A metaphor. An immanent feature of the language of poetry or a universal linguistic label?
Urszula Sokólska
Uniwersytet w Białymstoku
Abstract
The article is an attempt at answering the question about the function
of metaphors and their formal-semantic shape mainly in poetic and scientific texts. The comparative analysis being carried out proves that metaphorical conjunctions occur in both variants of utterances but their stylistic
function, frequency and a degree of conventionalization are of a different
character. Innovative and strongly individualized metaphors are characteristic
of poetry whereas for the language of science – mainly metaphors considerably
standardized based on system models and structures whose genetic innovative-
ness we are no longer aware of; rarely innovative metaphors. Therefore it seems
unauthorized to treat metaphors as universal linguistic labels typical of each
kind of utterance unless we understand such universality in a slightly narrower
sense, i.e., as “useful, usable, suitable, helpful”.
Keywords:
innovativeness, a linguistic label, a metaphor, conventionalization, a poetic text, a scientific text
