"Words are clamor-filled shells. There's many a story in the miniature of a single word!" - Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)

W e l c o m e   t o   t h e   M e t a p h o r  !

While not everyone has been welcoming of this Greek philosopher's dabbling in the affairs of language and poetry (The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Aristotle--quite certainly--had planted the seed for the metaphor. The fruit that has sprung forth is a result of the many global theorists, linguists, and educators who have nourished, spliced, cultivated, harvested, and marketed the metaphor to what it is today--it's various syntactic forms, it's multimodality, it's contextual uses. Accordingly, mastery of the metaphor has been considered the ultimate form on language acquisition.

This website was designed to introduce the English student, researcher, and the general Hong Kong Polytechnic University community to the world of the metaphor. In it, you will find theories; definitions; examples (in both discourse and action); usage in a real-world business contexts; activities; and opportunities for interaction.

Please enjoy.

The Research Team,
The English Department,
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University