Understanding and appreciating metaphors

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ing and appreciating metaphors* ROGER TOURANGEAU Connecticut College ROBERT

J. STERNBERG

Yale University

Abstract We consider three theories that have dominated discussions of metaphor. One view is that metaphors make comparisons, the basisfor the comparison being the features (or categories) that the terms of the medaphor share. The second view is that metaphors involve an [Tnomaly. The third view is that metaphors are ‘interactive‘, producing a new way of seeing the tcrjrjs. We propose a new theory- the domains-interaction view’-that draws on elements of aN three earlier views, but boizows especially from the interaction view. We consider the implications of our theory for three questions: What are metaphors? How are they understood? What makes a good metaphor? We argue that metaphors correlate two systems of t:oncepts from different domains. The best metaphors involve two diverse domains (more distance between domains making for better metaphors) and close correspondence bettieen the terms within those domains. We call the degree of correspondence within-domain similarity. Metaphors are interpreted in several stages: the terms of the metaphor are encoded; the domains involved are inferred; the structures to be seen as parallel are found; the correspondences between these structiares are ‘mapped’ or constructed; the terms of the metaphor are compared. If the terms are not seen to match or occupy analogous roles in their different domains, then the metaphor may be retnterpreted, The evidence on all this is tentative but supports our view. We revtew two studies (Tourarzgeau and Sternberg, 1981) that support the hypothesis that distance within domain relates negatively to aptness. whereas @RogerTourt,mgeau is currentlyat the National Opinion ResearchCenter, New York, N.Y. Preparation of this article was supported in part by Contract N0001478CO02S from the Office of MavdResearch to Robert J. Stemberg. We are grateful to Robert Abeisorr.Thomas Berndt, IrvinChiM,Ruth Day, Phoebe Ellsworth, MichaelGardner,John Goldin, and Michael Kubovy for their helpful suggestions on an earlierdraft of this article;we are especiallygrateful$0 Amos Tversky,whose ideas about metaphor have greatly influer ted our own. Requests for reprintsshould be sent to Robert J. Steam berg, Departmentof Psychology, Yale University, Box llh Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06S20, U.S.A. 00~0~0277/82/03020344/$10.75

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distance be,tween domains relates positively. Several studies on cemprehension tend to disconjirm the comparison theory’s notion that the tenor and vehicle necessarily share features. Tenor and vehicle also appear to have asymmetrical roles in the interpretive process.

Traditionally,

metaphors are de ned as imp1ici.t comparisons (Abrams, 1971). ‘l%ey are comparisons because the concepts involved are somehow seen as similar. The comparison. is implicit, because on its surface, the metaphor may mention only one of the concepts-leaving the other conmetaphor may cept to be inferred -or if both concepts are mentioned, appear to equate or identify rather than compare them. e metaphorical ‘sheathe thy impatience’ requires that we infer the actual behavior described; Blake’s aphorism that ‘Prudence is a rich, u,gly old maid, courted by Incapacity’ involves both the apparent equation of prudence with a particular sort of person and the substitution of a metaphorical act-courting-for some literal relation. Brooke-Rose (1958; cf. Perrine, 197 1) lists a tiumber of the overt forms that me?;Jphors take. None of them zplicitly makes a comparison, although the traditional view assumes that implicitly, all metaphors make a comparisoY1.When an overt nonliteral comparison r‘s made, it is usually called a simile. implicit in this definition is a theory about metaphors and about how they work. ‘The theory, originating with Aristotle, is often called the comparison view. There are two popular alternative views, the anomaly view and the interaction view. All three of these theories have implications for the questions that hav? dominated discussions about metaphor since Aristotle: .What is a metaphor? What makes an apt metaphor? How do we interp:i=t metaphors? We consider each of these theories in turil, focussing on their implications for these central questions and on the difficulties; they encounter in answering them. Next, we propose a new theory- the domains-interaction viewthat also addresses these questi.ons. This theory, which builds upon the previous views, seems to us at least to reduce maFly of the difficulties the earlier theories face. Then, we review the admittedly scanty evidence available to help decide which of these theories gives the best account of the processes of understanding and appreciating me,taphors. The question of what makes one metaphor better or more interesting than another, for example, has dominated philosophical and aesthetic discussions of the topic, but has received Iftle psychological attention. What evidence there is, though hardly decisive, seems supportive of our domains-interaction theory.

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tirely static. Each has evolved over time, theorists adhering to the same general every detail. We thus present only an account and some of its main variants. As a result, some of the objections we raise against the general position might be answered by a particular version of that position; that version might in turn fall prey to other problems that are not relevant to the version we consider. make no claim to present every version of the comparison, anomaly, and interaction views, but rather present an idealized version of each that captures what we see as the central characteristics of that position. The traditional comparison view Metaphoras comparison According to the comparison view, a metaphor is a comparison in which one term (the tenor or subject of the comparison) is asserted to bear a partial resemblance (the ground 0’ the comparison) to something else (the ve&iej, the resemblance being insufficient to sustain a literal comparison. As with any comparison, there is always, some residual dissimilarity (the tension) between the terms involved in the comparison, but comparison theorists tend not to emphasize this dissimilarity. The first part of Blake’s aphorism above could, according to the comparison view, be paraphrased: “Prudence is like a rich, ugly, old maid, in that it is vain, unattractive, cautious, conservative, infertile, slow to act, etc.‘. Prudence is the tenor or subject of the comparison; vanity, sterility, age, conservativism, and so on, form the ground of the metaphor---- the basis for the comparison. The sole difference between metaphors and similes is, according to this view, their overt form: similes include explicitly comparative phrasing; metaphors do not.

The comparisonprocess Aristotle (Puetics, xxi, 7ff; Rheto&, III, ii, 7ff.), who proposed the first comparison theory, also suggested several principles for finding the ground of the metaphor. His principles reduce to fading a category to which both the tenor and v&icle belong or to constructing an analogy involving them. The first p&lciple- that the ground of a metaphor involves finding a category shared by the tenor and vehicle-has proved izmensely popular,

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rivalled only by the closely related view that the tenor and vehicle share some set of features and that these shared features foml the ground or basis many who reject other for the metaphor. Almost all theorists -including aspects of the comparison view -assume that the ground of a metaphor consists of common category memberships, or a set of features, shared by tenor and vehicle (Basso, 1976; Bickerton, 1969; Guenther, 1975; Malgady and Johnson, 1976; Ortony, 1979 ; Tversky, 1977; Van Dijk, 1975). We reject this view and will present arguments against it below. The transfer process ?vIany comparison theorists (for example, Ortony, 1979a, 19796) re-

cognize that feature comparison cannot be the only special process involved in understanding metaphors. Metaphors have many uses beside making comparisons. One use of metaphor that presents special difficulties for the comparison uie~~~involves metaphors that acquaint us with unfamiliar (or fictional) tenors. Consider ‘Donald Leavis is the George Wallace of Northern Ireland’. Although Leavis is a fictional character, our evidence indicates most people have little difficulty in interpreting this metaphor. But since our readers know nothing about Leavis, they cannot interpret this metaplnor by finding relevant features that Wallace and Leavis share. A variant of the comparison view assumes a transfer process to handle cases like this one. The features of the vehicle (Wallace) are transferred to the unfamiliar tenor (Leavis), unless the transfer contradicts something known about Leavis; here, no one transfers the feature ‘American’ to Leavis, since that transfer contradicts the one fact that the metaphor explicitly mentions about Leavis -that he is from ‘Northern Ireland (cf. Ortony, 19796, on ‘predicate rejection’). Position on the political spectrum is most likely to be transferred because it is for hi.s political views that Wallace is known best, and thus this most salient feature of Wallace is most likely to be transferred. Relations to literal processing.

If there are special processes -involving comparison or transfer of features -used in interpreting metaphors, we must then ask how these processes relate to the ‘ordinary’ processes invoked by literal sentences. One proposal suggested by several comparison theorists is that, whaIever the surface form of the metaphor, the deep structure of the metaphor includes an explicit comparison between the tenor and vehicle (Mack, 1973, or a simile (Miller, 1979). ‘Ordinary’ transformational or parsing mechanisms take the surface metaphor, produce a reading of the literal frame for the metaphor, and put the metaphorical elements themselves into a canonical form. Once the metaphor has been transformed into this standard form,

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the special comparison or transfer processes apply to the underlying comparison. Metaphors may, as a result, involve a more complex derivation or rpretive process than literal comparison, since the terms involved in implicit comparison must first be identified; then this implicit comparison (in the surface structure) must be transformed into an explicit compare ison (in the deep structure); and finally, this comparison must be interreted by the special comparison process. Metaphors should generally take longer to interpret than literal comparisons, since (a) the derivations (parsing) of metaphors are generally more complex than those of literal comparisons and (b) interpreting a metaphorical comparison, even once it has been rendered explicit by the transformational component of the grammar, is more difficult than interpreting a literal comparison. One would thus expect metaphors to be interpreted more slowly than literal sentences. As we will note later, this prediction has some empirical support. Aptness and the comparison view Adherents to all three positions would probably agree that a number of criteria are useful in judging the aptness of a metaphor: how gross or exact the correspondences are between tenor and vehicle; whether k~c correspondences are subtle or obvious, new or hackneyed; how comprehensible the metaphor is; how metrical or rhythmic is its phrasing; whether the tenor and vehicle are agreeable concepts; how easy it is to visualize the tenor or the vehicle; whether the foml of the metaphor is appropriate to its content; and how well the metaphor is integrated into its context. Interesting as all of these considerations are, most of them do not distinguish one position from another. We will, therefore, focus on the issue of the relationship between similarity- the nature and degree of the correspondences between tenor and vehicle-and aptness; on this issue, the theories part company. SimilarSty

and aptness: the comparison view If a metaphor makes or assumes a comparison, then we might suppose that the better the comparison, the better the metap or. Thus, Malgady and Johnson ( 1976) say : Out basic hypathesis is that (metaphorical) adjective tiiun combinations which result in highly similarconstituent phrasesshould produce better and more interpretablemetaphorsthan those which result in lower constituent similarity.

They report findings (which we will discuss later) that support this hypothesis.

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There can be ‘too much of a good thing’, and when there is too much similarity between the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor, the metaphor becomes degenerate, i.e., -*aliteral statement of resemblance or identity. To say that ‘A squirrel has a chipmunk’s face’ is hardly to make a metaphor at, all, let alone to make a good one (cf. dlso Malgady and Johnson, 1976, p. 51). With too much similarity? the met.aphor seems to suffer. Comparison theorists, as a result, sometimes predict either that metaphors improve until some cutoff of similarity is reached!, cx that intermediate levels of similarity produce #the best metaphors. Aristotle himself realized that similarity affects aptness in a complex way. The Poetics advises that ‘...metaphors; (vehicles) should be drawn from objects that are related to the object in question (the tenor) but not obviously related’. Aristotle notes that a metaphor can go awry in at least two ways---it can be dull or it can be obscure -and that too much similarity contributes to the one p whereas too little contributes to the other. Ctiticisms of the comparison view

There are a number of criticisms leveled at compslrison views, especially at the idea that the ground of a metaphor co:2sists of shared category membership or shared features. The first problem is that common category membership often provides too little basis even for a nonliteyal comparison. Any two things are in some common category. Most of us could perhaps come up with some interpretation, often a farfetched one, of any metaphor, no matter how arbitrary the metaphor. In ‘the senator was a fox who could outwit the reporters every time’, surely it: does not matter that both senators and foxes are animals. Yet this is a highly salient category or feature of foxes, although it is less salient for senators. Some comparison theorists attempt :;) sidestep these problems by assuming that only some shared features or categories form the ground of metaphors. Guenther (1975), for example, argues that only the prominent features are involved in the ground; Stony f 19794,) makes the related suggestion that salient features of the veihicle and nolnsalient features of the tenor are involved. With arbitrary metaphor, if the tencjr and vehicle share any features at all, they are not the right sort of features to provide a plausible ground. These restrictions on the features or category memberships that may provide a plausible basis for comparison fail to address a second difficulty with the comparison theory’s treatment elf the ground: The common category or feature shared by tenor and vehicle is often itself shared only metaphorically. ‘The headache wasn’t severe and so was only a storm’ may assert that both headache imd storm are small. But the meaning of small

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does not apply to a headache as it applies to a storm; nor do a small headache and a small storm literally share membership in a class of minor disturbances. Linguistically, here may well be some univocal meaning of smail that applies to both headache and s tom. Psychologically, thou&, there appears to be some critical difference in sense, if only that a stern occupies or fills physical space in a way that a headache does not. Similar objections can be raised against the transfer process that some comparison theorists postulate. These theorists assume that in interpreting ‘Donald Leavis is the George Wallace of Northern Ireland’, the features of the vehicle (here, Wallace) are transferred to the unfamiliar tenor (the fictional Leavis), ebminating those features ehat contradict something already known about the tenor. CIearly, only some of the features are transferred. Few people infer that Leavis has had marital difficulties, that he is paralyzed, or that he is from the Southern region of his country, even though these are features of Wallace. The usual restriction on the features involved-that they are the prominent or salient features of the vehicledoes not overcome the problem in this case, since paralysis, marital problems, and Southern background are all salient characteristics of Wallace. Still another difficulty with the comparison view is that it does little to explain why metaphors so often seem fresh and surprising. If metaphors rely on. extant similarities, why should they have so much capacity to surprise us? -Also, the comparison view, although i! acknowledges the presence of dissimilarity between tenor and vehicle (i.e., the presence of tension), provibes no account of its role. Ftially, ihe comparison theory faces empirical difficulties in its treatment of aptness and of the ground, difficulties that we describe later. The anomaly view Metaphor as mistake ‘Ile comparison view emphasizes, indeed takes its definition from, the similarity of the tenor and the vehicle. Other theorists have taken the diametrically opposed position tha,t metaphors are defined by the obvious dissimilarities between tenor and vehicle and the anomaly that results when the two are linked. The theorists taking this view differ’ among themselves on the exact nature of the postulated anomaly (Beardsley, 1962; Bickerton, 1969; Campbell, 1975; Guenther, 1975; Percy, 1954; Van Dijk, 1975; Wheelwright, 1962; for related views, see Chomsky, 1964, and Katz, 1964). The anomaly derives from the overt form of the metaphor and from the

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nonliteral character of the comparison. Metaphors often seem to equate tenor and vehicle (‘Jealousy is a green+yed monster’): as a statement of identity, the metaphor is false or absurd. Even stated as a comparison‘jealousy is like a greeneyed mom ar’- -the metaphor is, taken literally, patently false. Compreherrion in t/it-anomaly framework

Those anomaly theorists who deal with the problem of comprehension tend to emphasize how ‘normal’ processes of interpretation must be augmented to deal with figurative language. The assumption is that the normal processes -such as transformational rules -cannot apply to figurative language, since figures (including metaphors) typically involve a violation of a selection restriction. How is the normal grammar to handie such sentences? One approach (Chomsky, 1964) suspends the violated selection restriction. In Chomsky’s account, this is accomplished by finding a higher-level category to which the problematic item belongs. At this more abstract level, the vioIation disappears; the rules of the grammar can then produce a partial, although more abstract, description of the structure of the sentence. A second approach is to add new rules to the grammar (Katz, 1964; Ziff, 1964). These transfer rules (Katz, 1964) relax the rules of the ordinary grammar so that they can apply to figurative sentences. Other theorists (e.g., Van Dijk, 1975), outside the framework of transformational linguistics, share Chomsky’s view that the restrictions are loosened by dropping some of the featurtis of the tenor and vehicie; the tenor and vehicle are abstracted so as to reduce the anomaly or tension. Thus, for many anomaly theorists, something akin to finding shared features or category mcmberships is part of the interpretive process (cf. also Bickerton, 1969). But this ‘comparison is undertaken not so much for its own sake as to reduce the anomaly produced by the metaphor. One implication of the anomaly theory is that a metaphor is interpreted in two stages (cf. Harris, 1976). First, we attempt a literal reading; the attempt fails because the sentence is anomalous. So, we then do something special; we invoke special rules or we ignore violated rules. These extraordinary measures allow a reading. Since only the ordinary measures are required for literal comparisons, they should be interpreted more quickly. The prediction that metaphors take longer to interpret is also made by the comparison theorists, although it is derived by them from different assumptions.

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Aptness from the anomal.~viewpc !nt Amxnaly theorists, in contrast to comparison theorists, take dissimilarity rather than similarity to e central in understanding the nature of metaphors. They divide among themselves, howe-cer, in their attitude toward this dissimilarity. For some theorists, incongruity and novelty are what is interesting about metaphor. (Campbell, 1975, and Percy, 1954, seem to be in this camp). A number of aesthetic theories favor such incongsuity ,;f. Berlyne, 1960) for engendering a new way of looking at one’s experience. Richards (1936) quotes Breton with approval for his statement that: l

to compare two objects, as remote from one another in character as possible, or by any other method to put them together in a sudden and striking fashion, this remains the highest task to which poetry can aspire.

Dissimilarity between tenor and vehicle creates complexity, incongruity, and novelty; and some theorists point to these as the crucial considerations. Other anomaly theorists, however, stress clarity; for them, dissimilarity between tenor and vehicle creates anomaly and confusion, not excitement and complexity. Extrapolating from this view, we might predict that, since clarity suffers as a function of the distance between tenor and vehicle, the best metaphors involve the least distance-a prediction also made by Malgady and Johnson (1976) and other comparison theorists. CriMms

of the anomaly view

There are two main difficulties with these anomaly views. First, anomaly theori& tend to fall back on, as we have seen, processes of feature comparison in explaining how metaphors are understood; the anomaly view is, therefore, prey to many of the complaints lodged against the comparison view. Second, many metaphors and related devices do not involve any obvious anomaly. Consider this example (Reddy, 1969): ‘The old rock is brittle with age’. Used to describe a senior professor, the sentence is metaphorical. But it doesn’t necessarily violate a selection restriction (Bjckerton, 1969; Chomsky, 1964; Katz, 1964; Ziff, 1964); nor does it produce a “sortal’ incorrectness or category mistake (Guenther, 1975; Ryle, P949; Van Dijk, 1975). It may violate a pragmatic rule forbidding the introduction of ideas that are irrelevant or out of context: in the example, rock is off the topic. But now consider Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’: 1) Turningand turning in the wideninggyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fafl apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

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The falcon is usually interpreted in part metaphorically, as an example of something going out of control. Vet, in a catalogue such as this one, it does not seem to be extraneous to the context It relates to the topic as much as anarchy or the centre not holding. Taken togethcr$ all these related ideas and images define thle context. This example 13ads to a related difficulty with the pragmatic analysis of the anomaly produced by metaphor. If the falcon and falconer received a more extended treatment, we woulif conclude that both literal and figurative readings are intended. But when ia literal reading in terms of the scene described can be sustained, often there are no out-of-context elements introduced. We are left to infer these extra elements ourselves. Fables, parables, allegories, and other extended metaphors thus present problems for the view that metaphors involve a pragmatic anomaly. Although extended figures may contain stylistic clues suggesting that we should give them more than a literal reading, it is doubtful that these clues involve ;uly contextual anomaly. We may well interpret a character named ‘Pearl’ in tl lle light of her name, but the name dsesn’t necessarily introduce anomaly. In allegories and fablers, the vehicle (what is literally going cn) is clearly not an extraneous idea off the topic-it is the apparent topic.’ The interaction view Metaphor as in terac.tion

’

As we have seen, comparison theorists emphasize the similarity of the tenor and the vehicle; some anomaly theorists, by contrast, stress their dissimilarity. Interaction theorists (Black, 1962; Hesse, 1966; Miles, 1967; Richards, 1936; Wheelwright, 1962; cf. also Verbrugge and McCarrell, 1977) try to stress similarity and dissimilarity equally. Interaction theorists argue that the vehicle of a metaphor is a template for seeing the tenor in a new way. This reorganization of the tenor is necessary, because the characteristics or features of the vehicle cannot be applied directly to the tenor; the features they %are’ are often only shared metaphorically. As Black (1962) observes, the ground of a metaphor may itself be nonliteral. ‘Men are wolves’, in Black’s example, in part because both are predators; but they are predators in shaw -

‘One could arguethat a theory of metaphorneed not apply to fables and parables.Still, one would prefer on groundsof generality a theory that did apply to both metaphorsand such extended Qurative devices. Literarytheorists do tend to tieat parable,fable, and allegoly as extended metaphor(see, e.g., Abrcms,1971).

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ly different Senses, senses that may only strike us as similar when we interpret the metaphor. In Black’s reading of this metaphor, we see competition in social relaticns as corresponding to predacity in beasts. Of course, scme men are predators in a literal sense (Le., they hunt for food), but the ground of the metaphor, at leaS! as IHack reads it, does not involve sharing this literal feature. Comprehending metaphors: the interaction view

Interaction theorists are mainly philosophers and critics; it is not surprising that they don? make very concrete proposals about the processes necessary for interpreting metaphors or about how these processes might relate to the ordinary ones used *h understanding literal language. Richards (1936), who originated the inter&ion view, lapses mto the comparison framework when he speaks of the ‘common characteristics’ of tenor and vehicle as forming the ground of the metaphor. Black (1962), on the other hand, does suggest some of the processes that may be involved. According to Black, tenor and vehicle (in his terms, the principal and subsidiary subject) each have a “system of commonplaces’ associated with them. These commonplaces are stereotypes, not necessarily definitional, not even necessarily true, just widely agreed upon. In interpreting ‘man is a wolf, we ‘evoke the wolf-system of related commonplaces’ and are led by them ‘to construct a corresponding system of implications about the principal subject (Man)’ (Black, 1962, p. 41). In Black’s view, then, interpretation involves not so much comparing tenor and vehicle for existing similarities, 3s construing Them in a new way so as to create similarity between them. -4ptness in the interaction view

Since a ‘metaphor works by applying to the principal subject (the tenor) a system of “associated implications” characteristic of the subsidiary subject (the vehicle)’ (Black, 1962, p. 44), the aptness of the metaphor should depend on the degree to which this transfer can be successfully accomplished. Because there is no single method by which the fc&ures are transformed or changed in meaning so as to allow their application to the tenor, Black concludes that there is ‘no blanket reason why some metaphors work and others fail’ (p. 45). We disagree. Below, we specify a version of the interaction view that does predict why some metaphors work and others fail. Criticisms of the interaction view St is considerably more difficult to criticize this interaction view, Once it has never been spelled out in the detail of the other two theor+. F. rther, we

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fiid ourselves in agreement with its main tenets. Like the anomaly view, the interaction theory offers an account of the surprise and novel vision that metaphors engender. We see one thing in terms of another thing that is plainly different from it; because they are so different, to interpret the metaphor, we must see tenor and vehicle in a new way. How, exactly, we do this is not very c1ea.r.Thus, the main problem with the interaction view is that it is so fuzzy. Our theory is an effort to provide a more specific formulation of the interaction view. The domains-interaction view Metaphor as interaction of domains

Metaphors often involve seeing in a new way not only two particular things but the domains to which they belong as well. In interpreting ‘Men are wolves’, we not only see men and wolves in a new light but we also see the domain of social relations as being analogous to the domain of the beasts; we see a characteristic, such as predacity, that applies within one domain, as being analogous to a characteristic, competitiveness, that applies within another domain. Metaphors can thus involve whole systems of concepts. Consider another exantple: ‘The room was orange with warmth’. Once we see the dimension of temperature as somehow corresponding to hue, we can more easily interpret a whole series of related synaesthetic metaphors: the room was blue with cold; red with heat; etc. The correspondence we see in interpreting the first metaphor involves not only orange and warmth, but the entire system o!‘hues and temperatures. We suggest that metaphors generally i:lvoIve seeing something (men) in one domain in terms of something (woI~es) iw a second domain, with a resulting change in our view of both domains. The difficulty in seeing men and their social relations in terms of our beliefs about wolves is that the features or dimensions that apply to wolves do not apply outside the domain of beasts. Applied outside their normal domain of application, the characteristics of beasts may not mean the same thing or, in fact, may not have any meaning at aII. Wolves are thought to be fierce, predatory, scavenging, constantly hungry; each of these characteristics could be applied literally to people. In Black’s metaphor, however, they are meant to apply to social relations. To apply to social relations, their meaning must be transformed. ‘Fierce’ competition among people has a different sense from ‘fierce’ competition in the domain of animals. Again, a univocal linguistic meaning of fierce may well work in both cases, but psychologically, people seem to Perceive fierce competition among animals in a different way from that in

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which tlrey perceive fierce competition among people. If one is told that adm:issions to graduate school are fiercely codmpetitive, for example, one is unlikely to view it as likely that one will be physicaZ2~ torn to bits. The meaning of a dimension or feature depends in part on the domain in which it is applied. We assume, then, that concepts-and the features, dimensions, and semantic relations that characterize them---cluster into domains. Outside their domains, features may lose their literal sense (‘a tall logarithm’) or change their sense: ‘That’s a tall tale’ uses taEdin a way that differs fi-om the use of taN in ‘Mt. Everest is tall’. In interpreting a metaphor, we se: zne concept in terms of another by construing features or dimensions thai: apply within the domain of the first concept (the subject or tenor of the metaphor) as somehow parallel to those that apply w?thin the domain of the second concept (the vehicle); further, tenor and vehicle are asserted to have similar values on these corresponding dimensions. In metaphor, we see concepts in different domains of classes as occupying analogous positions (i.e., having analogous features) within. their domains. In a related formulation, Miles (1967) argues: What is vital...in metaphor is the sense of relative position in a group or class. If the dove is a cabbage, then the tanager is a carrot.

We intend the notion of domains to be flexible. Sometimes the domain of a term is its ‘natural category” (Bosch, 1973) or some other highly salient class to which it belongs. When the linguistic context or situational cues are minimal, we are especially lik4y to infer that the domain of a term is some highly salient category. In interpreting ‘men are wolves’, the domain :,c X&GS is &rrPsQ surely animals (that is, non-human land mammals).* We do not assume that al1 terms fall iv to a single domain for everyone. of Vietnamese probably saw IIo Chli Mind1 in a different domain-that Vietnamese leader- from Americans, for whom he was a leader of a Communist foreign country; as a izsult, the metaphor ‘Ho Chi Nlinh is another George Washington’ makes considerably more sense to Vietnamese than to American listeners. Most metaphors, however, occur in a context; this context can determine the relevant domains. Beside linguistic context, features of the situation in which a metaphor is spoken may affect which domain we infer. In Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ (quoted earlier), the phrase ‘mere anarchy’ provides a context that suggest the political domain as the relevant one for interpreting ‘the centre cannot hold’ in the previous line; 2The domdn of man is not so obvious. We assume that Black intended man as a social b&g and tile relevant domain is social relatiorss. This is a highly salient domain for men and it readily permits us to see parallels between men and wolves.

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we may also attempt to give the falcon and the falconer a politi& reading. The title of the poem, of course, suggests another lausible domain. Depending on the situation in which. we read the poem, the one domain or the other may figure more prominently in our interpretation. Beside the nature of the tenor and vehicle themselves and the linguistic or situational context of th.e metaphor, the ground of the metaphor may also determine what domains we infer. Thus, when faced with a difficult metaphor, we may infer a domain for the tenor that most readily allows us to construct a system of implications parallel to those for the vehicle (cf. footnote 2). Domains play iwo roles in our theory. First, they often help specify what characteristics are important for interpreting the metaphor. They are the features or dimensions thalt are important within the particular domains involved, the ones that in Miles’s phrase give the ‘sense of relative position within a group or class’. Thus, we interpret ‘Donald .Leavis is the George Wallace of Northern Ireland’ as saying something about Leavis’s rightwing political views and his anti-Catholicism, because we infer that both the relevant domains are political ones and because conservatism and bigotry are important for both American and Northern Irish politics. On the other hand, Wallace’s paralysis or his marital history, although salient characteristics of Wallace, are not politically relevant and so do not enter into the interpretation of the metaphot. Sometimes, of course, an author establishes 3 new system of beliefs about the concepts; or an author may develop the subject in enough detail so that the context makes clear what the relevant features are. In these cases, it is not the pre-existing structure of the two domains that determines the meaning of the metaphor; it is the context. Domains not only help determine the features relevant to interpreting the metaphor; they have a second role. The domains determine the nature and degree of the parallel tha#eis constructed between tenor and vehicle. Because we know what sort of things social relations are, we can interpret ‘men are wolves’; we know not to apply the characteristics of wolves literally to men; and we know how these characteristics must be transformed, i.e., interpreted in a new way, to apply to people. Thus, domains sometimes tell us which characteristics of tenor and vehicle are likely to matter in interpreting the metaphor= And they also tell us how to map the features applying within the one domain oilto those applying within the other, As WChave seen, some.times domains mainly play this second role of constraining the process by which we construct correspondences between features in different domains. When the domains have only this function, they need not be so narrow. When it is clear from context, for example, what features are to figure in the interpretation, the domains of tenor and vehicle can be construed more broadly (cf. Russell, Reference note 1, on ‘levels’). In inter-

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tore down the walls that had loilg separated need to discover the exact class of events to expression refers; it may be enough to know that rred to (i.e., the tenor) occurs on the social, not the that ‘the w;tlls’ is the vc,hicle for a social difficulty,

ew, in summary, asserts that (a) a metaphor one domain in terms of something in another are often specific to a domain, they must be transformed, i.e., seen in a new way, if we are to find correspondences the domains are reinteracross domains; (c) since the features that strut domain, and not just a preted or transformed by the metaphor, the w particular term in it, partakes in this conceptual ‘interaction’; (d) either the context, or in default of this, the domains themselves, can provide the structure that makes salient the features or dimensions that figure in the interpretation of the metaphor; and (e) the domains involved place limitations on the manner by which features or Dimensions applying within the domain of the vehicle can be altered so as to fit the tenor. Sometimes we already have a system of b&efs about the concepts in the domain of the subject or tenor. We already know a good deal about men and their social relations, so that in interpreting ‘men are wolves’, fitting the characteristics of men to those of wolves mainly irjvolves seeing social relations in a new way. We must change our view of the features operating within the domain of social relations to see their correspondence to those within the domain of beasts. But at other times we knc+ lirtle about the tenor and its domain. In interpreting, ‘Donald Leavis is the George Wallace of Northern Ireland’, we fit the political characteristics of Wallace to Eeavis, constructing a new, paraiic;l beh f system about Leavis. Here, such reinterretation as occurs mainly affe s our view of American politics; our view of the fictional Leavis is cveated rather than modified by the metaphor (cf. Ortony, 18798, on ‘discovery’ and ‘recognit.ion’ metaphors). Comgrehensbn

in the domains-in terac tion view

Recognizing metaphors Whenever two domains or systems of thought are both active, and when they can be seen as parallel, then a metapho.ical reading may be justified, even if no explicit figures link the two domairis. In reading King Lear, alert readers notice the parallels between the Kent--Edgar-Edmund plot and the main plot involving Lear and his daughters, and use their understanding of

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the one story to enrich their understanding of the other. Similarly, even without an explicitly metaphorical statement, if the structure of one domain is salient and seems to correspond to that of a second domain, we may attempt a metaphorical reading. We may, for example, re d Kafka’s The Trial as sayiig something about man’s relation to God, even though no metaphor links the events of the novel to that theme. Our view is that the source of the anomaly that metaphors sometimes produce is in the attempt to see an event of one kind in terms of an event of another kind. It is this attempt that triggers the processes that produce a metaphorical reading. Underlying form of a metaphor

Tc i>roduce a metaphorical reading, we must identify or infer the two systems of concepts involved (i.e., the tenor and vehicle) and the domains from which they are drawn. In a sense, we are proposing that metaphors arc analogies that include both tenor and vehicle and their different domains as terms. Thus, ‘men are wolves’ asserts something akin to ‘In their social relations, men are as wolves are among the beasts’. Ordinary parsing mechanisms establish the relation between this underlying analogy and the literal frame or context of the metaphor.3 The mechanisms we outline below interpret this underlying analogy. Furiher, in some cases, variants of these mechanisms mus! ‘be used to infer one of the terms. Whether or not a term must be inferred, the final interpretation of a metaphor will take into account tenor, vehicle, and the domain from which each is drawn. Consu-ucting cw-espondences How is it that we can use the vehicle as a template for viewing the tenor?

How do we know which features or dimensions applying within the one domain correspond to those in the other domain? We follow Black (1962) in assuming that there is no sin e basis for seeing two features or dimensions as analogous. Central to our view is the assumption that features’ ‘shared’ by tenor and vehicle are often at best only analogous features, each limited in its application to one domain or the other. Of course, some features or dimensions are quite general, applying across the board to a number of d(Dmains. Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum’s (1957) connotative dimensions, for example, seem almost unlimited in their range of application. Thus, we do not deny entirely the possibility that tenor and vehicle share a feature or have similar values on some common dimension; instead, we simply deny the primacy of this mechanism. ‘(3.~ proposalsseem compatible with the parsingsystems describedby Schank (1975 ; see Russell, Referencenote 1) or Anderson($976).

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We propose several additional bases for relating features whose normal s of application are in different domains. One method is abstraction; the feature alppLyingto the tenor and that applying to the vehicle may both ome more abstract, common feature. In interpreting ‘Ian Paisley e Wallace’, we note that Paisley is anti-Catholic, that Wallace is and that both anti-Catholicism and racism are forms of bigotry. This mechanism is also similar to the ones postulated :ly comparison theorists. We tend, however, to focus the abstraction process on ihe features themselves, not on the tenor and vehicle. Natural association is a second seeing two dimensions or features as anaIljgous. Sometimes two s or features are statistically related; this correlation in our experience may be the basis for seeing the two dimensions as corresponding. The synaesthetic metaphor ‘the room was orange with warmth’, may rely on some regular co-occurrence of this sort. A third basis far relating two dimensions or features is that they are both relative versions of a single absolute scale. In ‘Bill Walton is a redwood’, part of the meaning is clear, because, while height in trees and height in basketball players may mean different things, they both map onto a common absolute dimension. (But, contrary to the ~:omparison view, the absolute differences in scale do not hurt the metaphor or render it less interpretable.) Still another basis for inferring a relation between two features or dimensions is that they share a common label. Later on, we quote a passage from Donne. Tn it, the COT:Inections between the lovers (the tenor of this elaborate metaphor) and th: compass (the vehicle) are reinforced by bawdy puns. Yet another basis involves finding a mediating dimension or feature. Melodies of different types seem to suggest to some people different visual shapes (some melodies suggest smoothly curving forms; others jagged lines), perhaps because both the melodies and the forms map onto dimensions in yet a third domain. Both may su est relaxation or arousal or some other affective state. We propose one nal method for seeing two concepts as corresponding: The concepts may have a similar structure. Thus far, we have tacitly assumed that the meanin or structure of concepts uses semantic netlvorks (Anderson, 1976; Lindsay and Norman, 1977; Quillian, 1969; Schank, 1975) as the chief representational device. We feel this format may be especially useful for representing the parallels that underlie metaphors involving actions or whole sentences. Consider the simile, ‘As when a man kicks an unsuspecting dog, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor’. Here both tenor and vehicle are developed in enough detail IIso that each is represented by an entire clause. Figure 1 illustrates a netwo representation of the two clzuses of this simile, in a notation patterned after . Anderson’s (1976).

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R. Tourangeau and R. J. Stemberg

Figure 1.

Using a representational system patterned after Anderson’s (19 76), we illustrate the idea of similar structures in a semantic network. The structure of ‘the man kicked the unsuspecting dog’, represented in (a), is similar to that represented in @I. Items in parentheses are items inferred in the comprehension process. (Note ‘S’ represents a subject relation; ‘I?‘, the predicate link; ‘R’, the relation link; and ‘A’, the argument link.) (a)

The

The

man

Japanese

kicked

attacked

the

dog

1 the base Pearl

unsuspecting

at

Harbor

1

(unprepared)

Two structures are similar when (a) they include the same skeleton of semantic rela.tions, represented as labelled arrows in Figure 1; (b) neither structure is embedded in some larger frame that modifies its meaning (as does the embedding frame ‘it is false that...‘, cf. Anderson’s, 1976, MATCH process); and (c). at least some of the concepts occupying corresponding positions in the two networks can be seen as analogous, using one of the other mapping principles already considered. In Figure 1, the Japanese may be seen as analogous to the man because both ‘share’ the feature of treachery; similarly, the dog’s being unsuspecting is likely to seem similar to Pearl Harbor’s being unprepared. If the two networks only differ in their subjects, with the other terms in corresponding slots in the two networks’ tokens of identical concepts, then we would say that the two subjects share a feature, Figure 2 illustrates this definition of shared features in a network system. Russell (Reference note X), within the context of Schank’s conceptual dependency theory, and Ma& (1975), within the framewcrk of generative linguistics, offer related analyses of the similarity of complex semantic

Understandingand apprectitingmetaphors

Figure 2.

221

Here we represent the idea of a sharedfeature in a network. Pn (a) and (t+, we see that Sarah and Robert share a feature. 7lhepath that links them to tokens of the concept jeans is identkal. In (c), Sam does not share thisfeature; one of the items in the network (‘hates”)is a token of a different concept from that appearingin (a) and (IQ.drc(d), Paul does not share the feature of wearingjeans; the path linking ‘Paul’to those concepts is embedded in a stnrcture thatlabelsthatpath false. b)

(5)

Sarah

wears

jeans

(cl

weors

hates

jeans

s

(Cl)

/Tg+-qi.

/fY(& Sam

Rotert

jeans

Paul

wears

jeans

structures. Russell finds her model particularly useful with metaphors that focus on verb concepts or actions (‘The chairman plowed through the discussion’). The tenor- conducting a meeting in a certaiil way-is seen t(J have a structure that is similar to the structure we characteristically associate with plowing, even though these two actions occur in different domains, or, in Russell’s terms, on differeilt levels. In conclusion, we have suggested an array of mechanisms for seeing COTXspondences between dimensions or features in different domains: (a) there may be some common feature or dimension crosscutting the two domains; (b) we may abstract the features themselves; (c) the features or dimensions may be naturally correlated; (d) there may be a punning connection or a common label linking them; (c:) the dimensions may map onto a common absolute scale;@“) they both may relate to a mediating dimension in a thhd domain; and (g) the concepts may have similar network structures.

?33 YU‘_

R. Tuumngeau and R. .J. Sternberg

Steps in comprehendirqg metaphors

Interpretation of metaphors involves a number of steps that we hypothesize, at least as a first-pass analysis, are executed sequentially. Suppose, for example, one were asked to complete the following statement with the better metaphorical element: ‘A lion among beasts is a king among (a) rulers, (b) humans’. n this event, the steps needed to complete the metaphor are theorized to include (a) encoding of the given terms, whereby the terms are identified and possibly relevant attributes are retrieved from long-term memory; (b) inference of the relation between lion and beasts, whereby a lion is conceived as a kind of beast; (c) mapping of the higher-order relation that links a lion in, its domain to a king in his domain, whereby each is seen as having a certain kind of primacy within its respective domain; (d) application of the previously inferred relation as mapped to the new domain to generate an ideal compl&ion, such as ‘people’; (e) comparison of this ideal completion to the two given completions, in this case, rulers and humans; (f) justification of one of the given answers as better than the other, although possibly non-ideal, so that humans is seen as close enough to the ideal, people, such as to be acceptable; and (g) response (Sternberg and Nigro, Reference note 3). Relations of steps to those in reasoning by analogy The steps proposed here are clearly closely related to those proposed by

Stemberg (1977a, 19776) for a process theory of analogical reasoning. Suppose, for example, we were presented with the analogy, “lion : beasts :: l&g : (a) rulers, (b) humans’. An individual solving this analogy must (a) encode the terms of the problem; (b) infer the relation between the first two analogy terms; (c) map the higher-order relation that links the domain (fmt half) to the range (second half) of the analogy; (d) appty the inferred relation as mapped to the range of the analogy so as to generate a potential ideal completion; (e) compare this completion to each of the two given answer options; (f) justi’> one given answer as preferred, even if non-ideal, and (g) respond. These steps seem to correspond quite closely to the steps invctved in the comprehension of metaphors. Data on the rekztions between stezu P in metaphorical and analogical comprehension

Forty-eight college students were asked to ‘solve’ metaphorical completions such as ‘Bees in a hive are a Roman mob in the (a) coliseum, (b) aqueduct’; another forty-eight college students were asked to solve analogical completions such as ‘bees : hive :: Roman mob : (a) coliseum, (b) aqueduct’. Items were the same except for the additional text in the metaphorical

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format. Each subject received a total of 50 such items, and teas timed from the time the item was first presented tachistoscopicaily to the time a response was recorded (see Sternberg and Nigro, Reference note 3, for details). Sternberg and Nigro (Reference note 3) found that a model including just five parameters -encoding, application, comparison, justification, and response --accounted for 86% of the variance in the latency data for metaphors, and 73% of th e variance in the latency data for analogies. Mean latencies needs to be considered i conjunction with the internal-consistency 3.84 and 3.90 seconds respectively (t < l), and the correlation across &mean response times for the 50 i%emtypes administered under each condition of presentation (metaphors and analogies) was 0.80. The correlation between latencies needs to be considered in conjunction with the internal-consistency reliability of the latency data, which was 0.90 for metaphors and 0.93 for analogies. The lower of these two reliabilities sets an upper bound on the possible correlation between the two d;cta sets. The comparison between the task intercorrelation (0.80) and the relevant reliability coefficient (0.90) suggests that processing of metapl-iors and analogies is probably highly similar but not identical, in that there is still some systematic variance left unaccounted for (0.10). Of course, metaphors such as ‘Bees in a hive are a Roman mob in the Coliseum’ can be seen as special cases, since their format is strikingly similar to that of analogies. In a second experiment, subjects were presented with metaphors stated in five different formats: 1. Bees in a hive are a Roman mob in the coliseum. 2. Bees in a hive are a Roman mob. 3. Bees are a Roman mob in the Coliseum. 4. Bees are a Roman mob. 5. Bees are a Roman mob in a hive. Twenty-four undergraduates were asked to rate the aptness and the comIprehensibility of metaphors presented in each of the five formats. The full process model accounted for 68%, 67%, 44%, 75%, and 50% of the variance in the aptness ratings for each of the five respective formats, and for 75%, Q,and 77% of the variance in the eomprehensibihty razings for 73%, 60%, 8OY each of the five respective formats (see Stemberg and Nigro? Reference note 3, for details). Thus, the proposed model seems to provide reasonably good fits of aptness and comprehensibility ratings for metaphors presented in forms other than the standard analogical one. Although these d&a suggest that metaphors and analogies are processed in similar way!&they also suggest th,at there are at least some differences in the ways the two kinda of items are processed. On our domains-interaction

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view, one salient difference between processing of the two kinds of items would be in the interaction between do.mains that we believe characterizes

_

metaphorical comparisons, but not (at least necessarily) analogical ones. I,ti this regard, the mean ratings of aptness for each of the five metaphorical formats described above are of particular interest. These means are 5.12, 4,67, 4.66, 4.32, and 5.27 respectively. The effect of metaphorical format was highly significant. Consider first Formats 1-4, where the terms of the metaphors are presented in the order cr.,rresponding to the underlying analogy (bees : hive :: Roman mob : colic~um). The highest aptness rating is attained by the metaphors in Format I., where no terms are left implicit. Intermediate ratings are attained by the metaphors in Formats 2 and 3, where one term is left implicit (coliseum in Format 2: hive in Format 3). The lowest rating is attained by the metapho-ss in Format 4, where two terms are left implicit (hive and coliseum). Thus, when terms are presented in the natural A, B, C, D order corresponding to the order of the terms in the implicit analogy, the presentation of more terms is associated with higher aptness. But Format 4, despite the fact that one term is left implicit (coliseum), is rated as highest in aptness. Of interest is the fact that in this format, the order of the second and third terms is reversed relative to the underlying implicit analogy. Stembcrg and Nigro (Reference note 3) suggest that the Format 5 metaphor is rated as most apt because the juxtaposition of the terms supplies a kind of information additional to that supplied i-1 the other metaphorical formats: In particular, it supplies information about the nature of the interaction between tenor and vehicle. In metaphors such ;as‘A pear is a Buddha on a sill’, or ‘Bees are a Roman mob in a hive’? or ‘Tombstones are teeth in a graveyard’, the tenor and vehicle are more easily seen to interact with each other, and it is especially easy in many cases to create an image of the nature of this interaction. One can easily imagine a Buddha transplanted to a window sill, a Roman mob scurrying about mindlessly in a hive, or teeth sticking up from the ground in a graveyard. In ord.cr to test their hypothesis that the fifth metaphorical format encourages formation of interactive imagery more than does the second (or any other) metaphorical format, Stemberg and Nigro (Reference note 3) had a separate group of twenty subjects rate ‘how vivid. the interaction [was] between the two princi& nouns’ in each metaphorical format. Mean ratings for the five formats were 4,48, 3.24, 3.00, 2.91, and 4.77 for the five respective formats. The effect of kteractive imagery was significant, with the ratings for Formats 1 and 5 significagltly higher than the rest. The most critical comparison was that between Formats 2 and 5, both of which contained the identical terms. In fact, the mean interactive imagery rating was

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significantly higher for Format 5 than for Format 2, as would be expected from our hypothesis that the difference in aptness of the two formats derived at least in part from diffcrenees in interactive imagery between tenor and vehicle in the two conditions of presentation. “Wetake the set of results as supporting our notion that the processes of metaph
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R. Tourangeauand R. J. Stemberg

Thy sou!l,the fixed foot, makes no show to move, but doth if the other do. And though it in the center sit, yet W~WJthe othe: far doth rc~m, It leans and hearkens after it, and grows erect as it comes home. Donne emphasizes certain physical properties of the compass, at the same time developing a set of detailed parallels between these properties and those on the social 1r:vel that characterize the situation of the lovers.4 (Of course, the last line suggests parallels on a more biological level.) We noted in our discussion of soms”factors affecting the speed and ease of the comprehension process that the distance between the domains of the tenor and vehilcle affects how easily the ‘mapping’ process can be performed. If the distance between the domains is foe great, it may be impossible to relate the features applying within the one domain to those applying within the other. It may be impossible, therefore, to interpret the metaphor. Thus, at some extreme of bstweendomains distance, the comz*yehensibility of a metaphor declines sharply and aptness suffers. Too little between-domains similarity can thus destroy the correspondence on which the metaphor is to be based. Our hypothesis is that the extent of the parallels created between tenor and vehicle is positively related to the aptness of the metaphor and that the similarity of the domains themselves is negatively related (except for extreme lack of similarity). It is the dissimilarity between domains, of course, that engender.s the complexity of the metaphor and that forces us to see tenor and vehicle in a new, interactive way.

Criticisms of the oth& views How does the domains-interaction position mitigate the problem associated with the other theories? We pointed out a number of problems with the comparison view: (a) that everything has some feature or category that it shares with everything else, but we cannot combine just any two thin zmetaphor; (b) that the most obvious shared features are often irrelevant to .a reading of t:he metaphor; (c) that even when the feature is relevant, it is often shared only metaphorically; (J) that some metaphors do not make comparisons, but insiead involve transferring features to an unfamiliar tenor; 41n this exampde, we are suggesting that ths domain of compass is construed broadly-its features are those of a certain kind of physical object -rather than narrowly as the class of drafting instruments.

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if this transfer is done wholesale, then irrelevant and inappropriate features are likely to be trans d; and (e) that metaphors are novel and surprising is hard to reconcile with the idea that they rely completely on extant similarities. ur view is that tenor and vehicle do not necessarily share a feature or ry membership. Indeed, our view is that the most obvious features that define tenor and vehicle as members of particular domains) and the most salient cate ries are nsb actually shared by tenor and vehicle (point la). We stead, that some features or structures are ‘mapped’, or seen as anal across different domains. We see no reason to assume that any two ithin-domain features can be mapped onto each other (point a). Because tenor ‘and vehicle belong to different domains, they cannot generally share features (point c). In constructing a belief system about a new tenor, we use our knowledge of the domains involved in deciding what features to transFer and how these features must be transformed to apply in a new domain. With ‘Donald Leavis is the George Wallace of Northern Ireland’, we transfer racism from Wallace, because racism is a salient characteristic of American politics, but not Wallace’s paralysis, because it does not seem to be a salient characteristic. Then we transform racism to antiCathoticism (which is not generally thought to be characteristic of Wallace), because of what we know about politics in Northern Ireland. It is this knowledge regarding the two domains that prevents us from applying irrelevant and inappropriate features (point d). Finally, that metaphors seem novel and surprising is no surprise for a theory that does not assume that metaphors rely directly on shared features or other extant similarities (point e), We believe instead that metaphors force us to create resemblances between systems of belief that often did not seem particularly related beforehand. The chief problems raised a ainst the anomaly view are than anomaly theorists tend to fall back on se hing for shared features as the mi:chanism for interpreting metaphors (with all the problems this search entails) and anomaly is associated with a netaphor. TAXdomainsthat often no app sts that when there is anomaly, it results from the interaction view attempt to see something of one sort in terms of something of a different sort. But whether this attempt produces a syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic or no anomaly at all -depends on the context and surface phrasanomaly=-=-ing of the metaphor. We believe it is mistaken to treat anomaly as crucial to metaphor. The main difficulty with the interaction view is its fuzziness. We have tried to remedy this deficiency by spelling out in detail one version of the interaction view.

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Evidence on the theories Aptness in metaphors

Comparison ar.d anomaly theorists have suggested three possible relationships between similarity .-Ad aptness. One is that the best metaphors involve the least similarity between tenor and vehicle; more formally, aptness is a decreasing monotonic function of similarity. A second is that the best metaphors involve the most similarity; aptness is an increasing monotonic function of similarity. The third is that the best metaphors involve intermediate levels of similarity; aptness is a nonmonotonic, inverted-U shape& function of similarity. We offer a different hypothesis: aptness increases with the degree of similarity within domains but decreases with the similarity of the domains themselves. Malgady and Johnson (1976) reported a study on the relation between similarity and aptness. They gave subjects metaphorical sentences with the basic form, ‘The adjective1 noun1 is adjective2 nounz’ (e.g., ‘the sleek hair is shiny silk’), or similar metaphors without the adjectives. The adjectives add features to the nouns and so alter the similarity of the noun phrases. Pairs of nouns varied in their initial unmodified similarity; and the adjectives varied in their effects on the final similarity of the noun phrases. The relationship between similarity and a measure of goodness dep ed, in part, on the degree of initial similarity of the nouns. For pairs nouns that were low in similarity before being modified by the adjectives, the final similarity (having been altered by the adjectives) correlated highly with goodness (r = 0.87); for pairs of nouns high in initial similarity, final similarity was less closely associated with goodness (r = 0.42). These positive correlations argue for the hypothesis that aptness increases with greater similarity. The difference between the two correlations, however, may su curvilinear relationship; and it is possible that the range of similarity studied was too narrow to detect an o!xxall nonmonotonic function. Malgady and Johnson did not attempt to separate within- and betweendomains similarity, a distinction we regard as crucial. We undertook a series of studies (Tourangeau and Sternberg, 1981) to explore this distinction in which we found evidence in support of it. In our initial series of scaling studies, subjects in eight groups rated twenty terms from a domain on a number of bipolar scales (e.g., noble@noble, warlike-peaceful). Subjects in one group rated twenty birds; those in other groups rated fish, land mammals, aircraft, ships, land vehicles, world leaders, or U.S. figures on the same set of rating scales. Factor analyses on each set of ratings revealed similar structures for the eight domains; all eight showed

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a cle sion.

and a second factor inclu ing both power and aggresed the factor scores of an item o these two factors as their coordinates on spatial dimensions applying within the item’s domain. We assumed that subjects, in interpreting metaphors using these terms, would see the facto or dimensions applying within one $dmain as analogous to those in the her domains. On this assumption, we clal lated the withinistance between two terms as a Eucli&:an func n of thk differences on these corresponding factors:

(Note that in this a d our other studies, we used distancre rather than similarity as our dependent measure.) In Equation (l), the within-domain distance between A and ‘B depends on the difference between their coordinates or factor scores on the m (here, two) corresponding dimensions within their doman& We assume that this measure reflects the degree to which we can see (or construct) parallels between tenor and vehicle. Another group of subjects rated the eight domains themselves on the bipolar rating scales; these subjects also rated the similarity of pairs of the domains directly. We treated the domains as terms in a higher--level domain of domains; we measured the distance between domains as a Euclidean distance, based on the differences between their coordinates on the dimensions that applied within this higher-order space. Figure 3 illustrates ojlr hierarchical conception of the spatial relation between these two types of )&stance. We used a factor analI;sis of the ratings of the domains on the bipolar scales to find between-domain coordinates. MuItidimensionaI scaling of the silxilarity ratings yielded a similar, but degenerate, solution. Subjects in our main study (Tourangeau and Sternberg, 198 1, Experiment 1) rated 64 metaphors, formed from the terms we had scaled, on their aptness or their comprehensibility. The metaphors were generated randomIy with the constraint that all the possible combinations of domains were reSSometimes there will be dimensions within one domain for which no paAl& can be constructed within the other domain. The presence of such noncorrespondingdimensronsimplies that within-

domainCMance is a more complicated function involving the expression in Equation (1) and the

numberof such n&-corresponding dimensions. Elsewhere (Tourangeau and Stemberg, Reference

note 2) we i;of8 how Equation (1) can be titered to yield asymmetriesin distance;Krumhansl’s(1978) paper offers a different solution to the problem of asymmetry in a dimensional model. Wealso note there (Tourangeauand Stemberg,Referencenote 2, pp. 27-28) that our commitment to dimensionsis practical,not theoretical, and show how within- and between-domainsdistancecan be measuredusing Tversky’s(1977) feature metric.

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Understandingand appreckztin,g metaphors

231

ofthe metaphors

was ‘The A is the B among C’ (e.g., fish.‘). Some of the metaphors ‘linked similar others linked more distant clornains, such as . The metaphors also differed on thle within-domain distances of their tenor and vehicle. It is easy to see sharks and hawks as heir domains, harder tr11see octopus and rated the metaphors on nine-point scales la ‘interesting-dull’, and ‘apt-not apt’. Bwause (median r = 0.94), we summed them to or aptness. We found, a:,; we had exe related negatively to this overall measure of aptness (r = -0.39; p < O.Ol)‘j and that between-domain distance related positively (r = 0.27; p < 0.02). We thus found that aptness actually increases with one type of distance or dissimilarity but decreases with the other. We readily admit that these correlations, although significant, are not strong, and hence account only in small part for metaphoric,11 aptness. Another group of subjects rated these 64 metaphors on how easily and quickly they understood them. These two ratings correlated highly with each other; we summed them in forming a single measure of comprehensibility. As expected, this measure correlated with the ratings of aptness (r = 0.63); it did not, however, relate to either within- or between-domains distance. Instead, we found two other factors that did relate to comprehensibility. First, we thought that if the vehicle had extreme values on its within-domain s, the relevant dimensions would be more salient and so more e found. We created an index to measure a term’s extremity. The vehicle’s extremity within its domain, but not the tenor’s, related significantly to comprehensibility (for the vehicle, r = 0.26, p < 0.05; for the tenor, r = 0.06). We had a second hypothesis, namely, that the metaphor should be more readily ~understood when the tenor is a source of some uncertainty or disagreement. If the tenor can be viewed with some flexibility, it ought to er to carry out the mapgin and ‘comparison’ operations that enable us to see it in terms of the vehicle. We formed a measure of the flexibility of a term, based on the variability of its within-domain coordinates. The flexibility of the tenor, but not that of the vehicle, correlated significantly with comprehensibility; for the tenor, the correlation was 0.3 1 @ < 0.05); Iforthe vehicle, it was 0.12.

%I

signifhance levels reportedam two-tailed.

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In our final studies (Tourangeau and Sternberg, 1981, ,Experiments 2A and 2B), subjects ranked possible completions for 32 metaphors lacking a C’, e.g., vehicle* The metaphors took the form, ‘Tire A is the -among ‘The eagle is the-- among birds’. For one group of subjects, all four of the possible vehicles for each metaphor were from a single domain; for another group, each vehicle came from a different domain. Within a particular domain, there is a point whose within-domain coordinates correspond exactly to those of the tenor. This ideal vehicle has a within-domain distance from the tenor of zero. We predicted that a term’s popularity as a vehicle would depend on its distance from the ideal vehicle in its domain (a prediction patterned after Rumelhart and Abrahamson’s (1973) model for analogical reasoning); in other words, a vehicle’s popularity should be inversely related to its within-domain distance from the tenor. Subjects ranked all four possible completions for each of the 32 metaphors, according to how well they completed the metaphor. We ranked each set of four possible vehicles for their popularity as first choices in completing the metaphor and for their wir,tin-domain distances from the tenor. Then we correlated these ranks across the 32 metaphors. Rank within-domain distance and rank popularity within a set of possible vehicles were negatively correlated, with r = -0.48 when the four possible vehicles for a metaphor were from a single domain (based on 96 independent ranks, p < 0.01) and r = -0.46 when the vehicles were from different domains (also p < 0.01). When the possible vehicles were from different domains, we could also examine the effect of the distance between the domains of the tenor and the possible vehicles. For each of the 32 metaphors, we ranked the four vehicles from first to last in between-domain distance; we correlated these ranks with the vehicle’s rank popularity as first choice for s-mpleting the metaphor. This correlation was positive but weak (r = 0.06 8 > 0.05). Vk’also examined the data of these studies for a relationship between our measures of aptness and a measure of the overall similarity of the tenor and vehicle. The overall similarity combined the information from both the within-domain and betweendomain dimensions into a single distance measure. We found no evidence for either a linear or U-shaped relation between over@ distance and aptness. This should come as no surprise. Differences along one St of dimensions consistently related negatively to aptness, whereas distances along the other set tended to relate positively. Combined in a single measure, the effects of within-domain distance and of betweendomain distance cancelled each other out. How can we reconcile our findings with the results reported by Malgady and Johnson (1976)? They reported a positive correlation between a scale

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based on direct similarity judgements (presumably of overall similarity) and a scale of aptness. We fmd no relation between aptness and overall similarity. We suspect that subjects in Malgady and Johnson’s study relied on similarity within domains in judging the similarity of noun pairs. In deciding whether beggar and schoolhouse, for example, are more similar than silk and hair, subjects try to see the terms in a pair as having analogous properties; the more successful they are at seeing such correspondences (i.e., the less the withindomain distance), the more similar they judge the pair to be. Because the nouns in all the pairs were from diflcrent domains (i.e., they belonged to different salient categories), subjects might have been encouraged to ignore the obvious differences in kind in making similarity judgments. If so, the correlations Malgady and Johnson reported agree with ours in suggesting that subjects prefer metaphors whose tenor and vehicle are seen as having analogous properties within different dti .nains. Cbmprehension processes

Even with the simple and somewhat arbitrary metaphors of our studies, the relationship between similarity and aptness is more complicated than the comparison or anomaly theories indicate, The nature and degree of the relationship depends on the type of similarity. What findings relate to the comprehension process? We review here evidence bearing on four points: Do tenor and vehicle play asymmetrical roles in the comprehension process ? What role do shared features or category memberships play? IIow do we infer the terms that a metaphor is missing? What affects the speed with which metaphors are interprete!d? The asymmetry oftenor and vehicle A number of theorists argue that tenor and vehicle play asymmetrical roles in metaphor (Qrtony, 197%, 1979s; Tversky, 1977). Tversky (1977) goes even further to suggest that similatity itself is not inherently symmetrical Elsewhere we present a similar structural approach to asymmetry (Stemberg, Tourangeau, and Nigro, 1979; Tourangeau and Stemberg, Reference note 2; cf. Krumshansl, 1978, for a different approach). We argue that the distance function is weighted to reflect the different roles of the tenor and vehicle. Because the tenor is to be seen in terms of the vehicle, the dimensions important for the vehicle are the ones that receive the most weight. Dimensions that are generally important in the domain of the vehicle and dimensions on which the vehicle is extreme receive more weight than those salient for the tenor in its domain.

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Tenor and vehicle play different roles in the process of comprehension. In interpreting a metaphor, we usually take the vehicle as given and attempt to see the tenor in a new way. It should be easier to accomplish this transformation of the tenor if the tenor can be viewed flexibly. Further, if the vehicle is extreme in some way, this extremity should make clear what features are to form the basis for the transformation. As we noted earlier, two fmdings from our studies (Tourangeau and Sternberg, 198 1) support this analysis of the different roles of the tenor and vehicle. The variability of the tenor’s position, but not that of the vehicle, and the extremity of the vehicle’s position, but ncc that of the tenor, relate significantly to the rated comprehensibility of a metaphor. Ortony (1979a, 19796) makes the related suggestion that the vehicle’s salient features figure critically in the interpretation of the snetaphor, and reports some evidence for this prediction. One of the chief claims of the comparison theory is that interpreting a metaphor requires finding a ground consisting of shared features or common category memberships. Ortony (19796) reports some evidence related to this assumption. In his study, subjects listed the features of terms taken from ten similes and twenty literal comparisons. The subjects also indicated which features were salient ones. According to Ortony, the terms paired in literal comparisons shared almost a quarter of the salient features listed for one term or the other; by contrast, the terms of the similes shared only 1% of their salient features. In our account of this finding, we assume that, like the terms of a metaphor, those of a simile are seen as being from different domains. Because they are ‘different kinds of things, the terms cannot share many features. Indeed, many of the most salient features of a term are the ones that define it as a member of a particular domain. These features contribute to the distance between domains rather than to the similarities constar I ;d within domains. Ortony’s results must be interpreted with some cau”r:In, since he did not present the similes to any subjects; instead, he gave them individual unrelated terms. ’ Verbrugge and McCarrell(l977). however, also reported a series of studies suggesting that subjects do not interpret metaphors by inferring grounds that consist of familiar features shared by the tenor and vehicle. In their first experiment, Verbrugge and McCarrell gave subjects metaphorical sentences, such as ‘billboards are warts on the landscape’. Later, the subjects tried to recall the metaphors with the aid of several types of retrieval cues or ‘prompts’. Some subjects received the tenor (‘warts’) as prompts; others got the vehicle (‘billboards’); still others got the ground (‘are ugly protusions on a surface’); those in the final group got an irrelevant ground (‘tell you where

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to find business in the area’). The relevant grounds are good recall cuesalmost as good as the tenor and vehicle themselves. The relevant grounds act as good prompts for the metaphor, Verbrugge and McCarrell argued, because the subjects infer the grounds when they first comprehend the metaphors, and they then integrate ground, tenor, and vehicle to form a single memory unit. There are several rival interpretations of these results, and Verbrugge and McCarrell (1977) examine three of them. First, the grounds may be good prompts simply because they are salient features of the vehicle; or the grounds may be salient features or frequent associates of the tenor; or, finally, the grounds may be closely associated with both tenor and vehicle. In any of these ways, the grounds would serve as good prompts without implying that anything new is inferred about tenor or vehicle when we interpret a metaphor. Verbrugge and McCarrell did three additional studies to rule out each of these alternative views: They showed in their Experiment 2, for example, that the grounds are of less use to subjects who studied lists, of the tenors alone; if the grounds are already prominent features of the tenor, they should cue its recall, even when no metaphor makes the connection salient .’ Verbrugge and McCarrell (1977) argued that in interpreting a metaphor, we infer an abstract ground for it, that this ground can serve as a basis for recalling the metaphor, and that the ground does not consist of shared features, previously associated with the tenor and vehicle. Instead, the ground is something new, produced when ‘the vehicle domain guides a novel schematization of the topic domain’ (p. 494). We share these conclusions. Ortony (1979b) reported that the tenors and vehicles of similes do not share salient features; what features they do share, he argued, are likely to be salient only for the vehicle. Verbrugge and McCarrell(l977) went further. They concluded that the ground of a metaphor does not take advantage of existing shared features at all; instead, the tenor is transformed, seen in a new way. Of course with some metaphors, the tenor must be seen in a new way, because it is a novel term. With these metaphors, transfer rather than comparison of features is the central mechanism of interpretation postulated by comparison theorists. ‘Verbrugge and McCarrell’s arguments are considerably more complex than this and defy brief summary. Their rejection of the notion that inferring the ground of a metaphor means retrieving or activating existing connections among tenor, vehicle, and ground seems to depend on the assumption that activation (‘priming’) has a more-or-less constant effect on a connection, regardless of its initial strength (Verbrugge and McCarreU,1977, p. 522). They assume, that is, that weak connections benefi: no more from priming than strung ones; after priming, the poor connections are still poorer and thi: good ones still better. This is a reiasonable assumption, but hardly unassailable; it is conceivable, for instance, that priming has considerably more impact on weak associations than on strong ones, so that relative initial differences among cues might not be maintained.

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We recently did an informal study to examine the process of interpreting metaphors with un miliar subjects or tenors. We had one group of subjects list the characteristics of Wallace. We then gave subjects in another group a metaphor, with Wallace as its vehicle and the fictional character Donald Leavis as its tenor: ‘Donald Leavis is the George Wallace of Northern Ireland’. We asked these subjects to list ‘what you now know about Leavis’. After they had !&tt?d Leavis’s characteristics, ‘tie asked them a final question: ‘What is Leavis’s attitude toward Catholics?’ six features of Wallace seemed to stand out for our subjects; they are given in Table 1, along with the proportion of the 15 subjects who mentioned each of them. We assumed that subjects would infer that Wallace’s domain was political, and this appears to be true; more than half of the subjects mentioned that Wallace was a politician. Similarly, about half of the 23 subjects in the other group inferred that Leavis must also be a politician. Furthermore, the two features of Wallace that are applied to Leavis are politically relevant, involving bigotry and conservatism; and. the featuis that are by and large not transferred to Wallace-his marriages, his Southern background, and his physical handicap- are irrelevant to the context of Northern Irish politics. Table 1.

hoportions of objects listingfeatures for Wallaceand Leavis _I_-

WalIace -_I_-Ma&d d~ficulties Bigoted Paralyzed Southern Politician Conservative

Leavis -

60% 53% 67% 47% 53% 33%

4% 52% 17% 0% 48% 35%

(n = 15)

(n = 23)

It is our contention that features are not simply transferred whole&e from the familiar vehicle to the novel tenor. The features are selected for their relevance to the particular domains--here American politics, on the one hand, and Northern Irish politics, on the other. Further, we contend that the process of ‘tmnsferring’ features across domains often requ$zs that the fenhues themselves be transformed. In this example, the majority of the subjects (1’7 out of 23) inferred that Leavis was anti=CaErolic; only 2 subjects thought that Leavis was pro-Catholic. No one mentioned either attitude as a f&ure of Wallace. Pt seems clear that subjects don’t merely

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transfer features from Wallace to Leavis. They take the features of Wallace and attempt to apply them within the new context of Northern Irish politics; in order to app y in that new domain, the features may have to be transformed. Here, racism in Wallace becomes anti-Catholicism in Leavis. Inferring implicit terms

Verbrugge and McCarrell’s (1977) experiments, &tony’s (19796) study, and our own informal study, deal with the ground of a metaphor. We argue, as do Verbrugge and McCarrell (1977), that the domain of the vehicle (Wallace in our example) is used as a model for constructing a belief system about the tenor (Leavis) In constructing this model, people often cannot transfer features from t (vehicle that, like racism, may not directly apply within the new domain. tblese instances, people must find parallel characteristics, like antiCatholicism, to apply to the tenor. The example in our study also suggests that people have little trouble in inferring the relevant don-air; -. Based on their knowledge of Wallace, our subjects seem to infer that )lib domain is American politics. They also infer that Leavis’s domain is I%o~ern Irish politics, perhaps because that is the analogous domain withir: the context of Northern Ireland or perhaps because a political domain makes it easier to construct a. belief system about Leavis parallel to the relevaydt beliefs about Wallace. We noted earlier that often one stage of interpreting a metaphor is figuring out the intended tenor or subject. We know of no evidence directly bearing on ho-:J this 1s done. One of our experiments described earlier (Tourangeau and Stemberg, 1981, Experiment 2) required subjects to rank pletions of a metaphor. We suggested that several possible vehicles as subjects compared each po vehicle with the ‘ideal vehicle’ in its domain -the vehicle whose withindomam distance from the tenor is zero. Earlier we discussed the evidence that the closer a vehicle is to this ideal, the more popular it is. A variant of this process could also serve as the basis for inferring an implicit tenor: if we know the domain of the tenor, we infer that the tenor must be the term in that domain that is closest to the ideal tenor; the unstated tenor is the term that has the minimal within-domain distance from the vehicle. Given only the description ‘the sharks of birds’, many of us would infer that hawks are intended. We create an abstract characterization of the intended b& unstated bird by imposing what we know about sharks onto the domain of birds; we select as the tenor the actual bird that best fits this idealized description. The speed of comprehension The anomaly view of metaphor is that a metaphor is a kind of mistake and

that normal interpretive processes must somehow be altered or augmented to

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produc:: a reading of a metaphor The conltextual or pragmatic view of the anom’a%ysuggests that interpretation may be accomplished in two steeps: first, the metaphor is interpreted literally and this interpretation is rejected as irrelevant to the context; then, it is reinterpreted figuratively. Comparison theorists suggest that metaphors require more complicated parsing to render the implicit comparison explicit; further, the comparison process that interprets this explicit, underlying comparison, may stilt be slo*wcr than its literal counterpart, since there are fewer features share the terms of a metaphor thag by the terms of a literal comparison. Our domalins-interaction theory makes no clear prediction as to whether metaphors are understood more slowly than literal sentences. We do make a number of predictions about the factors that affect how easily a metaphor is understood. We suggest, for example, that context can make it easir and faster to understand metaphors, by making salient the domains and features that figure in the metaphor’s interpretation. Harris (1976) found no differences in how quickly metaphorical and litera! sentences are understood. Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, and Antos (1978), on the other hand, found that metaphorical sentences took longer to interpret than literal paraphrases. Further, Ortony and his associates (Ortony ?t al., 1978, Experiment 1) reported that the difference between the literal and metaphorical sentences diminished when the sentences were embedded in a longer context. Context makes it easier to understand both literal sentences and metaphor, but has more impact on metaphors, a finding that supports several viewpoints, including ours. Summaryof the evidence The evidence we have reviewed is at best fragmentary and tentative. Our studies (Touiangeau and Stemberg, 1981) provided a direct test of the hypothesis that the aptness of a metaphor is affected positively by betweendomain dtitance and negatively by withindomain distance. These two sources of distance do relate to aptness in different ways, as predicted. Further, we found some evidence that tenor and vehicle have asymmetrical roles in the metaphor. The metaphor is rated more comprehensible when its vehicle is extreme within its domain. Ortony (1979~, 19796) presented evidence supporting the related hypothesis that the salient features of the vehicle figure prominently in the ground. A number of studies have attempted to test the hypothesis, suggested by comparison theorists, that interpreting a meta.phor involves finding features shared by #he tenor and vehicle. These studies tend to converge in their negative fin&ngs. Thus, Ortony (19796) suggested that tenor and vehicle

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do not share salient features; Verb.rugge and McCarrell (1977) argued that pre-existing connections among the ground, tenor, and vehicle cannot account for the ground’s effectiveness as a recall cue; and our informal study demonstrated that the features we infer for an unfamiliar tenor may be transformations of characteristics of the vehicle, and that these transformed features do not necessarily apply to the vehicle itself. Our informal study also suggested that inferring the domain is a step in interpreting a metaphor. The inferences made about the unfamiliar tenor in that study- the fictional Leavis -almost all involved politically relevant features. Prominent characteristics of the vehicle (Wallace) that were not political did not figure significantly in the interpretation. Finally, the evidence is somewhat inconsistent as to whether metaphors are slower to interpret, and context tends to reduce such differences as are reported (Ortony eb al., 1975). Our view suggests several accounts for the context effect. Coneiutions The domains-interaction view that we propose provides a reasonable account of what little is known about metaphor. Even this weak evidence is enough to present some serious problems for the rival comparison and anomaly theories. The relationship between similarity and aptness, for example, seems more complicated than either the anomaly or comparison views predict. We will conclude this paper by considering two additional wrinkles that complicate matters even more. Functions of metaphors The determinants

of aptness and the processes that produce interpretations of metaphors are almost certainly more elaborate than our theory suggests. Our theory concerns the structural determinants of aptness. It seems reasonable to assume that metaphors have different purposes and that these purposes may modify the effects of similarity. If we are using a metaphor to explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, then clarity and exactness are probably more important than novelty. Within-domain distance should therefore affect aptness more than betweendomain distance. If, on the other hand, we aim to gain some startling new perspective that renders the familiar once again strange, then between-domain distance may affect aptness more. A compiete theory of metaphors would include a consideration of their functions and would predict how these different uses affect aptness and th.e interpretive process. In effect, the two kinds of distance would be weighted.

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Still another use of metaphor is to express beliefs that are neither widely held nor carefully established within a literary context where we are willing to suspend our prior beliefs. Tf someone should say, ‘Americans are swine’, the meaning of this metaphor would be fairly obvioJc. But having apphed the characteristics of swine within the domain of people, we may find that they do not describe Americans. We can understand what it mean? for a person to be a swine, without agreeing that Americans are generally like this. We have noted some other uses of metaphor, such as hyperbole and irony, that also do not require: a good match (i.e., little within-domain distance) between tenor and vehicle. Asy.mmetry in metaphors

Such mismatches are an important source of asymmetry in the interpretation of metaphors. In metaphor, we are to see the tenor in terms of the vehicle; unless the tenor and vehicle have exactly the same features (unless their within-domain distance is zero), reversing the terms of the metaphor will change its meaning (cf. Tversky, 1977). To take a simple example, ‘men are pigs’ says that men have certain piggish traits and makes men seem worse than most of us believe they are; ‘pigs are men’ says that pigs have human qualities and makes pigs seem better. The asymmetry of these two imctaphors results in part from pigs and men not having identical values on corresponding dimensions; the metaphors are asymmetrical partly because they are, in some sense, false. ‘Men are pigs’ is false because, having translated -rhe features of pigs into those that can apply to men, we find that men do not after all have these features-men just aren’t that bad. Even metaphors that don’t contradict our beliefs are often asymmetrical, because they are used to make assertions, not comparisons. Literal assertions have this samle asymmetry. Both metaphorical and literal statements assert that the subject of the statement has certain qualities, namely, those enumerated in the predicate. Although it may require some interpretation to say what the asserted qualities are, ‘men are pigs’ clearly predicates something of men. Literal statements also predicate something of their subject and so are often necessarily asymmetrical. ‘Mines are long tunnels’ does not *makethe same assertion as ‘Long tunnels are mines’. This asymmetry reflects somethr_llg about the structure of assertions rather than about the structure of sitiarity. Only certain tautologous assertions-‘pigs are swine’- are symmetrical. ost metaphors, of course, are not tautologous. That they are asymmetrical is not so puzzling when they are not seen as making comparisons. There are additional sources of asvmmetry beside the ones deriving from the uses of metaphor. We argued above that dimensions on which the vehicle

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is extreme or dimensions that are generally salient within the doma_%of the vehicle (Cf. Q-tony, 1979& 19796) play an especially important role in the comprehension process. Another structural source of asymmetry that we find particularly interesting derives from differences in the int.rinsic prominence of domains. We use farm animals to denote types of people-bulls, lambs, pigs, cows, and chickens- but never the reverse. We describe our moods in terms of the weather-people have sunny or gloomy dispositions -but we don’t describe the weather in terms of psychologrcal states. We distinguish, then, several sources of asymmetry in metaphor. One source is in the use of metaphor: some metaphors are intended to express ironies, hyperboles, or controversial beliefs and so do not require that tenor and vehicle be seen as having similar values or features. Anothler source involves the nature of predication: tenor and vehi& are just special types of subjects and predicates; their asymmetry reflects the asymmetry inherent in any statement of predication. Finally, there are structural asymmetriesasymmetries in the similarity relation itself (Tversky, 1977). We .find convincing Ortony’s (19796) account of metaphorical asymmetry as deriving from differential salience of features in the tenor and the vehicle of a metaphor. In particular, a good metaphor is one in which highly salient attributes of the vehicle are matched to attributes ef the tenor that are relatively low in salience. For example, ‘All the world’s a stage’ would be viewed as a good metaphor because a highly salient fealrure of a stage-that it has actors making entrances and exits-is matched to a relatively lowsalient feature of the world-that people enter it, play out their roles, and make their exits. In terms of our domains-interaction view, Ortony’s notion could be formalized in terms of weights that take into account the possible interaction between the order in which a dimension appears and its role in a metaphor. Dimensions establishing the principal correspondence between tenor and vehicle (that is, the earliest corresponding dimensiom:s) would be weighted as contributing to the goodness of a metaphor if they were both early dimensions of the vehicie and later dimensions of the tenor (in terms of their order of appearance in, say, a multidimensional scaling or factor analysis); dimensions would be weighted as contributing to the badness of a metaphor if they were 0th early dimensions of the tenor and later dimensions of the vehicle. An aesth?tical& pleasing metaphor, then, would be one in which the princip4 correspondence is between an earlier dimension of the vehicle and a later dimension of the tenor. Summary We argue that metaphors correlate two systems of concepts from different domains. Good metaphors involve distant domains that nonetheless allow

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detailed correspondences to be drawn between the two systems of concepts. Our predictions about aptness receive some support from several studies we conducted (Tourangeau and Sternberg. 198 1). Because tenor and vehicle are in different domains, they do not share features (Ortony, 197942, 19796). Indeed, interpreting a metaphor may require constructing correspondences. We present evidence from an informal study suggesting that features are transformed in this process of constructing correspondences. We make a number of further proposals about the stages of iinterpreting a metaphor: the metaphor’s frame is parsed and its terms encoded; the relevant domains are inferred; the structures to be seen as parallel are found; the correspondences between these structures are mapped; the terms involved are compared; and the metaphor may be reinterpreted. The reinterpretation is often needed with ironic or hyperbolic metaphors. The mapping operation is guided by several types of connections between tenor and vehicle; they may have, for example, similar values on corresponding dimensions, or similar network structures. The evidence on comprehension is consistent with our model but hardly provides a stringent test of it. .Eyen our brief consideration of the functions of metaphors suggests that the cleterminants of aptness depend on how the metaphor is used. And some uses of metaphor suggest sources of asymmetry beside those already noted bv Tverskv (19773. Because metaphors make assertions, not comparisons, they are &ymmetrical. The tenor is said to have certain qualities-those of the vehicle, appropriately transformed to apply in a new domain. Reversing fb: terms of a metaphor will leave its meaning unchanged only when the tenor and vehicle have exactly analogous feature:s that are equally important fos both te;ms.

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Reference Notes 1 Russell, S. (1975) Computer Understandingof Conceptually Complex Phrases. Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University. 2 Tourangeau, R., and Sternberg, R. J. (1978) UvderstandingandAppreciating Metaphors.INR lSO412 ONR Technical Report No. 11). New Haven, Department of Psychology, Yale University. 3 SteInberg, R. J., and Nigro, G. (1981) Interaction and Analogy in the Comprehensionand Appreciktion of Metaphor,s.(NR 150412 ONR Technical Report No. 26.) New Haven, Department of Psychology, Yale University.

On consid&re trois thiories qui ont dominI les discussions sur les mitaphores. Dans la premi&re on soutient que lcs metaphores fond des comparaisons dont les bases sont les traits (ou catt!gories)