Letteralita’ e metafora: dinamiche e costruzione a partire dalle riflessioni di Francois Recanati

Abstract

Following Recanati (2004) metaphor is not confined to the post-semantic uses of language, but it will instead be conceived as an output of the complex pragmatic processes that actually concur in the activation or, vice-versa, in the inhibition of the potential meanings of the single parts of utterance. On the one hand, Recanati does not leave any doubt explaining the way pragmatic mechanisms determine figurative meanings; on the other hand, he is not explicit in clarifying what really happens in the language unit contributing to these mechanisms. In this paper, I will try to argue that Recanati always preserves the notion of literality of language units and will try to clarify the deep connection that relates terms’ semantic field to world’s knowledge