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Part of
Figurative Thought and Language in Action
Edited by Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó
[Figurative Thought and Language 16] 2022
► pp. 19–36

Important challenges in the study of metaphors

The world of metaphor scholarship is amazingly diverse, involving a myriad of empirical methods and theoretical frameworks. This diversity is greatly appealing, given the enormous complexity of metaphorical thinking, language, and human action. This chapter identifies some challenges for metaphor scholars both in doing particular empirical work and in offering theoretical accounts of metaphor and its role in human life. These challenges focus on issues with metaphor identification, the meanings of metaphor in discourse, online metaphor processing, and the metaphorical character of source domains. I see these challenges as “matters for all of us to think about” as we try to explain both the regularities and variations in metaphorical thinking, language, and multimodal action.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor, embodied metaphor, psycholinguistics, regularities, source domains, variations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Identifying metaphors: The view from nowhere?
  • 3.What meanings do people understand when they understand metaphor?
  • 4.Online, incremental metaphor processing
  • 5.The metaphorical essence of source domains
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 28 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.16.01gib
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