Until publication of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), it was assumed that meaningful use of language was governed by the rules of logic as determined during the European Enlightenment by thinkers such as Descartes and Leibniz.
Lakoff and Johnson drew attention to the fundamental role of metaphor in linguistic meaning, but they did not account satisfactorily for linguistic creativity. The cognitive metaphors described by Lakoff and Johnson are important, but they are
in fact no more than secondary conventions.
In this talk, I show how normal, conventional uses of words are exploited in three different ways. What they have in common is that they resonate semantically with literal, conventional meaning in three different ways. There are three kinds
of semantic resonance:
1) linguistic resonance, including freshly created metaphors but also many other kinds of unconventional phraseology;
2) intertextual resonance, including quotations from literature, but also the human habit of picking up innovative phraseology from other people;
3) experiential resonance – the nonliteral semantic (or rather, semiotic) associations of words such as summer and spider.
The three types of semantic resonance will be illustrated by a discussion of the meaning of a short passage near the beginning of TS Eliot's poem The Wasteland. It is important to emphasize, however, that resonance is not merely a literary device; it is a fundamental mechanism that enables meaningful communication using words.
The theory of norms and exploitations (TNE; Hanks 2013) argues that meaningful use of language is governed by two different sets of rules: one set governs the normal, conventional, grammatically well-formed use of words. A second set of rules governs the creative exploitation of linguistic norms. Both sets of rules are probabilistic, not deterministic. They can be discovered by large-scale corpus analysis.
Hanks, Patrick. 2013. Lexical analysis: norms and exploitations. MIT Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
[!] LECTURE PRÉPARATOIRE:
T. S. Eliot The Waste Land
Au moins la première section.
[
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land]
