The semantic underdetermination of metaphor

Abstract

This work intends to sustain that the best concept to deal with the relationship between metaphor and language is the one of semantic underdetermination. However the most common way of dealing with the phenomenon of metaphors relegates to pragmatic (not to semantics as expected) the function of explaining how the metaphorical meaning of a phrase is a context-generated entailment. According to this picture, metaphors would be indeterminate semantically because pragmatic entailments are virtually infinite and do not need to refer to the semantically expressed proposition. We argue, however, that the best alternatives to handle with matter come from the debate between contextualism and semantic minimalism. Metaphors would be cases
of semantic flexibility also present in other linguistic phenomena. For minimalism, metaphors can be addressed through the introduction of a lexical operator that would guarantee the necessary contextual flexibility to contextually dependent semantic terms. For contextualism, metaphors occur when terms within a phrase function as ad hoc concepts and are amenable to pragmatic enrichments. Although they do not reach a single solution, the debate between minimalism and contextualism offers
explanations of the phenomenon that corroborate the hypothesis of the semantic underdetermination presented in this work.