On Paraphrasing Metaphor’s Content and the Model

The paper explores the problems of whether a metaphor has a definite meaning and whether this meaning can be fully described by nonmetaphorical language.The authors point out that a metaphorical usage of language does have a specific meaning(speaker’s intended meaning) which can be fully described by a nonmetaphorical language(natural semantic metalanguage), in other words, a metaphor’s meaning can be paraphrasable.The paper also studies Goddard’s metaphor paraphrasing model and concludes that although Natural Semantic Metalanguage Theory provides a good describing tool and a new approach for paraphrasing metaphor’s content, the model still has room for improvement.