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Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond
Edited by Herbert L. Colston, Teenie Matlock and Gerard J. Steen
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 9] 2022
► pp. 223–240

Metaphor and elaboration in context

| Oberlin College
| Purchase College

In this chapter, we situate recent studies of metaphor comprehension and metaphor framing under broader theories of discourse processing, drawing out the connections between classic work on narratives, schemas, and elaboration and contemporary research on metaphor. Our analysis emphasizes that language is used to solve coordination problems in a social-pragmatic context. That is, listeners actively use language in combination with other sources of information (prior knowledge, gesture, and so on) to construct mental models in working memory that they can use to make decisions and act in a dynamic social world. Just as reading a sentence like “John went to a restaurant” calls to mind general knowledge about restaurants – which helps the listener build a richer “online” representation of the event than is communicated in the linguistic input alone – so too does reading about a “crime epidemic” call to mind salient schematic knowledge associated with the source domain (VIRUS), which helps the listener build a richer representation of the target domain (CRIME) that can drive decision-making.

Keywords: metaphor, narrative, inference, schema, mental model, elaboration, context
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Metaphoric mappings in language & thought
  • Metaphor framing in decision-making
  • Are metaphors just lexical primes?
  • Interim summary
  • What schematic elaboration leaves out
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.9.12thi
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