Metafora kao odsustvo značenja u javnoj komunikaciji
Metaphor as an absence of meaning in public interaction

Summary/Abstract: From Aristotel who has studied metaphor as a decorated speech to modern (cognitive) theories where metaphor is described as a mediator of abstract concepts, metaphor remains a mean of enriching the language. Metaphor also shows connection between language and man’s sensory experience of the world and is a product of man’s literary mind. Assuming that metaphor really is a product of interaction between human mind, corporeality and complex concepts of the human world, it can be studied as a fundamental feature of language expression, in literary and everyday communication. Metaphor points to the sensory foundations of human understanding of the world and man’s efforts to explain the categories of this world linking the known with unknown, simple with complex and concrete to abstract. This is how metaphor provides a language dynamics. Everyday language of public communication (media, politics) contains various metaphors in the range from conceptual metaphore to richly decorated figures of speech. Some of them tend to make the speech more understandable, while other exaggerate the meaning. Frequent appearance of certain metaphorical circuits in a public speech can produce the opposite effect and impoverish the meaning (empty phrases). In this case, the metaphor becomes an end in itself, does not recall additional meaning or associate abundance of meaning contained in its expression. The aim of this study is to discover this kind of metaphor, describe the manner of its functioning and compare it with the conceptual metaphor to which it oppones as a language structure without a deeper meaning.

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