Metaphor universals in literature

ABSTRACT Every literary writer seeks nothing but to communicate efficiently with his audience through language. Metaphor has been a driving force behind the success of every poetic idea conveyed through language. However, metaphor is not just a rhetorical device, but an issue of conceptualization in cognitive linguistics. Studies showed that although recent researches have been conducted on the use of metaphor in poetry, yet little has been done on the aspect of poetic metaphor, most especially in African poetry. It was against this backdrop that this study attempted an Analysis of poeticMetaphor of the Poetry of Gbonabam Hallowell’s ‘the Dinning Table’ and Phillips Umeh’s ‘Ambassadors of Poverty. The conceptual metaphor theory was adopted as the theoretical framework. This study found out that metaphor functions are not only as ornaments but also as the poet’s conceptualization and cognitive means. Conceptual metaphor has the rhetoric function because it offers the advantage of being at once expressive, compact and vivid. Cognitive function and aesthetic function of poetical metaphor make poetry convey the truth and the beauty. KEYWORDS: Poetic Metaphors, Critical Appraisal, Gbonabom Hallowell, Phillip Umeh

2019

IDEAS: Journal on English Language Teaching and Learning, Linguistics and Literature

This research aims to analyze the types of metaphors used and contained meanings contained in a collection of poems by William Blake. A metaphor is a part of figurative language that compares one thing to another. The researcher used a descriptive employed in study qualitative method to identify a collection of classic poetry by William Blake. The researcher uses the theory of Lakoff, George, and Johnsen (2003) to analyze the conceptual metaphors that shape the reality of 'life' which is reflected in poetry. There are three steps in collecting research data: observation, selection, and classification. This research result shows that ninety-five metaphorical lyrics are contained in the ten of classic collections of poetry by William Blake. The data were gathered using a collection of poems from three types of conceptual metaphors: structural, orientational, and ontological. The types of metaphors found in this research are ontological metaphors. And in reverse, the meaning of...

In Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads, 253-81. Antonio Barcelona, ed. Berlin: Mouton, 2000

Jambura Journal of English Teaching and Literature, 2021

This research is aimed at finding how the students of English Department of State University of Gorontalo perceive the thing as revealed in the metaphor they used in their English Poem and, as well, interpreting the metaphor. This research was designed in qualitative research methodology. The subject of research was the poems written by the students in 2010. It is found that the students used metaphor to express their feeling. The metaphor reflects the students’ perception of the reality categorized in semantic fields. In terms of the intended meaning of the metaphor, the researcher inferred the meaning by finding the metaphor predications based on the researcher knowledge of the predication.

International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 2020

This study is a literary work that has the intention to analyze the conceptual metaphor containing in Lang Leav's poetry through cognitive semantic theory. Lang Leav's poetry is one of the popular poetries which contents are interesting and relevant to the lives of this era. In this study, the author analyzes the conceptual metaphor in this poetry by applying the main theories of cognitive semantic developed by Evans & Green (2006), conceptual metaphor by Lakoff & Johnson (2008), and image schema analysis by Croft et al., (2004). The qualitative descriptive approach is applied in this study to analyze the data. The data are taken from the collection of poetry books that have been published by Lang Leav's, which are memories, lullabies, universe of us, and love and misadventure. The result of this analysis reveals that, based on the conceptual metaphor, there are structural metaphors, orientational metaphors, and ontological metaphors occurring in the data. Furthermore, the kinds of image schema that appear are the identity, existence, container, and space schema.

2019

Psycholinguistic research has shown that conceptual metaphors influence how people produce and understand language (e.g., Gibbs 1994, 2017a; Kövecses, 2010; Jacobs & Kinder 2017). So far, investigations have mostly paid attention to non-poetic metaphor comprehension. This focus stems from the original discovery of Conceptual Metaphor Theory that much of everyday, non-poetic language is metaphorical. The present study aims to expand this focus and explores whether people access conceptual metaphors during poetry interpretation. To answer this question, we conducted a psycholinguistic experiment in which thirty-seven participants, all L1 speakers of English, completed two tasks. In each task, participants read excerpts of poetry containing conceptual metaphors before selecting or rating items that indicated their implicit and explicit awareness of the conceptual metaphors. The results of both tasks show that participants retrieve conceptual metaphors when reading poetry. This provides...

To draw attention to a philosopher's metaphors is to belittle him-like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting. Addiction to metaphor is held to be illicit, on the principle that whereof one can speak only metaphorically, thereof one ought not to speak at all. Yet the nature of the offence is unclear. I should like to do something to dispel the mystery that invests the topic; but since philosophers (for all their notorious interest in language) have so neglected the subject, I must get what help I can from the literary critics. They, at least, do not accept the commandment, "Thou shalt not commit metaphor ", or assume that metaphor is incompatible with serious thought.

World Literature Studies, 2018

Te article discusses the role of metaphor in the new poetic response to reality which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, specially in the work of some Anglo-American poets and critics, known as imagists. The new trends, which the poets were part of as well as helped define, drew on the philosophy of T. E. Hulme who claimed that the future poetry will consist of dry and sophisticated images, which is in striking contrast to rich romantic imagery. The interpretive part of the article draws attention to imagistic anthologies in which the poets expressed new sensibility through several visually striking poems, most of them forgotten by now, as well as to the handling of metaphor in some poems by Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens.