Leezenberg (2001: 118) also discusses Searle (1979), for him “the second influential statement of a pragmatic approach to metaphor”. What Searle shares with Grice is that he sees metaphor as “a matter of speaker’s utterance meaning rather than word or sentence meaning”. Searle’s theory is classified as a “descriptivist version of a pragmatic approach”, which is a major difference to Grice. Furthermore, Searle considers conventions to be of greater importance in the interpretation of metaphor. Searle elaborates the question about metaphor to the general question how any form of literal meaning works. His major question is between the “speaker’s utterance meaning” and “word, or sentence meaning” where the first can be the new, different non-literal (metaphorical) meaning and the latter the original or literal meaning of words or sentences, as explained in Searle (1979: 93). Searle’s approach towards describing the processes leading to metaphor in a detailed manner are evaluated positively by Leezenberg (ibid.): “Because of these attempts to describe precisely what happens in metaphor, Searle’s work remains one of the valuable studies on metaphor, even if not all of his conclusions appear to be tenable.” This quotation can be interpreted in the way that Searle’s theory is very detailed and that it must have a certain potential to be useful and valuable as a frame of reference for the study of metaphor despite that Leezenberg does not agree with all its conclusions or assumptions. What makes Searle’s theory different? Which are the specific advantages and disadvantages?
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In general, Searle tries to generalize the question what metaphor is towards the question of what makes literal language, how a speaker can say one thing and intend to communicate something else. For Searle (1979: 93), metaphor is very much like other nonliteral uses of language, such as irony and indirect speech acts. He thinks that a metaphor can lead to change a word’s meaning, but only diachronically, not synchronically: “to the extent that there has been a genuine change in meaning, so that a word or expression no longer means what it previously did, to precisely that extent the locution is no longer metaphorical” (1979: 100). The first problem about this quotation is the narrow definition of semantic change. The meaning of an expression could also be expanded by another meaning, which is also a change, but the consequence would not be that it “no longer means what it previously did”. As Leezenberg (2001: 119) points out, Searle maintains a strictly synchronic perspective, which is needed for his strict separation between literal word or sentence meaning and metaphorical speaker’s meaning. Leezenberg states that – even as an a priori meaning, this is not unproblematic. According to Leezenberg (ibid.), it implies that meanings are conventionalized and therefore no longer metaphors. This, however, clashes with Searle’s own observation that metaphors may serve to fill lexical gaps and semantic needs and with the fact that he uses largely conventionalized metaphors to illustrate his principles of metaphorical interpretation(1979: 98). Searle does not give an actual argument why there cannot be metaphorical meaning at the level of sentence meaning. He gives what Leezenberg (ibid.) labels “a true but uninformative remark”: “sentences and words have only the meaning that they have” (1979: 93). Leezenberg (ibid.) also discusses the example of cut together with grass, cake and skin. Are the meanings of cut really the same in all three different scenarios? How can it be ruled out that
cut is seen as e.g. specifically linked to grass although uttered in a different
linguistic context? These two questions remain unanswered by Searle.
The problem of recognition of a metaphor is that it is based on the assumption of anomaly or falsity of the sentence in its literal interpretation. Therefore, Leezenberg (2001: 120) criticizes Searle as being “even less factual than Grice”. The defectiveness of the literal interpretation of the utterance is seen as the trigger for the hearer to look for a non-literal (speaker’s) meaning. This defectiveness is defined by Searle as “obvious falsehood, semantic, nonsense, violations of the rules of speech acts or violations of conversational principles of communication” (1979:
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114). As shown above (p. 27), this in itself is neither necessary nor sufficient to distinguish metaphor from literal meaning. Therefore, Searle relativizes his claims and says that the criterion is that there must be shared strategies, which allow the hearer to recognize whether an utterance is not intended literally (cf. Searle (1979: 120)). It remains unclear why the hearer should interpret an utterance in a metaphorical way and not in another literal meaning and how this can be recognized. All of these questions remain unanswered by Searle (cf. Leezenberg (2001: 121)). The conclusion Leezenberg (2001: 123f) has about Searle’s approach is devastating. Searle’s analysis, Leezenberg claims, marks no real advance over its pragmatic rivals. The most problematic aspect here is that Searle “holds on to the assumption that the conveyed meaning can always be expressed in literal terms” (ibid.). At the same time, Leezenberg says that the nature of their theories forces both Searle and Grice to do so because if they used a nonliteral implicatum or speaker’s meaning to explain metaphorical utterances, their accounts became circular. Leezenberg sees pragmatic accounts as boiling down to “sophisticated restatements of substitution view that the speaker says one thing and means another in uttering a metaphor.” (ibid.). Merely accepting that some metaphors cannot be rephrased would suffice to reject a strictly pragmatic approach, says Leezenberg. The problem both Searle’s and Grice’s approaches have is that they see the metaphorical interpretation as ‘secondary meaning’ i.e. derived from false or anomalous literal meaning.