Metaphor is a use of language in which one thing, experience, or idea is presented in terms of another rather than described only literally. Calling an argument “a battlefield,” for example, invites an audience to understand disagreement through ideas associated with combat. Traditionally classified as a figure of speech, metaphor occurs in everyday communication as well as literature. Its interpretation, expressive effects, and relationship to thought are subjects of linguistic and philosophical study. (poetryfoundation.org)
Structure and interpretation
A metaphor commonly involves a subject being described and another subject through which it is understood. In terminology associated with I. A. Richards, these are the tenor and vehicle. In William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, “Juliet is the sun” makes Juliet the tenor and the sun the vehicle. The utterance does not assert astronomical identity; it invites connections between Juliet and aspects of the sun relevant to Romeo’s situation. (plato.stanford.edu)
Metaphors need not take the grammatical form “X is Y.” A verb, adjective, or phrase can carry metaphorical force: someone may “grasp” an idea or encounter a “frozen” relationship. Interpretation therefore depends on more than sentence form. The same expression may be literal in one setting and metaphorical in another, making context central to identifying what is being communicated. (aclanthology.org)
Related figures and varieties
A simile makes a comparison explicit, commonly with “like” or “as”: “the argument was like a battlefield.” Metaphor instead speaks of the subject in terms of the other domain without that explicit comparative construction. The distinction is useful in literary description, although philosophical accounts disagree about whether metaphors can ultimately be explained as implicit comparisons. (poetryfoundation.org)
Personification describes a nonhuman thing or an abstraction as though it were a person. Expressions such as “the wind whispered” illustrate how human agency or behavior can structure figurative descriptions. Personification is particularly prominent in symbolic and allegorical poetry, where abstract qualities may appear as human characters. (poetryfoundation.org)
An extended metaphor develops a figurative identification across several statements or an entire work. A conceit is an especially elaborate or audacious extended metaphor. By contrast, conventional metaphors belong to familiar speech. Expressions such as “the head of a company” may become so established that their figurative origin attracts little attention; such expressions are often called dead metaphors. These categories distinguish a metaphor’s extent, originality, and familiarity rather than mutually exclusive grammatical forms. (poetryarchive.org)
Historical and philosophical accounts
In ancient Greece, Aristotle discussed metaphor in both the Poetics and the Rhetoric. He treated it as the transfer of a name between categories or through analogy. His classification was broader than many modern definitions, including transfers between genus and species. Analogical metaphor relates proportions: a cup can be named in terms of a shield because each bears a corresponding relationship to a particular god. Aristotle also associated metaphor with learning and with vivid, unfamiliar expression. (plato.stanford.edu)
Modern debates in philosophy of language concern whether metaphor changes linguistic meaning, communicates something beyond literal meaning, or primarily directs attention toward new connections. These alternatives intersect with semantics, which studies meaning, and pragmatics, which examines language use and contextual interpretation. No single account commands general agreement. (plato.stanford.edu)
Max Black’s interaction account rejects the idea that metaphor is merely decorative substitution. On this account, a metaphor brings two subjects into interaction, using associations attached to one to select and organize features of the other. Consequently, a literal paraphrase may convey part of a metaphor’s content while failing to reproduce its distinctive perspective. This approach helped shift attention from isolated transferred words to the organization of thought within an utterance. (stanford.edu)
Conceptual metaphor
Conceptual metaphor theory, developed prominently by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, treats metaphor as a feature of conceptual organization rather than exclusively a literary technique. In this approach, linguistic expressions provide evidence for patterns in which one domain of experience is understood through another. The theory belongs to research connecting linguistics with cognitive science. (cambridge.org)
The domain supplying the organizing structure is the source domain; the domain being understood is the target domain. For example, the conceptual metaphor LOVE IS A JOURNEY connects relationships with movement along a route. Expressions about a relationship “not going anywhere” or reaching a “dead end” instantiate this pattern. The claim concerns systematic correspondences across expressions, not simply the presence of a striking comparison in one sentence. (cambridge.org)
Computational study
In natural language processing, metaphor research distinguishes identification from interpretation. Identification locates metaphorical expressions; interpretation attempts to recover their contextual meaning, sometimes through less figurative paraphrases. A system must distinguish a “leaked report” from a physically leaking object and recognize disclosure rather than wetness as the relevant meaning. (aclanthology.org)
Research has used machine learning, distributional information, and patterns of word compatibility to model these tasks. A 2013 study by Ekaterina Shutova, Simone Teufel, and Anna Korhonen combined metaphor identification with paraphrase generation in unrestricted text. Such computational work tests how figurative meaning can be represented and recovered beyond narrowly specified examples. (aclanthology.org)