MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA (04/16/84)
The current issue of *Poetics Today* (V.4, N.2, 1983) is
specially dedicated to the subject of metaphor, and contains four
weighty articles by Umberto Eco, Eddy M. Zemach, Inez Hedges, and
Jan Wojcik. The article by Eco (who is considered by many to be
the foremost living literary theorist and semiotician in the
world) is especially useful.
Eco provides a glimpse of just how vast is the literature on
metaphor:
"The 'most luminous, and therefore the most necessary and
frequent' (Vico) of all tropes, the metaphor, defies every
encyclopedic entry. Above all because it has been the object of
philosophical, linguistic, aesthetic and psychological reflection
since the beginning of time. Shibles's 1971 bibliography on the
metaphor records around 3000 titles; and yet, even before 1971,
it overlooks authors like Fontanier, and almost all of Heidegger
and Greimas--and of course does not mention, after the research
in componential semantics, the successive studies on the logic of
natural languages, the work of Henry, Group u of Lieges, Ricoeur,
Samuel Levin, and the latest text linguistics and pragmatics."
Eco makes some remarks on the subject of metaphor which are
highly pertinent to AI researchers:
"No algorithm exists for metaphor, nor can a metaphor be
produced by means of a computer's precise instructions, no matter
what the volume of organized information to be fed in. The
success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format
of the interpreting subjects' encyclopedia. In this perspective,
metaphors are produced solely on the basis of a rich cultural
framework, on the basis, that is, of a universe of content that
is already organized into networks of interpretants, which decide
(semiotically) upon the identities and differences of properties.
At the same time this content universe, whose format postulates
itself not as rigidly hierarchized, but rather according to Model
Q, alone derives from the metaphorical production and
interpretation the opportunity to restructure itself into new
modes of similarity and dissimilarity."
The journal *Poetics Today* is a rich source of speculation
and analysis for anyone exploring the more subtle structures and
processes of natural language understanding.
--Wayne McGuire <mdc.wayne@MIT-OZ>