{"id":98,"date":"2025-03-04T10:41:56","date_gmt":"2025-03-04T09:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/?page_id=98"},"modified":"2025-05-16T08:59:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T07:59:11","slug":"the-ambiguity-of-metaphor","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/where-does-this-page-go\/key-issues-metaphor-in-interaction\/the-ambiguity-of-metaphor\/","title":{"rendered":"The ambiguity of metaphor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Many metaphors are structurally ambiguous between deliberate and non-deliberate meaning: the same utterance may in principle be used as metaphorically intended or not (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/full\/10.1080\/10926488.2024.2359406?scroll=top&amp;needAccess=true#d1e96\">Full article: The Ambiguity of Metaphor: How Polysemy Affords Multivalent Metaphor Use and Explains the Paradox of Metaphor<\/a>). This is because most metaphors are based in polysemy, which allows for ambiguous reference that is oriented either to the target domain only (non-deliberate metaphor) or also includes the source domain (deliberate metaphor).<\/p>\n<p>The resolution of this ambiguity typically requires the use of contextual information. This includes the speaker\/hearer&#8217;s attitude, knowledge, expectations, and discourse goals, or previous utterances in the discourse. Disambiguating the language user\u2019s intentions boils down to deciding whether the utterance requires making a comparison between referents in a source domain and a target domain, or not. This may happen relatively independently for production and reception.<\/p>\n<p>This ambiguity has not been sufficiently attended to in modern metaphor research. DMT aims to examine its full impact on the meaning and comprehension of metaphor.<\/p>\n<p>DMT postulates that most of this ubiquitous ambiguity is most often resolved without metaphorical comprehension for establishing an utterance&#8217;s meaning. This is possible because for most metaphor the intended figurative meaning in the target domain is already conventionally available in the language user&#8217;s mental dictionary, because of widespread metaphor-motivated polysemy.<\/p>\n<p>This is the basis for the <a href=\"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/where-does-this-page-go\/key-issues-metaphor\/the-paradox-of-metaphor\/\">paradox of metaphor<\/a>. (It may be possible that metaphorical processing occurs after the click of comprehension, enriching the understanding of the metaphor in post-hoc interpretation and other processes, as proposed by for instance Gibbs 2017; but this is another question that begs new questions.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many metaphors are structurally ambiguous between deliberate and non-deliberate meaning: the same utterance may in principle be used as metaphorically intended or not (Full article: The Ambiguity of Metaphor: How Polysemy Affords Multivalent Metaphor Use and Explains the Paradox of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/where-does-this-page-go\/key-issues-metaphor-in-interaction\/the-ambiguity-of-metaphor\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":380,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-98","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1440,"href":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98\/revisions\/1440"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphorinaction.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}