To give it something like its standard technical definition, ‘a conceptual domain is a coherent area of conceptualisation relative to which semantic units may be characterised’;1 or ‘a conceptual domain is any coherent organisation of human experience’.2 Slightly breezier is my own definition: ‘a conceptual domain is a bunch of stuff’. The conceptual domain can be ‘things-associated-with-an-idea’, i.e. whatever pops into your head as closely connected with ‘life’, ‘time’ or ‘travel’, ‘refrigeration’, ‘bunnies’, ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘proton acceleration’; it can be ‘things-associated-with-a-locus’, such as ‘in the restaurant’ or ‘on the train’ or ‘in a lecture room’; it can be a conceptual set, such as ‘regular verbs in English’ or ‘kinds of insect’. It can be pretty much what you like – so long as its constituents can be said to have some direct association with a central idea (either name-bearing or unnamed), this being the source of the rules which sustain the cohesion, coherence and integrity of the domain itself. These rules answer such questions as ‘What qualities, aspects and constituent parts does this domain possess?’, ‘In what sequence should things occur within this domain?’, ‘Which qualities are more important that others in this domain?’, and so on.

Words can also designate conceptual domains. We tend to think of words as having a denotative sense, but (to gloss cheerfully over a central controversy in the philosophy of language) a concrete noun, for example, really just designates a concept – one enclosing a bunch of attributes that we agree are most typical of the thing the word would designate, if that thing were actually present. Behind the concrete substantive lies a cluster of attributes, associations and consequences with a little black hole at its centre, a point of semic attraction where the referent should be. When we were small, we’d point at a sheep and say sheep! and that was all fine. After the acquisition of ‘object permanence’, language also enhanced our ability to think about stuff when it wasn’t there; but what we lost was the directly referential core of the word. Now the actual sheep is gone, the referent of the word ‘sheep’ is really the concept of that sheep; and that turns out to be less a sheep than the ‘conceptual domain of sheepness’. The slow intonation of the word may summon its icon – that’s to say you might almost see a zebra when you say ‘zebra’ – but it’s not actually the way you use the word. When we use it, it’s mostly a brief index to jab towards a zebra-concept, but when we consciously inspect the word ‘zebra’, that zebra turns out to be less of a zebra than a hunch about what ‘zebrahood’ is. Which is to say that a word’s denotation of a concrete thing is in many ways a happy fiction.

Mostly we don’t have to think beyond using the word as a fleeting and weightless sign, juggled in the larger intent-driven performance of our sentences. When we are forced to think about it, and asked to define what is meant, exactly, by ‘zebra’ (in making what is sometimes known as the ‘use–mention’ distinction) – we’re back to listing all its core attributes. None of which turns out to be essential: not its stripiness, nor its horsiness, its quadrupedalness, its African-ness, its mammalness, its aliveness, its solidity. A zebra can be albino, a stuffed pyjama case, or a ghost; it can be a headless, legless, Arctic, inflatable, invisible zebra; but generally speaking, so long as it ticks just enough of our core, dictionary-definition zebra-attributes to form a quorum, we’ll agree to call it a damn zebra. [See endnote 6 for some idle speculation on whether the actual presence or absence of the zebra makes any difference.]

While all the attributes of a domain are individually negotiable and dispensable, we can nonetheless make a sensible if not a definitive distinction between which are ‘core’, primary attributes, and which are secondary connotations. Its unique combination of core attributes are not perhaps what makes a thing unique or individually discernible – but it is what underwrites its status as a ‘thing worth naming’. The word ‘bedroom’ might designate a concept having the central attributes of ‘room’, ‘bed’, ‘house’ and maybe ‘sleep’, all of which we would tend to accept as legitimate components of the dictionary definition of ‘bedroom’. But all a dictionary does is list enough core attributes to establish the smallest unique set that will indicate one thing and one thing alone, and this rarely needs to extend beyond five or six terms. (The game of ‘twenty questions’ performs the exercise negatively, via a subtractive process: all known terms are reduced to one candidate through the removal of large sets which, for the first ten questions or so, generally have too many members to be of use in the dictionary-style ‘additive’ process; of course the dictionary doesn’t say ‘carburettor: mineral; a form of non-decorative inanimate object made from metal …’ etc. The game is played devastatingly well by computers using neural networks, and several internet versions exist.) However, when we start to dwell upon the wider domain ‘bedroom’ indicates, we might also find the secondary terms dark, dream, sex, dressing, mirror, pyjamas, quiet, and so on. We might not consider these terms essential to our definition, but they can still fall naturally within the domain we indicate by the word. The constituent elements of a domain are bound by a kind of nuclear force, and are strongly consensual at its core; however these characteristic associations and qualities loosen as the domain expands, and become increasingly contingent, casual and subjective.

I should mention that while I’ll use the words ‘connotation’ and ‘attribute’ to mean roughly the same thing, the nuance is still useful, since an attribute can be thought of as something ‘possessed by’ and intrinsic to a core, where a connotation is generated by its core – i.e. the former has arisen via a process that is more passively definitional, and the latter through one more actively propositional. You can’t have a system formed of nothing but passive semic co-ordinates and the summed difference between them; the entire parole would just shrug. Language is fundamentally motivated. [For some curious analogies with Fourier analysis, see endnote 7.]

A domain forms a unique set, but can be defined by no single attribute: every term within it will be shared with many other domains. It has a strong epicentre, to which certain terms gravitate or are magnetised; this creates a kind of force-field, resulting in a little semic solar-system of more- and less-tightly bound elements. The domains indicated by words can alter, expand, contract, weaken or strengthen depending on the enclosing domains of context, performance, discourse group, etc. within which they occur.3

Generic and specific domains

I’ll now make a distinction between generic and specific conceptual domains, and look at how they operate within the literary trope.

As Wittgenstein observed, words are just the way we use them.4 A language, or more accurately the Saussurian langue, is the way we use all its words and all its idiomatic phrases. It is a snapshot of the generic space in which we do the bulk of our thinking. The dictionary is just a guide to this generic space. It works by naming the core connotations each ‘thing’ possesses for a particular group consensus; for it to be useful, it has to be circular, which is to say it must reflect the culture, beliefs, knowledge and prejudices already held by the English/French/specialist/eighteenth-century/Western/capitalist/colonial etc. class who consult it. It doesn’t really tell you what a zebra is – one might argue that only a zebra could tell you – but it’ll say what zebraattributes we consider culturally or anthropocentrically salient within the conceptual domain we have come to accept as coincident with the real zebra.5 Poets cannot trust the dictionary if their use of language is to be subversive. Indeed – to anticipate my conclusion – we might say that poetry fights the tyranny of unchallenged generic domains with its use of subversive specific domains.

A word is just a gravitational point in the phase space of language-as-a-whole towards which certain attributes are attracted. It holds itself apart from other words through those attributes it most repels, i.e. those it is least likely to share with them. The lexeme is, in this sense, just a complex semic co-ordinate. The semic attraction of this point radiates out to infinity: to use the better gravitational metaphor, it continues to subtly restructure semic space at a great distance from its own position (i.e. all words, to some degree, affect the whole language, since language is predicated – at least in our necessarily ideal descriptions of it – on its being a closed sign-system). It can conceivably take any other term or attribute as a connotation. The reason, as we’ll see, is that this semic co-ordinate, besides the attributes it possesses in the generic space of language-as-a-whole, is also subject to its ‘context’, the unique by-laws of its local universe, and this often mean that unexpected elements will fall under its influence. Furthermore, to repeat the Heraclitean point: because language flows and context constantly changes, no word ever really means the same thing twice.

The trope of metonymy, which substitutes a related term for ‘the thing itself’, proves this neatly. You can always construct a context or a circumstance to justify anything being called by an associated term (and since the conceptual domain is potentially infinite, any term at all; though the further the term is from the semic centre, the more unusual or contrived will be the circumstances which justify its substitutive use). The literary theorist Hugh Bredin seems to be arguing for a relatively finite and exclusive set of substitutive formulae that determine what we can accept as a well-formed metonym: ‘Take the expression “publishing company”: its semic field includes such concepts as book, distribution, and profit; yet it is impossible to employ the name of any of these as a metonymical replacement for “publishing company”.’6 This statement is quite false: I’ve heard publishing companies described as both a ‘profit’ and a ‘book’: the former in the context of a publishing house being part of a larger, financially motivated conglomerate, within which some subsidiary publishers were failing and others succeeding – ‘profitable business’ had been metonymised as ‘profit’; the latter, in the phrase ‘when your book goes against our book’, which was uttered in the ‘domain’ of a conversation notionally ‘about’ two rival publishers’ big books in the pre-Christmas non-fiction sales charts, but which was actually – and quite openly – about inter-publisher competition. The speaker wholly intended ‘when Bloomsbury goes against Penguin’. Any connotation can be used as a metonym. It’s entirely to do with the way the relation between ‘thing’ and aspect is strengthened and legitimised by context, i.e. by the rules of its specific domain; and since rules are arbitrary, they can be constructed to emphasise any relation.

Within the domain of ‘restaurant’, contextually relevant things like table numbers, food orders, credit cards, and dietary requirements are tagged ‘important restaurant stuff’. However, the sock-colour, the size of the stamp collection and the criminal history of the customers will not be tagged ‘restaurant stuff’ – though might well be in the specific domain of a clothing catalogue shoot, philately conference or county court. It’s just our habitual way of reading our reality – which would be overwhelming, were it not for our ability to frame contexts and decide what was important on given occasions, ‘given occasions’ being the things that make up our entire lives. This is the basis of metonymy, and, as we’ll see, the means by which (in the famous textbook example) a man can be transformed into a ham sandwich. If the peculiar rules of the specific domain insist upon it, anything can be related to anything else – and if that relation is made sufficiently strong, anything can substitute for anything else. The poem, I’ll argue, is the specific domain par excellence – and if its strange by-laws are strictly applied, all manner of new, unnatural and miraculous transformations are possible.

Conceptual metaphor

If we accept (perhaps on trust, for now) that the conceptual domain is the only game in town, we can quickly see that there are two principal mental operations available to us: intra-domain, where we link things within a domain by the rules by which it is constituted; and inter-domain, where connections are made between two different conceptual domains. The first we often associate with metonymy; the second with metaphor. These terms, while cheerily familiar, are much too narrow, and really only describe single operations within a far larger set of tropes. The first set of intra-domain tropes I call tropes of relation; the second set of inter-domain tropes, tropes of correspondence.

This insight first became common intellectual currency in the 1980s, when George Lakoff explained it in the context of his theory of cognitive linguistics;7 the more sophisticated model of conceptual blending – the combination of mental spaces, from which often unexpected third terms emerge – was later developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.8 These theories also accord with an old insight of Roman Jakobson’s, which I’ll discuss briefly (it’s of great historical importance, since it’s where the old model of the trope was first booted into touch, and where it should have stayed).

Lakoff’s idea was that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings within one domain, or between two domains that share some content and overlap in the sets of their attributes. The theory holds incredibly well – up to a point. We know that the conceptual mapping LOVE IS A JOURNEY TO A DESTINATION is widely employed, and lies behind phrases such as We had a bumpy start / We lost our way / We took a wrong turning / You and I have a hill to climb, and so on. Occasionally someone might draw attention to this largely unconscious metaphor – and make it conscious and manipulable by phrasing it in a textually salient way: saying, poetically, I feel like we’ve been freewheeling down a sunlit avenue this last year; or comedically – maybe we should pull over at the next services and take a break; or nonsensically, I think our glove-compartment’s full. (Such deliberate innovations, of what Arthur Koestler used to call the ‘bisociative’ kind,9 tend to result in either poetry, comedy, surrealism, or nonsense.)

However, experimental psychology has shown that deep conceptual metaphors such as TIME IS SPACE – the one we use when we say ‘I’ll see you IN a moment’ or ‘I’ll see you ON the twenty-fifth’ – have been made almost wholly abstract. For example, spatial ‘at’ (I’ll meet you AT the corner) and temporal ‘at’ (I’ll see you AT eleven) have, effectively, entirely different senses. (One must always bear in mind that words are signifiers, not referents: they mean what they mean, not what they are.) Steven Pinker has pointed out that patients who have sustained brain damage can lose the ability to use spatial prepositions, while retaining the ability to use temporal, and vice versa, i.e. they will retain one use of ‘at’ while losing the other.10 This indicates not only that time- and space-perception run on different neural circuits, but that at this deep level, the conceptual metaphor operates with far less force. [For some more careful qualification and discussion of ‘embodied’ aspects of metaphor, see endnote 8.]

Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and others, Pinker demonstrates that we tend to read through to an underlying mapping only when the surface metaphor is new to us. The invention of new metaphors (and the resuscitation of dead ones) is one aspect of language’s natural poetic function; the rest of the time, however, we are using less actual metaphor than we are petrified metaphoric clichés – as ‘phrasemes’ that represent an underlying abstraction. Phrasemes work just like single words; we memorise them as lexical items, and think of them as having synonyms. For example: through repeated usage, ‘just park it’ or ‘just drop it’ will eventually become wholly synonymous with ‘just set aside your complaint for now’ or even just ‘shut up’; little conscious thought will be conjured of parking cars or dropping anything. (Though it seems some vague sensorimotor twinge will still be activated, since wholly disembodied language is probably an impossibility.) But it’s fundamentally the abstraction behind the words that’s doing the work, not the metaphor – which is now pretty much ‘dead’, or at least cryogenically suspended, and just a phrasemic idiom.

A ‘new metaphor’ will usually do one of two things. Its innovations can make us conscious of the underlying mapping behind a virtually ‘dead’ conceptual metaphor: take the latent IDEAS ARE FOOD mapping behind ‘I can’t believe he swallowed that story whole’ or ‘He just regurgitated the same old stuff we always hear’ or ‘This is pretty indigestible news’ or ‘I’m still chewing it over’. This can be reactivated and more consciously embodied via the use of a new cliché, like, ‘Your plan for the takeover made my mouth water’; or, more strongly, by the original extension of an existing phrase, like, ‘I chewed it over, but in the end it was so tough I spat it out’; or, most powerfully and poetically, by original improvisation within the mapping itself: ‘Did I like your idea? Hell, I swilled it round my head like a fine Bordeaux.’ Poetic examples would include Shakespeare’s constant riffing on CHILDREN ARE PLANTS, the mapping we find behind ‘sowing your wild oats’, ‘spilling his seed’, ‘she’s barren’ and ‘she’s blossoming’ (most iterations of this mapping are curiously sexist). Shakespeare deploys the metaphor in phrases like ‘For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?’ (Sonnet 3). A better example is Eliot’s comprehensive dismantling of LIFE IS A JOURNEY in Part III of ‘The Dry Salvages’: ‘You are not the same people who left that station / Or who will arrive at any terminus, / While the narrowing rails slide together behind you […]’11

Alternatively, a poetic phrase may innovate a new conceptual mapping. Its expression in the text is usually more or less coterminous with its deeper mapping, which is merely to say original poetic metaphors tend to openly state their own formulae, because they have no pre-existent mapping to activate. A new metaphor usually has to be clearly presented because the reader hasn’t encountered it before. ‘She is as in a field a silken tent’ declares the rather charmless mapping THE WOMAN IS A TENT.12 In Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken’ appears to state explicitly the mapping A READER IS AN ASTRONOMER, an idea most readers will vaguely derive while also simply enjoying their more specific understanding of the lines as ‘this reader of Chapman’s translation of Homer felt like an astronomer discovering a new planet’.13 A full engagement with a metaphor will and allow us to perceive both the depth and surface, the strangeness and accuracy of the comparison simultaneously; it’s this paradox that gives metaphors their frisson. It will quickly abstract and simplify the metaphor to a conceptual mapping, as it’s there that the striking originality of the comparison is best appreciated; and it will pursue the complexities of its textual articulation, as it’s there the rich appositeness of the comparison is best indulged. (In Keats’s metaphor we are specifically invited to map ‘planet’ to the new world Chapman has revealed, the alert stargazer to the assiduous reader, and so on; these aspects are largely missing from the mere formulaic mapping, and other realisations of the same mapping would produce very different takes on it.)

But often the metaphors are delivered so fast, we are only really asked to parse them for sense:

Here, one might claim that we quickly make sense of these lines via unarticulated, on-the-hoof mappings like A WHOOSH IS POWDER EXPELLED, A SOUL FREEING ITSELF FROM THE BODY IS A THING SQUEEZING THROUGH A TIGHT SPACE BETWEEN THE SHOULDERBLADES and THE SOUND OF THE WINGS OF BIRDS SCARED FROM A ROOF IS THE RAPID CLICKING OF A GEIGER COUNTER IN THE PRESENCE OF A RADIOACTIVE SUBSTANCE; though you can immediately see the absurdity of calling these ‘conceptual mappings’ at all. The mapping is wholly coincident with its articulation.15 All we are really doing is interpreting the lines by translating them from the (often codified, discontinuous and elliptical) language of poetry.

To sum up: one can innovate poetically within a well-established, deeply rooted mapping, like LIFE IS A JOURNEY or ARGUMENT IS WAR or HAPPINESS IS UP or PAST IS BEHIND; but if you want to create innovative or subversive mappings like ARGUMENT IS PASTA or that HAPPINESS IS DOWN or THE PAST IS UP, you’d best start by saying just that, and then elaborate on what the hell you mean – and not just say ‘I’m finding this conversation somewhat fusilli,’ or ‘Cheer down, that’s all above us now.’

For the most part, though, in poetry conceptual mappings arise far more organically. To take a straightforward example, you look up, and you think: hey, a CLOUD IS A BOAT. As a rule, metaphors whose shared ground is a primary aspect of both tenor (the subject) and vehicle (that to which the subject is compared) can dispense with the textual presence of either vehicle, tenor or ground: boats and clouds both move slowly and smoothly, therefore ‘the slow-sailing cloud’, ‘the tall white ships sailed overhead’ and ‘the cloud was a ship’ are all just as comprehensible as ‘the cloud sailed away like an ocean liner’. Metaphors which hinge on secondary connotations generally have to spell out their ground, however, as readers aren’t psychic. Metaphors based on culturally familiar mappings can improvise within them; metaphors based on original mappings either have to declare them clearly, or at least explicitly declare those aspects which form the ground of the comparison.

As dull and dry as this point is, I really can’t overemphasise its importance in poetic composition, where original mappings often contribute much confusion through the poet’s failure to put themselves in the reader’s position. ‘The tall-sailed cloud’ might make us think immediately of a masted ship; but ‘the far-journeying cloud’ doesn’t, however much it may have put the poet in mind of it, and however much it was their intention to communicate the ‘boatiness’ of the cloud. In a metaphor which omits direct mention of the vehicle, the ground (here, the transferred epithet ‘far-journeying’16) must function as its index. Alas, far too many other things besides boats are also ‘far-journeying’. Half of poetic obscurity can be blamed on a tenor, ground or vehicle that has gone missing in action. If the ground is omitted, it must be able to be derived from the comparison alone. If tenor or vehicle are omitted, the ground must be explicitly stated, and contain a clear index to the missing component; which is to say the ground must contain an effective metonym of the absent vehicle or tenor.17

Lakoff, incidentally, has gone on to make something of a nuisance of himself by trying to turn conceptual metaphor into a one-size-fits-all solution to every dilemma ever posed by Western philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science. He even offered advice to the Democrats in a vaguely consultative capacity, claiming that their electoral chances would be improved by using the right conceptual metaphors. Taxes should not be called taxes but ‘membership fees’, since that phrase implies the underlying conceptual metaphor NATION IS A CLUB, and we’d all warm to that. It’s not just that all this seems straightforwardly manipulative and sinister; Steven Pinker also points out that, come year-end, everyone is likely to feel just as brassed off about paying their exorbitant ‘membership fees’ as they did their ‘taxes’ the year before.18 It’s not long before the ‘euphemistic treadmill’19 completes its cycle, especially where the money, death and faeces are involved. [For connections to Whorfian theories, see endnote 9.]

But there’s a ‘referential treadmill’ too: reality always catches up with any original metaphorical or metonymic representation in the end, and in most speech-act contexts turns it into an empty sign for the most culturally banal, least contentious attributes of its referent. This is a phenomenon most sharply seen in the family trees that have grown from Indo-European roots, but traceable in just about any etymology. Randomly: tunnel is from the Medieval English tonel, a wide-mouthed net used to trap birds, so its first application to ‘subterranean passage’ will have been metaphorical – and would inevitably have carried the connotation ‘trap’ for a little while; urn is derived from the Latin urere, to burn, bake, so ‘urn’ was originally a metonym for ‘baked [clay pot]’, so would have carried overtones of ‘heat’ and perhaps ‘food’ (and may still). Each new application of the word might be the result of either a metaphoric or metonymic process. In both these examples, the original neologists will have been aware of their relation to earlier terms, but this consciousness awareness can be lost very rapidly. How many of us can now remember that ‘blog’ is a contraction of ‘weblog’? (Nonetheless I sense that these overtones are often retained in the complex co-ordinate whereby words differentiate themselves within the parole.)

1 Ronald Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 488.

2 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.

3 Something necessarily omitted from this description but worth mentioning briefly is the way the very sound of the word itself also functions as a further property of the word-invoked domain; this forges connections with other similar-sounding words (which may not, at first glance, be semantically related in any way) according to both globally diffuse and locally specific phonesthemic principles. I’d argue that these were derived from the iconic basis of language itself, and have pursued this in the essay on lyric.

4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Boston, MA: Blackwell, 1973).

5 This process isn’t quite enough, however. If language could offer a full description of our experience, we wouldn’t need poetry. Poetry is just language’s self-corrective function, kicking in whenever the human encounters a reality it can’t properly articulate by the usual means. Technically, it’s really no more than a recentring of language’s performative norm; it moves towards an explicit patterning, a ‘peak shift’ of its salient formal features of rhythm, sound, syntactic construction, address and trope that define a specific language’s characteristic structure, and thus simultaneously allow it to exaggerate those things, events and ideas that a language represents. As I’ve said, all you need is the pressure of time, the heat of emotion and the urge to speak – then the shift is made, and something identifiable to humans as ‘poetic’ will often be the natural result. However, this feature of ‘peak shift’ is something poetry probably shares with all art. As Thomas Hardy said long before V. S. Ramachandran, ‘Art is a disproportioning – (i.e. distorting, throwing out of proportion) – of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities … Hence, “realism” is not Art.’ Quoted in Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (London: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 235.

6 Hugh Bredin, ‘Metonymy’, Poetics Today 5, no. 1 (1984): 45–58, at 52; http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772425.

7 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (London: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

8 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Capacities (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

9 Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964).

10 Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2008).

11 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).

12 Robert Frost, The Collected Poems (London: Vintage Classics, 2013).

13 John Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1988), 72.

14 Dean Young, Design with X (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan New Poets, 1988).

15 This shouldn’t be interpreted as agreeing in any way with Donald Davidson’s attractive ‘brute force’ argument: Davidson contended that metaphors have no meaning beyond what they say, and any paraphrase or abstracted truth they further prompt is a psychological act of interpretation, equivalent to ‘dreamwork’. The theory is non-cognitivist, and based on a description of metaphor as a strongly linguistic phenomenon. I feel it holds little water these days. See Donald Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 31–47.

16 Let us hear no more of ‘hypallage’, another uselessly porous category from classical rhetoric. Note however that ‘transferred epithet’ describes a syntactic strategy, and need not result in an epithetic metaphor. It can occur in metonymy too. Suppose we have a bald man with a dog. If ‘the bald dog’ is merely intended – and taken – as a very peculiar way of designating ‘the bald man’s dog’, then ‘bald’ is just a metonymic contraction. Often it’s a little more confused: take Louis MacNeice’s ‘Suspended in a moving night / The face in the reflected train / Looks at first sight as self-assured / As your own face’ – Louis MacNeice, ‘Corner Seat’, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Macdonald (London: Faber & Faber, 2007). The ‘moving night’, as figurative as it sounds, is in a sense just ‘the night of the moving train’. If one expands the term and the result is a literally consistent peristasis – a mere descriptive phrase – then we’re dealing with a metonym. However, it’s clear that a metaphorical component is also generated in the process; indeed, the more unusual the syntactic expression of a metonym and the more the full expression behind it is contracted, the more we will be inclined to read in a blurring of domains. (Some might still say, ‘No, it’s just a metonym’ – but since nothing is intrinsic, what we read in is all there is; if ‘moving night’ feels metaphorical, it is; and that dog was, in a way, a little bald too.)

17 (I will merely mention once again that, pace Jakobson, I am convinced that the poetic function collapses the principle of equivalence into the principle of selection, and this is another example of their poetic interdependence.) The following remark will be better understood once I’ve explained the relationship between peristasis and metonymy, where a descriptive detail is contracted to an index, but for now: if the ground is a core aspect of the tenor, it can act as an index to that tenor, which can then be metonymically omitted. If it’s a core aspect of the vehicle, ditto. A TREE IS A BOAT is clear in the phrase ‘tall-sailed tree’, despite it having no text-present vehicle, and despite the attribute ‘having tall things which catch the wind’ being only a secondary and distant connotation of ‘tree’; we can wing that, because it’s explicitly stated. The point is that ‘tall-sailed’ provides a direct index to the missing vehicle. ‘He heard the high rustling in the ship’ (spoken of a tree) conversely deletes the tenor, though ‘rustling’ points to the tree well enough, and the secondary connotation ‘having high things which rustle in the wind’ is explicit enough to for us to quickly find ‘sail’ from the vehicle ‘ship’. (Its ‘success’ as a metaphor is, conveniently, a separate question.) Given sufficient context, if we invoke aspects that are core to both tenor and vehicle (‘he beheld the tall mast’) or at least indexical of both (‘he stared up into the crow’s nest’) we might arguably omit both tenor and vehicle, while still invoking them both. Vehicle and tenor can both be treated as peristases, and therefore a metonym can contact and substitute for either.

18 See George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 1990) and Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); Steven Pinker, ‘Block That Metaphor!’ New Republic (9 October 2006), https://newrepublic.com/article/77730/block-metaphor-steven-pinker-whose-freedom-george-lakoff.

19 There’s also a ‘dysphemistic treadmill’: see, for example, the urban Scots ‘cunt’ for ‘person’ (I have heard a female taxi driver describe her own father as ‘basically a good cunt’.) ‘Aa cunt’ and ‘nae cunt’ are synonyms for ‘everyone’ and ‘no one’, as in ‘I gave a poetry reading last week, and there was nae cunt there.’ Unlike its offensive homonym, the word receives no stress emphasis. It is hard to convince outsiders that a term regarded in most other contexts as either sexually explicit, grossly sexist or deeply offensive carries little charge – but here, no offence is intended and none taken; the original meaning of the word has been emptied out, and its dialectal referent has taken over its sense.