| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 跨文化研究所語言學碩士班 === 101 === According to Marcel Danesi, the term metaphor itself a metaphor, just like this paper is a metaphorical analysis of metaphors. What is a metaphor? A reasonable answer is offered as follows:
meta = beyond
pherein = to carry ,
metaphor = carry beyond
It is a well known fact that the word, metaphor, was coined by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE), who saw it as poetic license. Take the notion of life. How would one answer the question "What is life?" As Aristotle knew, there is no literal way to answer this question satisfactorily. Therefore, one must jump, not a physical jump but a mental jump, try to move away from the literal restriction, semantically speaking, to explore into rich land of abstraction. Aware of this, we have to be a poet ourselves in order to understand why we talk about jumps regarding our research topics.
Therefore, “jump” is our key concept, our m e t a p h o r.
An ordinary person would come up with something just as inventive. He or she might say something such as "life is a stage" or “life is a dream”. This is a jump, a mental jump which we have just discussed. A jump from source domain to target domain. In our case, stage and dream is source domain.
From there, we try to jump beyond to target domain. Stage and dream are metaphor, standing for a mental jump, which is like standing long jump in order to catch an illusive abstract idea: life.
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