The offensiveness of animal metaphors: A relevance-theoretic view

The paper examines how animal metaphors are communicated and understood, considering that such metaphors have been known since Antiquity and are universally common. First, uses of animal metaphors are described, focusing on their use as insults or terms of abuse. It seems that the source of these metaphors most often include animals’ appearance, behaviour, habitat, cultural and economic utility as well as their intelligence and character. Such metaphors are usually directed at a person’s physical appearance, sexual organs, sexual behaviour or human mental and psychological properties. The range of meanings triggered by these metaphors has been described and explained by reference to dehumanization, the Great Chain of Being or interrelations between taboo, closeness and edibility. It is argued that relevance theory provides a well-motivated explanation of how these meanings get communicated and how the associated emotional effects arise. At the propositional level, concepts lexicalized as words referring to or associated with animals are modified and, as ad hoc concepts, are included in the proposition expressed, or explicature, with modifications involving broadening and narrowing or the combination of the two processes. Emotional effects, such as offensiveness, on the other hand, are considered to be non-propositional and non-paraphrasable and accounted for by postulating a range of weak implicatures (poetic effects) or impressions identifiable by “meta-cognitive awareness”.