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to that feature of the code called 'rule-governed creativity'. That the code allows for factual judgments poses no difficulties either; the very nature of the code, which is arbitrary, explains how it can, by manipulating signifiers, refer to new signifieds produced in response to new experiences. It also explains why, once issued, factual judgments can be integrated into the code in such a way as to create new possibilities for semiotic judgment. How, though, does this 'rule-changing creativity' work? |
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Even prior to the specifically aesthetic usage of language, the first example of such creativity is provided in common speech by the use of different types of metaphors and thus of rhetorical figures. A series of problems that touch on rhetorical devices will allow us to respond to these questions. In the case under consideration we will at present deal with the problem of interaction between metaphoric mechanisms and metonymic mechanisms; to these one can probably ascribe the entire range of tropes, figures of speech, and figures of thought.
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The goal of this discussion is to show that each metaphor can be traced back to a subjacent chain of metonymic connections which constitute the framework of the code and upon which is based the constitution of any semantic field, whether partial or (in theory) global. This investigation takes as its point of origin a specific metaphoric substitution located in Finnegans Wake and explainable only through the exposure of a metonymic chain beneath the metaphoric level. A second check on a typical Joycean mot-valise (which, for the variety and polyvalence of its connotations, assumes a metaphoric value) will uncover, here too, a much more vast and articulate network of metonymies that have been wrapped in silence or revealed in another part of the work. |
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Finnegans Wake, at this point, presents itself as an excellent model of a Global Semantic System (since it posits itself, quite explicitly, as the Ersatz of the historical universe of language) and confronts us with a methodological exigency of the sort found in a study of general semantics proposing to illuminate the ways in which language can generate metaphors. The conclusion is that the mechanism of metaphor, reduced to that of metonymy, relies on the existence (or on the hypothesis of existence) of partial semantic fields that permit two types of metonymic relation: (i) the codified metonymic relation, inferable from the very structure of the semantic field; (ii) the codifying metonymic relation, born when the structure of a semantic field is culturally experienced as deficient and reorganizes itself in order to produce another structure. Relations of type (i) imply semiotic judgments, whereas relations of type (ii) imply factual judgments.3 |
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The usefulness of such an analysis, which traces each metaphoric substitution back to a metonymic chain founded on codified semantic fields, is as follows: any explanation which restores language to metaphor or which shows that, in the domain of language, it is possible to invent |
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