L.

JONATHAN COHEN AND AVISHAI MARGALIT

THE ROLE OF INDUCTIVE INTERPRETATION

REASONING OF METAPHOR

IN THE

According to most current theories the semantics of a natural language should be focussed quite sharply on to the task of describing literal meanings. Metaphor, on this view, is either a pathological phenomenon that any account of normal language is right to disregard, or a rare and specialised extension of language, as in poetry, that can safely be left on one side for later analysis while the main task of explicating literal meaning proceeds. Yet this conception of semantics is false to the realities of the situation, in at least three respects. First, so far as synchronic linguistics is concerned, native speakers often move from literal to metaphorical speech, and back again, without any sense of strain or any bizarrenessreactions in their hearers. Consider, for example, a conversation in which the following sequences of sentences are uttered: Has the producer secured any new talent? Yes, Rosemary has swallowed his bait. or There is no fire burning in his belly. Yes, he is a rather uninteresting person. It is altogether counter-intuitive to write off the metaphors here as being in any way aberrant or abnormal modes of speech. Secondly, so far as diachronic linguistics is concerned, the importance of metaphor as a source of new dictionary meanings is well-known. But why should one suppose that, when metaphor operates thus as a causal factor in semantic change, it operates from outside, as it were? It is much more plausible to see the death of a dead metaphor as a readjustment, or boundary-shift, within language. For then the description of what has happened falls squarely within the history of the language, and the power of metaphor to cause semantic change becomes more intelligible. Thirdly, so far as Synthese 21 (1970) 469-487. All Rights Reserved Copyright 1970 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland

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the psycholinguistics of language-learning is concerned the picture is grotesquely falsified if metaphor is regarded as a special form of linguistic sophistication. Children do not learn to speak metaphorically as a kind of crowning achievement in the apprenticeship of language-learning. Rather they use metaphors naturally from infancy onwards, and have gradually to learn - with respect to each noun, verb, adjective or adverb - how to speak literally. 'The car shouted at me', says the child. 'No, it hooted at you', corrects the parent. It is psychogenetically more illuminating to view literal patterns of word-use as the result of imposing certain restrictions on metaphorical ones, than to view metaphorical patterns as the results of removing certain restrictions from literal ones. The deliberate utterance of metaphor, in the awareness that it is such, is no doubt a phenomenon of adult parole. But metaphorical sentences are as much part of the langue that children acquire as are non-metaphorical ones. One condition of adequacy, therefore, for the semantic component of a linguistic theory is that it should elucidate the nature of the bond that links metaphorical to literal meaning within the structure of a natural language. In this paper we shall suggest that such an elucidation can be achieved by an appropriate account of the role that has to be played by inductive reasoning in regard to statements about meaning in natural languages. But we shall not attempt even to outline a complete theory of semantics. Our object is solely to show, by means of certain philosophically idealised reconstructions, how inductive logic can help to clarify the problem of metaphor. So we shall develop, first, a brief summary of what we take to be the main features of inductive logic, together with some applications of these to the compilation of dictionary entries, and secondly, in terms of all this, we shall sketch an explication of metaphorical meaning. It is worth noting at the outset, however, that one important consequence follows directly from the adequacy condition that we have just mentioned. Specifically, from the requirement that an adequate linguistic theory should explicate the nature of the bond that links metaphorical to literal meaning within the structure of a natural language, it follows that such a theory cannot assume that the meanings of lexical items are invariant under the process of semantic composition. A reductio ad absurdum argument, in six stages, suffices to show this:

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0)

(ii)

(iii) (iv) (v)

(vi)

Assume, as is commonly assumed in componential semantics, 1 that the meaning of a sentence is a componential function of a selection of just those meanings of its lexical items that are described in the dictionary. Then, as a consequence of (i), if metaphorical meanings occur in a sentence, they must be described in the dictionary. It is an accepted convention that the dictionary should record existing patterns of word-use, not anticipate new ones. It is a truism that the most striking metaphors are the ones that have never been used before. It follows from (iii) and (iv) that some metaphors that may be found in the sentences of a language cannot be recorded in the dictionary. Since (ii) and (v) are inconsistent with one another, (i) must be rejected.

What is essential to recognise is that the" novelty of a metaphor in speech no more constitutes it an innovation in the language than the fact that a sentence has never been uttered before constitutes its utterance a product of syntactic change. Any language, synchronically considered, contains an infinite potential for new metaphor, just as it contains an infinite potential for new sentences. It follows that metaphorical meanings can no more be listed in a dictionary than can sentences. So if the metaphorical meanings of lexical items contribute to the overall meanings of some sentences, these lexical items must be conceived to take on their meanings in those sentences in a way that is integral to the processes of semantic composition. And if the meanings of words that occur metaphorically are thus not invariant under semantic composition it is natural to suppose that literal meanings are also liable to be affected by this process. The difference between literal and metaphorical meaning will lie in the nature of the modification that takes place in each case. We seek to show how these modifications can be described in terms of the underlying inductive structure of semantic reasoning. Indeed we conceive the investigation of meanings in a natural language to involve an essential stage of inductive enquiry in which correlations are established between certain occurrences of certain words and the presence of certain circumstances. Knowledge of meanings can never be

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satisfactorily understood if it is conceived solely in terms of an ability to map readings on to sentences. When a child learns the meanings of sentences in his native language, or a linguist those of sentences in a foreign language, he acquires an ability that no mere paraphrase-machine ever possesses - viz. an ability to match sentences with appropriate circumstances.
II

We take inductive support to be a type of timeless relation between propositions which is gradable or rankable but not measurable. 2 That is to say: the inductive support-function appropriate to a particular field of enquiry maps ordered pairs of propositions on to the first n integers that are greater than or equal to zero. Suppose first a set of propositions that is closed under the relation of material similarity to one another - i.e., under the relation of similarity in subject-matter to one another - where this similarity is determined by a list, or characterisation, of the nonlogical expressions that may occur in such propositions. Next suppose a list of relevant variables for these propositions, i.e., a list of all sets of mutually exclusive circumstances (not describable in the terminology that determines the set of materially similar propositions) such that, for each set of circumstances, variation from any one of its circumstances let us call them its 'variants' - to some other makes a difference to the joint satisfaction of the antecedent and consequent of some universally quantified conditional that is a member of the set of materially similar propositions. E.g., the set of circumstances in-the-mating-season/out-ofthe-mating-season is a relevant variable for hypotheses about birds' plumage. Then, given any suitable well-ordering for the list of relevant variables, one can conceive a hierarchy of tests, of cumulatively increasing thoroughness, for any member of the set of materially similar propositions that is testable in structure, i.e., for any member that is a universally quantified conditional, and contingent, with a contingent antecedent and consequent, and so on. In test t~ (the null case) one does not yet use this list of relevant variables but seeks joint satisfaction of the antecedent and consequent of the tested proposition under appropriate variations of any variable that is mentioned (or has a variant that is mentioned) in the antecedent. In test t2 one operates every possible combination of these variations with variations of the first variable in the list of relevant vari-

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ables; in test t a one operates every possible combination with variations of the first two variables in the list; and so on. In other words test tl is like an application of Mill's methods of difference or concomitant variations, and tests t 2, t3, ... t n are like more and more refined applications of his method of agreement alongside those other methods. So a report E, that states in effect that a proposition H has survived test ti, without being affected by any variant of a variable not manipulated in that test, may be conceived to give H and its logical consequences at least ith grade support: i.e., s [1t, E] >1i/n, where n is the total number of different tests. Correspondingly, if E states that H is falsified by ti (again without being affected by any variant of variables not manipulated in that test), then E cannot give H as much as ith grade support: i.e., s[H, E]<i/n. Moreover, if H is (or might be) falsified by test ti but not by ti_ 1, it is always possible to introduce an appropriate qualification into the antecedent of H so that the resultant hypothesis is immune to falsification by t~. Such a qualification would standardly consist in a restriction of the generalisation to some specified variant of the relevant variable of which another variant is responsible for H's falsification, or in an insertion of the proviso that no variant of this variable has any effect. Indeed it is possible to grade the simplicity of a hypothesis in inverse ratio to the number of such qualifications that are introduced. Then for every assessment of how well E inductively supports H there will be a precisely equivalent assessment of how simple a hypothesis resembling H can be if it is to be fully supported by E. Also, the less simple the hypothesis becomes, the shorter is the statement of evidence that is needed to give it full support. Indeed a hypothesis that is qualified in relation to every relevant variable (e.g., a hypothesis that is required to hold good only under certain well understood laboratory conditions) can be fully supported by a single evidential instance (e.g., the outcome of a single experiment). Now the semantical content of an ideal dictionary for theoretical purposes may be viewed as a set of heavily qualified inductive hypotheses that are fully supported by reports of available evidence. If the dictionary is conceived as a part of a linguist's synchronic description of a natural language, the evidence will normally be constituted by the (presumably non-metaphorical) utterances of native speakers under sustained interrogation in appropriate circumstances or under self-interrogation (i.e.,

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introspection). If instead the dictionary is conceived of as a part of the competence that is ingested by an ideal native speaker through the processes of language-learning, then the evidence will be constituted by the (presumably non-metaphorical) utterances and reactions of adult speakers in appropriate circumstances. The relevant variables will be those sets of mutually exclusive circumstances which are such that variation from one circumstance to another within the same set sometimes falsifies a hypothesis about the meaning of a word or morpheme. What precise structure should these hypotheses be conceived to have? In order to simplify our account of them we shall assume here the availability of some bidirectional categorial grammar like that outlined by Lyons z. We conceive such a grammar to afford descriptions of deep structures only, and to require supplementation by transformational rules in order to afford syntactic descriptions of surface structures. But we choose a categorial representation of deep syntax rather than an equivalent 4 phrase-structure representation because of certain advantages (which will emerge in what follows) so far as semantic composition is concerned. We shall take a lexical item to be individuated by its phonological form and syntactic category, so that the different literal meanings of a polyseme would all be described, ideally, by a single dictionary entry. We shall concern ourselves here, however, only with the meanings of nouns, verbs (other than the copula), adjectives, adverbs and prepositions, since it would confuse the present issue if we were to go beyond what is necessary for an explication of the fundamental nature of metaphor. For the same reason we shall not concern ourselves here with the transformational rules that would be needed, in a complete grammar, to supplement our postulated categorial syntax, nor shall we concern ourselves at all with the semantics of token-reflexive words or of nondeclarative sentences (such as performatives, interrogatives or imperatives). For this reason also we shall illustrate our arguments only by very simple, syntactically univocal examples, and we shall take all our examples from standard English. We shall make considerable use of the concept of an 'occurrence' of a phrase or dictionary item. The same expression will be said to have different occurrences so far as it has different linguistic settings. But we shall not concern ourselves here with differences of occurrence that are determined by socio-physical settings. An unmodified occurrence of a

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word or phrase W is an occurrence of W in a sentence that contains no other noun, verb, adjective, adverb or preposition outside W, as typically in a sentence that does nothing but indicate an instance of what W names or describes, e.g., This is a cat (for the noun cat), This is black (for the adjective black) or This is running (for the verb run). Thus at the theoretical limit of simplicity - which in practice is far too simple to be of any use in the dictionary - a semantical hypothesis of the kind with which we are concerned would have the structure of (1) For any x and any y, if x is an unmodified occurrence of the word-form W that belongs to the syntactic category C, then x names or describes y.

where the values of x and y constitute the whole domain of human discourse. The relevant variables for our dictionary hypotheses will then be those variables which are such that variation from one variant to another (other circumstances being the same) sometimes falsifies a hypothesis like (1). Some of these semantically relevant variables will have variants that affect objects, e.g., the size variable, the colour variable, the shape variable, or the live/dead variable. Others will have variants that primarily affect events or processes, e.g., fast/medium-speed/slow, or harmful/beneficial/neutral. Yet others will have variants that primarily affect characteristics, e.g., temporary/permanent. And some variables w~ill affect everything, e.g., possessor of first-order characteristics/possessor of second-order characteristics/etc. (We assume the normal logical hierarchy whereby events, substances and objects possess first-order characteristics, first-order characteristics possess second-order ones, and so on.) These relevant variables for semantical hypotheses correspond to, though they are considerably more numerous than, what Aristotle called the categories of being. Indeed most semantic theories have worked with some such notion as that of a semantic category or distinctive feature classification. What we emphasise here is the fact that such a notion is not a peculiar and sui generis element of semantics, but just the local manifestation of a concept that is integral to the methodology of inductive enquiry in any field whatever - viz. the concept of a relevant variable. Correspondingly there is no need to restrict each mode of classification to a binary choice, as in a Jakobsonian distinctive feature

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matrix. An inductively relevant variable, whether in semantics or elsewhere, may have any finite number of variants. An accepted list of semantically relevant variables vl, Vz.... may be given at least a partial ordering by the number of different hypotheses like (1) that are falsified by variations of v~ in a corpus of interrogations of native speakers, and where two or more variables score the same number of falsifications the corpus may be extended until a well-ordering is achieved for them. The evidence of such a corpus may also be expected to show - or to be capable of an extension that will show - how far each hypothesis like (1) needs to be qualified, in respect of the semantically relevant variables, in order to achieve a fully supported version. For a univocal dictionary item the required qualification will consist in the specification, in respect of each variable v~ that causes trouble, either of an appropriate disjunction of one or more variants of v~ that exclude the falsificatory variant or variants, or of a proviso that the situation is unaffected by any variant of v~, as in, e.g., (2) For any x and any y, if x is an unmodified occurrence of the word-form ship, that belongs to the syntactic category n, and y is a possessor of first-order characteristics, and mobile, and either aquatic or aerial, and unaffected by the live/dead variable, etc. etc., then x names or describes y

where no qualification is needed in respect of, say, the size or colour variables) Now (1) may be regarded as showing the limiting structure of the hypothesis which an investigator sets out with ab initio, is trying to discover the meaning of a single word from a corpus of interrogations of native speakers; and (2) might then appear to be an example of the kind of hypothesis at which he eventually arrives. Indeed, up to a point an investigator may well profit by confining his attention, so far as he can, to unmodified occurrences, as in (2), since without an extensive knowledge of other words it will be quite difficult to ascertain the meaning of ship by studying what features are present or absent when a native speaker is brought to say This is a toy ship, This" is a model ship, This is a wrecked ship, or This is a sailing ship. But there are three reasons why a semantical hypothesis like (2) cannot be regarded as a paradigm dictionary entry. First, there will be many occasions on which an investigator finds it

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necessary to investigate the meanings of modified rather than unmodified occurrences. For example, in the case of an adverb there must always be something that is being expressly stated as happening or being done in the manner described by the adverb. Secondly, it will often be convenient to investigate modified occurrences in order to obtain a sufficient range of evidence or to make use of what is already known about other words. Thirdly, most occurrences of words in sentences are not unmodified ones. So a hypothesis like (2) would be relatively useless as a dictionary entry. It follows that a paradigm dictionary entry for the noun ship would not take the form of (2) but rather of (3) For any x and any y, if x is an occurrence of the word-form

ship that belongs to the syntactic category n, and y is a

possessor of first-order characteristics, and mobile, and either aquatic or aerial, and unaffected by the live/dead variable, etc. etc., and y is not excluded by any modifier of x, then x names or describes y where an occurrence of a noun, verb, adjective, adverb or preposition, or of a phrase of any of these types, is said to be a modifier of another occurrence of a noun, verb, adjective, adverb or preposition if both occurrences are in the same sentence. What has been proposed so far, however, is a structure for dictionary entries that relate to univocal items, like the noun ship. For a polyseme, like bank or carriage, a more complex structure is obviously involved. A large disjunction has to be inserted into the second half of the antecedent, as in (4) For any x and any y, if x is an occurrence of the word-form W that belongs to the syntactic category C, and y is EITHER V~, and 1/i, and unaffected by v3, etc. etc., OR V(, and unaffected by v2, and V~, etc. etc., OR etc. etc., and y is not excluded by any modifier of x, then x names or describes y,

where V~ and V~ name variants of vl, and VI and V~ name variants of v2 and v3, respectively. N o r should it be supposed that hypotheses like (3) and (4) can always be established in a fully determinate form with conclusive certainty. It has to be borne in mind that the meanings of most words in a natural

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language possess what Waismann called 'open texture', 6 so that for any given semantical hypothesis like (3) or (4) one may some day encounter a borderline situation that is under-determined by the hypothesis. For example, is a hovercraft a ship or not? If one wants to say that it is not a ship, it looks as though there must be some semantic variable of hitherto undetected relevance, such as the presence/absence of support by the medium through which travel is effected. Now certainly the once unsuspected existence, and later discovery, of hidden variables is a familiar phenomenon in all fields of scientific enquiry, 7 and especially when investigating a rather exotic language a linguist will often not feel confident that he has discovered all the semantically relevant variables. So if a dictionary hypothesis is formulated in a fully determinate form, the inductive support for it may never be gradable as more than n/e where test tn is the most thorough test that is known and t e (with the value of e unknown) is the most thorough test possible. Of course if n < e and grades of inductive support are thought of as probabilities, the multiplicationlaw for conjoint probabilities might then produce an implausibly low grade of inductive support for the dictionary as a whole, since many thousands of its entries, or individual hypotheses, will be independent of one another on the evidence of a particular corpus - especially where the corpus contains many unmodified occurrences. But it can be shown that, if grade of inductive support is assessed by the method of relevant variables, it conforms to the principle If s [H2, E]>~s[H 1, E], then s[H2 & H 1, E]=s[H 1, E] and that for this and other reasons grade of inductive support is not only not a probability but not even any function of probabilities. 8 And in any case there is always a way of ensuring full support for a dictionary hypothesis that has been qualified in accordance with the evidence available at a fairly advanced stage of investigation. All that is needed is the insertion of a proviso that the hypothesis is intended to apply 'in normal circumstances' or 'certeris paribus', and full support is bought, as it were, at the price of full determinateness. Even so the hypothesis will often be a very lengthy one. The meanings of many words in a natural language are immensely rich, and it is often impracticable (especially where a word does not belong to a closed and interconnected group, like the vocabulary of family relations,) to draw a sharp line between what a

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native speaker knows about the meaning of a word and what he knows about the things or situations which he would use the word to describe.
III

It will be remembered that in a categorial grammar the operation of so-called 'cancellation', which reduces a sentence's concatenation of morpheme categories to 1;, determines in the process an asymmetrical relation of dependence within pairs of constituents. E.g., in terms of Lyons's own example we can write the categorial classification of a sentence's lexical items underneath them, thus:
Poor John ran away

(n;,)

((1;

Then in order to produce just t; at the end, poor has to cancel with John and ran with away, and then poor John with ran away. At each stage the constituent with the more complex classification is to be regarded as the dependent constituent, and the one with the less complex classification as the independent one. A categorial description of the deep structure of a sentence may therefore be taken to afford a sufficient guide to the sentence's successive stages of semantic composition, so far as the deep structure is concerned. At the first stage, where pairs of individual lexical items are involved, the dictionary entry for the dependent constituent is incorporated into the dictionary entry for the independent constituent, in the case of each pair, with appropriate alterations being made to one or other or both of the two hypotheses, and a semantical hypothesis thus becomes available for each phrase formed by two such constituents. At the next and all subsequent stages this procedure is repeated, with the semantical hypothesis for the dependent constituent being incorporated into the semantical hypothesis or dictionary entry for the independent constituent, until finally a single semantical hypothesis emerges for the sentence as a whole (as far as its deep structure is concerned). This final hypothesis will not need (except at the level of discourse analysis) to include any clause of the form 'and y is not excluded by any modifier of x'. E.g., in the case of Poor John ran away, what we get are, first, hypotheses about anything's being named or described by poor John if

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it has certain characteristics, and about anything's being named or described by ran away if it has certain characteristics, and, secondly, a hypothesis about anything's being named or described by the sentence Poor John ran away if it has certain characteristics. In the process of carrying out such incorporations five different types of alteration may need to be made to one or other or both of the two hypotheses that are being amalgamated. First, there may be alterations that are necessary for disambiguating the two constituents, so far as such an alteration is determined by either or both of them. This type of alteration would normally take the form of eliminating one or more major disjuncts from the antecedent of one or both of the hypotheses. For example, the dictionary entry for the noun bank will no doubt have a disjunctive antecedent, as in (4). But the disjunct for the sense in which a bank is a financial institution (as distinct from the building that houses one) will presumably include some such restriction as 'and unaffected by the colour variable'. So in composing the semantical hypothesis for the phrase green bank (so far as literal meaning alone is concerned) this disjunct must be wholly omitted, since green describes a variant of the colour variable. Similarly, the dictionary entry for the adjective fair will no doubt also have a disjunctive antecedent. But the disjunct for the sense in which fair contrasts with dark will presumably include some such restriction as 'and light-brown or offwhite'. So in composing the semantical hypothesis for the phrase fair price this disjunct must be wholly omitted, since the dictionary entry for price will presumably contain the restriction 'and unaffected by the colour variable'. In other cases, perhaps, it will be just a clash of variants that secures omission of one disjunct as in the difference between the sense of the noun minister in the vocabulary of politics and its sense in the vocabulary of religion. We do not underestimate the immense difficulty of filling in the etc.-clauses of (3) and (4) and constructing each dictionary entry in just the right way to achieve such disambiguations. But it can hardly be denied that where a native speaker feels no ambiguity in regard to a particular occurrence of a polyseme this must, ideally, be reflected in corresponding interrelationships between the dictionary entries concerned (so far as differences of occurrence are determined solely by linguistic, and not at all by socio-physical, settings). Secondly, once this operation of disambiguation has been carried out

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as far as is possible it is necessary to look at whether the hypotheses concern possessors of first-order characteristics, possessors of secondorder characteristics, and so on. In the simplest type of case, as with green bank or tall ship, both hypotheses concern possessors of first-order characteristics. Almost all that need be done in such a case is to conjoin the restrictions specified in the semantical hypothesis for the dependent constituent with the restrictions specified in the semantical hypothesis for the independent constituent. The latter hypothesis, thus altered, and with any duplications removed, and speaking of a phrase of the appropriate syntactic category, will then become the semantical hypothesis for the literal meaning of the phrase as a whole. Thirdly, however, there will be many cases, like ran away or dances beautifully 9 where the hypothesis for the dependent constituent concerns possessors of characteristics of the next higher order than those possessed by anything that the hypothesis for the independent constituent concerns. In such a case the restrictions specified in the former hypothesis will not be conjoined with those specified in the latter but inserted as a modification of them, i.e., 'and is V1 ~and V~ and.., and this conjunction of characteristics is VIk and...'. The same will hold for dependent constituents that apply polysemically either to possessors of first-order characteristics or to possessors of second-order characteristics or to possessors of thirdorder characteristics (e.g., useful, as in useful object, useful attribute, useful manner), or to those that apply equally well to the last two of these three or to others (e.g., very, as in very beautiful, very beautifully, etc.). In certain cases the restrictions specified in the hypothesis for the dependent constituent will need to be conjoined with those already inserted as a modification of the main restrictions specified in the hypothesis for the independent constituent, as in drives fast and skilfully. In other cases there will be a modification of the modification as in drives fast skilfully. In yet others the polysemy of the dependent constituent will generate an ambiguity in the compound phrase, as in beautiful dancer. Also, there will be cases where a lexical item may need to be displaced by the reversal, or quasi-reversal, of a transformation before its semantical role can be properly understood. E.g., The snow has fortunately melted needs to be understood as That the snow has melted is fortunate so that is fortunate can be seen to be the dependent constituent that modifies The snow has melted. But there are far too many such points of detail for us to discuss them all here.

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In a fourth kind of case the hypothesis for the dependent constituent can only have its restrictions incorporated into those for the independent constituent if one or more of the latter are deleted. Normally, for example, one would not call anything a ship unless it were capable of transporting people. But words like toy, model, etc. apply only to things that do not do what is normally done by things resembling them in most other respects. So under the use variable they enforce an alteration from, e.g., a mention of human transportation to a mention of children's play when the semantical hypothesis for the phrase toy ship is constructed. Fifthly, there will be a characteristic type of alteration that is necessitated in the case of metaphor. The metaphorical meanings of a word or phrase in a natural language are all contained, as it were, within its literal meaning or meanings. They are reached by removing any restrictions in relation to certain variables from the appropriate section or sections of its semantical hypothesis. For example, baby has as one of its metaphorical meanings the sense of very small of its kind: cf. baby airplane as against baby daughter. Here it is obviously the age and human/animal/artificial/ etc. variables that are being treated as if they imposed no restriction, while a restriction of size is still retained. Or if this is considered an example of already dead metaphor, consider That old man is a baby, where on the most straightforward interpretation the age and size variables are presumably being treated as if they imposed no restriction, and other attributes of babies are being ascribed, such as mental incapacity. Or consider our earlier example of the sentence The car ~houted at me. Here it is apparently just the human/animal/artificial/etc, variable which is being treated as if it imposed no restriction on the occurrence of shouted. If a child says this, he has not yet fully grasped the relevance of that variable: if an adult, he is momentarily ignoring it. Or consider The poor are the negroes of Europe, where - on a plausible metaphorical interpretation - the colour variable is presumably being treated as imposing no restriction, and other attributes of negroes are being ascribed, such as being underprivileged. Note that in all such cases the variable or variables that have their restrictions removed may be expected to be fairly near the beginning of the ordered sequence of relevant variables. Any such variable must be a fairly important one. Otherwise there would not be sufficient distance between the restricted meaning and the derestricted one for the latter to be regarded as metaphor.

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But it is essential to distinguish here between metaphorical meaning in the speech or utterances of a community, and metaphorical meaning in the sentences of its language. In speech it is knowledge of background facts or of the socio-physical context of utterance, along with certain presumptions of appropriateness, that helps a hearer to recognise whether the speaker intends a literal or a metaphorical meaning for a particular utterance of a word, phrase or sentence. But in a natural language almost every sentence is potentially ambiguous in one or other of two main ways so far as metaphor is concerned) and its complete semantical hypothesis can be correspondingly disjunctive. One way in which this happens is when a meaning is obtainable for the sentence quite straightforwardly by amalgamations of some of the first four kinds mentioned above. For example, Tom is just a baby is such a sentence, and it has both a literal meaning, declaring Tom to be an infant, and several metaphorical meanings, e.g., declaring Tom to be rather small, or to be mentally incapable, or not to have existed very long. Similarly The weather is stormy today either declares the state of the weather, with literal meanings for all its words, or declares the general outlook to be currently unfavourable, with metaphorical meanings for at least weather and stormy. The other main form of ambiguity is when a sentence's meaning is not obtainable quite straightforwardly by amalgamations of some of the first four kinds mentioned, because at some stage in the series of amalgamations that ends in the composition of the sentence there is a conflict between one or more restrictions in the semantical hypothesis for the dependent constituent and one or more restrictions in the semantical hypothesis for the independent one. An obvious example of this is That old man is a baby. But which hypothesis then defers to which? It is tempting at first to suggest that before amalgamation takes place the conflicting restrictions have to be removed in each case from the hypothesis for the dependent constituent. But though this may be the presumptive interpretation in speech, the presumption is rebuttable by the evidence of context etc. : some very young babies do look curiously like old men. The correct view seems to be that, in the language, the sentence That old man is a baby is ambiguous. Either its subject is literal and its predicate metaphorical, or vice versa. 11 Disambiguation is a matter for speech. And the same is true when dependent and independent consti-

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tuents do not both apply to possessors of first-order characteristics, as in the phrase a baby in politics. It should not be a cause for concern that our account of metaphor imputes so much ambiguity to the sentences and word-occurrences of a natural language. Rather, the literal-metaphorical ambiguity should be seen as a vitally important part of the semantic richness of natural language. It is comparable, in that respect, to the residual vagueness of all words that is most conspicuously apparent in their unmodified occurrences. Language exploits this vagueness by using it as a raw material for the various processes of modification that are represented by amalgamations of semantical hypotheses. Indeed such processes of modification could be regarded, within the framework of discourse analysis, as capable of continuing far beyond the limits of a single sentence. A speaker often has to state his point very vaguely at first, and then gradually introduce more and more precision into it. Similarly a metaphor is often carried on and developed from one sentence to another. 12 Modification and metaphor are the two main instruments of semantic flexibility in natural language. If the words and phrases of a natural language were not as vague and ambiguous as they are, it would never be possible for speech to be as indefinitely precisifiable and variegated as it is. Two further points are perhaps worth mentioning within the limits of the present article. First it is obvious that a definition of synonymy emerges from our account of semantic composition. An occurrence of one word or phrase may be said to be fully synonymous with an occurrence of another if the semantical hypothesis that is fully supported for the former differs from that which is fully supported for the latter only in respect of the different word or phrase it mentions. Hence, as an investigator learns more about the semantics of a language, and comes to take more of the relevant variables into account, he may come to see that occurrences which he once thought fully synonymous with one another are not in fact fully synonymous. So synonymy in this sense is an empirical relation. Moreover such a synonymy can also be partial since two occurrences will have the same meaning just so far as the appropriate fully supported semantical hypotheses resemble one another in respect of each relevant variable. Of course, such a definition of synonymy will not free us from Quine's charmed circle of semantical terminology, since in the charac-

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terisation of semantical hypotheses we have used, as undefined primitives, the terms 'names' and 'describes'. But we do not regard the reduction of semantical terms to nonsemantical ones as being a task that either can or must be accomplished by a philosophical reconstruction of the semantics of a natural language. Secondly, on our view the sentences (i.e., syntactically non-deviant morpheme-strings) of a natural language do not admit of any distinction between the semantically deviant and the semantically non-deviant. N o r need there be any distinctions of syntactic deviance or non-deviance that are based on selectional rules, since we dispense altogether with syntactic rules of this kind. We distinguish instead between sentences that admit only metaphorical interpretations, like That old man is a baby, and sentences that admit both metaphorical and non-metaphorical ones, like Tom is a baby. Admittedly there are some extreme cases. Metaphorical sentences tend to give an impression of meaninglessness when the metaphors have got badly mixed and there seems to be a considerable variety of alternative metaphorical disambiguations, as in Colourless green ideas sleep furiously, or when rather a lot of restrictions have to be removed in the process of amalgamating meanings, as in Today is in bed. Nevertheless our proposals for the explication of metaphor do entail, so far as deep structure is concerned, that any syntactically non-deviant morphemestring of a natural language always has at least one meaning - just as for any actual speaker's utterance in ordinary speech, unless sanity or seriousness is in doubt, the hearer's presumption is always that some meaning can be found. N o doubt there are very many syntactically simple sentences that are never uttered because their metaphors are too difficult to disambiguate. But there are also very m a n y non-metaphorical sentences that are never uttered because of their syntactic complexity (degree of nesting, etc.). The existence of a metaphor, like that of a sentence, is a feature of langue, not of parole. 13

The Queen's College, Oxford

REFERENCES 1 Cf., for instance, J. J. Katz and J. A. Fodor, 'The Structure of a Semantic Theory', in The Structure of Language (ed. by J. A. Fodor and J. A. Katz). The rejection of this assumption was implicit in L. Jonathan Cohen, The Diversity of Meaning (2nd.

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ed., 1966) 7, esp. pp. 63-65. But that account of dictionary entries was altogether too sketchy to sustain an explication of the concept of metaphor. 2 The view of inductive reasoning that is presented here is a very brief summary of the account that is expounded and defended in detail in L. Jonathan Cohen, The Implications of Induction, 1970. In Avishai Margalit, The Cognitive Status of Metaphors (unpublished dissertation for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) a Carnapian version of induction is used to explicate metaphor. 3 John Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968) p. 227ff. 4 Cf. Y. Bar Hillel, C. Gaifman, and E. Shamir, 'On Categorial and Phrase Structure Grammars', The Bulletin of the Research Council of Israel 9F (1960) p. liT., reprinted in Y. Bar Hillel, Language and InJbrmation (1964) p. 99ff. 5 To deal with polyadic terms (e.g., transitive verbs, prepositions like between, etc.) it is obvious that more complex forms of hypothesis (with n-tuple quantification, where n > 2) are required. We ignore such polyadic terms in our explication of metaphorical meaning, because their peculiarities are not cardinal to the issue. But there seems to be no difficulty in principle in extending our explication to polyadic terms. We assume the domains of (1) and (2) to include everything that people actually talk of themselves as talking about, including objects, acts, events, properties, qualities, substances, numbers, persons, etc. But we think that this assumption is not a metaphysical commitment of any kind on our part, and that it need not obfuscate philosophical distinctions that may be important for other purposes. It should perhaps be pointed out that the ordering of the semantically relevant variables is important not only for the explication of synchronic interpretations of metaphor (as emerges in the present paper), but also for the elucidation of the difference between those features of a word's meaning that diachronic studies reveal to be more resistant to non-metaphorical change and those that such studies reveal to be less resistant to non-metaphorical change. 6 F. Waismann, 'Verifiability', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. XIX (1961) p. 236ff. 7 On the discovery of semantic (and syntactic) variables in childhood language-learning, cf. L. Jonathan Cohen, 'Some Applications of Inductive Logic to the Theory of Language', forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (October, 1970). It is also worth noting that Trier's notion of a semantic field is easily reconstructed within the proposed inductive framework. Essentially, a field is a set of words (e.g. boil, fry) that are subjected to the same restrictions as one another under some variables but not under all. s For the details of the argument, and the concept of evidence involved, cf. The Implications of Induction 3, 8, 12 and 13. 9 We borrow the example from H. Reichenbach's 'Analysis of Conversational Language' in his Elements of Symbolic Logic (1948) p. 307. 10 The exceptions seem to be either rather vacuous sentences like That is so, or sentences involving very abstruse technical terms. 11 In Black's terms, in the one case the focus of the metaphor is on the baby and the frame is That old man is .... and in the other case the focus of the metaphor is on the old man and the frame is ... is a baby: cf. M. Black, Models and Metaphor (1962) p. 27ff. 13 This is not the same as allegory, although it is sometimes so regarded (e.g., in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1932) s.v. allegory). A n allegory is a systematic reinterpretation that can be imposed on a stretch of discourse, like a one-to-one correspondence between two somewhat similar models for a logistic system. A n author could

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still intend an allegory even if he wrote in a language devoid of metaphor, since to credit him with knowledge of the correspondence between the allegorical and the non-allegorical interpretation is to credit him with factual wisdom rather than linguistic skill. Contrariwise an allegorically intended narrative, like George Orwell's Animal Farm, can contain occasional metaphors that are as much subject to allegorical reinterpretation as are the nonmetaphorical passages. What allegories do sometimes exploit is not so much metaphor as symbolism. In a culture in which the pig is a symbol for greed, and a man may be said to be as greedy as a pig, a story about a pig can more easily be reinterpreted as a story about a greedy person. In such cases we have to suppose that the dictionary entry shows pig, say, to be a polyseme that names members of the porcine species either tout court or as symbols of greed: it is the latter alternative that allows the common metaphorical use, as in That man is a pig. One of the worst features of the old theory that all language is symbolic (e.g., C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning o f Meaning, Ch. I) was that it blocked the way to recognising just when and where symbolism does influence language. 13 It is sometimes suggested, by grammarians who take all metaphorical sentences to be linguistically deviant, that metaphor is a merely surface structure phenomenon and arises through the improper application of transformational rules to a deep structure that has, from a semantical point of view, the pattern of a simile. But this suggestion blurs the difference between simile and metaphor. To state a similarity between two things significantly one must state in what respects they are similar, whereas all the interesting metaphorical sentences achieve their characteristic force without stating any respects in which a comparison is to be drawn.