A Contrastive Study of Interpretations of Metaphor from Pragmatic Perspective

Metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon, the study of metaphor is a complicated task, and the exploration of metaphor is still going on. This present paper attempts to interpret metaphor from pragmatic approaches from the perspectives of Indirect Speech Act Theory, Conversational Implicature Theory and Relevance Theory respectively, aiming at making a contrastive study of these three interpretations and finding features including similarities and differences and limitations among them.