In recent years, figurative modes of speaking and thinking have become a central issue for scholars engaged in the study of cognition and communication. A cursory glance at the research work carried in the last few decades reveals that figurative language has emerged as one of the most captivating topics of discussion and reflection in disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy, education and many more. These studies also suggest that scholars have started realizing the epistemic significance of figurative language since this mode of expression in essence comes into being because of the structuration and remodelling of the reality. It is born out of the perceptual ground that simultaneously accounts for the subjective expression and interpersonal communication.
It is the very change in the function of language that necessitates the figurative use of figurative language to change as Valery put it, "The walking of prose to the dancing of poetry', or as Wheelwright voiced it, from the heterogeneous elements of language to the 'cooperative fusion of meaning'. The most revealing finding came through the work of Pollio and his associates: The Poetics of Growth (1977), which convincingly demonstrated how figurative modes of communication constitute the basic and prevalent form of scientific discourse and text.
Metaphors and other figures of speech have been crucial topics of investigation by literary scholars, rhetoricians and philosophers; however, it is only recently that linguists have started taking interest in its intricate problems. Now many linguists have raised doubts on the Aristotelian view of figurative language as a decorative device employed primarily by poets, or, Quintillian's theory of substitution. They rejected all non-functional approaches to the study of figurative language language that reduced metaphor and other forms of figure to a mere stylistic accessory. It is true that earlier attempts of linguists to deal with such a vital phenomenon of language creativity were fragmentary and restrictive in approach and application. Linguists soon realised that for a more integrative approach to the study of metaphor they have to enlarge the domain of linguistic enquiry by taking into account cognitive and communicative aspects of the verbal phenomenon. Lakoff and Johnson's significant work: Metaphor We Live By (1980) and Lakoff's: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (1987) provide not only an integrated view of metaphor in which actions, events and objects are comprehended in terms of experiential gestalts, but even implicitly questions other linguistic theories of metaphor based exclusively on the formal properties of language or restricted to the violations of selection restrictions. In fact, metaphor is a test case for competing hypotheses concerning language, cognition and communication.
The author of this book pinpoints first the inadequacies of the present models, linguistic as well as non-linguistic, to study the intrinsic property of figurative language. He has then pursued a sociolinguistic approach for the analysis and understanding of the intrinsic relationship that connects metaphor and metonymy to communication and cognition. The Model helps him to integrate verbal and nonverbal signs, personal and communicative expressions, sentence-symbols and symbols in art and art, symbols and aesthetic symbols into a single interpretative strategy. Based on this model, methodological postulates have been evolved and applied to English and Hindi texts to show its operational efficiency and to reveal the intrinsic characteristics of metaphor and metonymy.
I am confident that the present study on the nature and functioning of figurative language in general, and metaphorical and metonymic expressions in particular, will help scholars interested in the area to understand and appreciate the ever-creative use of language in day-to-day communication as well as in literary discourse.
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