The Projection of Contexts: An alternative to George Lakoff & Mark Turner´s Approach to Poetic Metaphor

Abstract

The wide variety of images and emotions evoked by poetic language are lost in the mappings which Lakoff & Turner use to interpret poetic metaphors. In contrast, I propose a reinterpretation of Richards’ interactive theory based on the contextual character of meaning and the preeminence of the metaphorical expressions over metaphors. The meaning of words rises from the usual syntagmatic connections and by means of metaphorical expressions the source domain is projected onto the target domain. This approach does not diminish the variety and vividness of metaphorical expressions and serves to explain connotation and the difficulty of translating metaphors from one language into another.