ANALOGICAL TRUTH CONDITIONS FOR METAPHORS

It has often been said that metaphors are based on analogies, but the nature of this relation has never been made precise. In this article, I rigorously and formally specify two semantic relations that apply be tween some metaphors and analogies. I argue that analogies often provi de conditions of meaningfulness and truth for metaphors. An analogy is treated as an isomorphism from a source to a topic domain. Metaphors are thought of as surface structures. Formal analogical conditions of meaningfulness and truth are fully and rigorously worked out for sever al grammatical classes of metaphors. By providing analogical meaningfu lness and truth conditions for metaphors, in this article, I show that truth-conditional semantics can be extended to metaphors.