Lexikalische Erweiterungen und lebendige Figuren: eine grundlegende Abgrenzung

Rhetorical tradition recognizes two distinct pairs of tropes within a homogeneous area – metaphor and a broad definition of metonymy on the one hand, and 'live' figures of speech and lexical extension on the other. Metaphor and metonymy are seen as different outcomes of a transfer of concepts, whereas lexical extensions are seen as the outcome of a process of crystallization of 'live' figures of speech. Neither these two fundamental points, nor the assumptions they rely on, i.e., the association between trope and transfer, and the idea that the 'conceptual pressure' provoked by the trope always affects the external focus, have been challenged by recent approaches. In this paper, however, we attempt to challenge both of these assumptions. Indeed, we show that on the one hand concept transfer is exclusive of the metaphor, while on the other the conceptual pressure in metaphoric projection does not affect the external focus but the coherent tenor. In so doing, we essentially redesign the topography of the field of tropology. The metaphor and metonym are profoundly different conceptual structures. Likewise, the live metaphor and lexical extension involve opposite orientations in conceptual pressure – while the lexical extension adapts the meaning of the word to the conceptual domain into which it is transferred, the living metaphor exploits the transferred concept to remodel the new domain.