Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Edit Gaál: Dictionaries and methaphors: a consideration of the presentation of methaphoric usages in a selection of dictonaries

and Fodor (1964) suggest in "The Structure of a Semantic Theory". It is of special interest as they claim that one of the two components of a semantic theory of a natural language is a dictionary and that a dictionary entry besides the "grammatical portion" has "a semantic portion which presents each of the distinct senses the lexical item has in its occurrences as a given part of speech". With the help of semantic markers and distinguishes they branch the possible senses of a word and state that in this way all the senses of a word can be encompassed. The method which they presented looks convincing, but leaves one issue out of consideration and that is the metaphoric usages of words which constantly add new senses to the core meanings of words. As Campbell (1975) argues metaphors have no specifiable maximum meanings and it follows "that dictionary entries, of either the Katz-Fodor or the traditional variety, will come nowhere near the goal of listing every sense a lexical item can bear in any sentence". 4 Linguistic concepts of metaphors Here the question naturally arises what are metaphors, and although they are very frequently used in discourse, why are they so special and difficult to be encompassed linguistically? Metaphors have always excited linguists and many agree that metaphor is as ultimate as speech itself, and speech as ultimate as thought. Richards (1965) claims no less than that "metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language". There have been several attempts to define what a metaphor is. According to Max Black (1979) a metaphor formula is "to say something and mean another". Leech (1974), following I. A. Richards' terms, postulates that "every metaphor has the following form: X is like Y in respect of Z where X=tenor, Y=vehicle and Z

= ground". As Richards (1965) states "the co-presence of the vehicle and tenor results in a new meaning ... which is not attainable without their interaction. The vehicle and tenor in co-operation give a meaning of more varied power than is ascribed to either." In other words, metaphors are based on the notion of similarity that is expressed implicitly; i.e. a metaphor only includes two elements, the tenor and vehicle, and does not state explicitly what the ground of the comparison is. If we take an example, the metaphor 'the mind is an ocean', we can see that 'mind' is the tenor and 'ocean' is the vehicle. The ground of comparison is all the meanings of the two words that can be related to each other and combined into a new expressive, meaningful image, such as the human mind is as deep and vast, almost boundless or infinite to human beings as the ocean is, or the mind is the cradle of human creativity as the ocean is that of life, etc. The possible interpretations of a metaphor are not defineable in 104