Abstract The favourable reception of the analytic philosophy of language plays a central role in the composition of Ricœur’s literary hermeneutics. Following a brief description of the historical and methodological context of this reception, we show how Ricœur intends to link up phenomenology and analytic philosophy of language. Then we examine the role allocated to the analytic philosophy of language in establishing the idea of metaphor as a “more fundamental mode of reference” in The Rule of Metaphor. But once again Ricœur situates this semantic interpretation of metaphor within the context of an ontology. The result is methodological difficulties that mark the limits of Ricœur’s reception of the analytic philosophy of language. Keyword...