> [Arlo] > Take your favorite painting. Can you reduce it to something "literal", and > would it > still have the same "meaning"?...All words begin as metaphors, some function > to point better, and > "usual meaning" is simply a metaphor that has become frozen.
Your argument, if I have understood it correctly, is that (a) words have meaning like paintings; (b)paintings have only metaphorical meaning, so (c) words (initially) have only metaphorical meaning (at least until their meaning gets frozen or they get used in a particular pragmatic context). For one thing, (a) seems to beg the question: that words have literal & metaphorical meaning shows they don't have meaning like paintings. Also, could you always teach someone to use a word metaphorically if they couldn't use it literally? It would be like trying to explain a pun to someone who didn't know the meanings of the words. 1) I saw a yacht on the lake 2) The moon is a yacht in the nighttime sky I take 1) to be a literal use of 'yacht' & 2) to be a metaphorical use. It seems counter-intuitive to me that it's always the case that uses like 2) come first & then later use gets frozen to point to the kind of boat we call a yacht. This is not to deny that some words may have evolved like this. People are frozen by fear, water is frozen by cold. There may be no way to tell which use came first or whether one use was ever considered literal & the other metaphorical. Craig moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
