D. V. Duff said: if you are going to talk about a new figure of rhetoric, you better _label_ it first (the magic of names, etc. -- the thing comes to existence Because you name it). Witness Grice's implicature.
Etc.
The idea is:
"My room was so small: there was hardly room to lay my hat and a few friends" (Parker).
Is the idea that this is a "zeugma" some "enrichment" to the proceeding?
I can imagine that in China, they never heard of 'zeugma' (this was coined by Aristotle in his Rhetoric). And yet, knowing how lovers of word plays the Chinese always were, they possibly punned alla zeugma in things they said, in Chinese.
To generalise:
the label of a figure of rhetoric is _inoperative_ in the recovery of that figure. Therefore the label of a figure is inoperative. Sesquipedalianism.
I had posted the query elsewhere retrieving this answer by Gibbs, which I'm pasting. It's in the public domain:
ReplyDeleteFrom: Ray Gibbs
Reply-To: FLN
"I would like to respond to JL Speranza's interesting query about his paradox. I am a psycholinguist who has studied people's
use and understanding of figurative language. I firmly believe that people do not ordinarily label the figures of speech they hear as part of their immediate understanding
of what these figures mean. Instead, people process figurative language as they do any kind of linguistic material by trying to infer the speaker's communicative
intentions in a specific discourse situation. Speakers do not ordinarily aim to communicate a metaphor, irony, metonymy, or whatever, but they do unconsciously produce
these different forms to convey particular meanings. Both speakers and listeners may, after the fact, consciously
speculate that "what speaker X said was a metaphor" or whatever, and they may even consciously try to infer
additional pragmatic meanings when they engage in such conscious, reflective processing. But listeners AND readers
do not ordinarily engage in this kind of reflective practice.
[...] I don't doubt that in some cases that one's conscious recognition that an instance of language is, say, a zeugma MAY possibily enhance one's interpretation and
appreciation of what is meant. This is, howver, an empirical question (one which I am presently studying in regard to literary metaphor). My main point, however,
is that we need to be sensitive to different aspects of what it means to "understand" any particular kind of language and NOT draw unwarranted inferences from
one moment of understanding (e.g., "recognition") as applying to ALL aspects of understanding (e.g.,
"comprehension").
Interested readers can find more of my discussion on these
matters in my 1994 book "The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding," and my 1999 book
"Intentions in the experience of meaning" (both published
by Cambridge University Press).
Best wishes,
Ray Gibbs
UC Santa Cruz
----
Etc. But of course the polemic SHOULD ensue!