Metaphor and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage

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Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1017–1028 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Metaphor and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Catherine Wearing Department of Philosophy, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA Received 16 September 2006; received in revised form 5 January 2009; accepted 17 January 2009

Abstract This paper examines the account of metaphor developed within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework. It is claimed by this view that metaphorical content is paraphraseable, and that the use of metaphor can be described via a cultural script. I explore the importance of paraphrasing metaphors for the NSM approach, and argue that the prospects for successful paraphrases are less promising than has been claimed. I then show that the cultural script does not suffice to explain how metaphors work, and describe how the script must be supplemented to generate a more adequate explanation. # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Metaphor; Natural Semantic Metalanguage; Metaphorical content

1. Introduction Metaphor poses (at least) three challenges to the person studying how language has meaning. First, a metaphor seems to express something other than the literal or ‘ordinary’ meaning of its words, so the first challenge is to say what the metaphorical content of a metaphor is.1 The second challenge is to explain how metaphors express this content, and so how we produce and comprehend them as effortlessly as we do. Finally, one wants to understand the conditions under which metaphors are used—what, if any, are the cultural conventions or norms governing their appropriate use? Goddard (2004) offers several hypotheses about metaphor from within the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. In this paper, I will explore these claims with an eye to gauging the contributions of the NSM approach to answering the above challenges. Considering how the NSM approach deals with metaphor proves to be illuminating for understanding both the approach and the phenomenon of metaphor itself. In my view, the NSM approach is well positioned to address the third challenge, i.e. to explore the conventions governing the use of metaphor. However, by examining Goddard’s claims about the semantic content of individual metaphors, I will show that the NSM approach has some way to go in providing a satisfactory answer to the first challenge. I will then consider Goddard’s contention that metaphor is a culturally specific phenomenon in order to clarify the place of the second challenge – which remains largely ignored in Goddard’s

E-mail address: [email protected]. For the purposes of this paper, I will assume that metaphors express a content other than their literal content (contra Davidson, 1984). As we will see, a central controversy that arises in addressing both the first and second challenges concerns whether this content is properly classified as semantic or pragmatic. Aspects of this controversy will be explored below. 1

0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.01.004

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discussion – within the NSM framework. Let’s begin with a quick sketch of the NSM approach and its treatment of metaphor. 2. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach In the opening chapter of Semantics: Primes and Universals (1996), Anna Wierzbicka registers her dismay at the turn away from meaning that is visible in much of the study of language carried out over the last half-century or so. To resist this turn, she offers a way of approaching the study of language that places meaning once more at its centre, by aiming to develop a rigorously tested semantic theory that holds across languages. This approach culminates in the positing of a collection of semantic universals – semantically primitive (i.e. indefinable) elements common to all languages – that can be used for the explication of the other elements of each language. These primitives constitute the ‘Natural Semantic Metalanguage’ (NSM). The basic goal of the NSM approach is thus to study meaning. This study is premised on the hypothesis that any natural language can constitute its own metalanguage in such a way that the study of the meanings of the terms of any language can be carried out within that language in a way that avoids both technical jargon and circularity (Goddard, 2002). If this starting point is correct, then the semantics of each language can be explicated within that language. Technical jargon can be avoided if the ordinary words of the language suffice to articulate its semantics. More importantly, circularity can be avoided if there is an irreducible basis for the semantic explanation that is not itself in need of definition. The NSM approach tackles the notion of meaning by investigating the empirical adequacy of these hypotheses. This investigation leads the NSM approach to adopt two assumptions: first, that the language will contain certain words,2 semantic primes, that cannot themselves be defined using other words; and second, that all other words can be defined adequately in terms of the semantic primes. If these assumptions are correct, then at the end of enquiry we will receive a completed list of the primitive lexical items of a given language, together with explications of all other lexical items of that language in terms of the semantic primes. At the same time, the NSM approach adopts a hypothesis regarding the cross-linguistic reach of the semantic primes. It is hypothesized that the concepts expressed by the lexical items that function as semantic primes in a given language find expression in lexical items of every other language. Thus, the semantic primes are claimed to be both indefinable and universal, so that investigation must proceed on two fronts: first, into the identification of the semantic primes of a given language and the reductive paraphrase of other words using those primes, and second, into the presence of analogues in other languages for the posited primes. While the NSM approach is chiefly focused on this lexical semantic project, the semantic primes have also been hypothesized to play an important role in explicating the ‘ways of speaking’ that we find in the various societies and cultures of the world. Attempts to understand variations in cultural and discourse practices must aim to avoid distortion and bias resulting from the (often inadvertent) introduction of the researcher’s own such practices. Proponents of the NSM approach have argued that the universality of the semantic primes makes them a useful tool for the unbiased explication of cultural and discourse practices (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 1997). In the same way that the primes are used to explicate the semantic content of other lexical items, they are offered to explicate the ‘rules for speaking’ or ‘cultural scripts’ governing discourse practices in a culturally neutral way. Thus, the semantic primes lie at the centre of the NSM approach. From these primes, two distinct kinds of explications are given: those specifying the semantic content of other lexical items, and those specifying the cultural scripts or ways of speaking that members of a given culture or linguistic community engage in. Both sorts of script come into play in the discussion of metaphor in Goddard (2004). On the one hand, it is claimed that the semantic content of specific metaphors can be given by something analogous to the explications of lexical items; on the other hand, the practice of making metaphors (‘metaphorising’) is claimed to be explicable in terms of the sorts of norms that can be expressed by means of a cultural script. Let us now turn to the details of these claims.

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Note that ‘word’ is being used somewhat loosely here: a semantic prime may be expressed by a phrase or morphologically complex word (e.g. the same or someone in English) or by a bound morpheme (e.g. the suffix –nguru in Yankunytjatjara, cf. Goddard, 2002).

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3. The NSM account of metaphor Goddard focuses exclusively on what he calls ‘active’ metaphors: those metaphors that convey an informative content in an unusual way.3 Active metaphors typically exhibit a clash or dissonance between a sentence’s literal and metaphorical interpretations, and they often strike us as having a certain ‘freshness’ or novelty, as we can see in some of Goddard’s examples: a soft wine, language is the mirror of the mind, and the past is a foreign country. The account of active metaphor that Goddard develops within the NSM framework has two distinct parts: one having to do with the metaphorical content of particular examples, and the other to do with the script governing the practice of using active metaphors. The clearest place to start is with the script for ‘active metaphorising’. This script, Goddard claims, exhibits the ‘‘knowledge about a certain valued speech practice which speakers of English and other European languages share in virtue of having been socialized into a particular linguistic culture’’ (2004:1216). In offering this script, Goddard claims that the production of metaphors is not a ‘natural function of the mind’, but rather an activity that has come to exist in certain cultures (Goddard, 2004:1217).4 For convenience, here is the script in its entirety: everyone knows: sometimes when a person wants to say something about something this person says it with some words, not other words, because this person thinks: I know these words can say something else I want to say it with these words because if I say it like this, people will have to think about it I want this people think it is good if a person can do this well5 For our purposes, this script has two important features. First, it capitalizes on what Goddard argues is a crucial feature of metaphor, ‘metalexical awareness’, the awareness on the part of speaker/hearers that the words of the metaphor are being used to convey something other than their ordinary meanings.6 This metalexical awareness is

3 Note that this focus on ‘active’ metaphors leaves a variety of other cases untreated, including more idiomatic expressions (e.g. ‘food for thought’) and so-called ‘dead’ metaphors (e.g. ‘the mouth of a river’). It also ignores the role that ‘conceptual’ metaphors (e.g. ‘argument is war’) have been argued to play in structuring both our use of verbal metaphors and our thinking more generally (see, for example, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1994; Fauconnier and Turner, 1998). While a complete account of metaphor requires attention to these other cases and connections, for the purposes of this paper I will follow Goddard and restrict my attention to active metaphors. 4 This claim seems to conflict with the position of proponents of cognitive theories of metaphor such as Gibbs and Lakoff, who take metaphors to constitute ‘‘a fundamental part of people’s ordinary thought, reason, and imagination’’ (Gibbs et al., 2004). I will suggest in section 5 that the solution to this apparent conflict lies in a careful appreciation of how the cultural and cognitive aspects of metaphor intersect. 5 More recently, Goddard (p.c.) has modified this script slightly, replacing it with the following: everyone knows: sometimes when a person says something about something this person says it with some words, not with other words, because this person wants people to think about it this person wants people to think like this: ‘‘I know what these words say, when this person says these words now this person wants to say something else with these words, I want to know what this person wants to say’’ We can see that the emphasis has shifted from describing the thoughts of the speaker to the thoughts that the hearer is supposed to entertain in response to the speaker’s utterance. 6 Goddard does not seem to be suggesting that the speaker/hearer is consciously aware of the way in which her words are being used as an aspect of her comprehension of the metaphor. This is important—the idea that a conscious awareness of lexical dissonance (by which I mean some kind of occurrent conscious experience of dissonance) is necessary to explain metaphorical comprehension contradicts both phenomenological experience and experimental evidence. More plausibly, metalexical awareness is something tacit that a speaker (or hearer) could acknowledge on reflection, i.e. an aspect of a post-comprehension process such as recognition of a metaphor as such (cf. Gibbs, 1994:116). Goddard’s remarks suggest that this interpretation is compatible with his view. For example, he states that metalexical awareness ‘can be detected’ by linguistic and other tests (p. 1227), which suggests that it is a property one might not attend to in the comprehension process itself. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.

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reflected in the fourth line of the script: the metaphor-maker is described as knowing that her words can say something other than what they ordinarily say. The second feature to notice about the script is that it is aiming to describe the norms that govern a culturally specific practice. As Goddard is careful to note, the script is not intended to be an adequate description of the psycholinguistic processing that occurs when speaker/hearers produce or interpret metaphors (p. 1216, cf. also p. 1225). Instead, it aims to capture the conventions that structure the practice of producing these kinds of utterances in conversation. Thus, the script states that the point of active metaphorising is to make the listener think about what is being said. Similarly, it makes explicit that producing good metaphors is an ability that is valued. Leaving aside for the moment whether this is an accurate description of the practice, we can see that it aims generally to ‘‘[depict] the knowledge held by Anglo cultural ‘insiders’’’ (Goddard, 2004:1216). It is offered in the metalanguage of semantic primes in order to capture this ‘inside’ knowledge in an unbiased and non-technical, yet explanatorily adequate, way. In addition to providing a cultural script for the practice of active metaphorising, Goddard draws on the semantic metalanguage in order to deal with the metaphorical content of individual metaphors. His central claim in this connection is that the metaphorical content of a metaphor is ‘specific and determinable’, and that this content can be captured adequately by a paraphrase in the metalanguage of semantic primes. He aims to demonstrate this claim by example, exhibiting paraphrases for several active metaphors. These paraphrases are analogous to the explications offered for lexical items other than the semantic primes. In the next section, I will question the adequacy of these paraphrases, but my principal focus will be on the explanatorily prior question of whether the NSM approach needs to be able to provide such paraphrases of the contents of metaphors. 4. Paraphrasing the content of active metaphors As Goddard notes, it is standard to regard active metaphors as unparaphraseable (cf. Cavell, 1969; Davidson, 1984). One reason for this pessimism is the widely felt inadequacy of suggested paraphrases which are themselves shorn of all metaphorical language, particularly in cases of especially creative metaphors. Attempts to paraphrase that do not employ any metaphorical language at all tend to strike us as radically inadequate. At best, they are clumsy and unbalanced where the original metaphors are elegant and direct, leaving the impression that the metaphors’ contents have been badly distorted. At worst, one ends up relying on other, related, metaphors in one’s paraphrase, which is effectively to abandon the task of paraphrasing midway through. Moreover, the typical attempt to spell out exactly what a metaphor brings to mind concludes with ‘‘and so on. . .’’, precisely to indicate that there is more to be said than the suggested paraphrase has already set down. As a result, Goddard’s claim that active metaphors have ‘specific and determinable meanings’ is a bold one. To substantiate it successfully, he must do two things: first, he must provide a general characterization of metaphorical content, in order to identify what a paraphrase is aiming to capture. Without such a characterization, it is impossible to assess whether a paraphrase has achieved its goal. The second task, holding that characterization of metaphorical content in hand, is to demonstrate the possibility of paraphrasing the content of a particular metaphor. This requires exhibiting a reductive paraphrase for that metaphor within the framework of the NSM approach. Let us begin with the general characterization of metaphorical content. Goddard characterizes metaphorical content in terms of the intended or inferred meaning of the speaker who produced the metaphor. In short, the metaphorical content of a metaphor is just whatever its maker intends it to mean. This characterization emphasizes that metaphors are, first and foremost, strings of words that their authors offer in particular situations as contributions to ongoing discourses. This is to take seriously the idea that metaphorising is a way of using words, rather than a feature that words antecedently possess. To the extent that words appear to have a stable, context-independent metaphorical content when considered in isolation from particular contexts of utterance, it is most plausible to see this content as depending on assumptions about the sorts of contexts in which the metaphor might sensibly be used and the intentions of a speaker in such contexts.7 7 Note that this characterization of metaphor in terms of speaker intentions also implies that each metaphor has only a single interpretation on one occasion of use. If there were a case in which the speaker intended two distinct metaphorical interpretations, one might classify that case as an instance of both punning and metaphorising.

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In practice, of course, one will often have to make inferences about the intentions of a given speaker, and there will be practical difficulties with assessing whether a given paraphrase is an accurate explication of the metaphor-maker’s intentions. But the intentions themselves are what fix the metaphor’s content, so the paraphrase must aim to express whatever the metaphor’s maker intended the metaphor to mean.8 With this general characterization of metaphorical content in terms of speakers’ intended meaning in hand, let us now consider two of the paraphrases that Goddard offers for specific metaphors. I begin with the metaphor of a soft wine, which Goddard takes to depend on ‘‘a ‘similarity relationship’ between the terms of the metaphor’’ (Goddard, 2004:1224).9 The paraphrase (explication) of this metaphor’s content is as follows: a soft wine = when this wine is in a person’s mouth, this person can feel something because of this like a person feels when a person touches something soft The basis for this explication is the similarity between the metaphorical softness of the wine and the literal softness of things a person can touch (cf. Wierzbicka, 1996). The explication points to the similarity, but does not articulate the respects in which the wine and the soft thing are in fact understood (or intended to be understood) as similar. Goddard claims that ‘‘it is not necessary to ‘crack the meanings’ of the adjectival words [such as ‘soft’] in order to understand metaphors of this type, except to the extent that the nature of the adjectival word ‘cues’ us to the sensory dimension relevant to the grounds of comparison’’ (Goddard, 2004:1225). In other words, one only needs to be told that touch is the relevant sensory modality in order to perceive the comparison, and thereby understand the metaphor. This claims strikes me as having two problems. First, I think it is false: being pointed to the relevant sensory dimension is not enough to understand the metaphor. As someone who has great difficulty discriminating the various qualities that wines exhibit (and so who does not take herself to know what the content of this metaphor is), I confess to finding this explication quite unhelpful. I do not think I have ever tasted a wine that caused my mouth to feel quite like what my hand feels when it touches a cat’s fur or a silk shirt, and the explication just given does not give me confidence that I will be able to identify the next soft wine that I taste. Second, claiming that one can understand the metaphor without needing to see the meaning of the crucial terms (in this case, ‘soft’) spelled out in detail suggests that the metaphor’s content has not in fact been articulated by the paraphrase. Even if it were true that a pointer sufficed to allow someone to grasp the metaphor’s content, offering the pointer would not be the same as offering the content itself directly. What is missing in the explication given above is 8 It is worth noting that ‘poetic’ metaphors – metaphors that occur in poetic contexts – are not supposed to be covered by this explanation. The characterization of metaphorical content on offer is restricted to active metaphors occurring in what we might call ‘ordinary conversations’. Although poetic metaphors are a subset of active metaphors, Goddard offers two reasons for excluding them from consideration: first, poetry is a highly culture-specific practice, and so requires its own cultural script; second, metaphor is ‘‘not necessary to achieve a poetic effect’’, as many poems ‘‘employ verbal manipulations which do not fall comfortably under the banner of metaphor’’ (Goddard, 2004: 1223, footnote 12). These claims strike me as providing insufficient grounds for separating poetic metaphors from other active metaphors with respect to the nature (or paraphraseability) of their content. To begin with, the fact that poems rely on a variety of figurative and other devices in addition to metaphor does not show that there is an in kind difference of any significance between active metaphors in poetry and active metaphors in other discourses. Despite the ‘interaction effects’ that undoubtedly exist in poetry, it is not difficult to spot at least some active metaphors in such contexts, and it would be an advantage if one’s account of metaphor had something to say about such cases. Similarly, the fact that poetry is a culturally specific practice governed by its own ‘proprietary’ cultural script does not show that the active metaphors occurring within such contexts are different in kind from active metaphors in other contexts. It does suggest that the cultural script for active metaphorising is capable of being combined with numerous other cultural scripts, including those for (Western) poetry, ordinary (Western) conversation, and, as the evidence discussed below in section 5 seems to suggest, (Malay) practices of allusion. But it does not show that the script for metaphors occurring in poetic contexts, qua metaphors, is different from the script governing other active metaphors. Absent other reasons to draw an in-kind distinction between poetic and other active metaphors, one should expect that a fully satisfactory characterization of the latter will extend to poetic cases. For the purpose of generating a working account, however, it is certainly practical to restrict our attention to metaphors that occur in the context of ordinary conversations before turning our attention the more complicated case of poetry so I will follow Goddard in ignoring cases of metaphor in poetic contexts. 9 Goddard identifies two classes of metaphors: those depending on a similarity relationship between their vehicle and topic, and those depending on an analogical relationship (p. 1224). It is worth noting that there is some disagreement in the literature as to the correct basis for metaphorical interpretation. For example, Gentner and colleagues (e.g. Bowdle and Gentner, 2005) defend an analogical account (the structure-mapping and ‘career of metaphor’ hypotheses), Glucksberg and colleagues pursue a categorization account (e.g. Glucksberg, 2001), and Giora defends an account in terms of salience (Giora, 2003). The points made in this section are independent of these disagreements.

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an explicit characterization of the particular respects in which the soft wine is like the soft object. Being told that they are similar is not to be told the metaphor’s content; for that, one needs to know what their similarity consists in, and this is not articulated in the explication. Indeed, the difference between metaphor and simile hangs precisely on this fact: to say ‘wine is like a soft thing’ is not to say ‘wine is a soft thing’. One of these statements claims that there are similarities between wine and soft things, the other claims that wine is one of the soft things (in some sense of ‘soft’). This gap between stating that there is a similarity and stating the metaphor’s content is one reason why paraphrasing metaphors is so hard – paraphrases generally founder precisely in their attempts to make the relevant points of similarity explicit. (Consider what you might say to draw out the similarities between soft wine and soft fur, and then consider whether your suggestions are themselves metaphor-free.) The temptation to add ‘and so on. . .’ arises just as one’s creative powers are exhausted. So, the proposed paraphrase of the ‘similarity-based’ metaphor, a soft wine, fails to capture this metaphor’s content. Let us consider an ‘analogy based’ metaphor, language is a mirror of the mind. Goddard offers the following paraphrase for this example: EVERYONE KNOWS: people say things in some ways, not other ways I SAY: people say things in some ways, not in other ways because they think in some ways, not in other ways because of this, if someone knows many things about how people say things this person can know many things about how people think THIS IS LIKE: a person in a place can see some things, not other things, in a mirror because there are some things, not other things, in this place

As with the similarity-based metaphor, this explication hinges on a specific relation between two elements. In this case, these elements are the way that language (‘‘the particular ways in which people say things’’ (Goddard, 2004:1226)) reflects what people think, and the way that a mirror reflects what is in front of it. The speaker intends the hearer to grasp a specific relationship between the two, and this relationship grounds the metaphor’s content. However, the proposed paraphrase does not articulate the relationship in question, leaving the metaphorical content again unspecified. Two features in particular are not made explicit. First, the particular way in which a mirror shows things to a person – reflecting them ‘as they are’, perhaps, without distortion or modification – is not described. It is not enough to say that the mirror shows whatever is there, for there are various ways that this could be done (consider the various kinds of distorting mirrors in the funhouse at the circus) and it is the nature of the way that the mirror reflects what is in front of it that is relevant to grasping the metaphor’s content. Second, what it means to say that language does ‘the same thing’ with respect to people’s thoughts is not articulated – we are told only that it ‘is like’ what the mirror does. But language does not literally reflect anything, so it does not do the very thing that the mirror does. At the same time, there are any number of ways that what we say is constrained by what we think, and that what I can know about what you think is constrained by what I know about what you say. So there is a question as to which of these ways is the one that is like the way a mirror works. As with the similarity-based metaphor, the suggested paraphrase points to where to find the relevant property – in the analogy between language and a mirror – but it does not describe that property. But if Goddard is correct that metaphors can be paraphrased without loss, then an adequate paraphrase must state the metaphor’s content, not gesture towards it. So this explication too fails to provide an adequate paraphrase of its metaphor’s content. What should we conclude about these difficulties with the proposed paraphrases? I have claimed that the specific paraphrases that Goddard offers do not succeed in capturing the content of their corresponding metaphors; however, the failure of these examples does not show that the general enterprise of paraphrasing metaphors is impossible. Further refinements or a different example might improve the degree to which a given paraphrase captures its metaphor’s content. As a result, we cannot conclude directly that Goddard’s basic claim – that metaphorical content can be paraphrased within the language of semantic primes – is false. Nonetheless, the particular way in which the two paraphrases fall short of success shows that the task is considerably more involved than Goddard allows: pointing to the basis for the metaphor’s content – a similarity or an analogy – does not go very far towards stating the content. Someone who thinks that metaphors cannot be paraphrased

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might happily agree that a similarity or an analogy is the basis for a metaphor’s content; what she denies is that the substance of that analogy or similarity can be adequately articulated in non-metaphorical language. Insofar as the proposed paraphrases do not even attempt to spell out that substance, the pessimist is given no reason to think that the task of paraphrase can be successfully accomplished. The gap between the content of Goddard’s paraphrases and the content of the original metaphors constitutes the very heart of the original challenge involved in attempting to paraphrase active metaphors. The failure to attempt to reduce this gap, or adduce arguments against its existence, leaves us just where we started: with no hard evidence that it is possible to paraphrase metaphorical content without loss.10 At this point, I want to step back from these attempts to provide specific paraphrases, and ask whether the NSM account needs to provide paraphrases for metaphorical content in the metalanguage of semantic primes. Recall that a central hypothesis of the NSM approach is that the semantic content of all non-prime items will be adequately definable in terms of the semantic primes. If this proves impossible, i.e. if there are meanings of complex lexical items that cannot be expressed in the metalanguage of the semantic primes, then the NSM approach will have failed to provide a complete account of lexical meaning. So the possibility of adequately paraphrasing the meaning of ordinary lexical items is of vital importance to the NSM framework. But does this require that metaphorical content also can be paraphrased? Suppose, for example, that an adequate explication of the content of a particular metaphor could not be found using the method of reductive paraphrase employed by the NSM approach. Instead, suppose that only rough approximations of the metaphor’s content could be given, and that there was a good reason to think that any such approximation would necessarily be incomplete. On the face of it, such a situation appears to pose a problem for the NSM approach, for it involves a complex linguistic expression whose meaning cannot be fully expressed in the metalanguage of semantic primes. But does the NSM approach need to worry if such a situation turns out to exist? Answering this question requires a more careful specification of the nature the specifically semantic content of a metaphor (or any other expression), for this is what the NSM approach is aiming to reduce to explications in terms of the semantic primes. If there are other kinds of content, for which the NSM approach is not responsible, and metaphorical content is of one of these other kinds, then the NSM approach may not be required to account for it by means of reductive paraphrase. Thus, the nature and extent of ‘semantic content’, and the status of metaphorical content with respect to it, must be specified. As we have seen, Goddard takes the content of a metaphor to be equivalent to the speaker’s intended meaning, thereby ruling out other interpretations that listeners might arrive at independently. Part of the motivation for this identification is presumably to circumscribe metaphorical content so that it is more amenable to paraphrase. But is a speaker’s intended meaning part of semantic content? The answer to this question depends on what one means by ‘semantic’. Quite independently of the NSM framework, we might appeal to the distinction between what words mean and what a speaker means when using those words on a particular occasion of use. According to this distinction, what we might call ‘linguistic’ or ‘encoded’ meaning is whatever a word (or sentence) means in virtue of its linguistic features – whatever is constant in its meaning across all of its uses – and so is explained in terms of the conventions of language alone.11 ‘Speaker meaning’, by contrast, is what the speaker is typically able to convey by exploiting ‘world knowledge’ and general norms of communication in addition to linguistic knowledge, and so, often includes information beyond what is encoded. Given this distinction, there is a sense in which linguistic meaning is ‘primary’ – the speaker depends on words meaning what they do in order to communicate what she does. More importantly for present purposes, we might use this distinction to characterize the scope of semantics as follows: semantics accounts for linguistic meaning; speaker meaning, in virtue of its quite different relation to words and sentences, is the business of pragmatics. For one who accepts this demarcation of semantics and pragmatics, Goddard’s identification of metaphorical content with speaker meaning (at least for active metaphors) immediately entails that metaphorical content lies outside the province of semantics. Because metaphorical content is not associated with the words of a metaphor in the same 10

There is a further question here, namely, whether the general characterization of metaphorical content in terms of speakers’ intended meanings is correct. I will leave this question aside entirely. 11 Note that linguistic meaning should not be equated with ‘literal’ meaning. Whether the latter term is well-defined is a matter of some dispute; the current discussion is entirely neutral on this question. The notion of linguistic meaning employed here refers only to what is encoded in connection with a given word, and makes no commitments about what that might be. For example, there is no assumption that the encoded meaning of a sentence suffices to determine a truth-evaluable proposition.

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way that the metaphor’s semantic content is, the explanatory status of metaphorical content is different from that of semantic content, and so need not be accounted for by the NSM approach.12 There is some evidence that Goddard endorses this distinction between speaker meaning and linguistic meaning. For example, he states that ‘‘interpreting an active metaphor requires that one is aware . . . that there is a difference between what the words say, as it were, and what the speaker actually means’’ (Goddard, 2004:1213). In a similar vein, the script for active metaphor takes the speaker to know that the metaphor expresses something other than what it ordinarily means. These remarks suggest that the metaphor has associated with it both an ‘ordinary meaning’ and a metaphorical content. Further, in his discussion of analogy-based metaphors, Goddard describes the speaker as ‘‘[intending] some specific relationship to be inferred by the hearer’’, suggesting that interpreting a metaphor involves an inferential process not required for the comprehension of literal speech (Goddard, 2004:1225). Accounting for metaphor in terms of inferences is exactly the sort of move employed by pragmatic accounts that depend on the speaker meaning/linguistic meaning distinction just outlined.13 Nonetheless, there is no general suggestion that metaphorical meanings have a different status from literal meanings within the NSM framework; indeed, Goddard refers to metaphorical content as semantic content, suggesting that it is to be treated on a par with literal content from the point of view of the explications that the NSM approach aims to provide. Moreover, to the extent that the NSM approach is interested in representing content regardless of how that content is conveyed to hearers, all content is on a par. If this interpretation is correct, then the speaker meaning/linguistic meaning distinction does not mark any difference in the status of metaphorical content within the NSM framework. Instead, metaphorical content must be treated in the same way as literal content. The net result, then, is that the sentence meaning/ linguistic meaning distinction that I have sketched must be rejected as failing to capture a sense of ‘semantic’ relevant to the NSM approach, and the NSM account must therefore eventually substantiate the claim that metaphors can be paraphrased. If metaphorical content is simply ‘something else words can say’, then it falls within the scope of the general hypothesis that all complex expression meanings can be adequately explicated within the metalanguage of semantic primes. The discussion of the two examples above illustrates the size of the challenge that this result poses to the NSM approach. Because neither of the proposed paraphrases succeeds in capturing the content of their respective metaphors, the NSM approach cannot claim to have shown by example that paraphrasing metaphorical content can be done. Perhaps more worryingly, by failing to engage with the central obstacle to the task of paraphrase – namely, how to articulate the specific points of similarity or analogy that constitute a metaphor’s content – the NSM approach fails to provide any reason to think that the task can be successfully accomplished. Neither evidence nor argument has been adduced against the prevailing view that novel metaphors cannot be paraphrased without loss. 5. Explaining ‘active metaphorising’ At this point, recall Goddard’s claim that active metaphorising is a culture-specific phenomenon. More specifically, recall that active metaphorising is claimed to be a practice governed by norms expressible in a cultural script, and not a ‘natural function of the mind’. To support this view, Goddard offers observations about Malay and two dialects of the Western Desert Language, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (hereafter, ‘P/Y’). In this section, I will explore what is involved in the practice of metaphorising, and what is therefore required of our explanation of that practice. I will begin with the particulars of Goddard’s examples, in order to highlight a vital aspect of metaphorising that the proposed cultural script ignores. I will then consider what this missing aspect demands of the NSM approach. First, the Malay case: ordinary speech situations in traditional Malay appear at first glance to be extensively and beautifully metaphorical. However, Goddard argues that this appearance is misleading, for the discourse is properly 12 This should not be interpreted as endorsing any specific account of metaphorical interpretation. In particular, I make no commitment here to the account of metaphor based on Grice (1989) (according to which the hearer first recovers the literal interpretation of the sentence and then uses that interpretation to recover the metaphorical interpretation). On the contrary, I take the identification of semantic meaning with lexically encoded meaning to be compatible with a range of pragmatic accounts of novel metaphors, including accounts that move directly from lexically encoded meanings of words (or perhaps phrases) to metaphorical interpretations. 13 I do not mean to suggest that, if metaphorical content were classified as pragmatic (in the sense defined in the text), paraphrasing metaphorical content would become irrelevant or unnecessary. My point is simply that if the NSM approach is committed to explicating semantic content in the vocabulary of the semantic primes, then excluding metaphor from semantic content would remove the demand that it be paraphrased in that vocabulary. But the demand for paraphrases of metaphors might well persist as a requirement for any satisfactory pragmatic account of metaphor.

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understood as based on the Malay practice of alluding to an extensive corpus of both traditional verses ( pantuns) and proverbial sayings and maxims. He gives several examples of utterances whose correct interpretation depends on knowing specific pantuns. This practice does not employ the cultural script for metaphorising, but rather depends on a distinct script of its own. The reason for the practice of allusion in Malay discourse, Goddard suggests, is the general cultural importance of avoiding direct or plain speaking in a variety of situations. Allusion, because it is a way of expressing oneself indirectly, allows one to communicate successfully while observing the conventions against blunt speaking. However, the significance of this practice for metaphor is unclear. On the face of it, the fact that there is a cultural practice that differs from metaphorising, even one involving metalexical awareness, is completely independent of whether there is also a practice of metaphorising. The existence of the practice of allusion in Malay does not disprove the hypothesis that metaphorising is also present in that culture. Moreover, there seem to be active metaphors within the translations of the pantuns that Goddard cites, such as ‘this love comes from the eyes down to the heart’ and ‘how sweet a person’s words can be’. If these metaphors are not artifacts of the translations, then we appear to have evidence that metaphorising exists in addition to the practice of allusion among speakers of Malay.14 As a result, a much more extensive study of Malay discourse practices is required before we can draw conclusions about the nature and role of active metaphorising in this linguistic community. The second case, involving two dialects of the Western Desert Language, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, is much more striking, insofar as there seems to be an almost complete absence of active metaphorising in the P/Y language communities. According to Goddard’s evidence, the only clear cases of active metaphor in these languages come from discourses concerning such ‘foreign’ subjects as health care and Christianity. For example, one finds uses of metaphors and metaphorical similes such as the following: ‘English is the key’ and ‘this school is like a tree’ (Goddard, 2004:1218). Goddard also provides examples of less stereotyped metaphorical language found in discourses about land rights and community self-management, both subjects which involve substantial interaction of the P/Y linguistic communities with the state and/or national governments. Within traditional discourses, by contrast, Goddard reports being unable to find ‘‘a single clear instance of an active, original metaphor’’, and this report is confirmed by a second linguist with extensive knowledge of the language communities in question (Goddard, 2004:1217–1218). There are instances of ‘dead’ metaphors (lexicalized expressions with a meaning that is a metaphorical extension of the expression’s primary literal meaning) and apparently metaphorical idioms (e.g. liru (snake) ‘a malicious person’ or tjirilya (echidna) ‘a slowpoke’), so it is not the case that there are no metaphor-like constructions in these dialects.15 But what seems to be missing are uses within traditional contexts of expressions with no lexicalized metaphorical meaning for the purpose of active metaphorising. Instead, the practice of metaphorising in this culture appears to stem entirely from contact with other cultures in which active metaphorising occurs. This evidence, suggesting as it does that active metaphorising is not a universal practice, is extremely interesting. In particular, it shows that we should not assume that the practice of active metaphorising is a ‘natural function of the mind’ without a much more careful characterization of what exactly this practice amounts to. In my view, a keen sensitivity to the hazards of such universalizing assumptions is one of the chief strengths of the NSM approach. The general goal – to explicate the semantic significance of linguistic elements and practices using as culturally and linguistically neutral a medium as possible – reflects a thoroughgoing sensitivity to the extensive variation in human linguistic experience. Nonetheless, this very sensitivity requires that we pin down, as carefully as possible, the precise 14 There is also some evidence of other types of figurative language in Malay, including idiom, metonymy, and ‘dead’ metaphor (cf. CharterisBlack, 2002, 2003). 15 Goddard takes these examples to originate in ‘similes rather than metaphors’, thereby avoiding the standard assumption that dead metaphors derive from the ‘conventionalization of active metaphors’ (which would, of course, suggest that the P/Y community did at some point engage in active metaphorising) (Goddard, 2004:1218, footnote 8). This explanation strikes me as highly contentious, because it is clear that many similes are themselves metaphorical – which is to say, the points of similarity are exhibited only metaphorically by one of the simile’s objects (consider Goddard’s own example: this school is like a tree, meaning ‘in time it [the school] will grow and bear good fruit’). The mere presence of simile in an example does not automatically entail the absence of ‘metaphoricality’; instead, it looks as though some expressions are simultaneously metaphors and similes. As a result, it is not at all obvious why the correct explanation is that non-metaphorical similes somehow freeze into dead metaphors. If, in addition, one doubts that cultural extrapolation suffices to explain the creativity of the P/Y metaphors in the non-traditional discourses, one is forced back to the idea that the P/Y language community has some internal resources to deal with active metaphors. Nonetheless, I will ignore these problems in order to pursue the implications of a linguistic community that lacks a practice of active metaphorising. Thanks to an anonymous referee for useful comments in connection with this data.

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nature and extent of what is culturally specific about a practice and what is not. So, there are two questions to ask here: first, is this practice truly a culturally specific one?, and second, is the proposed cultural script adequate to capture the practice of active metaphorising? I think the answer to the second question is clearly ‘no’. Consider the situation of the P/Y speaker who is not familiar with active metaphorising – he or she must learn how to work out the correct interpretation of what a speaker means by a metaphorical utterance. But here we immediately encounter a limitation of the proposed script, namely, that someone who comes to learn only this script does not thereby learn enough to enable her to figure out the meaning of any particular metaphor. The script tells the uninitiated that the string of words in question can say something other than what they literally mean, and that the speaker wants them to concentrate on that something else, but it does not tell them either what that something else is, or how to figure it out. As Goddard notes, moreover, the script is equally applicable to other cases of figurative language, including metonymy and synecdoche.16 This means that the successful comprehension of ‘foreign’ metaphors by the P/Y speaker requires knowing more than what is captured by the script – specifically, she must know how to work out the metaphorical meaning of the particular sentence.17 Thus, the proposed script for active metaphorising does not suffice to explain what speakers must know (or learn) in order to produce and understand active metaphors. What it does capture is a general characterization of what the metaphor-maker is trying to achieve, namely, a ‘cognitive engagement’ with the uttered words on the part of the hearer. At the same time, it indicates how the metaphor-maker is trying to achieve this cognitive engagement, by exploiting the hearer’s metalexical awareness that words can be used to convey things other than what they say. But these general characterizations do not suffice to isolate the practice of active metaphorising; the insider’s knowledge of this practice must involve more than is expressed by the proposed script. What is missing, I suggest, is an explanation of what kind of cognitive engagement the hearer must undertake. In short, the P/Y speaker needs to know how to go about interpreting metaphorical language. For example, it would be useful to tell her that she could look for a similarity or an analogy between the objects of the metaphor. Alternatively, it might help to suggest that she look for ways in which the metaphor’s subject (language, a wine, and the school) might count as being the way it is described (a mirror, soft, a tree). These sorts of instructions nudge the P/Y speaker farther in the direction of metaphorical competence. With these suggestions in mind, let us return to the question whether active metaphorising is truly a culturally specific practice. Goddard’s evidence suggests that P/Y speakers do not engage in active metaphorising. However, the fact that a practice is not observed everywhere does not mean that it is not based on a universally shared foundation.18 As a result, we must ask: what exactly is involved in the practice of active metaphorising? To answer this question, it is vital to bring together the investigation of the cultural dimensions of the practice with investigations of the psycholinguistic processing that underlies and supports the practice.19 In effect, we must ask what in the practice of active metaphorising is not shared universally, and so must be learned by the members of a culture in which the practice does not already exist, and what does involve abilities that are universally shared? Goddard is explicit that his cultural script is not an attempt to account for the processes by which hearers understand metaphors, and he suggests that the explanation of how metaphorising works is not, and perhaps should not be, part of a cultural script (Goddard, 2004:1216). Nonetheless, as we have seen, he makes a number of specific claims about how metaphors work within his own discussion that do appeal to hypotheses about the underlying processing (for example, that metaphors exploit underlying similarities and analogies between their objects). We saw in the previous section that these claims play a vital role in guiding the production of paraphrases for particular metaphors in the language of semantic primes. At the same time, these sorts of claims are precisely what we are inclined to offer the P/Y speaker to help her understand the unfamiliar practice of active metaphorising. Thus, the relation of these sorts of claims about 16

cf. p. 1216, footnote 7. Note that this is also true of the updated version of the script given above in footnote 4. Conceivably, she might learn the meaning of each metaphor by rote, but this would not thereby teach her how to engage in the practice of metaphorising, for metaphorising involves the construction of new interpretations, not the retrieval of lexicalized expression-meanings. 18 The case of the facial expressions associated with various emotions presents a useful illustration of this point. Following the work of anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and R.L. Birdwhistell documenting the cultural variation in how emotions are displayed, it was thought that there were no universal human emotion-expressions. However, extensive work by Paul Ekman and others (e.g. Izard, 1969; Ekman and Friesen, 1971; Ekman, 1971) has shown that there are six or seven universally displayed and universally recognized emotion-expressions. Thus, the observed cultural variations in fact overlay a small number of ‘basic’ inherited responses. As a result, the correct explanation of emotion-expressions is a combination of universal biological endowment and culturally specific ‘display rules’. 19 Examples of such interaction already exist, of course. See Gibbs (1994) for one detailed discussion. 17

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processing to the cultural dimensions of the practice must be acknowledged explicitly and investigated. Only then can we understand the significance of the P/Y speakers, i.e. only then can we determine what is specifically cultural in the practice of active metaphorising and what might genuinely deserve to be called a ‘natural function of the mind’. 6. Conclusion I suggested at the outset that metaphor poses three important challenges to the study of language: to explain what metaphors mean, to explain how that meaning is conveyed, and to describe the norms governing the practice of using metaphors. I will conclude by assessing the contributions of the NSM approach to our understanding of these challenges. With respect to the first challenge, the NSM account makes two contributions, a characterization of metaphorical content in terms of the speaker’s intended meaning, and several specific attempts to paraphrase the content of individual metaphors. I have shown that Goddard’s attempts to paraphrase specific examples of metaphorical content within the language of semantic primes are unsuccessful, and further, that the NSM account has some distance to go in establishing that attempts of this kind could possibly succeed. It remains unclear that metaphorical content can be paraphrased in the language of semantic primes without loss. This leaves us with the general characterization of metaphorical content as the speaker’s intended meaning. In connection with this characterization, I have clarified why the NSM approach undertakes to paraphrase metaphors at all, tracing the source of the commitment to paraphrase to the NSM approach’s general conception of the nature of semantic content. This result leaves the NSM approach in something of a dilemma. If it is committed to treating speaker meaning on a par with linguistic or encoded meaning (i.e. as semantic), it must (eventually) either substantiate the demand for adequate paraphrases of metaphorical content or acknowledge that its explanatory reach does not cover all instances of meaning. With respect to the third challenge, the NSM account makes two contributions. First, the evidence regarding the limited presence of active metaphorising in the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara communities suggests that the use of active metaphors is not a universal linguistic or cognitive ability, but instead a practice that is at least to some degree culturally constructed. The second contribution here is a cultural script that takes steps to capture the norms governing this culturally specific practice. I have argued that the script as it stands is not sufficiently fine-grained to capture what the practice of metaphorising actually involves, for the script would not suffice to allow the novice to learn how to engage successfully in the practice. Nonetheless, the script could presumably be modified to describe the practice more closely. Such modifications, however, require that we investigate the practice of active metaphorising at both cultural and psychological levels. Goddard’s account of metaphor draws on certain hypotheses about the underlying processing required for metaphor comprehension, but does not develop the connection between these hypotheses and the proposed cultural script in any detail. Progress with both the second and third challenges thus depends on integrating the NSM account’s chief strength – its careful investigation of the cultural nuances in linguistic practices – with equally careful enquiries into the psycholinguistic processing underlying the production and interpretation of metaphorical language, in order to further our understanding of how metaphors work. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Marie-Odile Junker, Rob Stainton, Corinne Iten, Luke Jerzykiewicz, and anonymous referees for very helpful suggestions and comments. Thanks also to Cliff Goddard for useful correspondence. This research was funded in part by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. References Bowdle, Brian F., Gentner, Dedre, 2005. The career of metaphor. Psychological Review 112 (1), 193–216. Cavell, Stanley, 1969. Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy. In: Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 73–96. Charteris-Black, Jonathan, 2002. Second language figurative proficiency: a comparative study of Malay and English. Applied Linguistics 23, 104– 133. Charteris-Black, Jonathan, 2003. Speaking with forked tongue: a comparative study of metaphor and metonymy in English and Malay phraseology. Metaphor and Symbol 18, 289–310. Davidson, Donald, 1984. What Metaphors Mean. In: Inquires into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 245–264.

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Ekman, Paul, 1971. Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. In: Cole, J.K. (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 4th ed.. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Ekman, Paul, Friesen, W.V., 1971. Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17 (2), 124–129. Fauconnier, Gilles, Turner, Mark, 1998. Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science 22 (2), 133–187. Gibbs, Raymond W., 1994. The Poetics of Mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gibbs, Raymond W., Costa, Lima, Paula, Lenz, Francozo, Edson, 2004. Metaphor is grounded in embodied experience. Journal of Pragmatics 36, 1189–1210. Giora, Rachel, 2003. On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Glucksberg, Sam, 2001. Understanding Figurative Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Goddard, Cliff, 2002. The search for the shared semantic core of all languages. In: Goddard, C., Wierzbicka, Anna (Eds.), Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings, vol. I. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 5–40. Goddard, Cliff, 2004. The ethnopragmatics and semantics of active metaphors. Journal of Pragmatics 36, 1211–1230. Goddard, Cliff, Wierzbicka, Anna, 1997. Discourse and culture. In: Teun, A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction. Sage Publications, London, pp. 231–259. Grice, H.P., 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Izard, C.E., 1969. The emotions and emotions constructs in personality and culture. In: Cattell, R.B., Dreger, R.M. (Eds.), Handbook of Modern Personality Theory. Hemisphere Publishing Corp., Washington, DC. Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 1980. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Wierzbicka, Anna, 1996. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Catherine Wearing received her PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University and the University of Western Ontario, she moved to Wellesley College, where she is currently assistant professor of philosophy. Her main interests lie at the intersection of the philosophy of mind and language with linguistics and cognitive science.