Minimalist metaphors

We suggest that the impact of metaphoric language does not depend entirely on the conceptual metaphor that is evoked, nor on the form the metaphoric language takes, but also on the steps involved in evoking a given metaphor. This is especially apparent in minimalist poetry. Readers are given hints, cultural conventions, or no guidance at all, on how to fill in missing metaphoric domains and mappings. We place minimalist metaphors at the “effortful” end of the cline proposed by Stockwell (1992), and suggest that the other end can be associated with maximalist metaphors, which corral the reader into a highly specific interpretation. The degree of minimalism or maximalism depends on the specific mappings that are linguistically indicated, the degree of conventionalization of the metaphor, and reliance on cultural background knowledge.