According to the French entry for “Metaphor” in Wikipedia, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbretchts-Tyteca distinguish three elements in a metaphor, including two that are present in the discourse: 1. the theme, or compared element, which is the subject of which we are speaking, 2. the phore (which means the bearer in Greek), and 3. the motif or tertium comparationis, the analog element, upon which the two previous ones are linked, referred to as a quality; it constitutes the semic link that is the object of the transfer of meaning. This third implicit element is decodable through the cultural context and the cotext. Perelman and Olbretchts-Tyteca adapt the terminology of Ivor Armstrong Richards, who was the first to analyze the function of the metaphor in terms of tenor and vehicle. See the section on “Metaphor” in their 1958 work Traité de l’argumentation, la nouvelle rhétorique, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (1969) and Richards, Ivor Armstrong, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, (Oxford University Press, 1936).
