Metaphors were considered the research privilege of literary studies for a long time. However, with the cognitive turn of the 1980s a new approach emerged in modern linguistics, and linguists, for the first time, turned sharply away from the classic rhetorical understanding of metaphor. With Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive metaphor theory („Metaphors we live by,” 1980), a new linguistic discipline emerged that recognized metaphors as conventionalized linguistic units and even extended their capacity for understanding the human cognition. Although the cognitive approach brought an innovative direction to linguistics, it was viewed critically mainly by discourse linguists, who, unlike cognitive linguists, argued for a contextual interpretation of linguistic metaphors. As a result of the lively critical exchange between the two approaches, the metaphor analysis of the discourse dynamics framework emerged, which examines linguistic metaphors in their discourses in a context-dependent manner and conceptualizes them on the basis of their discourse metaphoricity. This study analyzes metaphors in this discourse metaphorical sense and aims to elaborate discourse metaphoricity of the source domain darkness and to represent the identified discourse metaphoricity with the help of linguistic indicators. In doing so, the paper addresses the so-called gradability of metaphoricity, which, to the best of my knowledge, has not yet been explored in the sense of this study. The paper analyzes discourse metaphors based on the cognitive tension between their source and target domains, answering the following questions: Are the identified metaphors strong and active ones („first-level metaphors”) or linguistically (strongly) conventionalized ones, whereby they unfold their metaphoricity only through discourse dynamics („second-level metaphors”)? By which linguistic indicators do metaphors become noticeable and how are these indicators to be described? Methodological means of the analysis are the metaphor identification method MIPVU with my own study-specific operationalizations, working methods of the discourse dynamics framework and discourse linguistic results on discourse dynamics. The corpus is the German literary text „Ich und Kaminski” by Daniel Kehlmann. As a result of the analysis, it was found that discourse metaphors also manifest below the text surface and are capable of becoming noticeable through a variety of indicators.
