I read “Conduit metaphor” In Wikipedia. But I cannot understand it. Summarize Michael J. Reddy’s 1979 paper concerning the “conduit metaphor”.
ㅡㅡ
Reddy’s 1979 paper, “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language,” is much easier to understand if we begin with one ordinary expression:
“Put your idea into words.”
Reddy asks: What are we really saying when we use an expression like this?
We speak as though an idea were an object, words were containers, and communication consisted of putting the idea into those containers and sending them to another person. The listener then supposedly takes the same idea back out. Reddy collected many ordinary English expressions showing this pattern. (Ars Technica)
So the conduit metaphor is roughly:
THOUGHT → put into WORDS → WORDS travel → listener takes THOUGHT out
For example:
“I can’t get my idea across.”
“There is a lot of meaning in that sentence.”
“I couldn’t get anything out of his explanation.”
Nobody literally puts an idea inside a word. Nevertheless, English makes us speak as though this happens.
Reddy thinks this picture is seriously misleading
His central point is that meanings do not literally travel between minds.
Suppose I think of something and say:
“There is a beautiful old house beside the river.”
The exact picture in my mind does not leave my head, enter those words, travel to you, and then enter your head.
You receive linguistic signals. You must construct meaning yourself, using your previous experience, knowledge, expectations, and circumstances. Your resulting mental picture may be quite different from mine.
So real communication is closer to:
Speaker’s THOUGHT → WORDS → listener uses WORDS + his own knowledge → listener constructs THOUGHT
This is very close to the problem we have recently been discussing.
Reddy’s “toolmakers paradigm”
Reddy creates an alternative imaginary situation to make the difference clear. People live separated from one another and cannot directly exchange objects. They can only exchange instructions telling each other how to construct things.
One person has an object. He sends instructions. The other person uses those instructions plus his own materials and knowledge to reconstruct something similar.
Communication works like that, Reddy argues. The listener does substantial work.
Therefore:
communication ≠ transportation of meaning
communication ≈ reconstruction of meaning
This is why misunderstanding is normal rather than exceptional. Successful communication requires continuing effort and interaction. (위키백과)
Why does Reddy care so much?
Because the conduit metaphor encourages us to think that communication should be easy.
If I believe that I have successfully “put my idea into words,” I may think my responsibility is finished:
“I gave you the idea. If you don’t understand it, that’s your problem.”
But Reddy’s alternative says that communication is naturally difficult because two people have different experiences and mental resources. We therefore need explanation, feedback, additional context, questioning, correction, and sometimes considerable effort.
This is also why Reddy makes the striking argument that culture is not literally stored in libraries. Libraries preserve signals—books and other records—from which later human beings can reconstruct cultural knowledge. Without people capable of that reconstruction, merely preserving more words does not preserve understanding. (위키백과)
Now compare it with our contextual triangle
This is where I think Reddy becomes particularly interesting for your present inquiry.
The conduit metaphor effectively assumes:
WORD contains THOUGHT.
Therefore:
sender’s THOUGHT → WORD → receiver gets the same THOUGHT.
But our contextual approach says something more complicated:
WORD + verbal context + situational context + receiver’s mental context → interpreted THOUGHT
That means the receiver is active.
Take our earlier sentence:
“To hire Vickery is to fire Brookes.”
Those seven words do not contain everything required to understand the statement. A reader needs knowledge about UCL, Vickery, Brookes, the institutional situation, what “fire” might imply, and so forth. Different readers therefore reconstruct different amounts of meaning.
That is almost exactly the weakness Reddy identifies in the conduit metaphor.
And this leads directly to information science
Reddy’s argument has an unexpectedly strong information-science implication.
The old information-transmission picture tends toward:
information source → message → channel → receiver
Reddy effectively says: do not confuse successful transmission of signals with successful communication of meaning.
The message can arrive perfectly while the recipient completely misunderstands it.
Therefore we need to distinguish:
signal transmission: Did the WORD arrive?
semantic communication: Did the receiver construct approximately the intended THOUGHT?
information use: Did the receiver understand its significance well enough to use it?
That third question takes us beyond Reddy and toward the information science for wisdom we have been discussing.
There is even a striking historical point worth noticing. Reddy’s paper appeared in 1979, right in the period we have been examining for the rise of context, cognition, implicit meaning, active receivers, and challenges to mechanical models of communication. His paper became highly influential in later conceptual-metaphor research; it also received substantial attention in information science. (위키백과)
So, in one sentence, Reddy’s message is:
Words do not carry meanings from one mind to another like pipes carrying water; words give another mind clues from which it must actively reconstruct meaning.
And that makes context indispensable. The less knowledge and context sender and receiver share, the harder successful reconstruction becomes.
This is very close to your basic information-science proposition: the important problem is not merely delivering the message but helping the receiver understand and evaluate it.
ㅡㅡㅡㅡ
You know I owe my linguistic study to Ogden and Richards. The latter was a pioneer in metaphor. He used the “tenor” and the “vehicle” to explain the transfer of both surface and add-on meanings. Meanwhile Reddy used “conduit”. What is the difference of explaning metaphors between Richards and Reddy?
ㅡㅡ
They are doing two quite different things with metaphor.
Richards uses metaphor to explain how meaning is created inside a particular expression. Reddy uses metaphor to explain how our whole culture thinks about communication.
For I. A. Richards, the classic pair is:
tenor = the underlying subject we are really talking about
vehicle = the image or expression through which we talk about it
For example:
“Juliet is the sun.”
Juliet is the tenor. The sun is the vehicle. The metaphor works because qualities associated with the vehicle—brightness, warmth, centrality, life-giving power—are carried over to the tenor. The resulting meaning is not simply the dictionary meaning of either word. It is created through their interaction.
So Richards is mainly explaining:
How does one metaphor produce an added or transferred meaning?
His interest is semantic and interpretive.
Reddy’s conduit metaphor works at another level. He notices that ordinary English repeatedly describes communication as though:
ideas are objects,
words are containers,
communication is a pipe or conduit,
and listeners extract meanings from words.
Expressions such as “put your ideas into words,” “get the message across,” or “there is a lot of meaning in that sentence” all belong to this larger metaphorical system.
So Reddy is not mainly analyzing one poetic metaphor. He is saying:
A whole network of everyday metaphors shapes how we think about communication itself.
And he argues that this metaphorical model is misleading, because meanings are not actually transported intact from one mind to another. The listener must reconstruct them.
The difference can therefore be put very simply:
Richards: metaphor is a mechanism for making meaning.
Reddy: metaphor can become a hidden conceptual framework that controls how we understand an entire activity.
There is also a nice relation between them. Reddy’s “conduit” can itself be analyzed using Richards’s terms.
The tenor is:
human communication.
The vehicle is:
physical transport through a conduit or pipe.
Then properties of the vehicle are projected onto the tenor:
object → container → channel → delivery → extraction.
Reddy’s originality is to say that this metaphor has become so ordinary that people hardly notice it is a metaphor at all. It silently organizes their thinking.
So Richards gives us a general theory of metaphorical meaning, while Reddy gives us a specific diagnosis of one powerful metaphor that structures our thinking about language and communication.
And this distinction fits your contextual discussion very well. Richards helps explain how implicit meaning arises from an expression itself. Reddy helps explain how a metaphor can become part of our mental context, shaping later interpretation without our noticing it.
In short:
Richards asks: How does metaphor mean?
Reddy asks: What happens when a metaphor becomes the hidden model by which we think?
That is why Reddy’s paper is not a rival to Richards. It is almost an application of the kind of metaphor theory that Richards helped make possible.
ㅡㅡㅡㅡ
Metaphor forms in the way that the tenor is the vehicle.
Life is journey.
Marriage is war.
The world is a stage.
Men are actors; women are actresses.
Which is “ploughs” of “The ship ploughs the sea.”, metaphor or metonym?
ㅡㅡ
“The ship ploughs the sea” is metaphor, not metonymy.
The literal meaning of plough is something like:
a farmer ploughs the land.
Then the action is transferred to another domain:
a ship ploughs the sea.
Using Richards’s terms:
Tenor: the ship’s movement through the sea
Vehicle: a plough moving through soil
The similarity is visible: the plough pushes through and divides the soil; the ship pushes through and divides the water.
So underneath the expression we have an analogy:
SHIP MOVING THROUGH WATER IS PLOUGH MOVING THROUGH SOIL.
That makes it metaphor.
Metonymy is different. It does not primarily transfer meaning because of resemblance. It substitutes something because of a real association or neighboring relationship:
“The White House announced…”
The building does not resemble the U.S. administration. It is associated with it. Therefore White House → administration is metonymy.
This gives us a very useful simple distinction:
Metaphor = similarity across different things/domains.
Metonymy = association or contiguity between related things.
Your examples fit the metaphor pattern particularly clearly:
LIFE IS A JOURNEY
MARRIAGE IS WAR
THE WORLD IS A STAGE
PEOPLE ARE ACTORS
In each case, one domain is understood as another domain.
“The ship ploughs the sea” is slightly less obvious because only the verb ploughs announces the vehicle. We don’t say:
“The ship is a plough.”
But the metaphor is nevertheless there implicitly. The verb activates the whole ploughing image.
And this illustrates your earlier point nicely: sometimes the expression itself supplies the clue to its hidden meaning, even without much surrounding verbal context. “Ploughs” is literally inappropriate for seawater, and that mismatch invites the receiver to search for the intended similarity.
In very short form:
metaphor: A is understood through resemblance to B
metonymy: A stands for B because A is associated with B
That distinction will become useful when we discuss implicit meaning, because metaphor and metonymy hide meaning in somewhat different ways.
ㅡㅡㅡㅡ
2026-08-23 Mark Park
Our Library 