Various Types of Metaphors and Their Different Functions in Psalm 51

Metaphors are usually not stand-alone units, but are very often components of larger chains that build into complex clusters, which function in transaction and interaction processes between a sender and an addressee. In cognitive linguistics, metaphor is in the first place regarded as a conceptual phenomenon. However, contrary to what Lakoff and Johnson in the eighties stated, metaphors cannot be understood as processed in “thought” only, but are also processed in communication. Metaphors are produced and received by people who are jointly aligning in their exchange, whether face to face or across vast amounts of space and time. The use of metaphors has, therefore, at least three dimensions, namely a linguistic, a conceptual and a communicative dimension. In recent, discourse event based, cognitive approaches to metaphors these three dimensions take up a central position. Such an approach includes three elements: a linguistic study that is directed towards the language system and regards its morphological, grammatical, and syntactic aspects; a conceptual study of the language use in a certain context, which regards its semantic, cognitive, and experiential components, and a communicative study that is aimed at the discourse event in which an utterance is produced, received and exchanged. Discourse events are higher-level processes of verbal interaction than language use. Literary texts like narratives or poems are examples of such discourse events. The present study operates within the framework of such a discourse based, cognitive approach to textual metaphors. It offers an analysis of the metaphorical network of Psalm 51, mainly based on a cognitive linguistic approach in combination with Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT). Its structure is as follows. It opens with a short introduction of Deliberate Metaphor Theory (section 1), followed by the body of the paper with analyses of four metaphorical clusters in Psalm 51 (section 2-5). A comparison of these metaphors will allow us to differentiate between conventional and deliberate metaphors, and their distinctive roles in the psalm. Thus I intend to show that out of these distinct metaphors a metaphorical network emerges, in which the sum is more than its parts