Metaphors are events, not objects

Abstract: This paper discusses the tension that exists between linguistic and psychological approaches to metaphor. It aims to demonstrate that interdisciplinary efforts are probably not all of equal value when it comes to serving the ends of any individual discipline. In the case of psychological research on metaphor, such interdisciplinarity may in fact be limited to a heuristic relation, in which linguistics offers useful constraints in defining an object of study that should allow psycholinguists to pursue their own general goal of mapping the architecture of the language processor. Thus, it may well be that the existing division of labor, between linguistics and psycholinguistics, that holds for the study of metaphor is a principled, instead of a merely contingent, reality. The paper’s argumentation for this starts from the observation that the psycholinguistic study of meaning phenomena in natural language is being increasingly marked by a quasi-exclusive focus on properties of the brain, as the seat of the mental lexicon, and not on the interpreter holding that brain. I concentrate on methodological difficulties conjured up by the “heteronomic” aspect of metaphor understanding, as well as on theoretical problems with defining metaphor as an object of study in diverging disciplines.