Ingrid Lossius Falkum uses data from young children’s communicative development to argue that metaphor and metonymy rely on different pragmatic mechanisms. Metaphor and metonymy do have certain characteristics in common: they both target individual words or phrases, they both contribute content to the proposition explicitly expressed, and they both lie on a continuum of literal and figurative uses. However, developmental data suggests that early metonymic uses may be the result of a more basic process than metaphorical uses, one in which the child exploits salient associative relations to compensate for gaps in vocabulary.

The focus of this chapter is on issues arising for the understanding of metaphors in a second language learning context. Elly Ifantidou presents an empirical study in which native Greek-speaking learners of English were presented with a selection of metaphors from British newspapers. The results of this comprehension task suggest that even when second language learners are confronted with a metaphor whose intended propositional content they cannot fully grasp, the literal content of the metaphor may still trigger images, sensorimotor processes and emotional attitudes which provide them with a partial interpretation.