ABSTRACTS:
Kathryn Banks (University of Durham)
Sensorimotor Imagining and Emergent Properties in the poetry of Mary Oliver
My paper suggests that some novel poetic metaphors produce a range of sensorimotor
responses, experienced from different perspectives and more varied than is captured by the
description of metaphor as ‘seeing one thing as another’. Emergent features can stem from
the combining of these sensorimotor effects. I’ll also explore the possibility that in some
cases sensorimotor effects retain a cognitive function beyond the retrieval of propositions.
The paper borrows insights from research in the Relevance Theory framework, while also
articulating some challenges posed by the attempt to account for poetic effects in RT terms. I
focus on examples from the poetry of Mary Oliver, whose explicit interest in sensorimotor
imagining and its relationship to propositional knowledge makes it particularly tricky to
work with an RT model of communicative intention.
Emily Caddick Bourne (University of Cambridge)
Sensory Metaphor and Imagining Experience [co-authored with Craig Bourne]
Can a firm distinction be drawn between metaphors which rest on an audience’s
understanding of the content of a representation (e.g. the literal meaning of a sentence) and
metaphors which rest on an audience’s perceptual responses? We consider some examples
from film which are naturally described as ‘visual’ or ‘aural’ metaphors. One useful way to
tease apart different ways in which these examples work is to see what each requires
audiences to imagine concerning their own experiences. This allows us to consider some
further issues concerning potential relationships between metaphors and demonstratives, and
whether elements of some metaphors can be changed or substituted without any impact on
understanding.
Elisabeth Camp (University of Pennsylvania)
Why Metaphors Make Good Insults
Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ‘framing effects’. These
effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or
someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of
‘complicity’ that cannot be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have
taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary
communication; against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically powerful
because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech
acts with assertoric force.
Robyn Carston (University College London and CSMN, Oslo)
Mental Imagery and Metaphor Understanding
The experience of mental imagery (a quasi-perceptual phenomenon) seems undeniable but
raises many questions: What is the representational format of mental images? What role do
they play in thought and in language use? Are they merely ‘epiphenomena’, enlivening our
experience, but without a significant role in cognition and communication?
Work by psychologist Allan Paivio has shown that the higher the ‘imagery value’ of
a word, the more memorable it is, and he suggests that the images evoked by a metaphor
provide an important base for its understanding: ‘Novel metaphors in particular appear to
need imagery for interpretation, especially vehicle imagery’ (Sadowski & Paivio 2001: 87).
In this talk, I try to assess the role of imagery in metaphor understanding. I assume
that imagery really is evoked in the minds of hearers/readers by the words used and that it is
consciously experienced in some cases of metaphor (and other uses of language). I suggest
that, at most, the images evoked may play a heuristic role in metaphor understanding, by
making certain properties associated with the metaphor vehicle highly salient. However,
even if the role of imagery in understanding a metaphor is quite limited, it may be imagistic
effects (as distinguished from cognitive effects) that make a metaphor especially pleasing,
apt and memorable.
Terence Cave (St. John’s College Oxford)
Towards a Passing Theory of Metaphor: Some Literary Examples
The relations between metaphor and other figures can be considered pragmatically through
examples where different figures (metaphor, metonymy, simile, catachresis etc.) interact
incrementally in the same utterance. This occurs in everyday speech, but the most complex
and arguably the most interesting cases occur in literary writing, especially poetry. These
examples support the view that there is no precise borderline between “figurative” and
“literal” language; that the borderlines between different kinds of figures are often eroded in
practice; and that the general underlying principle of such usage is inventive word coinage or
extension: lexical generation constrained by contextual association.
Tim Chesters (Clare College Cambridge)
The Lingering of the Literal in Some Poems of Emily Dickinson
The phrase ‘the lingering of the literal’ originates with Robyn Carston, and the model that
she and Catherine Wearing, building on earlier work by Sperber and Wilson, have begun to
develop for metaphor comprehension. Theirs is a dual model, in which two alternative
processing modes are seen to operate depending on the context. Mode 1 is ‘ad-hoc’ concept
construction, where hearers derive speaker-intended propositional meaning by narrowing or
broadening the encoded concept (or both) on the usual presumption of optimal relevance,
discarding any irrelevant literal or encoded content as they go. In contrast, the ‘lingering of
the literal’ is itself a suggestively metaphorical description of what happens in Mode 2, in
which literal components of a metaphorical utterance remain in the foreground. This paper
will revisit some of this theory and suggest a subdivision of the ‘lingering of the literal’ into
two distinct types: the ‘metarepresented’ and the ‘reactivated’ literal. In the shorter second
section, evidence for this distinction will be sought in the verse of Emily Dickinson. The
overall aim is not to propose some radical refinement to Carston’s model, and still less a new
model, but to offer a literary-critical perspective on this work in RT, and suggest some
further avenues of research.
Mitchell Green (University of Connecticut)
Imagery, Expression, and Figurative Meaning
Metaphorical utterances are construed as arrayed along a continuum, on one end of which
are semi-conventionalized cases amenable to analysis in terms of semantic content, speaker
meaning, and satisfaction conditions, and where image-construction is permissible but not
mandatory. I call these image-permitting metaphors (IPM’s), and contrast them with imagedemanding metaphors (IDM’s) inhabiting the continuum’s other end and whose
understanding mandates the construction of a mental image. This construction, we suggest,
is spontaneous, is not restricted to visual imagery, and its result is typically somatically
marked sensu Damasio. IDM’s may accordingly be used in service of self-expression, and
thereby in the elicitation of empathy. Even so, IDM’s may also be vehicles of speaker
meaning, and may reasonably provoke banter over the aptness of the imagery they evoke.
Bipin Indurkhya (Jagiellonian University)
Preliminary Results from Two Brain-Imaging Studies on Visual Metaphors
We will present results from two different brain-imaging studies on visual metaphors. In the
first study, which is based on fMRI, we found significant activation in temporal lobe during
visual metaphor comprehension, thereby suggesting that linguistic or symbolic resources are
required to interpret visual metaphors. We also found that brain areas related to visuo-spatial,
verbal memory and imagery are activated during visual metaphor comprehension. In
comparing activation levels in the left and right hemispheres, we found that Putamen in the
left hemisphere was significantly activated for the visual metaphors, but in the right
hemisphere for verbal metaphors. Our results suggest that in order to make sense of
seemingly anomalous juxtaposition, whether in language or in images, all different
modalities, visual, sensor motor, linguistic, and their associated knowledge is brought into
play.
In the second study, based on the ERP response to homospatial/integrated metaphors,
we found that, similar to verbal metaphors, incongruous images, when interpreted
metaphorically evoked the N400 effect. Interestingly, they also evoked the P600 effect.
These observations suggest two interesting conclusions. First, visual metaphors, like verbal
metaphors, result from detecting semantic anomaly; this finding supports the pragmatic view
on metaphor processing and suggests that images too are interpreted metaphorically only
when the literal interpretation fails. Second, our results also indicate that visual metaphor,
especially the processing of integrated or homospatial visual metaphor, might be different
from verbal metaphor and is mediated by the analysis of goal-related requirements because
of the explicit structural incongruity.
Raphael Lyne (Murray Edwards College, Cambridge)
Speakers and Hearers
I will explore why a speaker/intention-receiver/inference model of metaphor does not fit
easily with the ways in which many literary critics have learned to think. I'll suggest that the
‘speaker’ of a metaphor in a literary work might not be treated as a distinct or discrete thing;
and I’ll suggest something similar about the ‘reader / hearer / receiver’ of a poem. (The
example I’ll use is Robert Herrick’s ‘Corinna’s Going A-Maying’.) The goal will be to
develop an interdisciplinary conversation with possibilities on both sides.
Catherine Wearing (Wellesley College)
Where are the images?
It is widely claimed that there is something importantly imagistic about metaphors. Indeed,
they are perhaps the canonical figure of speech. But it remains rather unclear what this
imagistic aspect of metaphor amounts to. One way it has found expression is in the idea that
understanding a metaphor crucially involves seeing one thing as another. In this talk, I will
argue that this way of capturing the imagistic aspect of metaphor – for all its centrality – is
not yet sufficient. Instead, we must also look more carefully at the role of the images
themselves which many metaphors provoke.
Deirdre Wilson (CSMN, Oslo, and University College London)
Metaphor, Imagery and Relevance