Semantics Lexical Semantics Review of Related Theories
of a metaphor to include things beyond its immediate field or scope. He also says that symbol is used to control a rea
der’s imagination, to stimulate specific areas of brain so as to call up a definite range of emotions.
Metaphor in song lyrics is usually used in order to make the listeners imagine what the song writer is saying about because metaphor is used
usually to create the lyric more dramatic and more beautiful. That what Coldplay’s song lyrics also do. It uses several symbols for example stars
and heaven to make the listeners imagine what the song writer is telling about. That is why a symbol which is identically used by metaphor is very
important to make the story in the lyric alive. The value which is contained in a metaphor is when there is another
meaning in a word beside its lexical meaning or dictionary meaning. Metaphor is a representation idea of something, but sometimes people have
to deal with difficulties in defining meaning of metaphoric expression. The main point is the extended meaning appropriates the first meaning whether
the concept or the characteristics of it. That is why metaphor sometimes uses other attributes to make it easier in defining the extended meaning.
One of the attributes which is often found in defining metaphoric meaning is symbol.
Metaphor is usually known by symbolization of some expression. For example, in the
metaphoric expression ‘My home is a prison’. In this example, the word home is compared to the prison where they have
different meaning in dictionary, but a prison can be used to describe a home
somehow. In this metaphoric expression, a prison which means a building to which people are legally committed as a punishment for a crime or while
awaiting trial based on Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, is used to
symbolize a home where it is usually described as permanent place to stay peacefully with families.
The symbolization in metaphoric expression is used in order to create image beyond what an expression is said lexically. As stated by Jay
Parini in An Invitation to Poetry, symbol is simply the extension of a metaphor to include things beyond its immediate field or scope. Besides, a
symbol also controls reader’s imagination to define metaphor meaning based on the context of the story they heard or read.
On the other hand, there is also classifications of metaphor. In her book entitled Meaning-Based Translation: A Guide to Cross-Language
Equivalence, Larson distinguished metaphor into two classifications, they are dead metaphor and live metaphor.
Dead metaphor is a figurative language which its usage has already been popular. People are already familiar with the expressions because it is
a kind of conventional and it is also used as daily expression. The point why dead metaphor expressions were formed or their comparison do not
longer become the main concern because they are used in daily usage. When a dead metaphor is used, the person listening or reading does not
thing about the primary sense of the words, but only about the idiomatic sense directly Larson, 1998: 274.