Metaphor. Tony Veale
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in the target domain, then what we mean by a literal paraphrase is a target-domain paraphrase. This distinction, although perhaps obvious, is an important one. After all, many metaphors—such as negative metaphors—are literally true. In the case of negative metaphors such as “I am not Superman,” “Money does not grow on trees,” and “Your father is not an ATM,” the surface meaning from the source-domain of each is literally true and just as informative as the corresponding metaphor, but it cannot usefully be taken as a literal paraphrase of the metaphor. Likewise, a paraphrase that merely transforms a metaphor into a simile—such as “it’s like my car drinks gasoline”—may yield a reformulation that is literally true, but it does nothing to shift the focus of our attention to the relevant area of the target-domain. (The relation of metaphor to simile, and the ability to expand/compress/paraphrase one as the other, is the subject of ongoing debate; see e.g., Glucksberg and Haught [2006]; Utsumi [2007]; and Barnden [2012] for a flavor of this debate.) In other words, it is not the literalness of a paraphrase that makes it a useful guide to a metaphor, but its literalness with respect to the target domain.
Because concise metaphors are often the most under-specified, they frequently offer the most open-ended interpretations and require the most complex target-domain paraphrases. Indeed, this richness of possible paraphrases may not be an accidental feature of metaphor but a driving force in its interpretation. Utsumi [2007, 2011] refers to this richness as the interpretative diversity of a metaphor. Utsumi argues that listeners often choose an interpretation strategy (such as, e.g., a comparison of source to target, or a categorization of the target under a category suggested by the source) that increases the diversity of the resulting interpretation. Consider the metaphor “wishes are children” from the musical Into The Woods. This metaphor, coupled with the narrative context in which it is used—a fairy-tale world in which wishes come true with unexpected consequences—can evoke a diversity of more-or-less mutually consistent thoughts about wishes and their fulfillment, which might be paraphrased thus: “wishes are born of our deepest desires;” “wishes have lives of their own and grow to follow their own paths;” “wishes can bring us pain as well as joy;” “we give life to our wishes and so are responsible for their consequences;” etc. Related figurative phenomena, such as metonymy, may also play a role in paraphrasing a metaphor. For instance, one might consider wishes to be the stuff of childish optimism, and thus consider wish-makers to be child-like in their approach to life. Childless couples often wish for children, and so their wishes—when they come true, as in the case of one sub-plot of Into The Woods—actually become children. However, for Davidson at least, the metaphor means just what it says on the surface: that is, in truth-conditional terms, for every wish w there exists a child c such that w = c. As such, none of those prior statements is a paraphrase of the metaphor, rather they are a prior justification for it or a posterior response to it.
Davidson’s injunction against “attempt[s] to give literal expression to the content of [a] metaphor” further reminds us that metaphor is never reducible to a literal restatement, no matter how detailed that restatement may be. This fact is tautological in its obviousness, for, by definition, any literal restatement is not a metaphor, does not resonate with the same semantic tension as a metaphor, does not tease and thrill with the same ambiguity and under-specification as a metaphor, and does not pose a comparable challenge to our conceptual systems. Moreover, any literal restatement is not a paraphrase of the actual meaning of the metaphor, but a paraphrase of just one interpretation. The meaning of a metaphor resides not in a single authoritative interpretation, but in a whole space of possible interpretations. The indeterminacy and interpretative diversity of metaphor lends it an elasticity that cannot be captured in literal language. No matter how detailed our paraphrase, a metaphor always holds out the promise of more—more detail, more mappings, more associations—if we would only deepen our search. Finally, a paraphrase does not propose the same conceptual pact to an audience, and so is unable to serve the same communicative role as the metaphor it replaces.
One important communicative role that is not captured by an explicit paraphrase is plausible deniability, wherein a speaker uses metaphor to communicate a tendentious claim, and subsequently appeals to the ambiguity of metaphor to deflect criticism if this claim is ill-received by an audience. Consider the case of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was challenged on his alleged record of sexism by FOX-News reporter Megyn Kelly during the first televised GOP debate in 2015. Trump rebutted the charge and complained of mistreatment at the hands of the debate moderators, later claiming in an interview that “you could see there was blood coming out of her [Kelly’s] eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Many commentators in the media took Trump’s comments to be a potent mixture of metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, and bombast. Although Trump painted a picture of a woman possessed by a demon, bleeding uncontrollably from every orifice, and thus lacking control over her own physical and mental state, his under-specified reference to a woman bleeding from “her wherever” was widely taken to be a metonymic reference to menstruation. Trump, it was claimed, was simply giving new form to the old charge that a woman who behaves aggressively to a man must be in the irrational grip of premenstrual tension. In a daring move, Trump was seemingly fighting charges of sexism with more sexism, yet when pressed on the matter, he defended himself with this tweet: “Re Megyn Kelly quote: ‘you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever’ (NOSE). Just got on w/thought.” He elaborated further in a subsequent statement, claiming that “Only a deviant would think anything else.” Although we can debate Trump’s actual intentions for his blood metaphor, it does seem that its non-literal under-specification was an essential part of its communicative function, allowing Trump to push a provocative idea into the public sphere while denying that this idea was ever part of his intended message. Another issue with literal paraphrases then is that they sometimes render in plain speech an opinion that was never intended to be plainly expressed or openly interrogated in the first place.
Yet, for all this, there is little to be gained from being a radical skeptic on the matter of literal restatement. Paraphrases may be necessarily imperfect, but they possess a practical utility for researchers and speakers alike. For, in establishing a conceptual pact, a metaphorical utterance may prompt a listener to produce a paraphrase in response, as the listener’s own contribution to the construction of a joint meaning space. By doing so, the listener may propose a particular reading of a metaphor that enriches and elaborates upon the speaker’s own viewpoint. In effect, this exchange of paraphrases serves to align the understanding of both speaker and listener, and allows each to arrive at a deeper appreciation of a metaphor. For similar reasons, and for others that are distinctly computational, the ability to produce a literal paraphrase of a figurative statement is also of some practical value in a computational setting. Not only does paraphrasing allow a computer to explain its interpretation of a metaphor, in a way that allows users to detect a failure of interpretation, it also allows a computer to directly assign a semantic representation to a metaphor that is consistent with the system’s own axioms, so that then it can reason safely about the metaphor’s contents. Indeed, in a wide range of NLP systems—such as for sentiment analysis, information retrieval and extraction, question answering, and summarization—literal paraphrasing can support a perfectly adequate approach to metaphor meaning that is just as deep as the system’s treatment of literal texts and literal meanings.
As shown in our earlier discussion of the metaphor “wishes are children,” we need not limit ourselves to purely literal statements when paraphrasing a metaphor, and so, perhaps, neither should our NLP systems. The value of any paraphrase lies in its ability to explain a challenging turn of phrase using more conventional and less taxing language. This is so whether the text to be paraphrased uses the non-literal language of poetry or the literal language of legalistic jargon (as found, say, in a legal contract or a patent application). Indeed, the latter demonstrates that the most natural and most useful paraphrase is not always the most literal, and less challenging forms of figurative expression, such as a familiar conventional metaphor, may better convey the intended meaning of a metaphor. For example, when paraphrasing a metaphorical description of a wine as “muscular,” it is more helpful than not to exploit the conventional if metaphorical view of wines as possessing a “body.” Or consider the metaphor “to