The Literal and the Metaphoric as Fundaments of Metaphorology

Abstract

Following the description of the incoherence within the theory of metaphor in Literal Truth and Metaphoric Norm as Two Paradigms of Metaphorology, the present paper investigates, in the general philosophical-linguistic context, the concepts of the literal and the metaphoric. It finds that the first of them can be reduced to the concepts of the correspondence theory of truth and semantic-syntactic correctness, whereas the latter gains its status only by assuming the validity of the former. The ensuing two-partite division of language, however, when confronted with examples of sentences, poses a number of questions as to what type of language can be called literal or metaphoric.