Abstract

A variant of the compatrison theory of metaphor is put forward. The main points are a theory of metaphor belongs to semantics, not pragmatics, a metaphorical statement is a similarity statement, usually comparing descriptions of objects, a metaphor is a constellation of words connected by a certain kind of relation - the metaphorical link, metaphors are not necessarily asymmetric, what expressions copunt as metaphors in a certain language has to do with the semantic fields of the language in question