论文总字数：29509字

摘 要

隐喻是语言间最重要最普遍的语义现象之一，由于人类对从中心意义或基本意义到其他延伸意义的各种认知，它具有比喻意义。作为最复杂最有魅力的意义之谜，隐喻在语言的形成与发展过程中以及在人类对世界进行概念化和表达中都起着重要作用。前人的隐喻研究视角主要局限在修辞学与语言学，却很少从符号学角度探讨。因此，本文致力于从符号学理论角度以相似性和象似性为静态基础探讨隐喻的形成。利用最具有学术张力和解释力的符号学理论，隐喻将会被更好的理解。

关键词：隐喻；符号学；相似性；象似性

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

3. Introduction of Semiotics 2

3.1 Saussure and semiotics 2

3.2 The metaphor research towards semiotics 4

4. The Static Basis of Metaphor 5

4.1 Similarity between signs 5

4.2 The sign iconicity 6

5. Literal Meaning and Metaphorical Meaning from the Semiotic Perspective 7

5.1 Literal meaning and metaphorical meaning 7

5.2 The semiotic perspective of metaphor formation 9

6. Conclusion 10

Works Cited 11

1. Introduction

Being a most pervasive and important language phenomenon, metaphor has always attracted the attention of linguists of different schools. The development of cognitive science offers a thorough and systematic way to the analysis of metaphor. Some linguists believe that metaphor is a result of human cognition and assert that a word meaning is an open system which is subject to change and evolution. Ullmann insists that metaphors are the main motivation of the senses. Metaphorical mappings can occur between one source domain and multiple target domains. This kind of mapping may be located in the knowledge structure of the source domain. Therefore, the normal and ordinary lexicon of source domain is not always normal and ordinary. If the ordinary word in the source domain cannot find its normal counterpart in the target domain through mapping, a new sense will pop up and the process of polysemization begins. While metaphor is one of the most important instruments to recognize the world, studies of the formation of metaphor are of most significance.

In addition, people have been studying for long from the perspectives of rhetoric and linguistics, with its sign character untouched. Therefore, this paper aims at discussing how metaphor comes into being with the static basis of similarity and iconicity and how their literal meanings are extended based on the theory of semiotics, which will promote the cross of semiotics and linguistic.

2. Literature Review

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish——a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. However, the fact is that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life. Metaphor has been a major concern among many scholars, and its history can be traced back to Aristotle and Confucius. Different definitions to metaphor have been given by linguists, philosophers, logicians, and cognitive scientists. In rhetoricians’ opinion, metaphor is a figure of speech and a means of ornament for language; in logicians’ words, metaphor is a categorical misplacement. As far as linguistics is concerned, in An Encyclopedia of Linguistics, “metaphor, belongs to one type of figure of speech, and in metaphor, figurative words, such as ‘is’, ‘become’ etc. are often used to connect tenor and vehicle”.

Since metaphor plays an important role in the process of polysemization, we can define polysemy as a process, when the ordinary word in the scource domain cannot find its normal counterpart in the target domain through mapping. In this way, an individual word or phrase can be used to express two or more different meanings.

However, how do the two or more meanings relate or have connections, people have been studying for long from the perspectives of rhetoric and linguistics, with its sign character untouched. Therefore, this paper aims at discussing how metaphor comes into being with the static basis of similarity and iconicity and how their meanings are extended based on the theory of semiotics, which will promote the cross of semiotics and linguistic.

3. Introduction of Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of meaning-making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication. This includes the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. The semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications.

The importance of signs and signification has been recognized throughout much of the history of philosophy, and in psychology as well. Plato and Aristotle both explored the relationship between signs and the world, and Augustine considered the nature of the sign within a conventional system. These theories have had a lasting effect on Western philosophy, especially throughout the scholastic philosophy. The general study of signs that began in Latin with Augustine culminated in Latin with Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot in 1632, and then began anew in late modernity with the attempt to draw up a "new list of categories" in 1867 by Charles Sanders Peirce.

3.1 Saussure and semiotics

Saussure is the "father" of modern linguistics, whose remarkable contribution has been followed by all kinds of different linguistic schools. Instead of following the trends towards historical linguistics, he put forward that the real research object should be the language with collective psychological traits and social essence. His series of binary opposites has become the classic paradigm, such as langue and parole, diachronic and synchronic, signifier and signified, etc. On the basis of that, Saussure obtained the concept that language is a semiotic system, that is to say, language is a hierarchical symbol system, multidimensional relationship system and a pure value system. Systematic perspective embodies Saussure’s structural thought and has made a profound and extensive influence on the various structural linguistic scholars. However, Saussure didn’t stop at the pure linguistic category. He studied deeply and pointed out that “language is a kind of concept of sign system” and “the study of language is mainly about the problem of semiotics”. Before the existence of semiotics, Saussure had elucidated the relationship between sign and language. Later, the development of the two has confirmed Saussure’s foresight. It turned out that all the problems are fundamentally language-related. The linguistic transition of 20 century’s western philosophy exactly declared that only when solving the bottleneck of language, can the development of various disciplines make a great progress in the future. In this sense, the combination between linguistics and semiotics is Saussure’s unfilled aspiration. To be delighted, one hundred years later after the death of Saussure, linguistic semiotics has become an independent subject with the unremitting efforts of numerous scholars.

Saussure proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase uttered and the signified as the mental concept. According to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary—i.e., there is no necessary connection between the sign and its meaning. This sets him apart from previous philosophers, such as Plato or the scholastics, who thought that there must be some connection between a signifier and the object it signifies. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure credits the American linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) with insisting on the arbitrary nature of the sign. Saussure"s insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign also has influenced later philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. Ferdinand de Saussure coined the term sémiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906 to 1911. Saussure posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a "signifier", i.e., the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the "signified", or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued "sign". Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.

3.2 The metaphor research towards semiotics

With the promotion of Saussure’s semiotics and his defining linguistic as a part of it, language has become a special system in semiotics. As the main linguistic problem is about semiology, all of our arguments should get meanings from this important factor. Both signs and metaphors are significant character in human languages. So when we want to understand one thing from another and get the traits of metaphor, we turn to the point cut of semiotic research.

Rhetoric defines metaphor as a kind of word substitution or analogy, linguistic the result of meaning interaction between tenors and vehicles based on the similarity and cognitive linguistics one domain understanding and experiencing the other one, which is a selective and partial mapping from source domain to target domain. Or as widely excepted, it’s not only a device for language decoration, but also the form and tool for thinking. No matter whether these theories are validated or not, for we cannot prove the connection between metaphor and thought at present, the expression form of metaphor is what we can actually see and what we first pay attention to in metaphor studies. Metaphor itself is a kind of sign. It is produced in the process of one symbol replacing the other. When metaphor gradually linked to something new and separated from the old ones, it is more close to signs. To some extent, defining metaphor as the transformation of designation is an important approach for us to recognize and analysis metaphor.

Linguistic semiotics, whose object is language sign, is to solve language problems by using the thoughts and methodologies of semiotics. The publishing of “linguistic semiotics” by the name of Wang Mingyu is a great success of inheriting the will of the father of modern linguist, Saussure. The linguistic semiotics realized the merging between linguistic and semiotics. It is worthy to research deeper about the problem of metaphor by using semiotics.

4. The Static Basis of Metaphor

4.1 Similarity between signs

Metaphor is derived from the Grecian word metaphorá, which means transference. It is a kind of metaphorical or language mechanism of referring to some phenomena in order to express and name the other object or those different ones which share a certain similarities. In a more extensively sense, the technical word metaphor refers to the usage of vocabulary’s indirect meanings in any form.

The world we live in is an infinitely open one linked by similarity. From the perspective of cause and effect followed by human beings, the existence of anything has its foundation, in other word, each cause brings a consequence. Metaphor, as a linguistic phenomenon, has its own inner foundation in the process of formation. Aristotle was the first one to establish the basis of metaphor study: metaphor is people’s comprehension toward similar things. French rhetorician Fauconnier argued that metaphor forms between two concepts with similarity as substitute base and the result is metaphor. After doing the research on aphasiac, R.Jakobson suggested metaphor is not only a basic figure of speech but also people’s basic way of communication. Modern metaphor theory regards it as human’s ways of thinking from the opinion of cognitive science. With the metaphoric thinking, people understand and experience one thing through the other, which is also under the direction of similarity. People always start from the similar form, structure and links to learn those relatively unchanged intrinsic among ever-changing things. Hence, defining and classifying similarity is principle significant to deeper study the inner connection between similarity and metaphor.

According to the types of similarity, metaphor is generally divided into two----similarity-based metaphor and similarity-creating metaphor. Similarity-based metaphor refers to the obvious physical similarity between tenors and vehicles, say, table foot, the roof of the world, the lungs of the earth or emotional similarity which can arouse people’s common feeling toward the same things such as in low spirit and make one’s blood boil. While similarity-creating metaphor means the expression content is creative and novel, that’s to say, people have never realized the similarity before it happened, which mainly relies on their excavating hidden similarities between two far-related things. Once spoken out, its perplexing and novel feeling will bring us pleasure and some spirit resonance, which has more cognitive value than similarity-based metaphor. The main body of creating similarity is the speaker, whose cognitive and association abilities are of great importance. They find the similarity and transplant some characters and features of vehicles to tenors. Thus, creating similarity is human being’s further understanding to the universal relation between things. It not only enhances the connection of knowledge, but also is the brand new source for language to constantly accommodate the developing society. Just as Zhao Yanfang said, to learn and comprehend the world around, people instinctively ask for the similarity among different concepts, which consequently creates metaphor and develops language.

Metaphor developing from language phenomenon to cognitive phenomenon is a strengthening process of people’s rational thinking. Language is outfit and expression of thinking, while thinking decides the inner mechanical of language. Now since metaphor is language phenomenon, it is the main point to discuss the relationship between metaphor and language if we want to get deep inside of the essence of metaphor. Like the saying digesting knowledge and melting comprehension into blood, all of these are people’s usage of word metaphor. Acquiring knowledge is just like digesting food, which would not be found any inner connection before metaphorization. So this connection is not objectively existent. Due to metaphor is not ready-made, but formed by borrowing those already made, we cannot figure out whether we get metaphor because of similarity or our understanding of metaphor creates the similarity. In a word, metaphor is a complicated concept and similarity can be both object and subject.

4.2 The sign iconicity

Speaking of sign iconicity, the first thing we think of is the arbitrariness of sign. Though this iconicity theory was first explicitly put forward by Peirce, the thought about iconicity has been long existed. Since Saussure proposed the concept of arbitrariness between signifier and signified and regarded it as the most important principle dominating the whole schools of linguistics, arbitrariness as the primal character to understand sign system takes up the basic place of linguistic.

Symbol iconicity corresponds to symbol arbitrariness, which are two endpoints of sign traits. Rather than just iconicity and arbitrariness, there is a vague middle area between the two. As far as Saussure’s concerned, arbitrariness has irrationality and improvability. It is a kind of conventional relationship and once formed no one is able to change it. It should be pointed out that Saussure firstly defined arbitrariness on the level of vocabulary and the relationship between signifier and signified, but didn’t refer to sentences and discourse. We insist that arbitrariness is still the most important principle of sign system and iconicity is a complement. Iconicity is originally confined into onomatopoeia and interjection by Saussure and he thought that it’s a subordinate trait of semiotic, for it is quite limited to express similar semantic content through similar sound and meaning. However, the iconicity of language sign is a sort of connection between language form and meaning, which is mainly correspondent on the level of syntax and discourse and completely different from Saussure’s arbitrariness. To sum up, at the level of phonetic, language sign is more arbitrary, while it is more iconic at that of syntax and discourse because of human’s thinking. Both arbitrariness and iconicity are the characters of language and none of them can be neglected.

In Peirce’s classificatory system, metaphoric sign is a subordinate category and the most abstract and iconic-like iconic sign, including syntax metaphor, convention metaphor and poetry metaphor. Convention metaphor exists in human language with great quantity and is a significant tool for us to form concept system and express thought.

5. Literal Meaning and Metaphorical Meaning from the Semiotic Perspective

5.1 Literal meaning and metaphorical meaning

Coleridge said language is created not only to carry the object itself, but also to reflect the image, emotion and wiliness of the person who is expressing the object. That is to say, when language is delivering the objective world, it takes the responsibility of combining the image of the speaker with his inner thoughts at the same time. Maybe Coleridge was exploring the uniformity between words and things and made an effort to bring words into living things. And he suggested that words and sentences didn’t directly correspond to things in the terms of structure. Words should correspond to thoughts, grammar rules to thinking rules and connection of words to human’s emotion. People enrich their thinking through imagination and enlarge their vision through metaphor. So metaphor is not pre-existent. It is a thinking process of unifying variety and simultaneously presenting continuous happening things. In most cases, people are accustomed to putting life under the authority of eyes and always admit the high status of written language. Actually, the initial and specific language form is oral or parole rather than langue. Though langue is remarkable at its logic and clearness, its abundance lags far behind parole. Langue cannot fully reproduce parole. It is a miniature and abstract of parole at best. Parole, along with pronunciation, intonation and body language, will eventually be replaced by the abstract and explicit langue, which is the so-called literal meaning. On the contrary, the existence of metaphoric meaning is to fight with the unitary and abstract literal meaning. We live in the metaphor of the world.

Metaphoric meaning is often used to make contrast to literal meaning or dictionary meaning. “Metaphor bears the relationship between two things through vividly rather literally using a word or an expression. That’s to say, metaphor uses words on special meaning, which is different from those annotated in dictionary.”

Meaning is people’s thoughts, feelings and comprehension generated by subjective or objective things. It is what word signs refer to, usually divided into literal meaning and metaphoric meaning. Literal meaning is what we comprehend in our daily life, which is set in dictionary. This kind of meaning is directly and intuitively in common use by the group who share the same language. While metaphoric meaning gives a feeling of those different from literal meaning after interacting with context with the basis of literal meaning. In the pure rhetoric area of metaphor, words and concepts have the absolutely priority, so when we talk about a certain word, its literal meaning is original and inherent meaning and its metaphoric meaning is derived meaning. To sum up, the appearance of metaphoric meaning has two purposes: one is to express some more vivid concepts, and the other is to offset the drawbacks of language, for there are no equivalent concept words in language. Here we can draw a conclusion that metaphorical meaning is formed to vividly express new concept in a specific context. And it should be pointed out that the dividing of literal and metaphorical meaning doesn’t stay on the level of words, but also sentences and texts.

Before discussing literal meaning, we need to learn about the definition of word and the meaning of word. As for word definition, there is no universal one because the languages in the world belong to different language families which have great differences. With structural linguistics’ introductory function in modern linguistic history, the structural study and relation study has become the mainstream and centre. Morpheme, word, sentence and text become the units of language hierarchical structure. Though we cannot find a universal definition for word, we still can definite it roughly. We usually define word as a sign which can be freely used and has relatively fixed meanings and material carrier. Therefore words have the traits as followed: having material carrier, sign structure and phonetic form; expressing relatively fixed meaning, which guarantees the systematic use of words; is a sign and can be freely combined and applied, forming the basis of producing meaning creativity. The study of word meaning is the content of semantics. The semantic word meaning is the abstract generalization and summarization to objective things in people’s social life and practice. It unveils essential characters of things and exists in the dictionary as the form of signs and speech sounds. The meaning of word sign is what we have discussed----literal meaning.

5.2 The semiotic perspective of metaphor formation

From the perspective of semiotic, the essence of metaphor is: as the literal meaning of sign A is suspended, the signifier and signified of sign A become a new signifier as a whole. Then the user of sign creates sign B through positive association and put them together. Thus sign A and sign B will build some connection, which creates a new signifier meaning of sign A----metaphorical meaning. It should be pointed out that the literal meaning and metaphorical meaning are co-existent. That’s to say, metaphorical meaning doesn’t appear with the premise of the disappearance of literal meaning.

Corresponding to the generation mechanism of metaphorical meaning, metaphor is more often used to describe one thing from the other or re-describe the original things with creativity. Therefore nominal metaphor is mainly applied to describe predicative and subject. The cause of description relies on the similarity between two things, such as the word leg, whose meaning can be extended to the leg of table according to its support function. We can make a conclusion here that the semantic feature of metaphor is dualistic, the co-existence of literal and metaphoric meaning. However, regardless of the subjective trait of metaphor, it is not too subjective to control. The ambiguity of metaphor is exactly the essence of metaphor openness. From the perspective of rhetoric, metaphor was firstly defined in the area of poetics and rhetoric. The basic function of metaphor is in the aesthetics and ornament and the informational function is reflected in a remodeling of reality. Metaphor’s remodeling of reality is closely related to the level of metaphor study. In other word, on the level of words, it studies mainly on the substitution of word sign, and on the level of sentences, it is more about the update of semantics. As we all know, the function of sentences is to express the sign users’ new understanding of the world and reality with the vivid and creative form. When sign users unceasingly produce their new understanding through reality, signified gets its new derivation. The hierarchical derivation of signified tells the law of metaphorical meaning generation.

6. Conclusion

As is agreed by all, metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life. And it has been studied for long with its sign character untouched. So this paper has discussed about the formation of metaphor from the perspective of semiotics. The importance of signs and signification has been recognized throughout much of the history of philosophy, and in psychology as well. Plato and Aristotle both explored the relationship between signs and the world, and Augustine considered the nature of the sign within a conventional system. Saussure as the father of linguistic proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase uttered and the signified as the mental concept, which is on the static basis of similarity and iconicity. Then, with the theory of semiotic, it discusses the duality meaning of words including literal and metaphorical meaning, which finally forms metaphor.

This paper discussed the formation of metaphor. Undeniably, some problems involved in this paper need further exploration. For example, what main factors does it have in the process of metaphor construction and interpretation? Does metaphor exist in all languages? What else shall we find as theory basis to study metaphor from the perspective of semiotics? In addition, this paper mainly put weigh on the analysis of theoretical method, and it didn’t come to applied problems, especially when it comes to different contexts such as second language teaching, the use of native language and the compilation of dictionary. And the collection and analysis of linguistic data in nature is also needed to be done in the future.

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