Analyzing Metaphor in Literature: With Examples from William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"

In this essay I present the outlines of a cognitively motivated, discourseanalytical approach to metaphor in poetry. I will begin by emphasizing that analysis has to be seen in the context of the more encompassing framework of research into the relation between language structure and process. I will then adopt one particular starting point in a three-dimensional approach to metaphor as expression, idea, and utterance, presenting the groundwork for a conceptual taxonomy of metaphor. In particular, distinctions will be introduced between simple and complex metaphor, restricted and extended metaphor, and explicit and implicit metaphor. All of these distinctions are independent of each other. They also require support from linguistic and communicative metaphor analysis. Finally, I will apply these principles to the first two lines of William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," revealing how the linguistic, conceptual, and communicative structure of these lines interact to produce an intricate piece of poetry. Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics Since 1980, when George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By was published, it has become a common assumption among many linguists, psychologists, and literary theorists that metaphor should be regarded as a conceptual and not as a linguistic phenomenon (see also Ungerer and Schmidt 1996; Gibbs 1994; Steen 1994). The distinction between linguistic and conceptual metaphor, now widely accepted, has given Poetics Today 20:3 (Fall 1999) Copyright ? 1999 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. This content downloaded from 207.46. 13.0 on Sat, 16 Apr 2016 06:22:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms 500 Poetics Today 20:3 rise to a wealth of studies of metaphor as thought. The claim that conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and culture has led to the discovery of many cross-linguistic conventional conceptual metaphors involving non-literal mappings between distinct domains of knowledge that organize our knowledge about those domains in standard but metaphorical ways. The familiar examples include our views of abstract concepts such as LIFE or LOVE as JOURNEYS. That is why metaphors have become things we live by rather than the linguistic oddities that they were long thought to be. There are at least two immediate consequences for the linguistic study of metaphor. The first concerns the very aspect of linguistic oddity just mentioned, or the role of deviance. Since many of the metaphors studied by cognitive linguists over the past two decades are part of conventional conceptual metaphors, they also give rise to standard ways of talking about things by ordinary users. Their surface forms do not strike one as deviant but natural. As a result, literal meaning has now been defined as that kind of meaning which is a direct expression of experience, whereas non-literal meaning involves the kind of mapping from one conceptual domain to another that is characteristic of metaphor (Lakoff 1986). A related distinction is the one between congruent and incongruent expressions (Halliday 1985), where congruent expressions suggest a direct matching between our words and ways in which we conceptualize the world, whereas incongruent expressions do not. For instance, "If I am reporting the success of a mountaineering expedition, instead of writing they arrived at the summit on thefifth day I may choose an expression such as thefifth day saw them at the summit. Here the time 'the fifth day' has been dressed up to look as if it was a participant, an onlooker 'seeing' the climbers when they arrived" (Halliday 1985: 322). But what is important is that non-literal or incongruent meaning does not have to be deviant in the sense that it is semantically inacceptable. Non-literal meaning does not necessarily entail deviance, but may equally represent the norm, for metaphor may be the only conventional means available to the language user to communicate about a particular domain of experience. As a result, it has become possible to write learners' dictionaries of lexicalized metaphorical mappings between conceptual domains in connection with large and common semantic fields such as heat (Deignan 1995). The other consequence of the changed relation between linguistic and conceptual metaphor concerns the stylistic or rhetorical realization of conceptual metaphor as a specific figure of speech. Whether a conceptual metaphor is expressed as a metaphor, a simile, an analogy, an extended non-literal comparison, or even an allegory, these are surface variations This content downloaded from 207.46. 13.0 on Sat, 16 Apr 2016 06:22:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms Steen * Analyzing Metaphor in Literature 501 of the same underlying conceptual structure. In other words, conceptual metaphor may be related to a variety of rhetorical forms in language, the choice of which will have to be investigated in relation to possible alternatives in a particular context. For instance, Ravid Aisenman (1997) has suggested that metaphor and simile serve to express different types of metaphorical comparisons, while John Kennedy (1997), in work with Don Chiappe, has argued that felt differences in the strength of a claim advanced by metaphor and simile are to be related to their function in