Jürgen Pavel:
Metapher und kontrafaktische Rede
Abstract:
In order to understand metaphor, one must be able to cope with the tension between the propositional nature of metaphor, on the one hand, and its indeterminate and incomplete nature, on the other. It will be argued that the properties of metaphor can be explained best by taking metaphor to be a counterfactual way of speaking. A semantics is outlined which takes metaphor to be an elliptical, context-dependent, counterfactual way of speaking. The proposed account of metaphor is no variant of a substitution or comparison theory which is essentially based on similarity.
