18 - Allegory in Relation to Metaphor and Irony

Summary

Christoph Unger focuses on allegory, a kind of non-literal language use that has been little studied in pragmatics. He first outlines the pragmatic mechanisms employed in the processing of metaphor and irony, and then compares them with those that seem to be required for the understanding of allegories. Building on some early ideas of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, he argues that allegories are like fictions more generally in that they require the capacity to process multi-layered intentions. As such, processing allegory differs radically from metaphor comprehension (which involves ad hoc concept construction) but uses some of the same abilities as irony comprehension, specifically the ability to process utterances on two levels in parallel and the capacity to process interpretive resemblances between representations.