Metaforização textual: a construção discursiva do sentido metafórico no texto

Abstract

The present study introduces textual metaphorization: a textual/discursive phenomenon where metaphor is recognized as a practice of constitution of sense, rather than as an ordinary game of similarity figures, restricted to the word or sentence level. First, the study argues on the very concept of metaphor within the main traditional theories, whose interpretation mechanisms are established on the replacement or transfer of semantic features, on the tension set up between a word (focus) and its projection over a sentence structure (frame), or yet, on a pragmatic set to a logic sentential context. Such discussion showed the constraints of metaphor-word and metaphor-sentence theories as it circumscribes the metaphoric phenomenon to a lexicalist Semantics, as well as the need for transferring metaphor to another interpretation stage, the textual/discursive level. Secondly, the research investigates the way how cognitive, textual-linguistic, and socio-cultural features are engaged simultaneously in the foundation of metaphoric sense, from the dilution of literal/metaphoric dichotomy, and the drawing of a cognition concept applied to metaphorization. Finally, it examines the constraints of the concept of metaphorical (re)categorization presented by Lima (2003), in order to propose textual metaphorization and its description trough interpretative mechanisms capable of revealing the plurality of metaphorical senses in a textual/discursive level, further than the word and sentence boundaries. The study presents a theoretical conjunction of the following subject areas: Textual Semiotics, Text Linguistics (studies on Referenciation) and Cognitive Sciences, which made possible the consideration of metaphor as a dynamic, flexible phenomenon, able to emerge and organize itself within socio-communicative interaction. Such an interdisciplinary theoretical blending aided to describe metaphorization through interpretation mechanisms or devices, adapted from Eco’s (2000; 2004) text semiotics and from Bertrand’s (2003) literary semiotics, which are: textual cooperation, the concept of reader/observer, abduction, conceptual properties selection and, lastly, the discursive isotopy concept. The analysis was carried out by applying the previous interpretative devices to a set of samples that comprehended mostly news notes and some humorous texts (jokes) collected from varied sources, with no definite criterion, and without obedience to a systematic order – this could justify the lack of a specific methodological design to validate the analyses. Such analyses showed that by overcoming the word and sentence limits, and by emerging in a textual/discursive level, metaphor becomes a process, the metaphorization. It means that the phenomenon is set in the textual dynamics, within a discursive context where metaphorical meanings can be multiplied whenever an interpretative movement acts during reading