A (Potential) Lifespan of a Metaphor: The Case of a Bank

Abstract

The paper examines the possibility of certain metaphoric expressions starting out as interpretative use of language and becoming a descriptively used unit by means of reutilization and routinization. The aim is to illustrate this process by using one example – lexeme bank – and elaborating how a certain metaphorical mapping can become routinized within a group or a community. Theoretical framework used in this paper is Relevance Theory, a cognitive-inferential model of pragmatics. Two approaches to metaphoric expressions are taken into consideration – explicature analysis (descriptive approach) and modified explicature analysis (interpretative approach). The main idea is to illustrate the process of utterance interpretation when the lexeme bank is used metaphorically, both as a case of descriptive and interpretative language use.