Imagining Metaphors: Cognitive Representation in Interpreation
and Understanding Elsbeth Brouwer Overview: In Chapter 1 I
consider the problem that poetic text poses to theories of
linguistic meaning. Interpretation of poetic text involves
subjective representations of meaning, that are considered
normally to lie outside the scope of a truth conditional
semantics, or semantic theories on propositional meaning; hence,
the scarce occasions where poetic text is mentioned in semantic
theory, usually exclude it from the realm of semantic
interpretation. One aspect of poetic interpretation concerns an
allegorical, or metaphorical understanding of the text. Since
the semantic literature on metaphorical interpretation is
abundant, I at first restrain the topic of poetic interpretation
to the metaphorical interpretation of poetic text, and consider
to what extent theories on metaphor help explain it. I consider
first semantic perspectives, and then cognitive perspectives on
metaphor. Throughout the discussion of diffe