8 speakers, or hearers. The meaning of pragmatics is defined relative to speaker or
user of the language like in expression 2.
2. The Definition of Metaphor
According to Cameron and Low 1999, metaphor is a mental phenomenon which can be manifested in language. The term metaphor comes
from Greek word which has literally meaning of “transfer”. Cruse 2000 adds that the transference occurswithin the meaning of one expression to another
expression. Other definitions of metaphor come from several researchers. Smith 1981 defines metaphor as a figure of speech in which the meaning of a term or
phrase is transferred from the object it ordinarily designates to another object to provide new insight or perspective on the latter. According to Burke 1945:503,
metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else. From those definitions, the researcher concludes that the term metaphor can be defined as a
process whereby the meanings and relationships of one theory or model may be used to suggest meanings or relationships in another area. However, different
person has different ability to understand the metaphor concept. The occurrence of metaphor concept is commonly seen as figurative language only. Besides, an
expression can also contain more than one metaphor concepts. Giora 2003 argues that many advertisements, headlines, jokes and stories require the readers
to construct a range of non-metaphorical and metaphorical senses for the same words. In this research, the context of the expression can lead the different
metaphorical meaning interpretation.According to Fauconnier and Turner 2002, the context may involve predictable sense, but the readers may well have to
9 blendthe source and target concepts together in very different ways to create quite
new or developing meanings.
3. The Occurrence of Metaphor
In order to identify the occurrence of metaphor, Richards 1965 makes a distinction between three aspects of metaphor. The first aspect is vehicle, the
items used metaphorically. The second aspect is tenor, the metaphorical meaning of the vehicle. The last aspect is ground, the basis for the metaphorical
extension. Richards 1965 also provides the example of the aspect distinction. The example is the foot of the mountainphrase. In the phrase, the word foot is the
vehicle. T he tenor is something like “lower portion” which is the intended
meaning of the vehicle. The ground is the spatial parallel between the canonical position of the foot relative to the rest of human body, and the lower parts of a
mountain relative to the rest of the mountain. The example provided by Richards focuses the attention on the fact that there must be some essential connection
between tenor and vehicle. The example helps the researcher to realize the connections in each metaphorical expression. The different part is that in this
research, the researcher only takes the expressions containing the meanings of the metaphors with verb. Being equivalent
with Richards’ idea, the researcher rejects the idea that metaphors can be generally translated into literal language, pointing
out that there is an interaction between meanings that cannot be reproduced in literal language. A word cannot be used to mean just anything, but the nature of
the connection.
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