Metaphor, Salience and Literary Discourse

This thesis proposes and develops a cognitive-linguistic framework, the Salience-based Model for Metaphor, for the purposes of investigating metaphorical interpretations in the semantic-pragmatic interface. The notion of salience established in this research is both cognitively enriched and linguistically oriented, providing a balanced approach to the examination, construction and realisation of cognitive metaphor in a discourse.

Building upon the notions of salience outlined in the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora, 2003) and Topic-Focus Articulation (Hajičová et al., 1998), this thesis develops a notion of salience that explains prioritization and foregrounding of information involved in metaphorical interpretation. This notion of salience is treated as a continuum of information with highly consolidated lexical meanings at one end, and highly contextually dependable meanings at the other. It is argued in the thesis that one of the key issues involved in metaphorical interpretations is the salience dynamics in the interaction between the metaphorical target and source entities from the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Such salience dynamics can be observed by the Salience-based Model through three Salience Facilitators and eight sub-categories of salience. The detailed mechanism of the Salience-based Model for Metaphor is further illustrated in three case studies in which three selected texts are analysed in terms of salience dynamics in metaphorical interpretations from the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic perspectives.

Examinations of salience in the case studies deeply benefit from methodologies in various linguistic disciplines, which include: a semantic approach to examining salient lexical meaning and associated semantic fields and affective valences of a mental entity; a syntactic illustration of selected texts from the sentence-level to the discourse level; and a pragmatic discussion on the contextual effects and interpretations through discourse analysis. Other methodologies, such as corpus linguistics, reader response, and a series of cognitive-psychological models for processing literary discourses are also employed in the case studies to support the examination of salience dynamics in a discourse context.

Key findings and implications from the three case studies strongly support the notion of salience proposed in this thesis, and provide useful insights into issues such as meaning construction in the metaphorical comprehension, contextual effects in discourse analysis, the reader’s reading and interpretative strategies, as well as literary reception from text analysis and reader’s response.
Other analytical frameworks developed in the Salience-based Model for Metaphor, such as the illustration of syntactic salience-hierarchy in a given text, and the demonstrative model for a display of contextual information in a discourse, can also be fruitfully applied to metaphorical studies in particular, and to discourse analysis in general.