كَانَ أَسَدًا
“He was a lion.”
The word “asad” can function predicatively of a human to intensify bravery. The presence of a copular verb does not extinguish the rhetorical effect. Yet analysis still needs to locate the transferred expression and the conceptual claim that accompanies it.
The competing positions differ at precisely this level. A linguistic theory treats the predicative word as used outside its conventional animal-sense; an intellectual theory emphasizes the predication that depicts the human as belonging to the lion-kind.