Definitions of Literal and Figurative Use and the Technical Divisions of Metaphor

1. A remaining objection concerning convention and interpretation

A further objection remains after defining metaphor through use, assignment, and interpretation: if assignment by figurative interpretation counts as an ordinary conventional assignment, would every metaphor become literal? That would dissolve the distinction being defined.

Actual assignment identifies the established relationship between an expression and its meaning in a governing convention. Interpretive or claimed inclusion rhetorically treats one subject as belonging to another class. The two operations cannot simply be equated.

For example, calling a brave person “asad” (lion) claims a resemblance in courage. It does not make that human being a literal zoological member of the class of lions.

2. Actual assignment and interpretive extension

Bi'l-taḥqīq requires attention to a word's genuinely assigned sense. Bi'l-taʾwīl permits a rhetorical claim that an external subject belongs to the class represented by that sense.

رأيت أسداً يخطب
I saw a lion delivering a sermon.

The verb “delivering a sermon” supplies a clue to a human orator. “Lion” has not acquired a new zoological sense meaning “human preacher.” Rather, courage is expressed through the imaginative claim that the orator belongs to the category of lions.

3. Why the convention of discourse matters

في اصطلاح به التخاطب
Within the convention in which the discourse is taking place.

Before labeling an expression literal or figurative, determine the relevant convention: ordinary linguistic usage, a religious technical usage, or the terminology of another discipline. The same spoken form can carry an established sense in more than one domain.

Thus “ṣalāh” can signify supplication in general lexical usage and a specified act of worship in religious terminology. A definition that ignores the domain governing the conversation may misclassify an established technical sense.

4. Does this restriction belong only in the definition of metaphor?

An objection notes that the restriction “convention of discourse” is explicit in the definition of metaphor but not always repeated in exactly the same wording in the definition of literal use. This may make the definitions appear asymmetrical.

The reply asks whether the term assignment (waḍʿ) already presupposes the recognized assignment within the relevant speech community or technical domain. Where that is implied, repetition of the phrase need not add a new condition.

For practical classification the convention still must be identified. Otherwise participants may be judging the same utterance against two different established vocabularies.

5. One expression under different conventional perspectives

Literal and figurative status should not be assigned to a word-form in isolation from every context. An expression may be conventionally assigned to one sense in one domain and to another sense in another domain.

Case 1: Consider “ṣalāh” in ordinary lexical discourse where it can denote supplication.
Case 2: Consider it in juristic discourse where it denotes the prescribed act of worship.
Case 3: Consider a contextual use of the same term for supplication within a discourse governed by its religious technical sense.

The third case needs analysis of the relation between supplication and the broader ritual, not merely a comparison of surface word-forms.

6. Predication through an attribute and the definition of literalness

الجواد لا يخيب سائله
A generous person does not disappoint the one who asks him.

“Jawād” denotes someone characterized by generosity. The sentence predicates a further feature of the person under that description. Such predication does not itself create an entirely new figurative dictionary assignment.

We must distinguish a restriction relevant to the judgment from the expression's established lexical meaning. A sentence may use an attribute to identify its subject while retaining the ordinary conventional sense of the word describing that subject.

7. Ṣalāh and supplication: a part–whole relation

الصلاة
Prayer or supplication, depending on the governing convention.

In religious terminology, ṣalāh is a prescribed act comprising a structured set of words and actions. Supplication is associated with this act and can be considered part of what it encompasses. Calling a mere supplication “ṣalāh” in a context governed by the ritual sense may therefore raise a part–whole question.

The key is not whether “ṣalāh” has ever meant supplication lexically; it is which assigned meaning governs this utterance. Literalness in one convention does not automatically determine the status of every occurrence in another.

8. Assignment through established usage and shared convention

الوضع الذي وقع به التخاطب
The assignment under which the discourse actually took place.

“Assignment” need not be confined to a word's earliest recoverable sense. It includes a recognized convention through which speaker and listener understand the expression in their particular discourse.

When members of a discipline have an established technical sense for a term, using it in that sense is not figurative merely because everyday speech has another sense. The relevant test is the actual convention governing the utterance.

9. Comparing the relevant levels of classification

The classification of literal and figurative use involves several distinct questions.

AspectQuestion to resolve
AssignmentWhat meaning is established for the expression?
ConventionWhich speech community or technical domain governs?
Current useWhat meaning is intended here?
ClueWhat shows that an alternative sense is intended?

Conflating these stages leads to confident but ambiguous claims about an expression being “literal” or “metaphorical.”

10. Why an accidental misuse must be excluded

خذ هذا الفرس
Take this horse.

Suppose someone says this while pointing to a book. “Faras” conventionally denotes a horse, while the gesture points to the book. Nonliteral reference plus an external indication should not, by themselves, be sufficient to call the expression a rhetorical trope.

Intention and error must be distinguished. If the speaker meant to say “book” and accidentally uttered “horse,” the expression is a slip, not a successful figurative transfer.

11. The role of intention alongside a contextual clue

مع قرينة مانعة عن إرادته
With a clue precluding the literal sense from being intended.

This is a necessary part of identifying metaphor, but it must be understood with care. A circumstance may simply show that the usual referent is absent. A genuine figure of speech also employs an intelligible relation through which the listener reaches another intended sense.

A gesture toward a book while saying “horse” can rule out an actual horse, yet it does not establish a meaningful figurative link between a horse and a book. This separates accidental misuse from a deliberate rhetorical transfer.

12. The wording of the contextual-clue condition

مع قرينة
Together with a contextual indication.

The expression links the clue to the occasion of use. A clue is not merely an unrelated fact discovered afterward; it contributes to identifying what the speaker means in this utterance.

The analysis also distinguishes deliberately providing an indication from finding a circumstantial sign. Without a basis for intentional figurative meaning, the co-occurrence of an unusual word and a contextual sign may still be error rather than rhetorical usage.

13. Testing whether a restriction does real work

A useful definition needs restrictions that draw the correct boundary. Too broad a condition admits irrelevant cases; too narrow a condition excludes genuine examples.

“In other than its assigned sense” identifies semantic transfer.
“With a clue” identifies a contextual indication.
A meaningful relation and intended transfer distinguish figurative speech from mere accidental substitution.

Compare “Take this horse,” said accidentally while pointing to a book, with “I saw a lion delivering a sermon.” Both resist literal interpretation, but only the latter offers a coherent likeness in courage supported by a human action.

14. Distinguishing metaphor from other figurative uses

Figurative uses are not all based on the same relation. When an expression is transferred because of resemblance, the figure is metaphor (istiʿārah). Where the relation is causal, part–whole, container–contained, or another non-resemblance relation, the figure is a non-metaphorical transferred use (majāz mursal).

رأيت أسداً يخطب
I saw a lion preaching.

Courage links the orator and lion. By contrast, naming a location to refer to its inhabitants depends on a spatial relation rather than likeness. What matters is the type of semantic relation, not nonliteralness alone.

15. The metaphorical use of one side to indicate the other

الاستعارة بأن تذكر أحد طرفي التشبيه وتريد به
Metaphor mentions one side of a comparison with the rhetorical intent of conveying the other.

An ordinary simile may distinctly state both sides: “Zayd is like a lion.” Metaphor more directly presents one through the other: “Zayd is a lion,” or simply “a lion” while referring to the man.

The definition presupposes a relation of likeness and a communicative intention. The presence of one noun alone does not create metaphor unless the understood second side and the likeness are established.

16. A “lion in the bathhouse”: an overt source noun

في الحمام أسد
There is a lion in the bathhouse.

When context identifies a brave man as the referent, “asad,” the comparison source, is openly stated while the human target is not named. This is the structure of explicit metaphor (istiʿārah taṣrīḥiyyah).

The words alone cannot establish whether an actual animal is present. Context and the speaker's intention establish whether “lion” has been transferred to a human being because of courage.

17. Which side is expressed in implicit metaphor?

أنشبت المنية أظفارها
Death drove its claws in.

Here “death,” the target of the comparison, is overt. The predator used as the source is left unnamed, while “claws,” one of its associated characteristics, evokes that source.

Distinguishing explicit and implicit metaphor is not a matter of counting figurative words. The crucial question is whether the source is expressly named or signaled through an associated attribute. In al-Sakkākī’s analysis this involves an imagined predication as well.

18. Avoid confusing the stated side with the metaphor source

Technical terms such as the stated side, the target, and the source of comparison must be read according to their specific relations. In one example the stated noun is the source; in another the target is stated while the source remains implicit.

في الحمام أسد — “lion” is overt; a human may be intended.
أنشبت المنية أظفارها — “death” is overt; the predator is inferred through “claws.”

Both involve rhetorical association, but the relation between the word actually spoken and the unspoken source image is not the same.

19. A different division: realizable or imaginary comparison

Another division asks whether the conceptual referent involved in the metaphor can be realized through sense or intellect, or is instead an image constructed by imagination. This differs from the question of which side of the comparison is openly named.

Taḥqīqiyyah: the intended comparand has an intelligible or sensory mode of realization.
Takhyīliyyah: the wording produces a particular imagined configuration that need not exist in the external world as an object.

This classification concerns the ontological status of the represented content, not merely the grammatical presence of a target or source noun.

20. The straight path as an intelligible referent

اهدنا الصراط المستقيم
Guide us to the straight path.

A “path” has a familiar sensory image. Right guidance and the way of truth, however, are intelligible ethical and religious concepts. The example illustrates how an intellectual referent may be represented through a sensory source image.

The prayer is not merely a request to find a track across the ground. In a figurative reading, the accessible image of a straight route clarifies the intelligible idea of guidance while leaving that intended concept meaningful and coherent.

21. The peculiar imagined quality of death’s claws

Death is not literally an animal whose body has claws. The particular configuration of death equipped with claws is created by imaginative representation. Yet death itself is real, and actual predators may have real claws.

These are three distinct layers: death is an actual event; a claw is an actual bodily feature of some animals; assigning claws to death is a rhetorical supposition.

Without this distinction one may mistakenly treat imaginative metaphor as nothing more than a false proposition. The intended effect is to make the force and inescapability of death vividly perceptible.

22. An objection concerning illustrative imagery

Illustrative metaphor (tamthīl) may represent one complex configuration through another. Its rhetorical force can depend on an entire pattern of circumstances rather than the transference of one isolated noun.

One objection is that a narrow identification of realizable metaphor with single-word figurative transfer might wrongly exclude such illustrative cases. The reply first asks whether a statement classifies one subdivision or defines all metaphor whatsoever.

Mistaking the boundary of a subdivision for the boundary of the whole subject creates a technical contradiction that may not actually exist.

23. The scope of single-word figurative language

Discussions of single-word figurative use focus on a word employed beyond its established signification. But the existence of such a category does not show that every metaphorical act must be contained within one independent word.

An illustrative metaphor may use a configuration of multiple elements or an entire expression. The wider domain of figurative speech should therefore not be confused with one of its subdivisions.

For example, applying “lion” to a brave human is an evident one-word transfer; mapping a whole described situation to another situation can operate at a different structural level.

24. Word, expression, and composite structure

Before objecting to a classification, determine whether “kalimah” is used in the strict grammatical sense of a single word or in a broader discussion of verbal expression and semantic reference. A definition may concern a linguistic transfer without claiming that every figurative construction consists of exactly one lexical unit.

كلمة الله هي العليا
God's word is supreme.

The Qur'anic use of “kalimah” must not be confused automatically with the technical category “word” in linguistic classification. Different disciplinary and contextual uses of the same noun call for separate analysis.

25. The compared sides of a representation need not be composite nouns

An objection may assume that every illustrative comparison requires both sides to be expressed as visibly multiword phrases. But a composite similarity is determined by the structure of the resemblance, not only by the number of words naming the subjects.

مثلهم كمثل الذي استوقد ناراً
Their likeness is that of a person who kindled a fire.

The similarity concerns a dynamic scene: kindling, illumination, and subsequent loss or deprivation. It is not exhausted by one simple property of “fire” or “person.” Analysis therefore must attend to the represented configuration.

26. A synthesis of the classification objections

The objections can be grouped into three questions:
1. Scope: Is the statement about all figurative speech or only a specified subdivision?
2. Form: Is one lexical expression transferred, or does the entire configuration matter?
3. Semantic operation: Is there lexical transference, imagined predication, or transfer of a representative scene?

Once these questions are separated, apparently absolute claims such as “metaphor must always be a single word” can be replaced by carefully delimited principles that correctly fit the examples.

27. Comparing explicitness and imagined realization

DivisionMain criterionIllustration
ExplicitIs the source noun stated?Lion for an orator
ImplicitIs the unstated source evoked by an attribute?Claws of death
RealizableCan the intended referent be grasped through sense or intellect?The path of guidance
ImaginedIs the image specifically constructed by supposition?Death equipped with claws

These classifications answer different questions. An implicit metaphor may be analyzed together with an imaginative figure without making their names synonymous in every theoretical account.

28. A four-stage analysis for difficult examples

Use four stages to classify a difficult expression:
1. Assigned sense: Identify its meaning in the governing convention.
2. Intended meaning: Determine the speaker's aim from context.
3. Relation and clue: Identify the semantic connection and the indication blocking a literal reading.
4. Mode of transfer: Decide whether the figure rests on resemblance, another relation, imagined predication, or transfer of an entire scene.

“Take this horse” with a book gesture may be an error; “a lion preaching” has a coherent resemblance; “the claws of death” points to an unstated predator and an imagined attribution.

29. Lesson synthesis: consistency between definition and division

A successful distinction between literal and figurative speech must separate established technical use, intentional figurative use, and accidental misuse. Assignment, domain of discourse, contextual indication, and semantic relation all contribute to that separation.

The divisions explicit/implicit, realizable/imagined, and single-expression/illustrative are related but do not ask the same classificatory question. With their criteria distinguished, even “the claws of death” admits careful analysis rather than a merely verbal label.

The continuation examines further objections to imaginative metaphor and the predication of attributes associated with the unspoken comparison source.