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Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 193196 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Book review
Creativity and Convention: The Pragmatics of Everyday Figurative Speech Rosa E. Vega Moreno, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2007, 249 pp Creativity and Convention (CC) is presented as a unied account of gurative speech based on the theoretical tools provided by the latest developments in Relevance Theory (RT). The book, which makes lavish use of the relevant literature in psychological experimentation on language processing and gurative language in order to back up its proposals, is divided into eight chapters. In the following, I will present a brief summary of the most central theses of the book and then an assessment of its main strengths and weaknesses. The rst chapter discusses state-of-the-art work in psychology dealing with the way the human mind works in processing new information. The evidence points in the direction of selective processing which in turn often leads to shallow processing. The author argues that it is necessary to incorporate these ndings into work on ostensive communication, which is possible to do in relevance-theoretic terms through the notions of ad hoc concept construction and ad hoc categorization. The second chapter is an outline of RT, an approach to human communication according to which the human mind tends to cognitive efciency. Our minds have developed mechanisms for the recognition of ostensive stimuli and the interpretation of the intentions underlying them. Any such stimulus raises expectations of relevance, which triggers a comprehension procedure based on the balance between effort and effects. Chapter 3 discusses three approaches to metaphor: (i) the Comparison View, rooted in Aristotles Poetics, which identies features common to topic and vehicle; (ii) Glucksbergs Class-Inclusion theory, which proposes that a metaphorical interpretation results when the vehicle is taken to stand not for its literal referent (e.g. rats in Tom is a rat) but for a superordinate category that the vehicle exemplies (e.g. entities which are specially disgusting) and that can be constructed ad hoc; (iii) Blacks Interaction Theory, which sees metaphor as a creative process that explores similarities between entities thus giving rise to the reorganization of assumptions in the topic. These three approaches share a dynamic view of metaphor that results in the creation of ad hoc or emergent conceptual structure. However, the three views lack a clear specication of the principles and mechanisms that guide the creation of such structure. Vega sees relevance conditions as underlying such mechanisms. In this connection, the author briey examines Fauconnier and Turners Blending Theory, according to which emergent structure arises from blending conceptual structure from different mental spaces, i.e. conceptual constructs that are built during communication as needed for the purpose of understanding. The blended space or blend is the result of combining elements from the different input spaces with further information retrieved from long-term memory. For example, understanding the metaphor My surgeon is a butcher involves deriving conceptual structure from the input mental space where a surgeon is operating on a patient and combining this information with conceptual structure from the input space where a butcher is cutting meat. In the blend we have a surgeon that acts like a butcher operating on a patient as if cutting meat. The blend thus gives rise to the additional idea of incompetence, which does not belong to either of the input spaces. Vega criticizes this analysis of emergent structure since it leaves out potential (but possibly crucial) implications (e.g. the surgeon, but not the butcher, could be sued for medical malpractice). This problem, the author argues, can only be solved by a theory, like RT, that takes into account the speakers intentions. The fourth chapter discusses the RT view on metaphor interpretation, where metaphor is not a departure from literalness or truth but a case of loose use of language. On many occasions speakers prefer to produce a literally false utterance to convey the intended meaning if the utterance minimizes the amount of effort invested in doing so. A case in point is when we round off gures as in I earn 1000 dollars [vs. 989.39] a month. The loose expression is easier to
0378-2166/$ see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.07.006

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process and conveys the same meaning implications as its literal counterpart in terms of standards of living, personal achievement, etc. In a similar way, a metaphor is a literally false utterance that can economically produce a large number of meaning effects. For example, This room is a pigsty conveys the implications that the room is untidy and dirty, that it smells bad and makes the speaker sick. The implications derive from broadening the denotation of pigsty into PIGSTY*, and ad hoc concept that thus designates foul-smelling and untidy places that make people sick. In this light, the problem of emerging structure can be easily dealt with by considering the assumptions made accessible by the encoded concepts as mere inputs to a pragmatic inference process. A related issue that seems to be satisfactorily solved in RT is the transformation problem. For example, My lawyer is a shark conveys the idea that the speakers lawyer is aggressive and obstinate. This interpretation is taken by many to be a matter selecting the relevant properties of the vehicle that apply to the topic. The problem is that, even though both lawyers and sharks are aggressive and persistent they are so in different ways. The relevance-theoretic solution allows for a degree of ne-tuning of the notion of aggressiveness as applied to sharks which makes the notion denote positive aggressiveness involving energy and courage or negative aggressiveness involving intentional damage. Chapter 5 contrasts the relevance-theoretic and other cognitive approaches to metaphor. The Class-Inclusion model suggests that the content of a metaphorical word contributes to the explicit content of an utterance. This idea is explicit in RT. Thus, in My lawyer is a shark what is asserted is not that the speakers lawyer is a literal shark but a SHARK*, a member of the ad hoc category of aggressive people and animals. In turn, Lakoff and Johnsons Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which sees metaphor as a conceptual mapping of concrete knowledge onto abstract knowledge (e.g. LOVE IS A JOURNEY), is criticized by Vega on the basis of what she sees as a case of circularity in its central argument: people talk of love in terms of journeys because people think of life in terms of journeys; we know that people think of life in terms of journeys because they talk of life in terms of journeys. An additional problem is that many conceptual metaphors are, according to Vega, mere cases of analogy or simile, but not real metaphors. Thus, although life is like a journey in some respects, it is not a journey (it does not take place on a bus or a train, we do not buy tickets to embark on, etc.). Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to idioms with particular emphasis on analyzability and transparency issues. Vega argues for a model that captures the independence and interaction of both factors. The pragmatic perspective is useful here too since it allows the analyst to consider idioms as partly motivated by the literal meanings of their parts, an assumption that nds support in psycholinguistic experiments. Vega further claims that the stored meaning of an idiom, which is generally the result of broadening its compositional meaning, may sometimes need to be pragmatically adjusted into a new ad hoc concept. For example, the expression at snails pace, which has been broadened to designate slow events, will have to be adjusted differently in The train ran at snails pace and My grandma walks at snails pace. This view of idiomatic meaning naturally goes beyond the capacity of the compositionality approach. Finally, Chapter 8 discusses, on the basis of evidence from psychology and pragmatics, the complementariness of creativity and convention in language use, where convention is related to automaticity in performing other tasks (e.g. reading, writing, riding a bike, etc.) and can thus be explored in connection to the acquisition of cognitive and motor skills. Vega sees the development of such routine skills, including those affecting language, as a consequence of the tendency of human minds to minimize processing effort, a view that is consistent with the central claims of RT. From this summary it will have become evident that CC provides readers with an updated and exhaustive account of a number of potentially complementary perspectives on metaphor. The author discusses possible inconsistencies in each approach and consistently offers the most recent developments in RT as a solution. The result of this effort is a comprehensive account of metaphor as an everyday language use phenomenon that makes explicit the cognitive and pragmatic connections between gurative and non-gurative speech. Particularly impressive is the discussion of the various forms of pragmatic adjustment that take place in metaphor comprehension, all of them guided by the search for relevance. Pragmatic adjustment results in the construction of ad hoc concepts, very similar to the notion of emergent structure studied in Blending Theory. But in Blending Theory there is no motivation for emergent structure. It happens because it is retrieved from long-term memory. The advantage of the RT account, in this respect, lies in its ability to motivate the existence of such structure in terms of the notion of relevance. However, the appeal to relevance does not endow linguistic theory with much predictive power. For example, in the surgeon as a butcher metaphor, the surgeons incompetence is a crucial emerging feature. But in other cases, as in Milosevic was called the butcher of the Balkans, there is no such a feature. Butcher, in this context, is used to highlight the horrors of Milosevics ethnic cleansing campaigns. RT can account for the two different uses on the grounds of pragmatic adjustment by postulating the construction through broadening of two different ad hoc

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concepts, BUTCHER* and BUTCHER**. While it is true that this kind of pragmatic adjustment is a requirement of relevance conditions, what RT cannot explain is (i) how the adjustment takes place in terms of the way our minds handle concepts, and (ii) why some adjustments are not possible. The answer to both problems lies in some of the explanatory tools developed by Cognitive Linguistics that the author has not explored. One such tool is the classical Langackerian distinction between base and prole (Langacker, 1987). Every semantic structure designates an entity, the prole, which is a cognitively more prominent substructure of a more complex semantic structure or base. We generally prole butcher in the base domain of cutting and selling meat, but in the case of a war context the metaphoric topic (Milosevic and his role in the war) calls for a special focus on butchers in their role as slaughterers who have no feelings of mercy for the animals that they kill. As noted by Lakoff (1993), the metaphoric topic (called the target in CMT) constrains the way we look at the vehicle (or source). The topic also allows us to disregard potential vehicles that share the encoded concept but not some crucial conceptual elements. Thus, we would not refer to Milosevic as the meat cutter of the Balkans. Of course, underlying cognitive constraints like these is the search for cognitive efciency, but this does not mean that such constraining factors are superseded by relevance criteria. Vega points out that CMT was initially proposed as a theory about why people use the metaphors they way they do. In contrast, RT intends to account for how people understand utterances, including metaphorical utterances, on the basis of the same cognitive machinery. RT thus rejects the existence of special processing strategies for metaphor such as conceptual mappings. There are two problems here. One is the fact that RT accounts for metaphorical uses of concepts as cases of broadening concepts (versus narrowing which applies to some metonymies). Ironically enough, broadening a concept can also be taken as a special comprehension task. So, why substitute one for the other? The second problem ties in with the lack of constraining power of the relevance-theoretic machinery. If we do not have an adequate account of the mechanisms used to construct plausible metaphorical expressions, how can we expect speakers to be capable of shaping their utterances in a way that will maximize relevance? The potential of a metaphorical utterance to convey the intended meaning implications is based on the hearer knowing what communicative resources are available to the speaker. There are two other problems with Vegas treatment of CMT. One relates to the supposed circularity that was mentioned above. The original argument in favor of conceptual metaphor is that we can nd evidence in language that, for example, people think of some aspects of a love relationship in terms of journeys. This allows linguists to postulate a metaphorical system that underlies a wide array of linguistic expressions (e.g. We are going nowhere, Our love is on the rocks, Its been a long, bumpy road). Since the system is conceptually available it guides language users in their inferential processes (in We are going nowhere, the hearer may reason that it is possible for both lovers to retrace their steps and nd the right way to achieve their common goals). So cognitive linguists do not claim that people think of love in terms of journeys because people talk of this concept in terms of journeys; all to the contrary, the claim is that analysts know that people think of love, and other concepts, in terms of journeys because they nd linguistic evidence that that is the case. The second major problem is the misled assumption that what cognitive linguists regard as metaphors are cases of analogy or simile. Vega (p. 139) argues that conceptualizing life as a journey would imply we cannot think of life without thinking of journeys. This is simply a straw man argument. The actual position defended by cognitive linguists is not that people conceptualize life as a journey, but that some aspects of life those that have to do with achieving goals can be understood in terms of some aspects of journeys. We can, and we often do, think of life without thinking of it as if it were a journey. As to the analogy issue, if we are to understand analogy in a narrow manner as a simile, one may wonder where the analogy is between such concepts as life, love, or careers and journeys. There is no resemblance. Of course, it is possible to broaden the notion of analogy, as is modernly done by some cognitive scientists (cf. Gentner et al., 2001), to make it cover any form of alignment between structures, an idea that is very close to the notion of conceptual mapping. But in fact it is possible to see analogical reasoning in a narrow sense in some cases of metaphor. For example, a pump is to a hydraulic system as the heart is to the blood circulation system. This analogy licenses the metaphor where we think of the heart as if it were a mechanical pump. Or think of the lawyers as sharks example. There is analogy in the sense that in their professional context lawyers behave to people like sharks to their prey. But, as Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have discussed, there are many metaphors that are not based on resemblance relations between source and target, but rather on experiential correlations. Ironically, LIFE IS A JOURNEY, which Vega claims is based on simile, is in fact grounded in the more basic correlational metaphor GOALS ARE DESTINATIONS, which conates the events of reaching a destination and achieving ones purpose. So the metaphor cannot be based on analogy except in a very broad sense, which is not the one taken by Vega.

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Despite these obvious misunderstandings, Vega is right in joining some cognitive linguists in their claim that both CL and RT can benet from each other. Of course, some adaptation of the most radical claims from both sides may be required. CL may have to take online processing and pragmatic adjustment more seriously while RT may have to revise some basic misunderstandings of the CL position, especially in the light of the most recent literature in this approach. References1
Gentner, Dedre, Holyoak, Keith J., Kokinov, Boicho K. (Eds.), 2001. The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Lakoff, George, 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In: Ortony, A. (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought. 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 20022251. Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. Basic Books, New York. Langacker, Ronald, 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. I. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Francisco Jose Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez has published research on cognitive models, pragmatics, and functional grammar in the Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Communication, Folia Linguistica, and in different book series in Mouton de Gruyter and John Benjamins. He has been an invited speaker in many international conferences, the most recent being the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Krakow, 2007), and the Seventh International Conference on Researching and Applying Metaphor (Caceres, 2008). He serves on the scientic boards of journals such as Jezikoslovlje, Revue Romane, and Cognitive Linguistics. He is the editor of the Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics (John Benjamins) and co-editor of Applications of Cognitive Linguistics (Mouton de Gruyter).

Francisco Jose Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez Department of Modern Languages, University of La Rioja, Logrono, La Rioja, Spain E-mail address: francisco.ruizdemendoza@unirioja.es

Note: Support for this review has been provided by Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, grant number HUM2007-65755/FILO, which is associated with the Lexicom research group (www.lexicom.es).