Live, Moribund, and Dead Metaphors

Abstract

The term ‘dead metaphor’ is an established one, and it denotes vocabulary items that have lost their metaphorical character. The question is however what this means more exactly. In other words: how can members of this category be identified, and distinguished especially from uses that potentially retain their metaphorical quality, even if it is ordinarily not so obvious? The latter can be termed ‘dying’ or ‘moribund metaphors’, and the main aim of this article is to establish how they are different from dead metaphors. Moreover, both dead metaphors and moribund ones are different from ‘live metaphors’, and a further, more general aim is to analyse and describe what definitional characteristics prototypical examples of each of these three categories exhibit, and how they are different from each other.