Ofilirea „Metaforei Ofilite”
Withering of the "Withered Metaphor"

Summary/Abstract: The present paper calls into question the withered metaphor, as one of the most suggestive and long-lived metaphors of the metaphor, intensely and enthusiastically used among aestheticians and stylisticians. Interpreting its meaning in the light of the consecrated theories, as well as based on the imaginary schema of plants which gives its substance, it is believed that its successful invention and function were made possible only within a narrow framework of understanding the metaphorical phenomenon, strictly from an aesthetic point of view. Conversely, a significantly wider framework in approaching the metaphor, which would take into consideration theories of cognitivist origin, could show how this concept, going itself through a withering process, can do injustice to a large category of metaphors, and, for this reason, it should be reconsidered. If metaphorization as a phenomenon is no longer viewed as being specific to the poetic thinking, but it is seen rather as a fundamental cognitive process, able to generally explain both the functioning mechanisms of the human thought and the principles of linguistic creativity, then metaphors such as the foot of the mountain, the mouth of the valley, etc., could get the chance to a new life, without carrying the stigma of degradation. If such metaphors were no longer judged as aged forms, lacking their assumed original beauty and brightness, but as fundamental conceptual metaphors, their revaluation could gain a well-deserved place among metaphors: that of the most eloquent and transparent proof of how the human brain makes different metaphorical transfers from the source-domain to the target-domain, so as to create new words or idioms, and, consequently, new concepts.

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