engleski

Implicature-explicature interface in metaphor interpretation

In this paper we shall focus on the claim made by Ruiz de Mendoza and Perez Hernandez (2003) that interpretation of metaphorical expressions is about producing explicatures, rather than implicatures. We essentially agree with this claim. But if explicatures mean deriving targeted interpretations without the aid of supplementary contextual information, the question naturally arises as to the possibility of delimiting what is supplementary contextual material from what is straightforward development of linguistic blueprint. Namely, given the frequent polysemy of linguistic cues in metaphor, we claim that it is often impossible to derive the intended explicatures without the 'supplementary' contextual information. Thus the status of at least part of what would normally fall into the province of implicated meaning, i.e. implicated^premjises, is questioned in light of their crucial role in deriving explicated meaning. For example, on the basis of the minimal linguistic context we could interpret the utterance "He won" as meaning victory in the realm of legal battle, sports competition, even full- scale war and we must admit that their respective domain structures, despite some significant overlaps, are not quite the same. Further, even when contextually delimited to the domain of electoral battle, we cannot derive the same explicated meaning, and by extension implicated conclusions, if we on the one hand talk about the democratic victor of eTg. the British electoral race or when we report on the victory of a dictator whose 'campaign' had been nothing short of massive bloodshed. We must therefore be ready to admit a more central role of implicated premises, i.e. 'supplementary' contextual material in deriving explicatures in the first place. Moreover, we could perhaps see the former as steering the process of explicature derivation from the potentially polysemous lexical access node (Langacker, 1987) through its complex conceptual network to precisely those domains that will be relevant for intended explicated meaning behind the linguistic metaphor.

implicature; explicature; metaphor interpretation; supplementary contextual information; linguistic blueprint; implicated premises; implicated conclusions; polysemous lexical access node; complex conceptual network

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