This addendum confines itself to general accounts of the nature of verbal metaphor, setting aside work on such more specialized questions as whether metaphors are paraphrasable and such more general and speculative questions as whether the nonverbal arts provide convincing examples of nonverbal metaphor.

Semantic Twist Theories

Semantic twist theories follow Beardsley in holding that a metaphor is a sentence in which a relation of tension or incongruity obtains among the standing meanings of its constituent words and phrases, a tension which is relieved when some of these meanings (those of what Max Black called the focus) change or "twist" so as to come into harmony with the others (those of the frame). Semantic twist theories have been devised to fit many different conceptions of meaning and of verbal incongruity (Kittay 1989, Ricoeur 1979, Skulsky 1992). Such theories have trouble accounting for sentences one takes to be metaphors despite...