Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Interpreting metaphors is an integral and inescapable process in human understanding of natural language. The current investigation analyzes analogical mappings underlying metaphors and their implications for inference and memory organization. Regularities have been observed indicating that certain types of conceptual relations are much more apt to remain invariant in analogical mappings than other relations, resulting in an induced invariance hierarchy. The central thesis is that human inference processes are governed by the same analogical mappings manifest as metaphors in language.