full meaning, linguistic meaning and metaphorical meaning

Russian Literature XIV (1983) 287-298 North-Holland

FULL MEANING, LINGUISTIC MEANING AND METAPHORICAL MEANING

IRENA BELLERT

In Roman Jakobson's works, the meaning of a linguistic expression has been conceived of in its widest and most subtle sense. He claimed, therefore, that no two different linguistic expressions have exactly the same meaning - there is no full synonymy in language. Such a claim is certainly attractive and hardly deni- able, if one takes into account all the factors inter- acting in the actual process of human communication by means of language. As Chomsky puts it: "The actual reference of linguistic expressions in real life involves the interaction of cognitive systems. And grammar is only one of these. Much the same is true of most of our concepts, which are embedded within a sys- tem of belief about the nature of the world; the latter enter into the kind of semantic representation re- quired to account for legitimate reference, truth conditions, speech acts, and so on" (Chomsky 1979:147-8). Chomsky, along with all other transformational gram- marians, is interested in including in a theory of language only part of the meaning so widely understood, namely, that part which depends on purely linguistic (grammatical) factors. All the other factors play, however, "a role in what some might call the full semantic representation" (ibid.:147).

In this short essay I will try to account for the two points of view on the meaning of linguistic expressions in terms of a definition of full meaning, by showing that what linguists call a purely linguistic meaning may be viewed as a proper subset of the set of propositions which are represented in the definiens of that definition. I will also show how a metaphorical meaning of a sentence (or text) may be viewed in terms

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288 Irena Bellert

of a selected subset of the set of propositions which - according to that definition - represent the full meaning of the literal interpretation of that sentence (or text).

Following my proposal' concerning the representation of the full meaning of a text (a sentence being considered as a particular case of the shortest possible text), I will identify the full (semantic and pragmatic) meaning of a text T with the consequence class, that is, the class of conclusions which can be drawn from its propositional content PT together with the relevant Background BT and the relevant Hypotheses HT:

Def.(l):

Full MT =df Cn(PTUBTUHT) - cn((B+‘HT) - +)

Definition (1) expresses the intuition that the full meaning of a text can be identified with all the relevant conclusions we can take from the Text together with the relevant Background' (some pertinent propositions representing what we know or believe jn relation to the text and its context), and some relevant Hypotheses that we have to make in producing or interpreting a text, in order to give it a full meaning or to interpret it in a coherent way. Since we do not want to include in the meaning of the text those propositions which belong to the relevant Background alone or the Hypotheses alone, the consequence class of the (set-theoretical) difference between all those propositions and the propositional content of the text is, therefore, not included in the definiens representing the Full Meaning. This accounts for the fact that we make use of our Background and some Hypotheses as premises in drawing the conclusions, but such premises themselves do not belong to the meaning of the text.

The definition is based on the assumption that if someone is capable of drawing the relevant conclusions from a linguistic text, he thereby can be said to know what the full meaning of the text is. And, on the other hand, if someone understands the text or knows its full meaning, then he should be capable of drawing the relevant conclusions.3 The definition also accounts for the fact that if a speaker and hearer do not share the relevant background necessary for the interpretation of a particular text, then the hearer may very well misinterpret the text. The meaning of the text would then be different for the hearer from what it was intended to be‘by the speaker. It also accounts for the fact that the meaning of a text so widely un-

Meaning and Metaphor 289

derstood may differ from one interpreter to another, for it depends on the respective backgrounds of dis- course participants and their ability to postulate some necessary hypotheses.

Let us now examine the definiens of definition (1) from the point of view of how it should be restricted so that it may stand for the representation of the linguistic meaning alone. By linguistic meaning I mean a subset of all the consequences defined in (l), namely only those which could be derived from a sentence (or a sequence of sentences occurring in a text) by the rules belonging to a theory of language; that is, all those rules which concern the structural properties of that sentence and the properties of the lexical items involved. In other words, the subset of consequences representing the linguistic meaning of a sentence should include only those conclusions which a speaker (hearer) would in principle be capable of drawing from that sentence and from the rules of the language, independently of the context (in an 'anony- mous letter situation' as Katz and Fodor [1963] have put it), and independently of the speakers' (hearers') general and factual knowledge of the world as may be relevant to that sentence.

We will now examine the particular sets of propositions which occur in the definiens. PT, the propositional content of the sentence (or text), will of course remain in the definiens, as it represents the linguistic factors alone. BT, the Background (relevant to T), has to be reduced to its bare minimum, which I have called the Linguistic Background. The Linguistic Background represents all the universal and particular rules of language that a competent speaker implicitly knows and makes use of in drawing conclusions from the sentences of his language. The Linguistic Background represents thus linguistic universals and rules of inference which only partly overlap with some simple logical laws and basic rules of inference in classical logic, namely those rules which are used by all speakers, independently of their knowledge or lack of knowledge of logic. The Linguistic Background represents also a set of rules of inference specific for a natural language.

Some examples of the first type of rules are the following ones: Dictum de omni: What is true for all is true for some; the rule of modus ponens: If p is true and if p then q is true, then q must be true; disjunctive syllogism: If either p or q is true, and not p is true then q must be true. Such rules are used even by children when they conclude something from lin-

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guistic utterances. (For more details, see Bellert and Weingartner 1982).

Some examples of the second type of rules are the following:

(1) All the sentences with noun phrases quantified with 'some' imply sentences of the same form, except for 'not all' instead of 'some':

Some members of the committee voted for the amendment+

+ Not all members of the committeevoted for the amendment

(2) Sentences containing 'factive' verbs with senten- tial complement constructions imply their complements:

was amazed The president' regretted

1 that the ambassador was absent-

knew

-+ The ambassador was absent

(3) Sentences with so-called implicative verbs imply their respective presuppositions:

John stopped smoking + John used to smoke before

John opened the door + The door was closed before

(4) Sentences with proper names or definite descrip- tions occurring as arguments of the main verb imply the corresponding existential sentences:

John is talking with the girl standing in the door -j

~ 1 There is someone called John There is a girl standing in the door

Note: All the examples of implications due to rules described in the linguistic literature as rules of presuppositions, that is (2), (3) and (4) above, are valid only for sentences which are not negated.

The third set which occurs in the definiens of 11), HTI the set of hypothetical premises, should also be reduced to only those which are directly associated with linguistic structure and the lexical items occurring in a given sentence. Hypothetical premises are those which a speaker (hearer) accepts provisionally in relation to a sentence, but which can be so to speak 'cancelled“ in the course of interpreting some subsequent clause or sentence in the text. Typical ex-


amples of such hypothetical premises which belong to the linguistic meaning are rules accounting for presuppositions, such as exemplified in (2), (3) and (4) above, in the case of negated sentences.

For example, in the case of the sentence:

The president did notregret that the ambassador was absent

one may accept the presupposition "the ambassador was absent" as a hypothetical premise; such a premise may, however, be 'cancelled' if the sentence continues "... for the simple reason that the ambassador was not absent, but came later to the party".

Or, in the case of the sentence:

John did not open the door

the hypothetical premise "the door was closed" may very well be rejected, if the next sentence is: "The door had already been opened before".

Another example of a 'cancelled' existential presupposition is one given by Kempson (1979), whose claim is that any presupposition can be 'cancelled' in a negated sentence:

The Mayor of Liverpooldid not visit the exhibition this year,

as there is no Mayor of Liverpool any longer was no exhibition this year

Other examples of hypothetical premises are those due to what Putnam (1975) calls stereotype properties of the individuals belonging to the extension of a name. Stereotype properties are those properties which are usually true of an individual denoted by a given name (natural-kind or artefact), but are not necessar- ily true. An example of this type of linguistic inference is:

Ann's dress has the color of a lemon

and the hypothetical premise: "A lemon is yellow"; the conclusion will be "Ann's dress is yellow". Usually lemons are yellow, but yellowness is not a necessary condition, for there are also lemons which are green. However, the stereotype properties are usually included in a linguistic description. For instance, under the entry 'lemon' in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of current English, we find: 'Pale-yellow acid fruit...'.

In general, hypothetical premises to be reckoned as propositions that belong to the linguistic meaning,

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would be all those that are due to a linguistic description of lexical items and grammatical structures, but are not the logically necessary ones, and therefore they can be accepted as conditional premises only.

Concluding what has been said, I claim that the linguistic meaning of a sentence (or text) may be viewed as a proper subset of all the conclusions representing the Full Meaning of that sentence (or text) according to Definition (1)

Linguistic Meaning (T) C Full Meaning (T)

where T stands for a sequence of sentences in a text, or for one sentence in the shortest possible text.

* * *

We will now return to Definition (1) in order to show that a metaphorical meaning of a text can be viewed as a selected subset (or selected subsets) of the set of conclusions which represent the literal Full Meaning of that text. Notice first that for a metaphorical sentence, such a set of conclusions will contain contradictory propositions. To give the simplest exam- pies, the sentence "Man is a wolf" (discussed at length in Black 1962) would contain the following contradictory conclusion: "Man is a human being and man is not a human being". The sentence "Jim's wife is a beautiful flower" would contain among its conclusions "Jim's wife is a woman and Jim's wife is not a woman". In order to characterize the metaphorical meaning of a text, it is therefore necessary to add some conditions to the Full Meaning of a text, i.e. to Definition (1) with the sets BT and HT as described at the outset (i.e. not reduced to only those propositions which represent the linguistic meaning alone). In other words, the metaphorical interpretation of a sentence or a text which I will propose below, will be conceived of in terms of the widest and most subtle sense of the meaning of that sentence or text, the sense advocated by Roman Jakobson. In no case, the metaphorical meaning could be account- ed for by linguistic meaning alone. Def.(2):

A metaphorical interpretation of a text T (which in the simplest case consists of one sentence s) = df a selected subset (or subsets) of the literal Full Meaning of T, given by Definition (1) , such that satisfies three conditions:


(1) It is consistent (it does not contain contradictory propositions);

(2) It contains a novel combination of propositions, that is, it constitutes a set of conclusions which would not follow from any conventional combination of words;

(3) It has partial reference to the real world, that is, at least some novel combination of its propositions is true of an aspect of reality, of human feelings or experience.

Let me now comment on the claims involved in this definition and compare them with some intuitive statements on metaphor made by renowned theorists of literature or philosophers (for a full exposition of this proposal, the interested reader is referred to Bellert 1980/81).

The first point to be emphasized is that the interpretation of a metaphorical text is based, essentially,. on the literal conventional meaning of the constituent linguistic units of the text. This property of metaphorical texts is quite evident, and it distinguishes the metaphorical meaning of a text from the idiomatic meaning (which is also different from the literal meaning, but is not based on the actual literal meanings of the constituent units).4 A pertinent statement to this effect is as follows: "The metaphorical meanings of a word or phrase in natural language are all con- tained, as it were, within its literal meaning or meanings" (Cohen and Margalith 1972:735). To use Max Black's terminology, both the 'focus' and the 'frame', as units, are open to conventional interpretation, and a novel combination of such units yields a new semantic concept. Richards says that "when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of two different things active together", and the meaning of a metaphor is a "resultant of this interaction" (Richards 1936:93).

The definition is based on the assumption that the literal Full Meaning of a metaphorical text must contain at least one contradiction, which is due to a violation of a conventional rule on the semantic, syntac- tic or pragmatic level. In interpreting a metaphorical text, we reject some conclusions which contribute to contradictions or are irrelevant, and therefore the selected subset of conclusions representing the metaphorical meaning is consistent. These are also common- ly recognized properties of metaphorical texts. Ziff speaks of metaphor as resulting from a syntactically deviant utterance. Ryle describes this as a 'category mistake' and Chomsky as a deviation from grammatical-

294 Irena BeZZert

neSS or violation of selectional restrictions. A metaphor consists either of a syntactically deviant text, which is then also semantically deviant, or of a semantically deviant text, or of a text which is mis- placed pragmatically, and hence its literal interpretation is in any case a result of a violation of some conventional rule, which yields a contradiction in the conclusions. This latter property, which is explicit in my proposal, is only metaphorically alluded to in the literature on metaphor. This is not amazing in view of the fact that contradictions are not overtly expressed in the text. They can only be detected on the level of the semantic features of the lexical items involved and thus they are present in the conclusions. Therefore the corresponding interpretive statements made by theorists of literature or philosophers quoted below often describe the effect of such contradictory conclusions on those who interpret metaphors.

Goodman says that "the good metaphor satisfies while it startles" (1968:79). Beardsley states that: "an adequate theory of metaphor must explain the two properties of metaphor that are generally acknowledged to be the most fundamental. First, a metaphorical at- tribution differs from a literal one by virtue of a certain tension between the subject and the modifier: we are alerted by something special, odd and startling in the combination..." (1967:285). And he continues: "In some cases, there is a conflict between properties presupposed by the subject and modifier" (ibid.:286). When describing the Verbal-Opposition Theory of metaphor, Beardsley speaks of "the principle that metaphor involves essentially a logical conflict of central meaning" (ibid.:286). Black, when discussing the sentence "Man is a wolf" as an example, states that "literal uses of the word 'wolf' are governed by syntacti- cal and semantical rules, violation of which produces nonsense or self-contradiction" (Black 1962:40). Ri- coeur says that "metaphorical interpretation consists in transforming a self-defeating, sudden contradiction into a meaningful contradiction (...) So metaphor ap- pears as an answer to a certain inconsistency of the statement interpreted literally. We might call this inconsistency a 'semantic impertinence', to use an expression more supple and comprehensive than that of contradiction or absurdity" (1975:78). Ricoeur's ap- proach to metaphor is close to mine in that he inter- prets metaphors in terms of proposition rather than the words involved: "What we call a tension is not just something which occurs between the two terms of


the statement, but between the two complete interpre- tations of the statement" (1975:77).

Despite some trends in modern literary criticism which deny that poetic language refers to reality or to anything exterior to itself, a great number of thinkers and literary critics hold a different view, and some take reference to reality as one of the necessary conditions for successful metaphors. Roman Ja- kobson (1960) states that "the supremacy of the poetic function over the referential function does not oblit- erate the reference (the denotation), but renders it ambiguous". Goodman (1968) applies the term 'reality remade' to all symbolic functioning. He speaks of 'literal falsity and metaphorical truth'. When speak- ing of the truth of metaphor, he argues that there is no great difference between literal and metaphorical truth: "Standards of truth are the same whether the schema used is transferred or not (...) We may make mistakes in applying either 'red' or 'sad' to colored subjects" (1968:79). In Black's theory (1962), the re- description of reality is conceived of as a construc- tion of a model and the transposition of its properties into a domain of reality. Hester (1967:168) says: "I am not claiming that once the meaning or relevant sense of a metaphor is found it is not the purpose of poetry to step back into the world or assert about reality". Hester compares the views of several thinkers on the truth of metaphor: "There are really two questions involved: How is the poem related to the natural world, our scientific knowledge or literal truth, and how is it related to 'reality'? These are really the truth questions (...) Wheelwright (...) argues that poetic statements assert lightly, implying a different type of truth claim than that of literal statements. Yet he goes on to say poetry is rooted in metaphysics. Herschberger, on the other hand, is anxious to draw poetic and scientific truth together. Bremond is equal- ly anxious to drive them apart" (Hester 1967:99).

As I argued with respect to contradiction (which is implicit in a metaphorical text and can be made explicit only in the interpretation of a text conceived of as a set of conclusions), similarly, it is not amazing that the truth of metaphor is only alluded to, or accepted with various restrictions and reservations by those thinkers who express their intuitive understanding that there is some genuine truth implicit in a successful metaphor. Truth, indeed, is not applica- ble in a straightforward way to a metaphorical text, which cannot be said to be true or false, nor even can it be assigned any degree of probability. However,

296 Irena BelZert

as I claim, truth applies only to some conclusions belonging to the interpretive subset of the set of conclusions representing the literal Full Meaning of a metaphorical text. And the condition concerning partial reference to reality (i.e. the truth of at least some novel combination of conclusions belonging to an interpretive subset of the Full Meaning), which I take as a necessary condition for a successful metaphor, does not seem to be too strong.

Summarizing my proposal: the meaning (or interpretation) of a metaphorical text is a subset (or more than one subset) of its literal Full Meaning (or its literal interpretation), such that satisfies three conditions: (a) consistency, (b) novelty and (c) partial reference to reality. If no such interpretation can be found which satisfies these conditions, then the text is not a successful metaphor or it has not been understood by the interpreter as a metaphorical text. The choice among the possible subsets of the set of conclusions representing the literal Full Mean- ing of a metaphorical text corresponds to the fact that the interpretation of a metaphorical text is not uniquely determined. It is dependent on the particular interpreters (their background knowledge and beliefs, training, education, sensitivity, imaginativeness, in- genuity etc.). This is in agreement with both the theoretical statements of literary critics or philosophers and the empirical observations concerning the differences in the actual interpretation of metaphors.

If the intuition underlying my proposal is correct, if indeed the meaning of a text is based on the capability of drawing conclusions from the text together with the relevant background and some pertinent hypotheses, then my proposal provides a framework for see- ing more clearly how the linguistic meaning is related to the full meaning of a text, and how the metaphorical meaning of a text is related to its literal meaning.

McGill University, Montreal


NOTES

1. The proposal to describe the meaning of a sentence (or text) along the lines of the definition discussed here can be traced back to Bellert (1970,1974,1980/81) and Bellert and Weingartner (1982).

2. In my former papers, I used the term Background Knowledge, which was supposed, however, to cover not only knowledge but also beliefs. In Bellert and Weingartner (1982) this term has been replaced, owing to Weingartner, by the more adequate term Background.

3. For the notion of 'relevant conclusions' and an attempt to define formally the set of relevant conclusions, see Bellert and Weingartner (1982). I wish also to emphasize here that my assuming that the speaker (hearer) is capable of drawing conclusions is not tantamount to saying that he actually draws all the relevant conclusions. However, the knowledge of meaning is closely related to the capability of drawing the relevant conclusions. One of the semantic components of 'know- ing' or 'understanding' is 'being able to'. As Wittgenstein (1960:150) states: "The grammar of the word 'knows' is evi-

dently closely related to that of 'can', 'is able to"'. 4. It is important to emphasize that whenever I use the terms

'metaphor' or 'metaphorical text' in my own text or in quotes from other sources, what is meant is a novel, genuine metaphor. Dead metaphors are not taken into account in the present discussion, for a dead metaphor has a fixed meaning, similarly to an idiom, and it is usually listed in a dictionary with a separate gloss.

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Beardsley, M. 1967 Entry "Metaphor", Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

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1974 "On Inference and Interpretation of NaturalLan- guage Sentences", Theoretical Linguistics NGI, 3.

1980/81 "Sherlock Holmes' Interpretation of Metaphori- cal Texts", Poetics Today F2, lb.

Bellert, I. and P.Weingartner 1982 "On Different Characteristics of Scientific

Texts as Compared with Everyday Language Texts", Sublanguage, eds. R.Kittredge and J.Lehrberger (Berlin/New York).

298 Irena BeZlert

Black, M. 1962 Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.).

Chomsky, N. 1979 Language and Responsibility (Sussex).

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full meaning, linguistic meaning and metaphorical meaning

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