The Co-hyperonym Operation.

The Log has a guest post by Jean Charconnet about the use of analogy in discourse; here’s the beginning: Thirty years ago I defended a doctoral thesis on analogy, later published as « Analogie et logique naturelle » (Peter Lang, 2003), with a preface by Grize himself. It was built on the framework of natural logic Grize developed across a series of books, most fully in « Logique naturelle et communications » (PUF, 1996) — the study of how ordinary discourse builds meaning through a small set of recurring operations. Grize himself had identified one of these operations, which he labeled ρ3, as the mechanism of metaphor, and had noted in passing the discursive difference between a flagged comparison and an unflagged one. But he had not made metaphor itself an object of sustained study. That part was mine: my thesis took his operation and built a dedicated apparatus around it, and I assembled my own corpus to test it — a set of texts gathered around a single metaphor Grize had never…