Metaphor, Literal Meaning, and Conversational Implicature

Abstract

In the paper I analyse Grice’s theory of conversational implicature which is the key to an interpretation of figurative meaning: we often use sentences to implicate or convey a piece of information that transcends the (literal) meaning of a sentences, though in so doing we do not cease to observe the Cooperative Principle. This type of sentences also includes metaphors. Recently an allegedly Gricean theory of metaphor has been put forward which claims that this something more that is communicated is the literal meaning of the conversational implicature generated by the metaphorical expression rather than a new, metaphorical, meaning. The metaphorical expression is simply an ordinary, literal, sentence, which (with its utterance and context) invokes an additional proposition (conversational implicature) in us. The central part of my paper is aimed at proving that the aforementioned theory of metaphor contradicts both the letter and the spirit of Grice’s theory, as it ignores the role that intentionality has in Grice’s semantics. In addition, the theory is prone to be subjected to the objection that a metaphor involves some sort of a semantic deviation: first we have to grasp the literal meaning of the sentence, and only after we realise that the literal meaning is inappropriate in a specific context, do we begin to look for the metaphorical (or, in our case, for another literal) meaning. Experiments have been carried out which prove that this model of interpreting a metaphor is psychologically unrealistic. At the end of the paper I propose the theory of metaphor which I believe is compatible with Gricean semantics. To support it, I make use of the concepts of formality and dictiveness used by Grice in his later works, and I make an attempt to prove that this kind of theory of metaphor can avoid the reproach of being a two-step account.