By Jason Pickett
Each metaphor that exists in English and indeed in every other language carries a certain amount of grammatical and ideological rules with it. These rules may not always be easy to explain, but in this section the attempt to explain them will remain, regardless of the difficulties. The structures and boundaries of metaphor can be both obvious and unobvious to us both in grammatical terms and in terms of the content shown. Grammatically the rules are dependent on: relative simplicity, the ability to keep the metaphor straight and systematic, a clear source domain and target domain and so forth. Content-wise the rules are dependent upon: our ability to both draw one source from another, the terms in which we view one source being relatively simpler than the one the metaphor initially comes from, the compatibility of the objects being compared to us as thinkers, and the practical usage and understanding that others would be able to comprehend based on experiences and commonalities presumed to be had by the author or speaker. All of these factors combined generally allow for a good and comprehensive metaphor to assert itself to listeners or readers, and more importantly for a metaphor to be properly understood by the listener or reader.
Grammatically most metaphors have a very strong and standardized structure built generally on simplicity. Every metaphor has a target domain, which is generally the real subject of which two people are speaking, and it is the thing that two people are perhaps not as clear about in understanding, thus necessitating the cause for a metaphorical analysis. Every metaphor also has a source domain from which the metaphor is drawn, and it generally comes from things or events that we have more direct and tangible experience with. Source domains generally are quite basic in nature, but can be rather complicated as well. Keeping one metaphorical analysis straight and regulated is important when presenting information, and a rather natural and easy thing for humans to accomplish. Although it is generally easy for us to keep metaphors straight, often times it is more difficult than one would think, as a result of the occasional difficulty we come by ‘mixed metaphors’. “A mixed metaphor is one that leaps, in the course of a figure, to a second identification inconsistent with the first one. Example: Clinton stepped up to the plate and grabbed the bull by the horn. Here, the baseball and the activities of a cowboy are implied.” (Ruiz, 1 December 2001, pp 1).
Concerning content and ideological boundaries in metaphor, it has many premises and restrictions which one must consider before constructing a given metaphor. One of the first rules to giving any target domain a specific source domain is the compatibility of the two domains. The source domain must have a fairly good comparable basis with the target domain, and thus must have certain amounts of features in common with the target domain. This relationship of what is in common is also wholly dependent on the minds and culture in which they are drawn from. That is to say, in a society where Time is Money, the culture itself must first value time as being limited and finite as money and resources are, and can then have a notion of the two things being similar enough to be put into metaphorical terms. One might argue to this particular metaphor that time is a known infinite phenomenon with no end, but while this may be quite true, it is understandable that in our own lifetimes we will live and die, thus our own time is indeed very limited.
Another rule to giving a target domain a specific source domain is the ability to keep the source domain simpler and more recognizable to the experience of others, than the target domain would be. Perhaps it is too narrow to say “more simple”, but perhaps saying the source domain should be more familiar to our experiences than the target domain which we are comparing, would be more suitable to say. Most source dominions for metaphors come from common experiences for most people, especially within the same society. Most domains generally have something to do with orientation or ontology (physical objects and substance), among other things. These things all have one great thing in common, that is they all are within our direct experience, and we know of them through observation and self awareness. We know of orientation and ontology directly through senses, and in particular through sight. We know of personification (a sort of ontological subgroup) through the senses as well, but also a great deal through self-awareness especially. Most people of a given society and indeed in all the world share these experiences and they are all familiar to us.
The simplicity in these experiences is evident in that when they do occur, the experience is generally obvious to those observing, also it has an obvious boundary (and if it doesn’t our minds are generally capable of fabricating them anyway, and do!), it is a simple event to name, and it most likely could appear again so that others may also observe the phenomenon. Often times the source domain is in fact, our senses themselves, which are quite common, familiar and simple for most people in the world. Some examples of this would be metaphorical concepts such as Seeing is Believing, Seeing is Understanding, Hearing is Agreeing and so forth.
The ability for an author or speaker to communicate an idea to a given audience through metaphor depends on a few things. Sharing common experiences to his audiences is perhaps among the most important. The author and his audience must share certain experiences for the metaphor to have a large degree of coherent and understandable meaning, signifying that generally the simpler the metaphor is, the more likely it is to succeed to a wider audience. When an obscure metaphor (to a particular reader or listener) appears, generally the metaphor itself is lost in meaning to him, thus the metaphor may as well have never been used at all anyway (at least to the readers and listeners who do not understand it). In the metaphor “Life is a box of chocolates” it would be far too obscure for someone who has never eaten chocolate especially, or has never had chocolates from certain boxes, that have a large variety of flavours and fillings inside of them, say from countries or cultures who are unfamiliar with these items. This metaphor would mean nothing significant to them, because they can not draw on the same source domain, because they have no experience with it whatsoever.
Using source domains everyone may have in common must also have the same connotations to the author or speaker and his audience in order for the metaphor to be understood correctly. Using the metaphor light is good and dark is bad for one culture may seem obvious or undeniable, but for another, it may be just the opposite, or the other culture may have no particular opinion one way or the next, thus a person from one culture describing a “black day” to a person from another culture may not be clear to him, because ‘black’ to the other person could well mean the opposite for whatever reason, and thus the metaphor would be taken with the opposite effect of what had been meant by the speaker. This sort of trouble occurs rather rarely, when speaking in one’s own culture, and generally source domains tend to mean the same things to different cultures, depending on the relatedness between the cultures as well.
The rules, both grammatical and content-wise, are built primarily on logic, and tend to be universal for most metaphors everywhere. The wisdom in knowing how the metaphors work is always important for those who desire to improve their use of metaphor, and it tends to help for perceiving the metaphors that others use when communicating to us. Grammatically it is always wise to avoid mixing our metaphor so as to remain more coherent to those we are speaking or writing to. Also it is wise to remember to keep our syntactical structures constant and stable, otherwise the same problems as with mixing metaphors could occur. All of these rules are generally done automatically by everyone anyway, but knowing that they can and do occur can be helpful nonetheless, for our understanding and application in the real world. Content-wise, keeping metaphors simple, aimed at the reader or listener’s experience, and keeping the two domains feasible are equally important as are the grammatical rules.