specific constraints and others exhibit near-universality, cultural constraints will be elaborated in the following subsection.
3.5 Cultural Constraints
Apart from functioning as cognitive instruments, the conceptual metaphors and metonymies manifested in proverbial expressions allow us to see cultural variation and universality. Kövecses (2002: 195) proposes that most cultural variation in conceptual metaphor occurs at the specific level whereas universality in the metaphor can be found at the generic level. In other words, our knowledge of the
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
world includes specific-level and generic-level schemas. As Lakoff and Johnson (1989: 165) put it, specific-level schemas are concrete and memorable, containing a great deal of information relevant to our everyday experiences. Generic-level schemas, on the other hand, lacking specificity, have the power of generality to make sense of a large amount of cases, such as causal relations and shapes of events.
Moreover, the changes take place in the cultural models and the conceptual metaphors due to the cultural context and its influence on conceptualization. At a specific level, for example, there are differences in the metaphor for anger across cultures. Kövecses (2002) exemplifies that Euro-Americans conceptualize anger via the notion of the four humors (phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood); Japanese conceptualize anger via the concept of hara, which is composed of truth, real intentions, and the real self; Chinese conceptualize anger via qi, which is energy regarded as a gas that flows through the body and can produce an excess. While reflecting cultural distinctiveness, the culture-specific concepts of anger
demonstrate that the ANGER IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER metaphor is universal.
That is, anger appears to be cross-culturally conceptualized as a kind of internal pressure inside a container, which is found at the generic level.
Furthermore, metaphor is a matter of thought—all kinds of thought—thought about emotion, about society, about human character, about language, and about the
‧
nature of life and death (Lakoff and Turner
1989)
. Metaphors evoked in proverbs typically concern human affairs. The attributes and behavior of people areunderstood in terms of those of animals, plants, and so forth activated in metaphors.
Lakoff and Turner (
1989: 162ff)
propose the GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR to provide interpretations of proverbs. The GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR is an ensemble consisting of four ingredients. The first is the basic Great Chain defined by attributes and behavior, and arranged hierarchically, where each form of being has all of the attribute types lower on the hierarchy. For instance, animals do not have mental and character attributes, but they have instinctual attributes, as well as biological, structural, and natural physical attributes.The Basic Great Chain
—HUMANS: Higher-order attributes and behavior (e.g. thought, character)
—ANIMALS: Instinctual attributes and behavior
—PLANTS: Biological attributes and behavior
—COMPLEXOBJECTS: Structural attributes and functional behavior
—NATURAL PHYSICAL THINGS: Natural physical attributes and natural physical behavior
The second is the commonsense theory of the Nature of Things, which is a causal theory that links attributes to behavior: the characteristic behavior of a form of being is a consequence of its characteristic attributes. The combination of the basic Great Chain and the Nature of Things gives us a more elaborated, hierarchical folk theory of forms of being and how they behave, which is an essential ingredient
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
in the understanding of proverbs.
The Nature Of Things Plus The Great Chain
—HUMANS: Higher-order attributes lead to higher-order behavior.
—ANIMALS: Instinctual attributes lead to instinctual behavior.
—PLANTS: Biological attributes lead to biological behavior.
—COMPLEXOBJECTS: Structural attributes lead to functional behavior.
—NATURAL PHYSICAL THINGS: Natural physical attributes lead to natural physical behavior.
The third is the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor, where proverbs evoke schemas, including specific-level and generic-level schemas, rich in images and information they evoke, regarding knowledge of animals, objects, and situations. In other words, the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor triggers the mappings between a specific-level schema and numerous parallel specific-level schemas that all have the same generic-level structure as the source-domain schema. For example, Once bitten,
twice shy evokes a concrete and information-rich specific-level schema, which
induces a generic-level schema: A traumatic experience can lead to an automatic response to all situations even slightly similar, even when the response is improper.
Proverbs like this are grounded in the richness of particular cases through the
GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor.
The fourth is the communicative Maxim of Quantity, which indicates that speech should be as informative as is required and not more so. In other words, how much
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
53
information should be contained in the response primarily depends on how much information is appropriate in the conversation. O’Grady (1996) exemplifies as follows: If someone asks where a celebrity lives simply out of curiosity, then the response about which part of the country the celebrity lives in is sufficient; if the person intends to visit the celebrity personally, then much more specific information (e.g., the address) is appropriate.
To illustrate that the GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR is a tool of great power and scope, Lakoff and Turner (
1989: 174ff) exemplify
the proverb Big thunder, little rain.Literally, it is simply a description of a storm. Metaphorically, it is used to describe the futile bragging of a person. The GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR applies to the
specific-level schema evoked by the words in four ways. First, the Great Chain associates storms with human beings. Second, the commonsense theory of the Nature of Things picks out attributes and their causal relation to behavior at the levels of storms and human beings. Third, the Maxim of Quantity picks out the highest attributes and behavior relevant at each level. Finally, the GENERIC IS
SPECIFIC metaphor extracts the corresponding generic-level structure from this specific-level knowledge about storms. It maps this structure onto the target domain of human beings, picking out the highest-level human attributes and behavior which preserves the generic-level structure. In brief, the universality of proverbs is that we
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
understand the attributes and behavior of human beings in terms of the GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR.
Classifiers and measure words in Taiwanese Hakka are found to manifest metonymically and metaphorically in proverbial expressions. As a rule, these proverbial expressions carry social functions, involving with social activities and denoting affective effect or an evaluation towards what people describe. Apart from the operation of cognitive mechanisms, they also exhibit cultural variation and universality. A thorough analysis of the data based on the operation of cognitive mechanisms and cultural constraints will be elaborated in the following chapter.
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
55
CHAPTER IV
ANALYSIS
With the cognitive mechanisms laid as the foundation in the previous chapter, this chapter is going to explore how they are operated in the classifiers and measure words in Taiwanese Hakka proverbial expressions. Attention will be paid in
particular to metonymy, the interaction between metaphor and metonymy, idiomaticity, and cultural constraints. The data collected in the study include 80 items. For illustration, however, 16 representative proverbial expressions will be carefully spelled out, with the rest listed in Appendix I. First, with a closer scrutiny of the elements of classifier-proverbial expressions, the data are classified into four types of constructions, carrying different meanings. Then, the proverbial expressions
particular to metonymy, the interaction between metaphor and metonymy, idiomaticity, and cultural constraints. The data collected in the study include 80 items. For illustration, however, 16 representative proverbial expressions will be carefully spelled out, with the rest listed in Appendix I. First, with a closer scrutiny of the elements of classifier-proverbial expressions, the data are classified into four types of constructions, carrying different meanings. Then, the proverbial expressions