Romero, E. y Soria, B.: en prensa, A View of Novel Metaphor in the Light of Recanati's Proposals. En M.J. Frápolli (ed.), Saying, Meaning and Refering. Essays on François Recanati's Philosophy of Language, Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition.

Abstract:

 In the present paper, we show our agreement with Recanati’s defence of contextualism, and with his general defence of metaphor as involving a primary pragmatic process. Nevertheless, in the various occasions in which he speaks about metaphor he takes different positions. In Recanati’s Literal Meaning, metaphor involves loosening, and in Recanati’s 1993 and 1995 metaphor is concerned with transfer.
In this paper, we are going to side with Recanati’s 1993 and 1995 to argue that novel metaphor is a case of transfer, although we are not going to belittle some correct intuitions included in the idea that metaphor involves loosening. But, as Recanati’s works are not very explicit about how metaphor is identified and interpreted, we detail the criteria for the identification and interpretation of metaphor. By doing this, we argue that novel metaphor is a case of transfer of meaning that depends on a context-shift of the metaphoric utterance, prompted by the identification of a metaphoric use of language. This is defended by using an extended notion of context-shifting in order to include metaphor as one type of context-shift, in particular, a type of language-shift required by the process of transfer involved in metaphor.