Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we explore the relationship between metaphor and polysemy. We begin by discussing how novel metaphoric mappings can create new word meanings in the form of domain-general representations. Tuming next to consider the implications of this view for the on-line comprehension of figurative language, we suggest that there is a shift from comparison processing to categorization processing as metaphors are conventionalized. Finally, we describe a series of experimental findings that support the proposed account.