What Is Metaphor?

Metaphor, from the Greek for "transference," is the use of language that designates one thing to designate another in order to characterize the latter in terms of the former. Nominal metaphors use nouns in this way, as in "My daughter is an angel." Predicative metaphors use verbs, as in "The dog flew across the back yard." In addition to single words being used metaphorically, phrases, sentences, and more extended texts can also function as metaphors, as in the assertion "Bravely the troops carried on" to refer to telephone operators who continued to work during a natural disaster. Sometimes a metaphor can be recognized because it is literally false. When a proud father says, "My daughter is an angel," no one believes that she has wings. But a metaphor need not be literally false. The opposite assertion -- that one's daughter is no angel -- is literally true; she does not have wings. Yet this is not likely to be the speaker's intended meaning, nor is it likely to be a hearer's interpretation. In each of these two cases, hearers must go beyond the literal meaning to arrive at the speaker's intention -- what the hearer is intended to understand.

It was discovered in the late 1970's that the mind contains an enormous system of general conceptual metaphors -- ways of understanding relatively abstract concepts in terms of those that are more concrete. Much of our everyday language and thought makes use of such conceptual metaphors. This paper claims, first, that the system of conceptual metaphor that functions in ordinary thought and language is also used, first, to provide plausible interpretations of dreams and, second, to generate dreams