Always great to see the Aristotelian mind at work, proceeding with metaphor by
a kind of taxonomy. Presumably, he brainstormed all the examples of metaphor
he could and then sorted them into types -- working with that biologist's mind
of his.
The limit of this approach (if it is not absolutely exhaustive in its
description of all possible metaphorical moves) is that it sorts out the
surfaces. It can't go below the surface to look at metaphor in formation or
at the ambiguity in metaphor. For example, is the phrase that I have just used
-- "in formation" -- metaphorical or not in that precise context? I'm not
asking as a linguist would, by the way, as though I were seeking a grammatical
category: I'm interested in the poetic impulsion.
Doug
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