Similes as poetic comparisons

• Similes are not a type of metaphor, but a use of comparison to achieve poetic effects.
• Similes do not involve contextual enrichment at the level of the explicature.
• Comparison-relevant content is a useful notion for researching simile.

Similes achieve poetic effects in virtue of the fact that they communicate explicit comparisons. This has been described as the ‘standard view’ of how similes are understood within relevance theory (Wałaszewska, 2013), although it has only recently been developed at length (Gargani, 2014, Cf. O’Donoghue, 2009). In this paper I defend the standard view of similes as poetic comparisons, and argue that whatever like in similes encodes, it is the same as like in formally equivalent non-poetic comparisons. On my account, the assumption that metaphors and similes are understood in broadly the same way is false, but the content of similes which corresponds to the ad hoc concept communicated as part of the explicature by a metaphor (where applicable) can be captured in terms of a notion of comparison-relevant content. I end by comparing this account with an alternative proposal to explain simile within relevance theory by Wałaszewska (2013).