This essay is a pragmatic reading of moral and socio-political decadence in Femi Osofisan’s Midnight Hotel. It does this by analyzing ten out of twenty-five proverbs deployed in the text. In analyzing the proverbs, this essay observes that each has at least an ad hoc constituent which requires semantic modulation to get at the meanings of the proverbs. This modulation is not arbitrary, but contextually negotiated until the reader reaches his optimal relevance.
Wilson and Carston argue that metaphors are cases of ad hoc constructions (7), for instance, when a speaker says, ‘The boy is a lion’. While a literary scholar would see this as metaphorical, Wilson and Carston believe that the above sentence is a case of the use of an ad hoc constituent-lion- that if modulated the meaning becomes clear: lion = a four legged carnivore lion* = the king of all animals; ferocious and brave
If this sense of lion* is transferred to the sentence, one would understand that the speaker means any of the followings:
a) The boy is the leader of his peers
b) The boy is ferocious
c) The boy is brave
Ad hoc Construction has to do with meaning modulations that occur to pertinent constituents in utterances. These modulations could be widening or narrowing (Wilson and Carston 9). It is this sense of analysis that this essay transfers to the proverbs used in Osofisan’s Midnight Hotel. This is because this paper understands that proverbs are largely cases of metaphor. Osofisan’s Midnight Hotel is a classical humourous play which reflects the socio-political, abysmal, perverse, corrupt, sordid, squander mania spirit that ‘graced’ the Second and Third Republic that Nigeria has experienced. Many of the works on the play see it as a humourous art which chastises...
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...he The Midnight Blackout and Fiddler on a Midnight Lark”. Journal of the Literary Society of Nigeria (JLSN). 4 (2012): 117 – 130.Print.
Romero, Esther, and Belen Soria. “Introduction: Explicit Communication and Relevance Theory Pragmatics.” Explicit Communication: Robyn Carston’s Pragmatics. Ed. Romero and Soria.Hamsphire: Palgrave, 2010.1-24.Print.
---. “Phrasal Pragmatics in Robyn Carston’s Programme.” Explicit Communication: Robyn Carston’s Pragmatics. Ed. Romero and Soria. Hamsphire: Palgrave, 2010. 183-198. Print.
Sperber, D., and Wilson D. Relevance: Communication and Cognition.2nd ed.Oxford:Blackwell,1995.Print.
Wilson, Deirdre and Robyn Carston. “Metaphor and the ‘Emergent Property’ Problem: A Relevance-Theoretic Treatment”. The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication: A Figure of Speech. 3 (2008). New Prairie, 2008. 1-39. Print.
“Metaphor.” Dictionary of World Literature: Criticism - Forms - Technique. Ed. Joseph T. Shipley. New York: Philosophical Library, 1943. 377-8.
... A metaphor, used as a communication skill, is best described in a political way. Think of Reagan’s Voodoo economics, or Bill Clinton building a bridge to the 21st century. Politicians can easily scam an ignorant voter, should one not understand a metaphor. For example: Clinton refers to building a bridge, but does not tell us with which tools he intends to build it with. This particular concept is valid alone for the above reason. Whether you are talking to a teacher or watching television, metaphors need to understand.
The signifying monkey invariable repeats to his friend, the Lion, some insult purportedly generated by their mutual friend, the Elephant. The Monkey, however, speaks figuratively. The Lion, indignant and outraged, demands an apology of the Elephant, who refuses and then trounces the Lion. The Lion, realizing that his mistake was to take the Monkey literally, returns to trounce the Monkey. It is this relationship between the literal and the figurative, and the dire consequences of their confusion, which is the most striking repeated element of these tales. The Monkey’s trick depends on the Lion’s inability to mediate between these two poles of signification, of meaning. (p.55)
Pages 261- 267. doi: 10.1016/j.pec.2011.10.006. Cameron, D. (2001). The 'Case Working with spoken discourse and communication. London: Thousand Oaks & Co. Carson, C., & Cupach, W. (2000).
The first important idea I find is interesting is in The Vision of Dialogue (1996), Bohm points out that there are many ways of defining what a metaphor is. These definitions lie within assumptions on what is the metaphorical expression versus what is the literal meaning of the metaphor. Depending on how one interprets a metaphor. One is able to understand its message. What Bohm argues about can be seen from our daily conversation. Like we sometimes like to send recipient an emoji or a sticker without a word in a conversation. For example, an emoji with tears could be interpreted as the person feels sad, or it could be the person burst into tears because of laughing out loudly, or other indescribable feelings that leads the tears come out,
Jimmy S.Baca use of metaphors, similes, imagery, diction, tone and mood are used in a very effective way in his essay Coming into Language. His use of metaphors and similes really give the reader a visual, helping develop imagery. Baca’s use of imagery paints pictures in the reader’s head but also develops a type of emotion by the use of diction. The word choice used provides the reader with an understanding of where the author is coming from leading us into tone and mood. The author’s tone starts off very low but by the end of the essay you will feel very satisfied.
In the book Metaphors We Live By, authors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson address the traditional philosophic view denouncing metaphor's influence on our world and our selves (ix). Using linguistic and sociological evidence, Lakoff and Johnson claim that figurative language performs essential functions beyond those found in poetry, cliché, and elaborate turns of phrase. Metaphor permeates our daily experiences - not only through systems of language, but also in terms of the way we think and act. The key to understanding a metaphor's effect on behavior, relationships, and how we make sense of our environment, can be found in the way humans use metaphorical language. To appreciate the affects of figurative language over even the most mundane details of our daily activity, it is necessary to define the term, "metaphor" and explain its role in defining the thoughts and actions that structure our conceptual system.
...hings we cannot change but have to accept, all build our experiences. This umwelt of our existence structures our experiences and is what we use to create metaphors. "The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.S (Lakoff and Johnson, P. 5) To find meaning in our experiences we construct metaphors. These allow us to explain the past and to predict the future. Religion is a system of metaphors which helps us to create meaning out of life. To believe in a certain religion requires us to adopt it's metaphors.
Metaphors are used by Chesterfield, whereby he uses them to portray his son’s values. Chesterfield builds his son up, and provides all the obstacles that could come into his life in the near future. He takes his time to warn his son about the problems, and struggles that he is to face in the future through a metaphor where he says, “thorns and briars which scratched and disfigured me in the course of my youth” (Stanhope 91). He refers to these problems as thorns and briars. He was frightened that his son was going to make the same mistakes he made while he was a youth and so, he had to warn him in advance of what awaits him. He uses metaphors in his warnings just to emphasize his points. Later on, in his warnings to his son; Chesterfield also uses anastrophe in contradicting his points. He uses anastrophe as an understa...
Our literal understandings of a word are twins in constant opposition with one another, twins in constant competition to receive the most love from their mother and father. Let us pretend the parents are the literary community that demonstrates love frequently by showing a preference for one of their twins. Donald Davidson's theory expressed in What Metaphors Mean is a tragic, intellectual miscarriage; it is a theory of language that brings forth a stillborn child, a dead metaphor.
The choice of a signifier is nowhere near arbitrary; words may not have transcendental meaning, but they certainly relate to each other within a given linguistic structure - a language, a dialect, or even a piece of fiction. One interesting way to explore the mystery of the signifier is through constructs like metaphor and metonymy. These work within a text, simultaneously concealing and betraying meaning. Metaphor an...
This paper will explain the process we, as humans usually follow to understand a certain text or utterance. This explanation would be achieved through the analysis of two journal articles from semantics and pragmatics perspective, taking into account a range of techniques associated with each of the two concepts including:
Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 1.1 (Jan. 1968): 1-14. PDF. 19 Aug. 2013.
Pragmatics focuses on language use within a given social environment, analysing how people interpret the various meanings language conveys. Yet, miscommunication arises due to situational contexts and thus, pragmatists “focus on what is not explicitly stated”, instead emphasising “what is communicated by the manner and style of utterance” (Finch, 2000). Consider a sign saying “Garage sale.” Naturally, without further information, we understand that there is a sale within an individual’s garage, rather than actual garages being sold. The example highlights how pragmatics furthers the understanding of an interpretation that is found past the words. This deep-seated meaning is transparent not by the reason of the semantics of the words themselves, but due to the contextual knowledge that is widely known. Ultimately pragmatics is the study of the ambiguity of language, as it examines the multiple meanings each sentence may have, which may lead to confusion, conflict and ambiguity. Therefore a sound understanding of pragmatics, may lead to a reduction in conflicts betw...